Opening the 6 GHz band to Wi-Fi could add $153.75 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years, according to a new study.In late April, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that make 1,200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6 GHz band available for unlicensed use. Freeing up the chunk of 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi is the biggest frequency allocation upgrade to the now aging wireless protocol in 10 years. Wi-Fi using 5 GHz spectrum – the last major touch-up – was introduced in 2009. The original 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi was introduced in 1997.To read this article in full, please click here
NVIDIA, a company known for developing advanced chips for artificial intelligence and high-speed gaming applications has is making a concerted effort to go after cloud-based data-center customers by acquiring Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed amount.Cumulus offers a Linux-based network operating system aimed at white box network gear users that supports large data-center, cloud and enterprise environments. Its Cumulus Linux offering supports over 130 different types of networking hardware.To read this article in full, please click here
(Root-cause analysis is one of the features least supported by network troubleshooting tools, according to Enterprise Management Associates’ recent research Network Management Megatrends 2020, that surveyed 350 network-management professionals about these tools. This article by EMA Vice President of Research Networking Shamus McGillicuddy discusses this finding and recommends how management pros should evaluate this feature. A recording of a webinar covering the research is here.)Troubleshooting is perhaps the most vital responsibility of a network operations team. When IT services are interrupted or degraded, engineers and admins race to diagnose and remediate the problem. Every minute counts, because transactions, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction all suffer while the network team is doing this work.To read this article in full, please click here
While data-center staff have been classified as essential, like medical staff and grocery store staff, construction is taking a bit of a hit. In recent weeks, Facebook, Google, and Apple have announced a slowing of construction of major new data centers in the U.S. and Europe.The problem, as it turns out, is not because construction is being ordered halted, or even due to a lack of IT equipment, but because other components of the supply chain like fiber optics, batteries, and racks are scarce, according to Rick Villars, vice president of data center and cloud research at IDC.To read this article in full, please click here
COVID-19 has squashed in-person events worldwide. Red Hat Summit, Cisco Live, and VMware's VMworld are just a few of the upcoming network industry events that will now be held virtually.A digital event doesn't offer the same opportunities to mingle and network with industry peers that an in-person event provides, but there are some silver linings. Attendees don't have to travel, and in many cases, they don't have to pay to register.Stay on top of product roadmaps, hear from technical experts, and keep your skills sharp – all from the comfort of home – at these upcoming virtual events.Red Hat Summit 2020
Red Hat is planning a blend of live and recorded content for its big summit, which will be held April 28-29. The event, dubbed Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience, is free for attendees and will include keynotes, breakout sessions, ask-the-expert sessions, and collaboration opportunities, Red Hat says. So far, more than 58,000 people have registered to attend, according to the company. More information is available here.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise equipment vendors are rolling out financing and relaxed payment plans in an effort to keep customers buying during the COVID-19 lockdown that might be stressing their budgets.For example, Nutanix, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software provider, announced the Nutanix Special Financial Assistance Program (NSFAP) that provides its partners extended payment terms to give them more financial flexibility. Nutanix also offers financing options for customers through Nutanix Financial Solutions (NFS). [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The program runs through May 31, and participating partners can offer the extended payment terms to their customers. The length of the term extensions will be based on individual partner’s needs, according to the company.To read this article in full, please click here
With the 2019 acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat under its belt and a new cloud-savvy CEO at the helm, IBM is looking to reverse a decade of declining revenue and sagging stock prices with a bold strategy focused on hybrid cloud.CEO Arvind Krishna, who formerly led IBM's cloud and cognitive computing division and engineered the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, made IBM's intentions clear in a LinkedIn post to employees in his first day on the job: "Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company. IBM has already built enduring platforms in mainframe, services, and middleware. I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud."To read this article in full, please click here
With the 2019 acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat under its belt and a new cloud-savvy CEO at the helm, IBM is looking to reverse a decade of declining revenue and sagging stock prices with a bold strategy focused on hybrid cloud.CEO Arvind Krishna, who formerly led IBM's cloud and cognitive computing division and engineered the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, made IBM's intentions clear in a LinkedIn post to employees in his first day on the job: "Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company. IBM has already built enduring platforms in mainframe, services, and middleware. I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud."To read this article in full, please click here
In the space of one month, the number of available IT jobs dropped by 20% across the U.S., according to the recruiting site Glassdoor, about on par with the avarage loss across all job oppenings.The data came from Glassdoor’s economic research unit and was part of a broader analysis of all U.S. industries. All told, the number of job openings between March 9 and April 6 dropped to 4.8 million, a 20.5% decline.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Sixty percent of employers have reduced job openings since March 9, with almost one in four pulling all of their job postings.To read this article in full, please click here
More than two-thirds of the world's surface is covered by water. It plays an important role in our economic existence, including in major verticals such as oil and gas, shipping and tourism.As the Internet of Things proliferates, questions arise as to how IoT will manifest itself underwater given that radio waves degrade over distance in seawater, and underwater acoustic communication (which does actually work okay) is easily eavesdropped on and isn't stealthy.To make the underwater Internet of Things happen, light is the answer, some say. Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, are proposing underwater optical communications. They're investigating simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT) configurations, which they're using to transmit energy and data to underwater electronic devices. Recently, the researchers announced a breakthrough experiment in which they were able to achieve an underwater, two-way transmission of data and power over 1.5 yards between a solar panel-equipped sensor and a receiver.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD has introduced three new processors in its second-generation EPYC 7Fx2 series, which is optimized for frequency and delivers what AMD claims is the fastest per-core performance in the x86 server market.In the server space, AMD is besting Intel when it comes to core count. AMD has the 64-core EPYC line. Intel, which currently tops out at 28 cores, has 38- and 48-core parts due later this year. But it's the individual core performances that matter, and in some benchmarks, Intel wins.
