As technology extends deeper into every aspect of business, the tip of the spear is often some device at the outer edge of the network, whether a connected industrial controller, a soil moisture sensor, a smartphone, or a security cam.This ballooning internet of things is already collecting petabytes of data, some of it processed for analysis and some of it immediately actionable. So an architectural problem arises: You don’t want to connect all those devices and stream all that data directly to some centralized cloud or company data center. The latency and data transfer costs are too high.That’s where edge computing comes in. It provides the “intermediating infrastructure and critical services between core datacenters and intelligent endpoints,” as the research firm IDC puts it. In other words, edge computing provides a vital layer of compute and storage physically close to IoT endpoints, so that control devices can respond with low latency – and edge analytics processing can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred to the core.To read this article in full, please click here
Edge computing is gaining steam as an enterprise IT strategy with organizations looking to push storage and analytics closer to where data is gathered, as in IoT networks. But it’s got its challenges.
Tech Spotlight: Edge Computing
Proving the value of analytics on the edge (CIO)
The cutting edge of healthcare: How edge computing will transform medicine (Computerworld)
Securing the edge: 4 trends to watch (CSO)
How to choose a cloud IoT platform (InfoWorld)
Edge computing: 5 potential pitfalls (Network World)
Its potential upsides are undeniable, including improved latency as well as reduced WAN bandwidth and transmission costs. As a result, enterprises are embracing it. Revenues in the edge-computing market were $4.68 billion in 2020 and are expected to reach $61.14 billion by 2028, according to a May 2021 report by Grand View Research.To read this article in full, please click here
Ever heard of Homebrew? It’s a package manager with a very unusual feature. It allows ordinary users to install packages without using sudo, and it’s available for both macOS and Linux. While the tool on each of these systems is referred to as Homebrew, the Linux version installs as linuxbrew.Once installed, users can use Homebrew via the brew command to install packages very easily. Installation of Homebrew itself, however, does generally require sudo privileges and installs in /home/linuxbrew.The man page for the brew command calls it “The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)”.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s the time of year when most enterprises are involved in a more-or-less-formal technology review cycle, as a preparatory step for next year’s budgeting. They’ve done this for decades, and it’s interesting to me that in any given year, enterprises share roughly three of their top five priorities. It’s more interesting that over three-quarters of enterprises carry over at least two of their top five priorities for multiple years. Why aren’t they getting addressed? They say their top problem is an “information gap.”Buyers adopt network technologies that improve their business, not just their network. They have to justify spending, particularly spending on some new technology that someone inside or outside has suggested. That means that they have to understand how it will improve operations, how they’ll deploy it, and what the cost will be. To do this for a new technology, they need information on how that improvement would happen—and they say they’re not getting it.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the sar command. The name "sar" stands for "system activity report". It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity and so on.
NAND flash maker Kioxia has expanded its Software-Enabled Flash technology to bring a greater degree of programmability to NAND storage. The move will benefit hyperscalers the most but will have benefits for enterprises and SMBs as well.Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) first introduced SEF last year. It’s an open-source API that operates as a new kind of hardware flash controller to offload some functions to a controller, thus freeing up the CPU, while allowing large data-center environments to manage at scale.Because the API is open source, competitors in the flash space can adopt the API and customize it for their hardware. Hyperscalers think about SSDs in terms of deploying and serving workloads at scale. Kioxia notes that cloud providers often have different types of drives they deploy for different use cases, like block storage versus file storage or ZNS.To read this article in full, please click here
When it comes to protecting data-center-based resources in the highly distributed world, traditional security hardware and software components just aren’t going to cut it.That’s the bottom line for enterprises as they move to distributed digital environments according to Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking & advanced security business group. The idea is that security needs to be put deep into the infrastructure fabric and protect workloads across their lifecycle, Gillis said during an interview with Network World at the company’s VMworld virtual conference.To read this article in full, please click here
Facebook says the root cause of its outage Monday involved a routine maintenance job gone awry that resulted in rendering its DNS servers unavailable, but first the entire Facebook backbone network had crashed.To make matters worse, the loss of DNS made it impossible for Facebook engineers to remotely access the devices they needed to in order to bring the network back up, so they had to go into the data centers to manually restart systems.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is all in at the edge as the company has rolled out new software to help enterprises support and manage ever-more distributed applications and data.At its virtual VMworld conference this week the company took the wraps off VMware Edge, an amalgamation of new and existing software packages that together let enterprises run, manage, and secure what VMware calls “edge-native” apps across multiple clouds at local and far-flung edge locations.To read this article in full, please click here
Modernizing a data-center network is no easy task under any conditions, but when a healthcare system that includes hospitals and emergency care depends on that network, the pressure is only more intense.That’s the challenge that Tom Hull, CIO of Kaleida Health, the largest healthcare system in western New York, has undertaken in the past year-and-a-half with the goal of building a secure, software-defined data-center environment capable of moving the provider into the future.To read this article in full, please click here
Data-center owners and operators face increasing complexity and operational challenges as they look to improve IT resiliency, build out capacity at the edge, and retain skilled staff in a tight labor market.Meanwhile, use of the public cloud for mission-critical workloads is up, according to Uptime Institute, even as many enterprises seek greater transparency into cloud providers’ operations.
