If you like survey data, here’s an interesting fact for you. Every year since 2000, when I started surveying enterprises on the question, the most important factor driving investment and change in enterprise networks was the data center. It’s like the network is the tail of a big, fuzzy, maybe-largely-invisible dog, and it’s time we look at where that dog might be leading us.Today’s virtual private networks (VPNs) evolved from the days when companies leased time-division-multiplexed (TDM) lines and connected their own routers. That approach focused companies on how to network sites, and they now think about networking people instead. But people are half the story; the other half is what the people are doing, which is accessing (increasingly via the cloud) data-center applications and databases.To read this article in full, please click here
Network management has never been easy, and the proliferation of IoT devices, the shift to remote work, and the migration of applications to multi-cloud environments have added new levels of complexity to enterprise networks.IT execs are dealing with network management tool sprawl and employee skills gaps. They are also struggling to gain visibility across increasingly distributed networks, including SaaS instances that are not under their direct control.To read this article in full, please click here
Both the Linux zip and zipcloak commands can create encrypted zip files, but they have some important and interesting differences. Here’s what you need to know about how they work and what you should understand when using them.zip
The zip command provides an easy way to take a group of files and squeeze their content into a single smaller file. To join a group of files into a single file—often done to make copying them to other systems considerably easier—use a command like the one shown below. The first argument is the name to be used for the zip file and is followed by the list of files to be included.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the whatis command. It’s a helpful command that will give you a one-line description of any command that you ask about.
There are quite a few ways on Linux to get a list of the users logged into the system and see what they are doing. The commands described in this article all provide very useful information.users
The users command displays a simple list of logged-in users. In this example, one user is logged in twice and is, therefore, listed twice.$ users
nemo popeye shs shs
Note that the users are listed in alphabetical order.who
The who command provides additional information. The login terminal is identified along with the login date and time. The final field displays the terminal or the IP address of the connecting system.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD has announced plans to work with French chip designer SiPearl to build exascale-level supercomputing systems that use SiPearl's Arm-based Rhea processor with AMD's Instinct GPU accelerators.SiPearl is a relatively small startup that began operation in 2019 with a license for Arm’s Neoverse high-performance technology. It has forged a number of alliances with partners including Intel, Nvidia, HPE, and Graphcore.SiPearl is also involved with the European Processor Initiative (EPI), a consortium selected by the European Union to support the development of a European microprocessor specifically for high performance computing (HPC), as well as emerging applications such as artificial intelligence. The EPI's goal is to develop an Arm-based processor for an exascale supercomputer by 2023.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD has officially launched the fourth-generation of its Epyc server processors for high performance computing (HPC) in the data center, and all the top OEMs showed up for the party.Officially named the Epyc 9004 but commonly referred to by its codename “Genoa,” the new chip is based on the fourth generation of AMD’s Zen microarchitecture and built on a 5nm manufacturing process by TSMC.Thanks to its chiplet design, which breaks the monolithic CPU into smaller “chiplets” that are tied together with a high speed interconnect, Genoa has up to 96 cores (double Intel’s best at the moment). The chiplets, with 16 cores each, are easier to manufacture than a single 96-core CPU. Genoa includes the latest I/O technology, such as PCI Express 5.0, 12 channels of DDR5 memory, and CXL 1.1.To read this article in full, please click here
Supercomputers are super expensive, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced plans to make supercomputing accessible for more enterprises by offering scaled down, more affordable versions of its Cray supercomputers.The new portfolio includes HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, which are based on the Frontier exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs. These servers come with the full array of hardware, including compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software, and flexible power and cooling options.To read this article in full, please click here
Frontier, which became the first exascale supercomputer in June and ranked number one among the fastest in the world, retained that title in the new TOP500 semiannual list of the world’s fastest.Without any increase in its speed—1.102EFLOP/s—Frontier still managed to score 2.5 times faster that the number two finisher, Fugaku, which also came in second in the June rankings. An exascale computer is one that can perform 1018 (one quintillion) floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOP/s).Despite doubling its maximum speed since it was ranked number three in June, the Lumi supercomputer remained in third-place.There was just one new member of the top-ten list, and that was Leonardo, which came in fourth after finishing a distant 150th in the TOP500 rankings in June.To read this article in full, please click here
While not a very well known Linux command, ac can provide very useful stats on user login time. In its simplest form, it will show you how much time users have spent on the system in the time period covered by the wtmp file. All you have to type is “ac” to get a figure showing overall login time for all users.$ ac
total 8360.60
