Like a lot of other people, I remember the Juniper ads of decades ago that used cartoons to poke fun at competitors. It was in-your-face marketing, and it seemed to pay off for Juniper in visibility.Then they got quiet, and while Juniper continued to innovate at the product level, they didn’t make news like they used to. Then they held their Nov. 2 analyst event, and they got in their competitors’ faces again. Why, and how?The why is related to a principle of marketing I’ve talked about for decades: trajectory management. All sales processes these days aim at converting “suspects” into “customers” through a series of steps. First you get mentioned in tech news articles and analyst briefs. Second, those who see those mentions go to your website for more information, which leads them to the third step—a request to talk to a salesperson. In-your-face marketing gets good ink, and Juniper got more coverage of its event than it’s gotten for anything else in years.To read this article in full, please click here
ITRenew, the reseller of slightly used hyperscalar servers, has partnered with Pluribus Networks to add Pluribus’s Netvisor ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric controllerless SDN cloud networking software to its hardware.ITRenew resells servers it buys from hyperscalers like Amazon and Google that are retiring them, typically after a year or so. It refurbishes them, offers a warrantee, and sells them to enterprises for half the price of new hardware.ITRenew sells the servers under the Sesame brand, which will now include Pluribus’s open networking software with their hyperscale-grade compute, storage and networking infrastructure for a fully integrated hardware and software solution.To read this article in full, please click here
The chpasswd command allows admins to change account passwords by piping username and password combinations to it.This can be done one-account-at-a-time or by putting all of the accounts to be modified in a file and piping the file to the command.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
How to use chpasswd
Using the chpasswd command requires root privilege. You can switch to the root account and run a command like this:# echo nemo:imafish | chpasswd
Better yet, you can use sudo with a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here
A startup called Rockport Networks has exited stealth mode with an intriguing product: a switchless network. It claims the Rockport Switchless Network product can move data faster and with better latency than switched networks.In a Rockport Switchless Network, switching functionality has been reassigned to intelligent endpoint network cards where these devices (nodes) become the network. Each device has an FPGA and can connect up to 24 endpoints to a dedicated 1U SHFL (pronounced “shuffle”) optical device using passive cabling.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
SHFLs need no power or cooling and can be linked together to scale out the network. Ethernet and InfiniBand traffic can be carried over the Rockport network. The network cards are standard, low-profile half height, half length (HHHL) PCIe cards.To read this article in full, please click here
Kyndryl, formerly IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services unit, is officially an independent company.From the start the spinoff will be big, with more than 90,000 employees, $19 billion in annual revenue, operations in over 60 countries, and a customer base that includes 75% of the Fortune 100. Its goal of modernizing customer infrastructure will remain at the center of its strategy, but it wants to expand.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Company executives say by spinning out of IBM, Kyndryl will have more freedom to partner with other major tech companies and cloud hyperscalers such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft. Plus it can invest in its workforce as well as focus on developing services for hot markets such as 5G, edge computing, cloud, and security.To read this article in full, please click here
Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 9 released today as a beta, bringing about a dozen major new features focused on security and compliance, simplified management and automation. But the biggest news might be the lack of changes to the management and administration tools from the previous version, which could make adoption fairly painless.The key new management features include enhanced web-console performance metrics for easier diagnosis of problems, live kernel patching without the need for downtime, and an easier way to create new OS images.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Many of those features make RHEL 9 better-suited to use in edge environments, according to IDC vice president Dave McCarthy, who noted that automation seemed to be a particularly important focus in the new version.To read this article in full, please click here
The term "cheat sheet" has long been used to refer to listings of commands with quick explanations and examples that help people get used to running them on the Linux command line and understanding their many options.Most Linux users have, at one time or another, relied on cheat sheets to get them started. There is, however, a tool called "cheat" that comes with a couple hundred cheat sheets and that installs quickly and easily on Fedora and likely many other Linux systems. Read on to see how the cheat command works.Finding installed packages on Fedora Linux systems
First, to install cheat on Fedora, use a command like one of these:To read this article in full, please click here
The PowerShell Get-WindowsFeature command—or, more properly, cmdlet—can retrieve a list of Windows features, including server roles, that are installed on a server or workstation running Windows, making it a handy tool for server admins.Learning about it can point up its value and how a broader knowledge of PowerShell commands may lead to more efficient administration of Windows servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Tim Ferrill
By default, the output of the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet provides something of a hierarchical view with individual features having boxes checked or not depending on their installation status. (Click to expand the image at left.) This is great for quickly eyeballing a single server to get an idea of what functions it provides, but as the list contains upwards of 250 roles and features, it starts to lose practicality when you are looking for a specific set of features or want to inventory multiple servers in a single pass.To read this article in full, please click here
There are quite a few ways to search through compressed text files on Linux systems without having to uncompress them first. Depending on the format of the files, you can choose to view entire files, extract specific text, navigate through file contents searching for content of interest, and sometimes even edit content. IFirst, to show you how this works, I compressed the words file on one of my Linux systems (/usr/share/dict/words) using these commands:$ cp /usr/share/dict/words .
