AMD saw another quarter of outstanding growth in sales of its server chips, giving the company its highest single-quarter gain for server CPUs since 2006 and eating into Intel’s most valuable market segment, according to the latest market report from Mercury Research.We’ll get to the desktop segment later, but AMD’s server CPU share grew 1.8 percentage points from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021, from 7.1% to 8.9%. That is astonishing as server numbers just don’t move like that so quickly. In the same single-quarter period, Intel slipped 1.8 percentage points, from 92.9% to 91.1%.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] There is seasonality in the server market, where it is normal for sales to go down in Q1, Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, told me. Cloud-server companies like AWS and Google go through a build/burn cycle where they buy a lot, then take time to deploy it all. Right now we are at the very bottom of build cycle where they buy the least amount, so if they are putting up these kinds of numbers during a low point, it will be even better when they Continue reading
VMware says its COO for products and cloud services, Raghu Raghuram, will be its next permanent CEO, a signal that the company’s board intends to keep VMware on its present course.When Raghuram takes the reins in June, it will end a four-month interregnum, during which the company has been helmed by CFO Zane Rowe. Former CEO Pat Gelsinger became the CEO at Intel in February, returning to the company where he had worked for 30 years.VMware is the unquestioned 800-pound gorilla of the enterprise hypervisor market and has pursued both internal technology development and a succession of strategic acquisitions to diversify its business. The company’s hypervisor business, buttressed by deals with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other hyperscalers to provide its core products as cloud services, is still the main revenue stream. But VMware also plays in security, containerization, and cloud-native applications.To read this article in full, please click here
A flurry of announcements from hardware vendors points to a change in how enterprises are purchasing servers, storage and networking resources for their data centers and edge deployments.To entice companies to keep workloads on premises, hardware vendors including Cisco, Dell, HPE, IBM, Lenovo and others are offering consumption-based pricing for data-center infrastructure. These pay-per-use products are designed to shorten procurement cycles, allow customers to scale up or down with demand, and more economically link hardware spending with usage.HPE, for example, pledged to transform its entire portfolio to pay-per-use and as-a-service offerings by 2022, and last week, the company added to its GreenLake lineup with new data services and infrastructure. Dell, for its part, unveiled the first products in its Apex portfolio of managed storage, servers, and hyperconverged infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
Linux commands offer a lot of flexibility. This post details some ways to make them even more convenient to use by making use of some clever tricks.Using file-name completion You can avoid typing a full file name by typing the beginning of its name and pressing the tab key. If the string uniquely identifies a file, doing this will complete the filename. Otherwise, you can enter another letter in the name and press tab again. However, you can also get a list of all files that begin with a particular string by typing the string and then hitting the tab key twice. In this example, we do both:$ ls di<tab><tab> diff-commands dig.1 directory dig.2 dimensions disk-usage-commands $ cd dir<tab> $ pwd directory [Find out how MINNIX was used as the inspiration for Linux.] Reusing commands and changing them Reissuing recently used commands is easy in bash. To rerun the previous command, all you have to do it type !! on the command line. You can also reissue a command with changes. If you issued the first command shown below only to find that sshd wasn't running, you could issue the second command to start it. Continue reading
Linux commands offer a lot of flexibility. This post details some ways to make them even more convenient to use by making use of some clever tricks.Using file-name completion You can avoid typing a full file name by typing the beginning of its name and pressing the tab key. If the string uniquely identifies a file, doing this will complete the filename. Otherwise, you can enter another letter in the name and press tab again. However, you can also get a list of all files that begin with a particular string by typing the string and then hitting the tab key twice. In this example, we do both:$ ls di<tab><tab> diff-commands dig.1 directory dig.2 dimensions disk-usage-commands $ cd dir<tab> $ pwd directory [Find out how MINNIX was used as the inspiration for Linux.] Reusing commands and changing them Reissuing recently used commands is easy in bash. To rerun the previous command, all you have to do it type !! on the command line. You can also reissue a command with changes. If you issued the first command shown below only to find that sshd wasn't running, you could issue the second command to start it. Continue reading
As TSMC charges to 5nm transistor designs and Intel struggles for 7nm, IBM has topped them all with the world’s first 2-nanometer node chip.OK, it won’t come to market for four years, according to IBM, and they might not be the first name that comes to mind when you think of processor design, but they are the quiet power in the semiconductor world.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] As far as commercial chips go, IBM makes two: the Power series for its Power line of Unix and Linux servers, and zArchitecture that is used in the z Series of mainframes. But IBM has its IBM Joint Development Alliance which is partnered with just about every semiconductor vendor out there—Intel, AMD, Nvidia, TSMC, Samsung, you name it.To read this article in full, please click here
As the enterprise edge expands to include semi-permanent remote workforces, IoT, and a range of applications like AI and M2M, they generate torrents of nonstop data that must be stored indefinitely and be available in near-real-time to users and applications.Legacy storage architectures are failing to keep up with both data growth and user/application demand. While storage innovation is pushing more workloads into the cloud, many startups have found that the average enterprise is not yet ready for cloud-only storage. Legacy architectures and applications are experiencing extended shelf-lives due to tight IT budgets, and many enterprises still prefer to keep certain workloads on-premises.To read this article in full, please click here
A UK-based AI-chip startup is making its first moves into North American to take on Nvidia on its home turf in the enterprise with new channel and reseller partners.Founded in 2016, Graphcore makes what it calls Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and shipped its first product—the Colossus GC2 “massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor”—in 2018. In July 2020, it released its second-generation processor called GC200, but news of that was drowned out by all the disruption caused by COVID-19.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" In addition to chips, the company sells cards and racks. The IPU-M2000 is a 1U blade built around four Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one petaFlop of AI compute. The IPU-POD64 is designed for large-scale deployments and offers the ability to run very large models across as many as 64 IPU processors in parallel.To read this article in full, please click here
A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here
Certificate-based authentication is a cryptographic technique that allows one computer to securely identify itself to another across a network connection, using a document called a public-key certificate.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the tool called speedtest. It allows you to check the speed of your connection to your Internet provider. The tool is not installed on Linux systems by default, but is easy to find and install.