Read more: Data-center recruitment needs to change to avoid staff shortagesTo read this article in full, please click here
Fedora Linux has been recognized as a "digital public good" by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a strategy group set up by UNICEF to promote sustainable development through open-source solutions that contribute to an equitable world.The reasons Fedora was recognized include that Fedora:
promotes best practices and adheres to standards
creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users
is free of charge and comes with permissions to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the software without restrictions other than that the same permissions must be granted to anyone using resulting products
adheres to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws
shares personal information in limited and acknowledged ways
causes no harm
follows privacy policy guidelines and makes privacy policy available to partners
Finding installed packages on Fedora Linux systems
DPGA also notes that Fedora is actively used in 483 countries.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced three new cloud-related offerings to more effectively protect data and make it more available to analytics.The first is called HPE GreenLake for Data Protection that relies on the company’s on-premises Greenlake data-center hardware sold on a pay-per-use model rather than purchasing everything upfront.The service includes HPE Backup and Recovery Service for VMware and GreenLake for Disaster Recovery.How to choose the best NVMe storage array
The backup and recovery service allows enterprises to back up on-premises virtual machines to the public cloud. This is purely a service with no hardware purchase requirements. Customers can recover instantly on-prem, and it is particularly aimed at protecting against ransomware attacks.To read this article in full, please click here
Gigabyte Technology isn’t the first name that comes to mind in data-center hardware. It’s better known as a consumer player, but it is a significant server player none the less, making server motherboards on par with other top names like Supermicro.Now the company has teamed with CoolIT Systems to provide two high-density servers equipped with liquid-cooling technology.The servers, H262-ZL0 and H262-ZL2, are equipped with direct liquid cooling for CPUs designed to support the high-performing but super-hot 280 watt AMD EPYC 7003 (Milan) processors.The servers, based on the company's H262-Z6x family of air-cooled servers, are hyperconverged and very dense, targeting HPC, HCI, in-memory-computing, and scientific-research markets. They both pack four nodes with two sockets each and eight DIMM slots per node in a 2U form factor. To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise looking to buy data-center switches face longer lead times and lack of stock over the course of the next year or so as demand continues to substantially outpace supply, according to a report from the Dell’Oro Group.Sameh Boujelbene, leader of the analyst firm’s campus and data-center research team, said that one canary in the coal mine was Broadcom’s announcement earlier this year that 90% of its total chip output for 2021 had been spoken for as early as March. That’s the result not just of material shortages that have affected the semiconductor market as a whole, but of human behaviors that arose in response.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years
Whether they’re smaller enterprises or big hyperscalers building out capacity, IT decision makers tend to rush into pre-orders whenever headlines about shortages appear, Boujelbene said, and Dell’Oro projects that will true in 2022.To read this article in full, please click here
At first glance, Intel doesn’t look like a company under siege. In its last fiscal year, it recorded $77.8 billion in sales and $20 billion in profit. Its market capitalization is $220 billion as of mid-September 2021.And yet it is. When you’re the leader, all your competition is gunning for you. Intel is wrestling with a loss of leadership in manufacturing and process nodes, it’s losing share to a very resurgent AMD, an unrelenting Nvidia is challenging Intel for AI dominance, the Atom processor failed spectacularly against Arm in the mobile market, and it’s on its third CEO in three years.
More about Intel:
A closer look at two newly announced Intel chips
Intel shifts to a multiarchitecture model
Intel revises its chip terminology and branding
CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel
But Intel revels in the competition. “Our success in so many markets makes us targets for lots of companies,” said Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of the Xeon and memory group. “So it’s not a surprise that we have competitors that want a piece of that.” To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the wait command. It's a command that allows you to wait for a process running in the background to finish before you move on to the next command.
Nutanix is releasing enhancements to its AOS operating system and Era database-management service designed to make it easier for enterprises to manage data, workloads, and business-continuity security tools in hybrid cloud environments via software-defined networking capabilitiesAOS and Era are both components of the Nutanix Cloud Platform. AOS 6, the new version of Nutanix's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, is designed to simplify network management across multiple clouds and enable enterprises to build virtual private clouds. Nutanix announced the updates at its .NEXT event this week.To read this article in full, please click here
When it comes to storing data, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, so before you decide where or how to store your data, first understand the amount and type you have and why you need to store it.How to make sure data that should be backed up gets backed up
So how do you formulate a sound data-storage management strategy? IDG asked dozens of storage and data management experts, which resulted in these top 14 suggestions regarding what steps you need to take to choose the right data storage solution(s) for your organization—and how you can better ensure your data is properly protected and retrievable.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo is expanding its TruScale pay-per-use model to cover all its data-center products—servers, storage—and client-side devices—laptops, tablets.This transition to a fully integrated, end-to-end, as-a-service model is part of the company’s “One Lenovo” strategy of providing its entire portfolio of clients and servers as a fully managed, on-premises cloud environment through TruScale leasing.One Lenovo simply means laptops and desktops will be sold along with data-center products together all under one sales program. Lenovo will launch a new channel program in 2022 to encompass the One Lenovo strategy.The everything-as-a-service announcement came at the company’s virtual Lenovo Tech World 2021 eventTo read this article in full, please click here