Rotary Club members who donate $1,000 or more to the Rotary Foundation get a lot of special attention. They are named Paul Harris Fellows in honor of the organization's founder. They receive a certificate and an elegant lapel pin. It's an important award in the Rotary world, and one that has been around since 1957. But recently it had become the source of a lot of unhappiness.When Discover Financial Services set out to expand its offerings beginning in 2007, the company's legacy technology was an obvious impediment, according to executive vice president and CIO Glenn Schneider. "As with many others who've been around for years and have multiple generations of technology in their data centers, the question was, how do we leverage that?" he says. The company's move into the banking business, with IRAs, CDs and many other types of accounts, made its banking platform an obvious choice for an update. "Our mission is to be the leading direct bank and payments platform," Schneider says. "We are all online, so to create competitive differentiation, we felt the necessity to start at the foundation level itself and create a new platform."To read this article in full or Continue reading
A University of Texas at Dallas researcher has come up with a way for virtual machines to have each others' backs in the name of better cloud network security.Dr. Zhiqiang Lin, an assistant professor of computer science at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas, has earned a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to support his efforts in the area of virtual machine introspection. The award includes $500,000 in funding for five years.MORE: Will containers kill virtual machines?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Redditor submitted this picture to the section of that site that is devoted to networking.
“I think this is more of a network cabling thing,” he writes. “I mean the installation isn’t that old to find something like this but ... personally speechless to find this in a modern building.” Here’s the full picture: Reddit user riahc3 via Imgur
What is it?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BitbucketKey features: Bitbucket Server (formerly named Stash) is a Git solution for professional teams. New capabilities include Git Mirroring for distributed team members, Large File Storage support and help in organizing complex repository structures. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers are working with a process that turns old tires – and there are some 300,000 tossed yearly – into electrodes for supercapacitors that would be used on the grid or in cars and other electronics applications.+More on Network World: Real Jobs for Real Robots+
The technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University produces carbon composite papers through a process described like this: “the researchers soaked crumbs of irregularly shaped tire rubber in concentrated sulfuric acid. They then washed the rubber and put it into a tubular furnace under a flowing nitrogen gas atmosphere. They gradually increased the temperature from 400 degrees Celsius to 1,100 degrees. After several additional steps, including mixing the material with potassium hydroxide and additional baking and washing with deionized water and oven drying, researchers have a material they could mix with polyaniline, an electrically conductive polymer, until they have a finished product.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Matt Asay has a smart piece over on InfoWorld about some ongoing struggles with OpenStack, as evidenced by Red Hat’s most recent earnings call.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What broke Amazon's cloud +It begs the question: Are containers to blame?Here’s Asay:
As big as the community behind OpenStack has been, [Red Hat CEO Jim] Whitehurst declared Docker the “single biggest topic that comes up among ... [Red Hat’s] leading [customers].” In fact, Whitehurst noted that he hears more from customers about Docker than OpenStack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Real Jobs for Real RobotsImage by REUTERS/Issei KatoIt’s quite possible someday soon that robots may deliver food to your table in a restaurant or gather up your laundry and bring it to the laundry room – that is if some of the machines featured in this slideshow make it out of the research labs and into the real world. Here we take a look at 18 robots that are already functioning in a variety of real life jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP's plan to lay off 33,000 workers over the next three years -- the latest step in its massive restructuring -- underscores the challenges the tech giant faces as it seeks to adapt to changing demands in corporate computing.CIOs, many of whom are under pressure to inject digital capabilities into their businesses and support increasingly mobile workforces, are shifting spending away from enterprise hardware and services to cloud, mobile and analytics software. Incumbent vendors are scrambling to keep up, each in different ways. However, HP’s answer to the challenges is the most dramatic and headline-grabbing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Carly Fiorina, surging in the polls thanks to her performance in the Republican presidential debate last week, is not to be underestimated or believed.Fiorina was crisp, sharp and quick in the debate -- all characteristics that helped her become Hewlett-Packard's CEO from 1999 to 2005. But she also used her opportunity before a national audience to distort her history at HP by omitting key facts.[ Get the latest tech news with Computerworld's daily newsletters ]
"Yes, we had to make tough choices, and in doing so, we saved 80,000 jobs, went on to grow to 160,000 jobs. And now Hewlett Packard is almost 300,000 jobs," said Fiorina, during the debate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett-Packard has faced no end of financial and legal woes in recent months, and on Friday it was hit with one more: A new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a $49 million project the state says is still not completed after 10 years.The contract dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers
HP was given a 2010 deadline to deliver a replacement, but it failed to do so, the state says, leaving the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget and SOS staff dependent on the old technology for functions such as vehicle registration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Live Segments Key features: improves the process for both segmenting large promotional email lists and implementing behavioral data to create personalized communications, while automating the labor intensive processes around segmentation, data analysis and product recommendations. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most of the references to technology in the so-called main-stage GOP debate Wednesday night were around protecting U.S. borders. There were calls for drones, visa entry and exit tracking systems, and overall more reliance on electronics to deter illegal crossings. It was all about building a better fence, and not about government's role in advancing technology.There was no discussion about the H-1B visa except at the margins. There was no mention of the federal government's role in science investment. Space exploration? Not discussed. Technology hardly came up in the three-hour debate, the same as what happened in the first debate on August 6.Climate change, bypassed in the first debate, did come up in Wednesday night's debate. It's a subject that offers much opportunity to talk about science, government investments in basic science including supercomputers, alternative energy systems and energy storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uncooking an egg, peeing like a whale, and fathering a few hundred childrenDon’t look so confused – it’s the 2015 Ig Nobel awards, the scientific equivalent of the Razzies, given out to real science projects “that make you laugh, and then make you think.” Or, in the case of several of this year’s “winners,” that make you squirm uncomfortably in your chair. Read on, if you dare.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
25 years oldEach year since 1991, Improbable Research has highlighted a handful of real researchers whose work might seem goofy on the surface, but often has serious implications. The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually at a ceremony at Harvard University shortly before the Nobel prizes are announced. Here’s a look at a winner from each of the past 24 years, with the 2015 prize winners being announced tonight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite all the hype about containers, the application packaging technology is still evolving, especially as relates to networking.
