Dell introduced the PowerEdge FX2 platform late in 2014 as its flagship entry into the converged infrastructure hardware market. With slots for up to four half-wide 1U server modules or two full-width modules, you could use the 2U FX2 enclosure to implement a heavy-duty virtualization cluster and/or software-defined storage solutions such as VMware Virtual SAN and Windows Server Storage Spaces. The PowerEdge FC830 FX server block is the latest addition to the FX2 family, packing four sockets of computing power and up to 1.5TB of memory into a full-width 1U module.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Watson transforms industriesSince IBM opened IBM Watson to the world last year, it has been building a developer and entrepreneur community around the development platform. The community now consists of more than 280 commercial partners, as well as tens of thousands of developers, students, entrepreneurs and other enthusiasts that are generating up to 3 billion monthly API requests on Watson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual reality has been anticipated with feverish excitement by gaming enthusiasts, but it could be just as transformative for businesses.So says Bob Berry, cofounder and CEO of Envelop VR, which is developing productivity software that will tap VR to offer business users new ways of working. The company was founded last year, and on Monday it said it had secured $2 million in seed funding.Virtual reality is a technology that has been “10 years away for 40 years,” Berry said. Today, it has finally reached a level of maturity whereby it can deliver “presence”—where your brain really thinks you’re somewhere else—without the motion sickness hampering earlier versions, according to Berry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Major changes are coming to our iPads, from the way we select text, to the way we interact with our favorite apps and play videos.Speaking at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi showcased an updated version of iOS 9 that included a few new features designed specifically with tablet users in mind.MORE FROM WWDC: Apple's El Capitan OS X 10.11 to bring natural language search, other enhancementsLet’s start with QuickType, an enhancement to the iPad’s onscreen keyboard that includes new shortcuts and turns into a trackpad when you place two fingers on it. The trackpad can be used to select text, move objects around, and generally combine the convenience of touch controls and the precision of a mouse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco says reports that its star spin-in engineers – Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, aka “MPLS” – may leave the company this year are untrue. Speculation arose last week during Cisco’s top level management makeover that some or all of MPLS might leave after the departure of CEO John Chambers, and certain vesting and bonus milestones are reached in September.Cisco at first had no comment on the future of MPLS at Cisco while noting that incentives tied to their most recent spin-in, Insieme Networks, run through Cisco’s fiscal year 2017, which ends in July 2016. Once that response was published, Cisco followed up with a sterner denial in an e-mailed statement:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As cloud computing, big data and the deployment of mega-scale data centers accelerates, organizations need to continually recalibrate and evolve the network. This challenge has led to the development of new technologies and standards designed to increase and optimize network capacity, security and flexibility, all while keeping a lid on cost. Here are the top five trends as we see them:* Rapid Adoption of 802.11ac. Tablets and smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in the workplace. As the number of mobile devices and the deployment of cloud-based enterprise services continues to scale at a dramatic rate, the keepers of the network must reconsider how they provision, secure and control enterprise computing resources and information access.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.Gluware 2.0 SD-WAN Orchestration PlatformKey features: Gluware 2.0 is the intelligent orchestration platform designed to unlock the potential of Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) for enterprise networks and operations teams across the services lifecycle. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Surface Pro 3 tipsWe’ve collected several tips for Microsoft’s popular tablet computer. Most are useful or interesting, one is kind of silly, and another is a nearly literal hack to the Surface Pro 3. Enjoy!Train Surface Pro 3 to better recognize your handwriting The Surface Pro 3 has software that’s already set to learn your handwriting when using the Surface Pen, for converting your written notes to typed text. If you use the tablet a lot for note taking, though, then you should run the Handwriting Personalization program and take a moment to train it to improve its recognition of what you write. There are two ways to do this: by writing specific characters and words you want it to recognize, or following the program as it instructs you to write out sentences or characters (letters, numbers, symbols) that it assigns you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your image of the Google cafeteria is a bunch of portly coders tucking into steak and lobster every night, think again: Silicon Valley’s cream of the crop is going on a diet.To the list of perks you’re missing out on at the famous workers’ paradise, you can now add healthier food. But don’t worry, the planet wins, too. For the last year and a half, Google’s food department has been on a mission to cut down on meat.“A more balanced, plant-centric diet is good for the environment and is good for your health,” said Michiel Bakker, director of the Global Food Program at Google. “So if we can move more people to eat less meat and to enjoy more vegetables, the rest will follow.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple will begin taking a smaller cut of application revenue from some developers on its App Store, according to a report Friday from the Financial Times.Since the App Store opened in 2008, one of the costs of being an iOS developer has been handing over to Apple 30 percent of an app’s revenue. But the company is now working with media companies including Spotify, Netflix and Time Inc. to give them a larger cut of the sales from their apps, the FT said, citing unnamed sources.It’s unclear what the new revenue split will be, or which companies will be eligible for it, but it marks a departure from the plan Steve Jobs announced when the store first launched.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Taiwan held its 35th annual Computex trade show this week, and the event hasn’t aged well. There was little news to get excited about, the crowds were thinner, and there were no products on the show floor that generated the buzz seen in years past.To be sure, Computex has never had the glitz and glamor of CES, but for the PC industry it’s the big event of the year. Taiwanese companies make most of the world’s PCs—including those sold under more famous brands—and Computex has been a place where Intel and AMD launch new processors, and where competing memory and interface technologies battle for dominance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the upcoming release of Intel’s Skylake chips, there’s a lot to look forward to, including faster computers, fewer ports and wireless charging. At Computex in Taipei this week Intel shed more light on the new chip technology, a much hyped successor to Intel’s family of Broadwell family of chips. Here are five things we learned:1) Skylake chips won’t be released when Windows 10 becomes commercially available on July 29, so PCs with a combination of the new OS and chip technology won’t be immediately available, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, during an interview at Computex. Intel has built Skylake to work hand-in-glove with Windows 10, which among other new features offers biometric authentication that will allow a user’s fingerprint or face to replace a typed password. Skaugen declined to provide a specific release date, but Skylake could be the centerpiece announcement at the Intel Developer Forum in mid-August. PCs could follow soon after.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Video is everywhere, and growing exponentially. According to a recent report, 35 billion video ads were viewed in December, representing year-over-year growth of more than 100%. And every industry is seeing video growth, which creates a problem for data managers because video challenges storage management in four ways:
Performance requirements are not served well by traditional storage architecture.
