NetApp announced Tuesday that its on-premises and cloud storage offerings are now unified under the umbrella of a single platform, called BlueXP, which serves as a control plane for each of its products and simplifies the management of enterprise storage for organizations.BlueXP—which is a free upgrade for its customers—is a reaction to the reality that more and more companies’ storage environments are hybrids these days, combining cloud and on-premises storage, according to NetApp. Businesses of almost any size that have been in operation for more than a decade or so are, more often than not, involved in digital transformation efforts that move at various paces, said company senior vice president and general manager for cloud storage Ronen Schwartz.To read this article in full, please click here
There has been much teeth-gnashing, mixed with a little obfuscation and concern, about what the merged VMware and Broadcom might look like and what it will mean to customers. On Thursday, Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan took to his blog to offer some details about what he expects the VMware buy will mean to Broadcom and try to ease some of the concerns customers are having.One of the apprehensions for all customers is cost of products going forward. “Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester told Network World in a recent article. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.To read this article in full, please click here
There has been much teeth-gnashing, mixed with a little obfuscation and concern, about what the merged VMware and Broadcom might look like and what it will mean to customers. Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan has taken to his blog to offer some details about what he expects the deal will mean to Broadcom and try to ease some customer concerns.One worry: cost of products going forward. “Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester told Network World in a recent article. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.To read this article in full, please click here
Determining how many characters are in a file is easy on the Linux command line: use the ls -l command.On the other hand, if you want to get a count of how many times each character appears in your file, you’re going to need a considerably more complicated command or a script. This post covers several different options.Counting how many times each character appears in a file
To count how many of each character are included in a file, you need to string together a series of commands that will consider each character and use a sort command before it counts how many of each character are included.To do that, you can use a command like this one:To read this article in full, please click here
If you want to check a text file for typos, Linux can help.It has a couple of tools and a number of commands that can point out the errors including aspell and enchant, and I’ll share a script that I put together recently that looks for typos using the system's words file.Using aspell
aspell is very clever tool that will point out typos and make it surprisingly easy to fix them. When used to make changes to a single file, it reverses the text and background colors to highlight misspelled words. You would start it with a command like this:$ aspell check myfile
If aspell detects no typos, it simply exits. Otherwise, it will open with a display that contains the file text (or just the top lines depending on the length of the file) followed by a list of suggested replacement words and, below that, a list of the commands that you can run. The first typo (or suspected typo) will be displayed with the text and background colors reversed as shown below.To read this article in full, please click here
This time last year, AMD had no networking products. Today, it has three, thanks to two separate acquisitions. It's a shift that's strengthening the company’s position against competitors like Intel and Nvidia by providing a full suite of silicon, including for the enterprise.To fill out its portfolio and stay competitive, AMD had to build up its offerings of workload accelerators and its networking technologies. It's a very active market, with Nvidia (BlueField), Intel (FPGA-based smartNICs), Marvell Technology (Octeon), and Broadcom (Stingray) all competing for the smartNIC market. AMD risked being left behind.To read this article in full, please click here
At a time when most enterprises are planning cloud deployments and many are reportedly sharpening their mainframe exit strategy, IBM is seeing double-digit growth in its big iron business for the quarter ended September.The company, which declared its third quarter results on Wednesday, reported a 98% jump in revenue for its z line of mainframe computer in terms of constant currency (that is, eliminating the effect of currency fluctuations). IBM, which buckets mainframes under its infrastructure line of business, released the z16 mainframe in April before beginning to sell it in the second quarter.To read this article in full, please click here
A semiconductor startup is targeting the high-performance computing (HPC), claiming that in some instances, GPUs aren’t the best fit for the task.The chip is known for now as Thunderbird but will get a formal name when it launches in Q1 of 2023, according to Doug Norton, vice president of business development at InspireSemi. Thunderbird is mounted on a PCI Express card that plugs into a server, just as GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD do.The Thunderbird chip contains 2,560 RISC-V cores, and there are two chips per card. GPUs also come with thousands of cores but CPUs have less than 100, except for the Ampere Altra Max, with 128 cores.To read this article in full, please click here
Oracle is giving cloud control to its partners and customers with the launch of Oracle Alloy, an infrastructure platform that lets organizations build and deploy custom cloud services using their own hardware and data centers.The Alloy platform is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the vendor’s portfolio of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services.“Oracle has spent a lot of money and effort to build out OCI. They’re really keen on growing share, and they’re going after programs like Alloy aggressively to do so,” said analyst Chris Kanaracus, a research director in IDC’s worldwide infrastructure practice. “Oracle is incentivized to be as appealing to customers – on economics and flexibility and localization – as possible.”To read this article in full, please click here
If you are sitting in front of a Linux system, you can always pop open a browser and query topics of interest on Wikipedia. On the other hand, if you’re logged on through a terminal emulator like PuTTY or you just prefer using the command line, there is another option: wikit.Wikit is a tool that queries Wikipedia from the command line and provides summaries of its content on a huge collection of topics. It's easy to use and allows you to quickly query and, if you want, save the rendered information in a file.How to use wikit
One of the things Wikipedia will not, at least currently, tell you about is wikit itself. So, this post will provide information on the command and show you how you can use it.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, we’re going to examine bash's continue command. It is a bash built-in and provides a way to stop executing the commands in a loop depending on some condition.
