Intel announced plans to split its AXG graphics group and move the resources into two existing business units to better serve their respective markets.The consumer/gaming end of the GPU business will move to Intel’s Client Compute Group (CCG), which develops consumer computing platforms based on the company’s CPU products. The teams responsible for data center and supercomputing products such as the Ponte Vecchio and Rialto Bridge will move to the Data Center and AI (DCAI) business unit.The GPU SoC and IP design teams will also fall under the DCAI umbrella, but they will continue to support the client graphics team. Jeff McVeigh, currently the vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group, will serve as the interim leader of this team until a permanent leader is found.To read this article in full, please click here
The ss command is used to dump socket statistics on Linux systems. It serves as a replacement for the netstat command and is often used for troubleshooting network problems.What is a socket?
To make the best use of the ss command, it’s important to understand what a socket is. A socket is a type of pseudo file (i.e., not an actual file) that represents a network connection. A socket identifies both the remote host and the port that it connects to so that data can be sent between the systems. Sockets are similar to pipes except that pipes only facilitate connections between processes on the same system where sockets work on the same or different systems. Unlike pipes, sockets also provide bidirectional communication.To read this article in full, please click here
A month after the UK’s Competition Market’s Authority (CMA) announced it was investigating Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware, European antitrust regulators have launched its own probe into the $61 billion deal.In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is five months into its own investigation of the deal.Meanwhile, the EU Commision said in a statement published on December 20 that it “is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software.”To read this article in full, please click here
HPE has announced new features for its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, including Kubernetes support and workload-optimized instances.HPE launched GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise in June. It's an automated private cloud offering for enterprises looking to deploy both traditional workloads and cloud-native applications inside their data centers. The service includes virtual machines, bare metal workloads, and containers, all running on GreenLake’s on-premises consumption model.Among the new services HPE announced is the option to deploy Kubernetes container services through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. Customers can now run the same container runtimes on-premises that they use in the public cloud, with a consistent experience across both public and private clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
If not deployed properly, today’s whiz-bang network management tools wind up making more work for network admins rather than saving them time and reducing their overload.Wait, labor saving devices don’t save labor? Not really, at least when it comes to freeing up time for more important or rewarding activities.It’s not unlike the "labor saving appliance" revolution in the American home, especially in the post-WW2 era.I’m referring, of course, to Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic history of technology book, More Work for Mother, which explored in depth how various supposedly labor-saving advances in household technology did not reduce the amount of time those women who kept house spent on housekeeping. On the contrary, because they mainly mechanized or automated work previously done by servants, children, or (occasionally) men, these tech advances shifted women’s efforts from organizing such work to doing it. At the same time, with some kinds of work around food preparation and clothes washing, they also brought back “in-house” work that had been effectively outsourced to commercial laundries, bakeries, etc.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the wall command. The name is short for “write all” and it provides a way for messages to be sent to all logged in users. On some Linux systems (like Fedora), this requires the use of sudo.
