We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?”
5G resources
What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones
How 5G frequency affects range and speed
Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t
Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading
Our initial look at Intel’s Architecture Day focused on the new Xeons and IPU processors. Now we’ll get into the fine details, as well as look at other upcoming technologies.Sapphire Rapids
Intel’s upcoming next-generation Xeon is codenamed Sapphire Rapids and promises a radical new design and gains in performance. One of its key differentiators is its modular SoC design. The chip has multiple tiles that appears to the system as a monolithic CPU and all of the tiles communicate with each other, so every thread has full access to all resources on all tiles.To read this article in full, please click here
Something happened back in 1991 that dramatically changed the future of computing. Linus Torvalds, a Finnish-American software engineer, released the Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). A good portion of the technology we use today would not be what it is had this not happened.It all started on August 25th of that year when Torvalds announced in a usenet post that he was working on a free OS and that it would be ready within a few months. He also said it "won't be big and professional like gnu," but that wasn't exactly how things turned out!The GPL
The beauty of the Gnu GPL was that, instead of restricting what users can do with the Linux kernel, it maximized their rights. Richard Stallman, GNU founder, referred to these rights as the "four freedoms." They include the freedom to run, copy, study/improve and distribute. This was akin to turning the function of a license inside out.To read this article in full, please click here
There are quite a few shells on Linux system and more that can be easily added. This post examines some of the more popular shells, how they differ and the files that contribute to their configuration.The default shell on most Linux systems is bash. Unless you make an effort, any user accounts added to the system will be assigned bash as their login shell. Bash has been around since 1989 and was meant to replace the Bourne shell (sh). In fact, if you take a look at /bin/sh, you'll probably find that it's nothing more than a symbolic link to /bin/bash.$ ls -l /bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4 Jan 25 2021 /bin/sh -> bash
Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux
Popular Shells
Some of the best and most popular shells include:To read this article in full, please click here
Storage will never be as fast as system memory--that’s just the nature of system architecture. But thanks to NVMe (nonvolatile memory express), SSDs can deliver such blazingly fast performance, the penalty of “going to disk” tends to be miniscule.NVMe encompasses a family of specifications for how software talks to storage. It works over a number of transport methods, including PCI Express, RDMA, and TCP. Storage arrays that support the NVMe standard are the sports cars of storage, exposing super-fast storage media more directly and efficiently than any other mainstream method allows.To read this article in full, please click here
There was a time when Intel was all-x86, all the time, everywhere.Not anymore.Last week Intel held its annual Architecture Day with previews of multiple major upcoming architectures beyond x86. For once, it’s not hyperbole when they say these are some of the “biggest shifts in a generation.”CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel
And it’s not just architectures or just more and faster cores, it’s new designs, whole new ways of doing things. Instead of just packing more cores onto a smaller die, Intel is switching to a new hybrid architecture that adds low-energy-draw cores, similar to what some ARM chip makers have been doing for years on mobile devices.To read this article in full, please click here
German data center hardware giant Schneider Electric is the latest OEM to jump on the on-demand leasing program hardware, in this case the company’s American Power Conversion line of uninterruptable power supplies (UPS).The primary beneficiaries are channel partners, but the user comes out ahead as well. This is similar to the on-premises leasing model used by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Cisco, and more. Rather than make a massive up-front purchase, you lease the gear and pay monthly for actual use.The deal is for channel partners to pair APC Smart-UPS solutions with its monitoring and dispatch services to create their own service offering. Schneider says this partnership will allow channel partners to offer more visibility and front-end maintenance across their customers’ dispersed UPS systems.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD likes to crow about how its Epyc server processors can encrypt the content of virtal machines while they’re in operation so they are secure and isolated, preventing other VMs on the processor from accessing the encrypted contents.Well, researchers from the Technical University of Berlin have found a weakness in that feature, known as Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and published a theoretical attack that defeats the protection.The paper ”One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization” details how the researchers succeeded in mounting a voltage fault-injection attack.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, you'll learn two checksum commands -- one that provides an easy way to compare a copy of a file to the original, and one that computes a 256-bit checksum that is cryptographically secure.
