While it is clearly early in the game, VMware has made a bunch of moves recently to ensure that DPUs and the smartNICs they enable are an equal part of enterprise networking environments of the future.VMware is a leading proponent of using digital processing units to free-up server CPU cycles by offloading networking, security, storage, and other processes in order to rapidly and efficiently supporting edge- and cloud-based workloads.Competitors—and partners in some cases—including Intel, Nvidia, AWS, and AMD, also have plans to more tightly integrate DPU-based devices into in firewalls, gateways, enterprise load balancing, and storage-offload applications.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise IT teams are always on the lookout for ways to save money or gain operational efficiencies. One approach is to purchase used data center equipment such as servers, rather than investing in brand new systems and paying top dollar.There’s no shortage of resellers who cater to this market. Some equipment resellers specifically target gear from hyperscalers, because the hyperscalers replace their hardware at a fast pace, and the equipment they turnover can be more powerful than what most enterprises use today.Those in the business of selling used equipment say demand for their offerings is high.To read this article in full, please click here
SambaNova Systems is now shipping the second-generation of its DataScale systems specifically built for AI and machine learning.You may not have heard of SambaNova, a startup led by ex-Oracle/Sun hardware executives and Stanford professors, but its work is likely familiar. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was an early adopter of DataScale and used the systems in its COVID-19 antiviral compound and therapeutic research in 2020.“Our systems were deployed in supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which were then used by various parties for the research and development of COVID-19 antiviral compound and therapeutics,” said Marshall Choy, SambaNova’s senior vice president for products. “So, yes, they were a small part of that. As bad as the pandemic was, at least we got to do something good through it.”To read this article in full, please click here
Thanks to innovative cooling technology developed by an MIT-hatched startup, data center managers may soon be able to acquire servers and HPC (high-performance computing) devices that will significantly reduce the energy cost and footprint of the faciities they oversee.The startup, Jetcool, sprang from research conducted at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, and this month received an R&D 100 Award from R&D World magazine, marking it as a standout innovator for its use of what it calls “microconvection” liquid cooling of electronics.To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud expertise dominates the most in-demand tech skills for enterprises today, according to Skillsoft.The digital-learning company released its 2022 list of top-paying IT certifications, and AWS certs accounted for five of the 15 slots. Two Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certs and one Microsoft Azure cert also made the list.The continuing value of cloud certifications isn’t surprising, but what’s noteworthy is a shift toward multi-cloud skills, said Michael Yoo, customer market leader for Skillsoft’s technology and developer portfolio. “The increase in importance of Google Cloud and multi-cloud certifications—not just AWS and Azure—speaks to the growing fraction of enterprises that now rely on more than one cloud computing platform.”To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo Group is marking its 30th anniversary with its largest data-center product launch ever, with more than 50 new products covering servers, storage, and edge systems.Specifically, the celebration is for the ThinkSystem server, and many of the announcements were about upgrades. first introduced under the name PS/2 Server when IBM owned the business. It sold that x86 business to Lenovo in 2015, and it became the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.Due to the sheer numbers we won’t get into the individual products. Suffice it to say nearly everything is being upgraded. The next generation of ThinkSystem servers and storage, along with the ThinkEdge edge computing device lineup, as well as the ThinkAgile family of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances collectively are called Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3.To read this article in full, please click here
In reviewing CPU and server benchmarks, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that testing covers both single-core and multi-core performance. Here's the difference.In terms of raw performance, both are equally important, but single- and multi-core have areas of use where they shine. So when picking a CPU, it’s important to consider your particular workloads and evaluate whether single-core or multi-core best meets your needs.Single-core CPUs
There are still a lot of applications out there that are single-core limited, such as many databases (although some, like MySQL, are multicore).Performance is measured in a couple of ways. Clock frequency is the big one; the higher the frequency the faster apps will run. Also important is the width of execution pipelines, and the wider the pipeline, the more work can get done per clock cycle. So even if an app is single threaded, a wider pipeline can improve its performance.To read this article in full, please click here
The commands for looping in bash are extremely useful. They allow you to run a series of commands as many times as needed to process a large collection of data. The break and continue commands provide another special option. They allow you to exit a loop early or skip the remaining commands in the loop and return to the beginning.Both the break and the continue commands are meant to be used only in for, while and until loops. In fact, if you try to invoke the break command on its own, bash will tell you just that.To read this article in full, please click here
Chip powerhouse Broadcom recently announced its intention to acquire virtualization pioneer VMware for $61 billion. In light of Broadcom’s less than stellar track record with prior acquisitions (CA Technologies in 2018, and Symantec in 2019), VMware’s enterprise customers are understandably worried.“Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” says Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees it differently. Rather than advising VMware customers to identify the exits, Elliot believes customers should “double down” on their relationship with the vendor, moving towards a more strategic business partnership.To read this article in full, please click here
Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development.