Hybrid and multicloud initiatives will continue to shape enterprise IT in 2023, and the impact on data-center networking will be felt across key areas including security, management, and operations. Network teams are investing in technologies such as SD-WAN and SASE, expanding automation initiatives, and focusing on skills development as more workloads and applications span cloud environments.“The most important core trend in data centers is the recognition that the hybrid cloud model – which combines current transaction processing and database activities with a cloud-hosted front-end element for the user interface – is the model that will dominate over time,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and a Network World columnist. The industry is seeing a slow modernization of data center applications to support the hybrid-cloud model, Nolle says, “and included in that is greater componentization of those applications, a larger amount of horizontal traffic, and a greater need to manage security within the hosted parts of the application.”To read this article in full, please click here
Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).To read this article in full, please click here
A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.To read this article in full, please click here
Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.To read this article in full, please click here
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network architecture that combines software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security functionality into a unified cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployments, improved efficiency and security, and application-specific bandwidth policies.First outlined by Gartner in 2019, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) has quickly evolved from a niche, security-first SD-WAN alternative into a popular WAN sector that analysts project will grow to become a $10-billion-plus market within the next couple of years.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has a new program called Intel On Demand that will allow customers of its new Xeon Scalable Processors to unlock specialty processing engines for an extra fee.Intel has not disclosed what it will cost to access the On Demand features, which are activated through Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), a newly added function using authentication keys to activate the additional features.For most customers, the standard Xeon core is all they need. But some may want the specialty processing engines included in the latest Xeon generation, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The chips are available now to OEMs but will have a formal launch Jan. 10, 2023.To read this article in full, please click here
Two networking technologies – secure access service edge (SASE) and wireless— lead a list of six core trends that will impact enterprise infrastructure and operations activity in 2023, according to new research revealed by Gartner analysts at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week.Implementing SASE, a term coined by Gartner, has been ongoing but is expected to grow substantially in the next year. Gartner forecasts that worldwide SASE spending will hit $9.2 billion in 2023, a 39% increase from 2022.To read this article in full, please click here
Just a few weeks ago Gartner analysts said that sustainability and issues around it would transcend all of the strategic technology trends for 2023.This week at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference Gartner described how corporate data centers might make sustainability a practical reality.“IT leaders must avoid wasting value through the premature replacement of IT infrastructure,” said Philip Dawson, vice president and analyst at Gartner, at the conference. “They can do that by using real-time health analytics to maximize the useful life of data-center assets.”To read this article in full, please click here
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday suffered an outage at one of its four regions in the US, just days after the close of its annual re:Invent conference where it announced a multitude of new and updated services.The outage, which according to the company lasted for about 75 minutes between 11:34 AM and 12:51 PM Pacific Time, resulted in internet connectivity issues to and from the US-East 2 region.The loss in connectivity for certain instances at the Ohio region, which was identified by AWS around 12:26, also saw several people taking to Twitter to complain about it.To read this article in full, please click here
You might not be challenged very often to convert numbers from one numbering system to another but, when you are, you can do it with either of two fairly easy commands on the Linux command line.Converting in your head can be taxing, especially for longer numbers. While the decimal numbering system allows any digit in a number to have any of ten values (0-9), digits in hexadecimal numbers can have 16 (0-F), digits in octal numbers only eight (0-7) and digits in binary numbers only two (0-1).And, whether you like it or not, from time to time you are likely to run into numbers displayed in hex or octal, and knowing how to convert them from one number base to another can come in handy.To read this article in full, please click here
The bash shell provides a superb functionality when it comes to writing scripts. This includes many ways to loop through a pile of data so that you can get a lot done with one running of a script. Whether you’re looping through a large group of numeric values, days of the week, usernames, words, files, or something else entirely, bash has an option that can make it easy for you.for, while, and until loops
The first thing you need to know about looping in bash is that there are several basic commands to use. The while loop will loop as long as some particular condition holds true. The until loop will loop until some condition becomes true, and the for loop will run through a series of values regardless of their origin.To read this article in full, please click here
Compressed Linux files are helpful because they save disk space, but what should you do when you have a series of compressed files and want to determine if any are duplicates? The zdiff and zcmp commands can help.To begin, if a directory contains two files like those below, it’s easy to tell just from the listing that they are not identical. After all, the file sizes are a little different. The files look like this:$ ls -l
total 200
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102178 Nov 22 2021 2021.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102181 Nov 22 11:19 2022.gz
If you compare the files with the diff command, it will confirm that the files differ:To read this article in full, please click here
Thanks to some engineering wizardry involving existing technologies, Seagate has introduced a new line of hard disk drives that can match the throughput of a solid state drive.The drives are part of Seagate’s Mach.2 line, called Exos 2X18. This is the second generation of the Mach.2, coming in 16TB and 18TB capacity and support either SATA3 6Gbps or SAS 12Gbps interfaces.The drive is essentially two drives in one, with two sets of platters served by two separate actuators, the arms with the drive heads, that work in parallel. So the 16TB/18TB capacity is achieved through two 8TB/9TB drives packed into one 3.5-inch form factor. The Mach.2 line is filled with helium to reduce friction.To read this article in full, please click here