Pay-per-use hardware models such as HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex are designed to deliver cloud-like pricing structures and flexible capacity to on-premises data centers. And interest is growing as enterprises look for alternatives to buying equipment outright for workloads that aren’t a fit for public-cloud environments.The concept of pay-per-use hardware has been around for more than a decade, but the buzz around it is growing, said Daniel Bowers, a former senior research director at Gartner. “There’s been a resurgence of interest in this for about four years, driven a lot by HPE and its GreenLake program.”To read this article in full, please click here
Pay-per-use hardware models such as HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex are designed to deliver cloud-like pricing structures and flexible capacity to on-premises data centers. And interest is growing as enterprises look for alternatives to buying equipment outright for workloads that aren’t a fit for public-cloud environments.The concept of pay-per-use hardware has been around for more than a decade, but the buzz around it is growing, said Daniel Bowers, a former senior research director at Gartner. “There’s been a resurgence of interest in this for about four years, driven a lot by HPE and its GreenLake program.”To read this article in full, please click here
Pay-per-use hardware models such as HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex are designed to deliver cloud-like pricing structures and flexible capacity to on-premises data centers. And interest is growing as enterprises look for alternatives to buying equipment outright for workloads that aren’t a fit for public-cloud environments.The concept of pay-per-use hardware has been around for more than a decade, but the buzz around it is growing, said Daniel Bowers, a former senior research director at Gartner. “There’s been a resurgence of interest in this for about four years, driven a lot by HPE and its GreenLake program.”To read this article in full, please click here
You may know that passwords are hashed on Linux systems, and the hashes are stored in the restricted access /etc/shadow file. But did you know that you can also determine the hash method that was used and report the number of days since a password was last changed from this file as well?To look at a user record in the /etc/shadow file, run a command like this:$ sudo grep nemo /etc/shadow
You should see a line that looks something like this:nemo:$6$FVYIIgcEcObSsUcf$FsSBlV9soVt.Owbd4xnvhlZzjx73ZBQQBT0WMyah6qcdnH91tBf9C4EaYbRtr7jKGETP/TwBNjyrDFqhvK0NV1:18698:7:90:7:::
Viewing and configuring password aging on Linux
In spite of how long that line is, it's quite easy to parse. The first two fields in the lines of this colon-separated file store:To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn an easy way to do math on the command line using double parentheses. This construct is often used in scripts, but also works just fine on the command line.
Just months after it was considering buying DXC Technology, Atos is reportedly looking to sell some of its legacy business operations, including its data-center and communications businesses. If true, it’s a further sign that the on-prem consulting business is falling out of favor.Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Atos is exploring a sale of its legacy information technology business, including some outsourcing operations. One day later, Atos CEO Elie Girard said during its earnings call with analysts that the company is definitely looking to make some kind of changes to its businesses.To read this article in full, please click here
ITRenew and Vapor IO are teaming up on an enterprise service that's designed to bring performance and affordability to edge computing. ITRenew, which I've written about before, specializes in acquiring used data-center gear from hyperscale vendors, refurbishing it, and selling it to data-center operators for much less than new equipment would cost.Up until now, ITRenew focused on enterprise data-center customers. Now it's eyeing the edge through its partnership with Vapor IO, which specializes in colocation, networking and interconnection services.To read this article in full, please click here
After two decades of failure and endless jokes, the Intel Itanium is officially no more. Intel has finally stopped shipping its doomed-from-the-start 64-bit processor, two years after saying it would cease shipments.Really, the end came some time ago. The last Itaniums were the 9000 series “Kittson,” which shipped in 2017. It’s a bane of technology firms to support technologies they would much rather ditch but can't due to customer investment, and for years Intel was obligated to support the paltry market that existed for Itanium.To read this article in full, please click here
One surprisingly easy command for grabbing a portion of every line in a text file on a Linux system is cut. It works something like awk in that it allows you to select only what you want to see from files, enabling you to pull fields (regardless of the delimiter used), characters or bytes. To check on cut, you can ask about its version like this:$ cut --version
cut (GNU coreutils) 8.32
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Written by David M. Ihnat, David MacKenzie, and Jim Meyering.
Selecting by field
To illustrate how the cut command works, we'll first run commands using a sample "cities" file that contains details of the largest cities in the US in a tab-separated format. The lines in this file look something like what is shown below:To read this article in full, please click here
A startup called Pliops has emerged from stealth mode with a new way to do data processing. Rather than load data into main memory as is traditionally done, the Pliops technology offloads data and the application to a PCI Express card, and data is processed where it is stored, thus freeing up the CPU for other tasks.It's called computational storage. The concept has been around for a while, but like so many technological ideas, it was ahead of its time. The technology needed to catch up to the concept. It could never be done with mechanical hard drives, and SSDs, too, needed to make gains. Recently, Samsung and Xilinx partnered to deliver a compute-on-storage SSD device that uses a Xilinx FPGA to offload the processing work.To read this article in full, please click here