In the past year though there have been significant advancements to Docker container networking functionality. At the same time Docker has built a plug-in architecture that allows more advanced network management tools to control containers.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cisco’s “open” data center OS embraces containers +
Meanwhile, startups have developed custom platforms for managing containers, while traditional vendors such as Cisco and VMware have enabled their network management tools to control containers. So, the earliest container networking challenges are beginning to be solved, but there’s still more work to be done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"Ve are here to Pump You Up." I can't help but think about the old Saturday Night Live routines with bodybuilders Hans and Franz when looking at today's cloud data centers. They are big. They are bulked up. They are, indeed, pumped up. But how strong are they, really? As we would ask in IT terms: Do they scale? Can they perform? Or are they girly-man clouds?Those are hard questions.Knowing the capacity of a data center is next to impossible. The tech specs are easy – so many servers, so many CPUs, so many gigahertz, such-and-such network connectivity, so much storage I/O bandwidth. Those specs are easy, and also meaningless, without actually measuring the complete stack's end-to-end performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It seems 10 Gig Ethernet (Gig-E) technology has been the de facto standard in data centers for the better part of a decade now. Frankly, 10 Gig-E is still a lot of bandwidth and is fine for most businesses. However, it cannot cost-effectively meet the bandwidth requirements of next-generation cloud and web-scale environments. Sure, there's 40 Gig-E, but that's actually four 10 Gig-E "lanes" bonded together, so the cloud provider would likely have to install at least twice as many switches, along with all the cabling, space, power, and cooling required to meet the needs of today and the near future.This is the primary driver behind the development of the 25 Gig-E standard. Compared to 10 Gig-E, 25 Gig-E provides 2.5-times the performance, making it much more cost-effective. Since the 25 Gigabits of bandwidth is provided in single lane, it provides much greater density and scale than 10 Gig-E. Also, deploying 25 Gig-E provides an easy upgrade path to 50 Gig-E (2 lanes) or even 100 Gig-E (4 lanes).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Arista Networks this week became the latest major vendor to roll data center switches that support 25G, 50G and 100Gbps Ethernet.Arista also upgraded its operating system software to support the new switches and give them a number of new features to enhance uptime, and avoid resets and reloads.The new Arista 7060X, 7260X and 7320X fixed-leaf and modular spineswitches are based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk chipset. Tomahawk silicon delivers 3.2Tbps switching capacity – 32 100G ports -- and SDN-optimized engines in a single chip, and features all-25G per-lane interconnect, enabling transformation to 25G and 50G Ethernet networks and eventually up to 100G.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Spoiler alert: We’re pretty sure we know what this is pictured above – entirely thanks to Reddit – and you will, too, if you don’t stop reading this.A user of the Reddit forum dedicated to networking, r/networking, asks: “We found an adapter and we aren’t sure what type of connection the male end is. Can any of you identify this for me?” Here are a couple more close-up views: Imgur
Imgur
It didn’t take long for a consensus to emerge: “My guess is (it’s) a PCMCIA Ethernet card adapter.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
iPad alternatives for the enterpriseImage by ThinkstockApple's iPad -- no matter the generation -- is usually at the top of most "best tablets" lists. That remains true with the latest iPad Air 2 - and will probably be true when the just-announced iPad Pro becomes available. However, while the iPad offers a lot in the way of performance and design, when it comes to productivity, you might find it lacking in some areas. Without the option to use a mouse, split-screen apps and a lack of expandable storage, it may not measure up for your business needs. Or maybe you're just tired of the same old tablet and want to try something new. Whatever your reason, if you want to stray from Apple, here are five iPad alternatives that can easily move your office to your couch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here