COVID-19 has turned the world inside out, and the impact on infrastructure and operations teams is significant.That's the conclusion of Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt, who detailed the core infrastructure trends that IT executives can expect to see in the next 12-18 months. Hewitt shared the research at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2020 Americas event, which is being held virtually this week. (Related story: Gartner's top 9 strategic technology trends for 2021)"The situations created by COVID-19 have had a significant impact on the world," Hewitt said. "This impact is having an influence on almost all of the trends that infrastructure and operations leaders will be facing going forward."To read this article in full, please click here
All of the major IT hardware suppliers to one degree or other have adopted a consumption model, which is a fancy word for leasing. Rather than the outright purchase of hardware, customers lease it, usage is monitored, and the customer pays a monthly use fee.Now Dell Technologies has announced it is expanding its as-a-service capabilities with Project APEX, to simplify how customers and partners access Dell technology on-demand.APEX will cover an array of Dell products —storage, servers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, PCs, and broader solutions. Project APEX will unify the company’s as-a-service and cloud strategies, technology offerings, and go-to-market efforts previously sold under the On Demand monicker.To read this article in full, please click here
Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.8 trillion in 2021, an increase of 4% from 2020, according to research firm Gartner, but still shy of pre-pandemic levels. IT spending in 2020 is expected to total $3.6 trillion, down 5.4% from 2019.Certain industries facing prolonged lockdowns due to COVID-19, such as entertainment and air transport, have cut IT spending by more than 30% in 2020, according to Gartner, which delivered the current outlook for the global IT market at its virtual IT Symposium/Xpo 2020 Americas.
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Deploying password-quality checking on your Debian-based Linux servers can help ensure that your users assign reasonably secure passwords to their accounts, but the settings themselves can be a bit misleading.For example, setting a minimum password length of 12 characters does not necessarily mean that all your users' passwords will actually have 12 or more characters.Let's stroll down Complexity Boulevard and see how the settings work and examine some that are worth considering.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The files that contain the settings we're going to look at will be:To read this article in full, please click here
Companies need to focus on architecting resilience and accept that disruptive change is the norm, says research firm Gartner, which unveiled its annual look at the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to prepare for in the coming year.Gartner unveiled this year's list at its flagship IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference, which is being held virtually this year.
READ MORE: VMware highlights security in COVID-era networking | Essential edge-computing use cases | How AI can boost data-center availability, efficiencyTo read this article in full, please click here
Databases, also referred to as structured data, are an essential part of any data center. While databases do not typically hold a high percentage of the terabytes housed in a given data center, they do hold a high percentage of mission-critical data. Understanding their unique structure and operation is key to backing them up.Structured data cannot be backed up like unstructured data due to three very big challenges. First, databases are typically stored in datafiles that are constantly changing as long as something is making updates to the database. This means you cannot just back them up like any other file.To read this article in full, please click here
Having completed its purchase of bare-metal cloud specialist Packet in March, Equinix is announcing the availability of Equinix Metal, an automated and interconnected bare metal cloud service in four major regions.A bare metal service means the customer provides the operating environment, not just the apps. Typical IaaS/PaaS includes the operating system (either Linux or Windows) plus developer tools and middleware. In a bare metal environment, there's no operating system or virtual machine. All you get are cores, memory, storage, and networking.
READ MORE: Why a bare-metal cloud provider might be just what you need | Google Cloud's bare-metal initiative | Rackspace offers bare-metal cloud offeringTo read this article in full, please click here
AMD had a busy week last week. It introduced the third generation of its Zen microarchitecture, which has been propelling the company’s comeback since 2017, and is the subject of reports it is looking to buy field-programmagle gate array (FPGA) maker Xilinx.Five years ago, AMD was a non-entity in the CPU market and only kept afloat by its GPU business. Intel had written the company off and considered Qualcomm its biggest competitor. Then the company came out with Zen, a whole new design. “We started with Zen from scratch, starting from a clean sheet of paper,” said CEO Lisa Su in a video announcement.The result is a nice comeback for a company that had been written off five years ago. It has 5.8% of the server market share as of Q2, 19.2% of desktop and 19.9% of mobile, according to Mercury Research, which specializes in semiconductor market share. The server share may seem low, but two years ago it was at zero and server turnover is slower than desktop.To read this article in full, please click here
Common red masonry bricks – the same type used in construction projects, including many data centers – can be adapted and used to store electricity, researchers claim.A team from Washington University in St. Louis has found that the red pigment in bricks can trigger a chemical reaction, in much the same way rust occurs, that enables bricks to store a significant amount of energy.Specialized bricks aren't required; the synthesis works with any kind of brick, according to an article published on the university's news site. The team used common bricks bought from the Home Depot in Brentwood, Missouri, for 65 cents apiece.To read this article in full, please click here
Pluribus has fine-tuned its switch fabric software to support larger, distributed multi-vendor data centers. Specifically, the company has enabled its Adaptive Cloud Fabric to scale from its current level of support for 64 nodes to up to 1,024 switches in a unified fabric. The scale-up is part of the company's recently upgraded core network operating system, Netvisor One, which is a virtualized Linux-based NOS that provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking and distributed fabric intelligence. The NOS virtualizes switch hardware and implements the company's Adaptive Cloud Fabric. Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and can be deployed across a single data center, or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms or hyperconverged infrastructures, the company said.To read this article in full, please click here