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The working group will create a common definition and framework defining what mainframe modernization should look like and promote open-source development on the Big Iron.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia kicked off its second GTC conference of the year with news that its H100 “Hopper” generation of GPUs is in full production, with global partners planning to roll out products and services in October and wide availability in the first quarter of 2023.Hopper features a number of innovations over Ampere, its predecessor architecture introduced in 2020. Most significant is the new Transformer engine. Transformers are widely-used deep learning models and the standard model of choice for natural language processing. Nvidia claims the H100 Transformer Engine can speed up neural networks by as much as six-fold over Ampere without losing accuracy.To read this article in full, please click here
Data-centers are working to improve the resiliency of their physical infrastructure, avoid increasingly expensive outages, and recruit skilled staff in a competitive labor market. Meanwhile, many aren’t tracking critical environmental metrics, even as they face looming sustainability requirements.These are some of the highlights of Uptime’s Institute's 12th annual Global Data Center Survey, which tracks trends in capacity, tech adoption, and staffing.To read this article in full, please click here
Kyndryl has launched an infrastructure-management service that promises to help connect and integrate enterprise resources.Kyndryl Bridge integrates existing tools, partnerships, intellectual property, and processes the company has amassed through years of delivering infrastructure services and uses it to provide as-a-service capabilities and applications that help control and manage enterprise infrastructure.Enterprises have invested in heterogeneous tools and management platforms that don’t integrate the data they gather, and Kyndryl Bridge connects, aggregates, and centralizes that siloed performance data, said Antoine Shagoury, Kyndryl’s chief technology officer. "Then, we use our engineering expertise and AI to analyze the results in real time to provide operations personnel the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance," he said.To read this article in full, please click here
On Linux, the apropos command helps identify commands related to some particular term. It can be helpful in finding commands you might want to use—especially when you can’t remember their names.For example, if you couldn’t remember the command to display a calendar or put your shell to sleep for a short period of time, you could try these commands:$ apropos calendar
cal (1) - display a calendar
$ apropos sleep
sleep (1) - delay for a specified amount of time
usleep (1) - sleep some number of microseconds
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Seagate has upgraded its Exos Application Platform storage arrays with a new ASIC RAID controller that doubles performance and adds what Seagate calls self-healing to preserve data on defective hard disks.The Exos X models are a rebranding of the old Exos AP line. The chassis can hold a mix of traditional hard disks as well as SSDs. It comes with software that automatically moves “hot” data, which is being frequently accessed, to SSDs, while less used, “cold” data is moved to the hard drives.There are three Exos X products, defined by their size and drive-bay count. The 2U12 is a 2U chassis with 12 3.5-inch hard-drive bays; the 2U24 with is a 2U chassis has 24 drive slots; and the 5U84 with 84 slots in a 5U chassis. It has all of the standard connections: SAS, network attached SAS, Fibre Channel up to 32G, iSCSI up to 25G and a 10GBASE-T option as well.To read this article in full, please click here
Arm has introduced the next generation of its Neoverse high performance core technology, and Nvidia will be one of the first licensees to offer it out of the gate.Arm introduced the Neoverse N-Series processors for data center use in 2019, along with the Neoverse E-Series for edge computing and the Neoverse V-Series for high performance computing (HPC).For Neoverse V2, Arm is claiming higher per-thread performance at half the power consumption of its x86 competitors. Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions at Arm, said on a conference call with journalists that the main aim of V2 is improved performance for cloud and single-thread workloads while balancing power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here
Organizations often use Azure AD Connect to maintain the relationship between their on-prem active directory and their Office 365/Azure cloud instance, and when doing this, it’s important that they build in redundancy with business continuity in mind.Recently our organization sought to make two meaningful changes to its sync relationship:
set up a non-domain-controller AD Connect server
configure the existing sync server as a standby for failover in the event of problems with the primary server
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IBM has unveiled the next generation of its LinuxONE server, which uses the Telum processor found in the System Z mainframe, promising both scale-out and scale-up performance and much lower power use.Officially dubbed IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4, even though it uses the System Z processor, it only runs Linux-based workloads. The system is tailored to meet the needs of Linux workloads in the data center, according to Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow, CTO of Cloud Platform, IBM LinuxONE.He says that if a customer has Linux-based workloads running on a Z series, they will be portable to the Emperor server. The server can run Red Hat, SuSe, and Canonical Linux distros.To read this article in full, please click here