IBM continues to tweak its venerable mainframe to keep the Big Iron among the talking points in hybrid cloud.About a year ago the company changed its 20-year mainframe software pricing scheme to make it more palatable to hybrid cloud and multicloud users who might be thinking of moving workloads off the mainframe and into the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
Used frequently, bash aliases can make working on the Linux command line a lot smoother and easier, but they can also be complicated and hard to remember. This post examines how you might make your aliases work for you rather than vice versa.In general, aliases are especially good for: simplifying commands that are long and overly complex remembering commands with odd or complicated names saving time using commands that you use very often What you need to keep in mind is that: aliases can themselves be hard to remember giving an alias the same name as a regular command can be a good thing or a bad thing (more on this shortly) How to create an alias Use the alias command and remember to add it to your ~/.bashrc file so that it will still be waiting for you whenever you login.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell is launching a new offering of managed storage, server, and hyperconverged infrastructure that can be deployed in a company's own data center, at edge locations or in colocation facilities, and enterprises pay for capacity as needed.Dubbed Dell Apex, it includes storage, cloud services, and a console for streamlined management. The launch coincides with the kickoff of Dell Technologies World 2021, which is being held virtually this year.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Pay-per-use hardware models such as Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake are designed to deliver cloud-like pricing structures and flexible capacity to private data centers. The concept of pay-per-use hardware isn't new, but the buzz around it is growing. Enterprises are looking for alternatives to buying equipment outright for workloads that aren't a fit for public cloud environments.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM announced a pair of additions to its storage portfolio designed to improve the access to and management of data across hybrid-cloud environments and offer faster, higher capacity.The first is container-native software defined storage (SDS) called IBM Spectrum Fusion that’s due out in the second half of 2021. It will initially come in the form of a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system that integrates compute, storage, and networking. Next year, IBM plans to release an SDS-only version of Spectrum Fusion.To read this article in full, please click here
New features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are tuned to provide better remote support for edge networking where processor- and memory-constrained devices can present management problems.RHEL 8.4 announced this week at Red Hat Summit has new capability to send lighter-weight universal base images and is designed for potentially less capable edge devices, letting Red Hat customers deploy edge applications more flexibly.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] In addition to the new RHEL version, Red Hat announced updates to Podman, the company’s open-source container engine, that will allow users to manage widely deployed containers from a single console, and an OpenShift update that adds support for smaller clusters and remote worker nodes makes it easier to use Kubernetes in resource-constrained locations.To read this article in full, please click here
Arm Holdings has disclosed details of its two new server-processor designs, Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1, as well as an updated high-speed mesh to connect its processors.The two designs were introduced last September but Arm was mum on performance. Now it's talking numbers.The Neoverse V1 is designed for scale-up servers, especially high-performance computing (HPC). It supports for Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) and delivers more than a 50% performance increase over the N1 for HPC machine-learning workloads.To read this article in full, please click here
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in enterprise disaster recovery and business continuity planning in areas such as remote access, networking, SaaS applications and ransomware. Over the past year, IT execs have been scrambling to plug those gaps and update DR plans on the fly.More significantly, the pandemic triggered fundamental IT changes at many organizations, including a hasty migration of applications to the cloud, an acceleration of digital transformation efforts, the emergency provisioning of new systems and services outside of traditional procurement procedures, and, in many industries, the emergence a new category of full-time, work-at-home employees who are handling mission-critical data on their personal devices.To read this article in full, please click here
Smaller organizations eye SASE to provide secure access to applications. Lack of maturity, existing security and digital transformation investments give large enterprises pause on SASE.(Insider Story)
During this week's Red Hat Summit, the company announced enhanced support for edge networking in its upcoming RHEL 8.4 release. The Red Hat Edge initiative promises new capabilities that will make RHEL a more powerful foundation for the open hybrid cloud.The Red Hat Edge aims to extend Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio to the edge. This will involve everything from telecommunications and transportation to smart automobiles and enterprise devices. With Red Hat technologies, the edge-ready technology stack uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with: Red Hat OpenShift – making it possible to deploy Kubernetes platform in both space- and resource-constrained locations Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – adding Kubernetes management capabilities across the hybrid cloud Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform – automating workflows Red Hat Integration – connecting applications and data across edge and open cloud deployments Red Hat Data Services – storing, analyzing and distributing data across edge and data centers The company is also expanding its predictive analytics offering, Red Hat Insights, across the open hybrid cloud with the launch of Red Hat Insights for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and with expanded capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Continue reading