Dell Technologies has aggressively promoted Azure Stack, Microsoft’s software package that allows enterprises to run a complete copy of the Azure cloud service within their own data center.Now it has introduced a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system designed to support Azure Stack: a 1U server that allows organizations to start small with their deployment and grow.Formally known as Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, the single-node system is designed for customers with smaller data-center footprints, but is expandable to support AI/ML workloads.To read this article in full, please click here
By most definitions, the network router’s purpose is defined by its name – it routes packets from one location to another. But over the course of decades of internet networking, the value of the router has grown significantly, offering enterprises additional functions such as network security, content filtering, quality of service, and more.At its most basic level, a router is a device that connects networks to each other, forwarding data packets from one location to another until they reaches their destination. Within a local area network (LAN), a router can also allow multiple devices to use the same Internet connection, such as how a home router allows users to connect their laptops, phones and tablets (among countless other devices) at the same time.To read this article in full, please click here
Using a function in bash allows you to create something in Linux that works as if it were a script within a script. Whenever the data being processed matches a set of conditions, your script can call a function that does further processing.The format of a function is very straightforward. The syntax looks like this:<function_name> () {
<commands>
}
You can also use the following format that uses the word "function" if you prefer:function <function_name> {
<commands>
}
In fact, you can also create a function on a single line if the commands to be run are limited, but note the required “;” that follows the command(s):To read this article in full, please click here
Google Cloud has extended its mainframe migration services to include a new option that enables parallel processing – customers can simultaneously run their mainframe workloads on prem and in the cloud, with the ultimate goal of moving those resources to the cloud.The new service, Dual Run for Google Cloud, is in preview status and lets customers run workloads on their existing mainframes and on Google Cloud concurrently without interrupting operations. Enterprises can then perform real-time testing and determine application performance and stability in the cloud. A large challenge with mainframe systems is the tight coupling of data to the application layer. Companies would have to stop an application for some period of time in order to move it, modernize it or transform it, according to Google.To read this article in full, please click here
Seven years after its $16.7 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Altera, Intel is expanding the technology it gained into new areas.While the primary use for an FPGA processor has been for smartNICs that offload tasks from server CPUs, Intel is now looking to broaden its application from the data center to remote, edge computing, and embedded systems.It’s not as if the Altera processors languished over the last several years, however. One major change is manufacturing. When Intel purchased Altera, its chips were made by TSMC. Now they are made by Intel, so hopefully that’s one less supply-chain headache to worry about.To read this article in full, please click here
Back in August, TrendForce Research predicted that due to an oversupply in NAND flash memory, the price of SSDs could drop by 5% to 10% in the third quarter.Since then, the economy has only worsened and the oversupply has continued, and while TrendForce hasn't reported the Q3 actuals, it's now predicting 15% to 20% drop in NAND flash prices in the fourth quarter on top of the Q3 drop..TrendForce says buyers of NAND flash memory—vendors that make SSDs but don’t manufacture their own memory—have reduced their NAND inventory and cut back on new purchases in the second half of the year. Meanwhile makers of memory drastically reduced prices to boost sales. Now TrendForce predicts that before the end of the year, suppliers will be selling memory at a loss and reduce production.To read this article in full, please click here
Bash provides a large number of options that can be used to control the behavior of bash scripts. This post examines some of the more useful ones and explains how to display which options are in use and which are not.Exiting when an error occurs
If you want a bash script to exit soon as it encounters an error—any error at all—in your scripts, you can add the set -o errexit option. If your script contains a syntax error, tries to read a file that doesn’t exist, attempts to append to a file when you don’t have permission to do so, or misuses a command in some way, the script will end abruptly. Here is a simple example:#!/bin/bash
set -o errexit
tail NoSuchFile
echo -n “Enter text to be appended> “
read txt
echo $txt >> NoSuchFile
Try to run this script, and you’ll see this:To read this article in full, please click here