The most significant network and service outages of 2022 had far-reaching consequences. Flights were grounded, virtual meetings cut off, and communications hindered.The culprits that took down major infrastructure and services providers were varied, too, according to analysis from ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. Maintenance-related errors were cited more than once: Canadian carrier Rogers Communications experienced a massive nationwide outage that was traced to a maintenance update, and a maintenance script error caused problems for software maker Atlassian.BGP misconfiguration also showed up in the top outage reports. Border gateway protocol tells Internet traffic what route to take, but if the routing information is incorrect, then traffic can be diverted to an improper route, which happened to Twitter. (Read more about US and worldwide outages in our weekly internet health check.)To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the tree command. It’s a command that displays the files and subdirectories in whatever directory you ask it to display – and it does it in a surprisingly graphical way.
Intel has formally introduces its 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Sapphire Rapids) and the Intel Max Series CPUs and GPUs, which isn’t much of a secret as we have documented the processors here already, but there are a few new features to go along with them.Those new features include a virtual machine (VM) isolation solution and an independent trust verification service to help build what it calls the “industry’s most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio.” To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has punched up the power and sustainability features of its Unified Computing System family with new UCS servers based on Intel’s latest generation processors.Intel introduced those processors—the 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors and the Xeon CPU Max Series—this week after months of delays. The new processors include a new micro-architecture, up to 60 cores per chip, plus support for DDR5 memory, PCI Express Gen 5, CXL 1.1, HBM2E memory and a of special-purpose accelerators for storage, networking, analytics, AI, and CPU-core load balancing.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a lot more to working with files on Linux than creating, listing and updating them. After all, files can be Linux commands (i.e., binaries), scripts, images, simple text files, pointers to other files or folders. You might remember the "everything is a file" description of Unix and Linux systems.Even sockets and named pipes are files in their own way. Sometimes only the owner can see and use files, sometimes everyone can and sometimes select individuals will also have access. Here are some of the subtleties.Listing files
Listing files on Linux is easy. You use the ls command. On the other hand, commands like ls, ls -l, ls -a and ls -ltr work very differently:To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a lot more to working with files on Linux than creating, listing and updating them. After all, files can be Linux commands (i.e., binaries), scripts, images, simple text files, pointers to other files or folders. You might remember the "everything is a file" description of Unix and Linux systems.Even sockets and named pipes are files in their own way. Sometimes only the owner can see and use files, sometimes everyone can and sometimes select individuals will also have access. Here are some of the subtleties.Listing files
Listing files on Linux is easy. You use the ls command. On the other hand, commands like ls, ls -l, ls -a and ls -ltr work very differently:To read this article in full, please click here
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) might be the last place you’d expect an enterprise product to debut, but AMD unveiled a new server accelerator among the slew of consumer CPUs and GPUs it launched at the Las Vegas show.AMD took the wraps off its Instinct MI300 accelerator, and it’s a doozy.The accelerated processing unit (APU) is a mix of 13 chiplets, including CPU cores, GPU cores, and high bandwidth memory (HBM). Tallied together, AMD's Instinct MI300 accelerator comes in at 146 billion transistors. For comparison, Intel’s ambitious Ponte Vecchio processor will be around 100 billion transistors, and Nvidia’s Hopper H100 GPU is a mere 80 billion transistors.To read this article in full, please click here
Gigabyte has split in two, breaking off its enterprise business as a subsidiary called Giga Computing Technology that's focused on sales and support for its data-center products.The Taiwanese company is well known for its motherboards and GPU cards for gaming, but also for several form factors of servers. Breaking out Giga Computing into a separate unit enables it to better cater to the needs of enterprise customers, according to Daniel Hou, CEO of the new business. “This is just another extension of our long-term plan that will allow our enterprise solutions better react to market forces and to better tailor products to various markets,” Hou said in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft on Monday said it is acquiring composable infrastructure services provider Fungible for an undisclosed amount in an effort to augment its Azure networking and storage services.Microsoft’s Fungible acquisition is aimed at accelerating networking and storage performance in datacenters with high-efficiency, low-power data processing units (DPUs), Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Core, wrote in a blog post. Data processing units or DPUs are an evolved format of smartNIC that are used to offload server CPU duties onto a separate device to free up server cycles, akin to hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA).To read this article in full, please click here
Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here
The past three years have been an unprecedented period of disruption in the semiconductor industry. The Covid pandemic and ensuing lockdowns shut down manufacturing, there were interruptions in shipping, and then the war in Ukraine adversely impacted supplies of critical raw materials.The first half of 2022 saw 46% more supply chain disruptions than the first half of 2021, according to a research report released this fall by Resilinc, a supply chain resiliency company.To read this article in full, please click here
If networks are to deliver the full power of AI they will need a combination of high-performance connectivity and no packet lossThe concern is that today’s traditional network interconnects cannot provide the required scale and bandwidth to keep up with AI requests, said Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista Networks. Historically, the only option to connect processor cores and memory have been proprietary interconnects such as InfiniBand, PCI Express and other protocols that connect compute clusters with offloads but for the most part that won’t work with AI and its workload req uirements.Arista AI Spine
To address these concerns, Arista is developing a technology it calls AI Spine, which calls for data-center switches with deep packet buffers and networking software that provides real-time monitoring to hep manage the buffers and efficiently control traffic.To read this article in full, please click here
AI-enabled management platforms and infrastructure are beginning to make their way into enterprise networks. I say “beginning” because despite lots of AI-washing marketing efforts over the last few years, a lot of what has been characterized as “AI-driven” or “powered by AI” hasn’t really materialized. It's not that these systems don’t do what the marketers say, so much as they don't do it in the way they imply.Even some tools that do truly employ AI in meaningful ways, and with visibly different results than are possible without it, don’t feel qualitatively different from what has come before. They may be better, for example by dramatically reducing the number of false positives in alert traffic, but not different.To read this article in full, please click here
The locale settings in Linux systems help ensure that information like dates and times are displayed in a format that makes sense in the context of where you live and what language you speak. Here's how to use them.NOTE: None of the commands described in this post will change your locale settings. Some merely use a different locale setting to display the response you might be seeing from a different location.List your settings
If you’re in the US, you should see something like this when you use the locale command to list your settings:$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
The en_US.UTF-8 settings in the above output all represent US English. If you’re in France, this response is more likely:To read this article in full, please click here
Managing directories on Linux is easy, but the process gets more complex when you need to create, empty or remove large, complex directory structures. This post will take you from the most basic commands to some fairly complex ones that can help make the process easier.mkdir
The mkdir command can create a single directory like this:$ mkdir newdir
It can also create a complex directory and subdirectory structure with a command like the one below. The -p argument tells the command to create the base directory if it doesn't already exist.Each group of directory names that appears in the command shown – like {1,2,3} and {docs,script} – will result in a series of subdirectories being created at that level.To read this article in full, please click here
Geopolitical tensions among the US, China, and Taiwan are forcing a notable change to server manufacturing, according to Asian market research firm TrendForce, which predicts that core parts of the server supply chain will eventually shift to southeast Asia and the Americas. According to TrendForce’s research, Taiwan-based original design manufacturers (ODM) currently account for about 90% of global server motherboard production. A notable exception is Supermicro, which has a 1.5 million square-foot factory in Fremont, California. It also has an 800,000 square-foot facility in Taiwan.Ever since the start of the trade dispute between the US and China beginning in 2018, server ODMs began looking at moving their production lines from mainland China to Taiwan. Then, due to the explosion in construction of data centers across the Asia-Pacific region, motherboard makers began looking at southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand for capacity expansion.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the zdiff command. It’s a command that allows you to view the differences between 2 gzipped files – differences in the content that was compressed.
Nvidia is playing some serious games.When Jensen Huang and his two partners established Nvidia in 1993, the graphics chip market had many more competitors than the CPU market, which had just two. Nvidia’s competitors in the gaming market included ATI Technologies, Matrox, S3, Chips & Technology, and 3DFX.A decade later, Nvidia had laid waste to every one of them except for ATI, which was purchased by AMD in 2006. For most of this century, Nvidia has shifted its focus to bring the same technology it uses to render videogames in 4k pixel resolution to power supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) in the enterprise, and artificial intelligence.To read this article in full, please click here