The figure above indicates that users spent a total of 8,360.6 hours on the system. Looking at the wtmp file with the who command, we can see that the saved logins started on June 6th – a little more than 6 months earlier.$ who /var/log/wtmp | head -2
shs tty2 2022-06-06 16:00 (tty2)
shs pts/1 2022-06-06 16:23 (192.168.0.12)
To look at the times by user, add the -p (people) argument.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has announced new processors with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) geared toward high-performance computing (HPC), supercomputing, and artificial intelligence (AI).The products are known as the Xeon CPU Max series and GPU Max series. The chips are based on existing technology; the CPU is 4th Generation Xeon Scalable, aka Sapphire Rapids, and the GPU is Ponte Vecchio, the data center version of Intel's Xe GPU technology.To read this article in full, please click here
Bash is not just one of the most popular shells on Linux systems, it actually predates Linux by a couple of years. An acronym for the “GNU Bourne-Again Shell”, bash not only provides a comfortable and flexible command line, it delivers a large suite of scripting tools—if/then commands, case statements, functions, etc.—that allow users to build complex and powerful scripts.This post contains a collection of articles about important aspects of bash that will help you make better use of this versatile shell.Commands vs bash builtins
While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself. To get a list of the bash builtins, just type “help” when you’re on the bash command line. For more about built-ins, refer to “How to tell if you’re using a bash builtin”.To read this article in full, please click here
After almost a year and a half of delays, Intel has begun to ship its 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to customers, and it has set January 10, 2023 as the formal launch date.The launch is a formality because, according to an Intel spokesperson, the new Xeons are already shipping to customers—OEMs—now, but it falls to those OEMs to announce their product release plans.CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company was ramping up production for launch and that he expected the new Xeons to see the fastest ramp to one million units ever.The challenge for Intel wasn’t in design, it was manufacturing. This will be the first generation of chips using Intel 7 fabrication, an advanced 10nm design that took years to get right.To read this article in full, please click here
The chip maker says tests of its BlueField-2 data-processing units (DPU) in servers results in significant power savings over servers that don’t use the specialized chips to offload tasks from the CPUs.The DPUs, or SmartNICs, take on certain workloads—packet routing, encryption, real-time data analysis—leaving the CPU free to process data. But Nvidia says they can also reduce power consumption.The four tests involved running similar workloads on servers with and without DPUs, and Nvidia concluded that even with the additional power draw by the DPUs, overall power consumption by the servers dropped.To read this article in full, please click here
The chip maker says tests of its BlueField-2 data-processing units (DPU) in servers results in significant power savings over servers that don’t use the specialized chips to offload tasks from the CPUs.The DPUs, or SmartNICs, take on certain workloads—packet routing, encryption, real-time data analysis—leaving the CPU free to process data. But Nvidia says they can also reduce power consumption.The four tests involved running similar workloads on servers with and without DPUs, and Nvidia concluded that even with the additional power draw by the DPUs, overall power consumption by the servers dropped.To read this article in full, please click here
In the year since it spun out of IBM, Kyndryl has made a number of big strides in establishing itself as a core infrastructure service management player, but challenges remain.For example, while it has substantially expanded its partnerships and technology, its financial situation hasn’t shown a similar bump. Just this week the company reported second quarter revenues of $4.2 billion, a year-over-year drop of 9%. The company has reported similar results in other recent quarters. “Currency and energy-costs impacts are superseding the operational progress we’re making,” Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner told Wall Street analysts during the firm’s 2Q 2023 call this week. “And while the risk of a global recession has clearly increased, we continue to see broadbase demand for digital transformation in infrastructure services.”To read this article in full, please click here
AMD announced third quarter results this week, and while it posted a $64 million loss in terms of overall operating income—mainly due to its acquisition of Xilinx—but large gains in the company’s data center, embedded and gaming segments provided an encouraging note.Total revenue rose by 29% for the third quarter of 2022, to $5.56 billion from $4.31 billion one year ago. Gross profit also rose in year on year terms, from $2.08 billion in last year’s third quarter to $2.35 billion for the past three months. The decline in operating income was caused by much higher operating expenses, which more than doubled in the third quarter, rising from $1.14 billion a year ago to $2.42 billion in the most recent figures.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has introduced the 11th generation of its ProLiant servers designed for a range of modern workloads, including AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, graphic-intensive applications, machine learning, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and virtualization.The new ProLiants have three processor options: AMD Epyc “Genoa” generation processors, Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” generation processors, and Ampere Altra and Altra Max cloud-native processors.Compared to the previous server generation, the new HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers support twice as much I/O bandwidth and 33% more high-performance GPU density per server to support AI and graphic-intensive workloads than the prior generation.To read this article in full, please click here