Rapid video growth can overwhelm storage environments while resource utilization is masked by virtualization
Use of traditional backup tools make data protection expensive and challenging
Long-term data value means this is not a temporary problem
If, however, you move video to specialty storage, you’ll achieve five amazing benefits:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once you've configured a Docker container, you'll probably want to see how it's configured. In this video excerpt from the Pearson/Addison-Wesley training course "Docker Containers LiveLessons", Christopher Negus will show you how to use commands such as
docker inspect - View container information
Pid - Check process ID of a running container
IPAddress - See the IP address of a running container
Binds - See bind mounts
nsenter - Access a running container's name spaces
Watch the video:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Computex keeps it realOne of the last major tech expos of the year just took place in Taiwan, and with it came a flood of major PC news as manufacturers rush to prepare for Windows 10 and the crucial holiday shopping season.Intel provided more Skylake details and introduced Broadwell-H chips, Microsoft dropped a Windows 10 release date, AMD revealed a new processor of its own, and crazy peripherals and gaming gear were everywhere. (How does a 128GB flash drive mice the size of a dime and Decepticon-like laser-projected mice sound?) Here's all the most interesting and momentous news from Computex, compiled in one handy-dandy spot in no particular order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acer couldn’t keep the mystery around the launch of its highly-anticipated Acer Predator 8-inch gaming tablet bottled up for too long.The tablet could launch sometime in September, with a big event planned for Europe, said a representative at the Acer booth on the Computex show floor this week.The tablet was first shown on stage in April at a lavish event at the World Trade Center in New York. At the time, Acer CEO Jason Chen said during an interview that the tablet details were being finalized and more details would be shared at launch. However, no specific launch date was provided.But details about the tablet starting trickling out much earlier at Computex in Taipei this week. It will run on Android OS and have Intel’s Atom processor code-named Cherry Trail, which has two times faster graphics than the aging predecessor chip code-named Bay Trail. The Cherry Trail chip is also used in Microsoft’s Surface 3, which started shipping last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft gave its privacy policy and service agreement a facelift Thursday, and offered users a new central clearinghouse to manage privacy settings for all the data the company keeps about them.The newly-minted privacy dashboard (included in the Security and Privacy section of Microsoft’s account administration page) gives users links to control data stored for personalizing their experience on Bing, what apps and services use their information, whether Microsoft personalizes ads for them and whether the company can market to them via email. It’s part of a move by the company to unify and simplify most of its service agreements and privacy policies for various products under one document.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adding to a growing portfolio of software development applications, CA Technologies has acquired Grid-Tools, whose software automates the process of testing newly-built applications.CA customers will be able to use Grid-Tools’ products to build software using agile development methodologies, in which small teams work in close collaboration to quickly build and update large applications.Last week, CA announced it is purchasing for $480 million Rally Software, which offers a set of software and cloud services to help developers manage complex software projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Living inside a machine is "definitely a possibility," according to a British neuroscientist. Dr. Hannah Critchlow,of Cambridge University, says that if a computer could be built to recreate the 100 trillion connections in the brain, it would be possible to live within programs.Critchlow's statement, at the Hay Festival, was reported by the Telegraph and Metro newspapers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google's impact on the enterprise market may not have been obvious at its annual I/O developers conference in San Francisco last week, but the implications of the company's growing involvement and interest in business applications are strong. Google's suite of apps for work and education continue to help organizations cut costs while improving communication, productivity and collaboration across teams. + ALSO: 9 most important announcements at Google I/O 2015 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here