In recent days Intel and Nvidia have introduced or announced new networking products with a common goal of offloading networking traffic to the network processor, thus freeing up the CPU for computational work.Intel announced a new networking initiative to capitalize on what it calls “a perfect storm of 5G, edge buildout and pervasive artificial intelligence” with an expanded lineup of hardware, software and solutions for network infrastructure.This includes enhancements to Intel’s software reference architecture, FlexRAN; Intel virtualized radio access network (vRAN) dedicated accelerator; network-optimized next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable and D processors (codenamed “Ice Lake”); and upgraded Intel Select Solutions for Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI).To read this article in full, please click here
If there was any doubt Nvidia has arrived as an enterprise player, its deal with VMware should erase all doubt.The GPU developer and VMware announced at the recent VMworld 2020 conference that they plan to integrate their respective core technologies through a series of development and networking partnerships.As part of the collaboration, Nvidia’s set of AI software-research tools on the Nvidia NGC hub will be integrated into VMware’s vSphere, Cloud Foundation, and Tanzu platforms. This will help accelerate AI adoption, enabling enterprises to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations, and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the data center, cloud and edge.To read this article in full, please click here
Microservices-style applications rely on fast, dependable network infrastructure in order to respond quickly and reliably, and the service mesh can be a powerful enabler.At the same time, service-mesh infrastructure can be difficult to deploy and manage at scale and may be too complex for smaller applications, so enterprises need to carefully consider its potential upsides and downsides in relation to their particular circumstances.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
What is a service mesh?
A service mesh is infrastructure software that provides fast and reliable communications between the microservices that applications may need. Its networking features include application identification, load balancing, authentication, and encryption. To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is continuing its effort to remake the data center, cloud and edge to handle the distributed workloads and applications of the future.At its virtual VMworld 2020 event the company previewed a new architecture called Project Monterey that goes a long way toward melding bare-metal servers, graphics processing units (GPUs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), network interface cards (NICs) and security into a large-scale virtualized environment.Monterey would extend VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which today integrates the company’s vShphere virtualization, vSAN storage, NSX networking and vRealize cloud management systems to support GPUs, FPGAs and NICs into a single platform that can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
Reports hit the Web last week that the Windows XP source code has been leaked and posted to 4chan, one of the seediest boards not on the dark web.A link to a 42.9GB file was posted but quickly scrolled off. 4chan does not archive its posts so once the message scrolled off it was gone, but the link is getting around in other ways. The code is being hosted by Mega, a file-sharing service with its own dubious past.Reports from other sites say the code is legitimate. Microsoft has only said “We are investigating the matter."[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
What is still unclear is whether the code is the whole codebase or just a portion. Those who have examined the code have said it covers Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003. The code has been circulating privately for years, according to the leaker. One theory is that the source of the code is an academic institution.To read this article in full, please click here
Big Memory software startup MemVerge launched its Memory Machine software designed to turn DRAM and Intel Optane persistent memory into a software-defined memory pool, bringing DRAM performance to persistent memory (PMEM).For some use cases, SSDs just aren’t fast enough. “Despite all the great advances in storage, the latency difference between memory and storage remains at more than three orders of magnitude, making this data movement inefficient,” said Alper Ilkbahar, vice president and general manager of the memory and storage product group at Intel in a conference call with MemVerge.To read this article in full, please click here
Many of today’s cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, edge computing and microservices, owe their start to the concept of the virtual machine—separating operating systems and software instances from the underlying physical computer.What is a virtual machine?
A virtual machine (VM) is software that runs programs or applications without being tied to a physical machine. In a VM instance, one or more guest machines can run on a host computer.To read this article in full, please click here
Acquisitions and defections be damned, Arm Holdings is pushing forward with its Neoverse line of server processor designs with the launch of the Neoverse V1 and N2 processor architectures.The new chips are the successors to the Neoverse N1 and E1 designs, which are used in server processors like Ampere’s Altra, Amazon’s Graviton2, and Marvel’s ThunderX2. Arm claims these chips will deliver 40% to 50% better performance than the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power.To read this article in full, please click here
With the recent release of the linear tape–open 9 (LTO-9) standard, tape drives with increased capacity and speed should be available soon, but that doesn’t mean users of tape drives should rush to buy them.Here are some of the pros and cons to weigh when considering whether an upgrade is in order.Tape drives are a very reliable way to write data to storage, and are very good at holding onto data for multiple decades. They make an excellent medium for long-term storage and for shipping large amounts of data across long distances (a FedEx truck has unlimited bandwidth).[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
What tape is not good at is going slow. LTO-8 has a compressed transfer speed of 900MB/s, which is significantly faster than most any backup you're going to send to it. It's definitely faster than any incremental backup that will be sent to it, and that comprises most backups. That makes tapes as the initial target of backups problematic.To read this article in full, please click here
IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period.
READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here