$ 7z a words.7z words
$ bzip2 -k words
$ gzip -k words
$ xz -k words
$ zip words.zip words
How to use the grep command on Linux
The -k options used with the bzip2, gzip, and xz commands kept these commands from removing the original file, which they would by default. The resultant files then looked like this:To read this article in full, please click here
There could be as many as 15 billion IoT devices connected to enterprise infrastructure by 2029, according to Gartner. These devices will generate massive amounts of operational data that needs to be translated from their original protocols, aggregated, and analyzed in order to deliver real-time actionable alerts as well as longer-term business insights.For organizations with significant IoT deployments, edge computing has emerged as an effective way to process sensor data closest to where it is created. Edge computing reduces the latency associated with moving data from a remote location to a centralized data center or to the cloud for analysis, slashes WAN bandwidth costs, and addresses security, data-privacy, and data-autonomy issues.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the xargs command. It accepts input that is piped to it and then uses that input as arguments to whatever command you specify.
Among the greatest component shortages bedeviling everyone is that of GPUs, both from Nvidia and AMD. GPUs are used in Bitcoin farming, and with massive farms around the world gobbling up every GPU card, getting one is nigh impossible or prohibitively expense.So customers need to squeeze every last cycle out of the GPUs they have in service. An Israeli company called Run:AI claims it has a fix with a pair of technologies that pool GPU resources and maximize their use.The technologies are called Thin GPU Provisioning and Job Swapping. Not the most creative of names but they describe what the two do in tandem to automate the allocation and utilization of GPUs.To read this article in full, please click here
Graphcore, the British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has greatly increased the performance of its massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) servers.Graphcore sells its AI-oriented chips in rack-mounted designs called IPU-PODs. Up until now, the maximum per cabinet has been 64 units (in the IPU-POD64). The newest racks are twice and four times as large: the IPU-POD128 and IPU-POD256.
Read more: 10 of the world's fastest supercomputersTo read this article in full, please click here
Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation. Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t. To explore why, first let’s take a look at the technology.To read this article in full, please click here
Edge computing is shaping up as the most practical way to manage the growing volume of data being generated by remote sources such as IoT and 5G devices.A key benefit of edge computing is that it provides greater computation, network access, and storage capabilities closer to the source of the data, allowing organizations to reduce latency. As a result, enterprise are embracing the model: Gartner estimates that 50% of enterprise data will be generated at the edge by 2023, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the global market for edge data centers will reach $13.5 billion in 2024, up from $4 billion in 2017. To read this article in full, please click here
The xargs command on Linux can make it easier to build and execute commands. If you want to run the same command for a group of files or users, xargs can often make that process easier. Here's a very simple example of xargs that creates or updates the update time on some files.$ echo file1 file2 file3 | xargs touch
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file2
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 0 Oct 15 12:41 file3
The command below is similar, but creates a file with blanks in its name because the -d specifies the input termination character.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft has just made the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) available in the Microsoft Store for Windows 11 systems. WSL is the application that allows Windows users to run a GNU/Linux environment directly on Windows without the overhead of a virtual machine or dual-boot setup.One good aspect is that it installs as a separate app, decoupled from the OS. This means that users can update the app without having to wait for Windows OS updates to become available.Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux
The app in the Microsoft Store is not a new version of WSL. It’s still WSL 2, but is a preview version that was added as an option for end users to get the latest features faster and more conveniently. The binaries will no longer be part of the Windows image.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to add comments to your scripts. It's a super easy thing to do and can make it a lot easier for you or someone else to figure out what your script is intended to do – especially if the script is complex or you haven't looked at it in a long time.
VMware is in the process of spinning out from Dell Technologies, but the working relationship remains as strong as ever with a bunch of announcements from VMworld.All told, the pair made four significant announcements at the show, the first being that VMware Cloud will be sold on systems acquired through Dell's Apex pay-as-you-go program. The new Apex offering gives customers the ability to move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and costs.The new offering combines Dell’s hyperconverged infrastructure VxRail with VMware Cloud, VMware Tanzu for building cloud-native applications, and VMware HCX for application migration. Businesses can deploy the offering in their data center, at an edge location or a colocation facility with partners like Equinix.To read this article in full, please click here
You have to hand it to Larry Ellison, he is persistent. Or maybe he just doesn’t know when to give up. Either way, Oracle has shipped the latest in its Exadata server appliances, making some pronounced boosts in performance.Exadata was the old Sun Microsystems hardware Oracle inherited when it bought Sun in 2010. It has since discontinued Sun’s SPARC processor but soldiered on with servers running x86-based processors, all of them Intel despite AMD’s surging acceptance in the enterprise.When Oracle bought Sun in 2010, it was made clear they had no interest in low-end, mass market servers. In that regard, the Oracle Exadata X9M platforms deliver. The new Exadata X9M offerings, designed entirely around Oracle’s database software, include Oracle Exadata Database Machine X9M and Exadata Cloud@Customer X9M, which Oracle says is the only platform that runs Oracle Autonomous Database in customer data centers.To read this article in full, please click here