READ MORE: How to dispose of IT hardware without hurting the environmentTo read this article in full, please click here
Stray, ambient magnetic fields that are naturally created from electricity usage should be captured, diverted, and converted into power for Internet of Things sensors, researchers say."Just like sunlight is a free source of energy we try to harvest, so are magnetic fields," said Shashank Priya, professor of materials science and engineering and associate vice president for research at Penn State, in a statement published on the university's web site. "We have this ubiquitous energy present in our homes, office spaces, work spaces and cars. It's everywhere, and we have an opportunity to harvest this background noise and convert it to useable electricity."To read this article in full, please click here
Many enterprises don’t think much about where their obsolete IT gear winds up, but it’s possible to be green-minded, not bust the budget, and even benefit a little from proper disposal. Here is how.Go back to where you bought
The first option to consider is returning the equipment the vendor or reseller you bought it from, says Susan Middleton, research director, financing strategies at IDC. “Every year we ask customers, ‘How do you handle end-of-lease?’ Overwhelmingly, they return to vendor or partner who are better equipped to handle recycling,” she says.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Vendors often give a fair-market buyout for the devices that can go toward new products, Middleton says. “The big players like IBM and HPE do a great job because they can clean them up and resell them, and the facilities to do that are pretty big,” she says.To read this article in full, please click here
Schneider Electric has introduced a system for cooling individual server racks in remote and edge locations that aren’t well suited for traditional data-center cooling schemes.Uniflair Rack Mounted Cooling is a split system consisting of the air conditioning unit that goes in the cabinet and a fan that vents hot air from the cabinet to the outside. The external unit can be up to 20 meters away and up to five meters above or below the cooling unit.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The 5U, Freon-based air-conditioner unit blows cool air up the front of the cabinet where it is sucked into the servers by their front fans and absorbs heat generated by the servers. The hot air is expelled out the back and drawn down, cooled, and recirculated upwards.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo is boosting its ties to Microsoft with an edge-to-cloud platform that runs Microsoft’s Azure Stack in a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), putting HCI on the edge of the network rather than in a data center.The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 server analyzes data at the edge near where it is gathered, a change in direction for the usual edge strategy. In earlier edge schemes, data collected at an edge endpoint is merely sorted, and only the relevant data is sent up to the main data center where it is analyzed.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The ThinkAgile MX1021 platform is a ruggedized, half-width, short-depth, 1U compact server that can be installed almost anywhere: hung on a wall, stacked on a shelf, or mounted in a rack. For connectivity, it supports Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G.To read this article in full, please click here
A group of researchers at University College London is tapping supercomputers in the U.S. and Europe in an effort to find ways to fight COVID-19, looking for vaccines and anti-viral drugs, among other things.The team at UCL is part of an international group called the Consortium on Coronavirus and is made up of more than 100 researchers around the world including those at UCL and eight other universities, five U.S. national laboratories, a private research center and a public academy.To read this article in full, please click here
A group of researchers at University College London is tapping supercomputers in the U.S. and Europe in an effort to find ways to fight COVID-19, looking for vaccines and anti-viral drugs, among other things.The team at UCL is part of an international group called the Consortium on Coronavirus and is made up of more than 100 researchers around the world including those at UCL and eight other universities, five U.S. national laboratories, a private research center and a public academy.To read this article in full, please click here
Arm processors on servers has gone from failed starts (Calxeda) to modest successes (ThunderX2) to real contenders (ThunderX3, Ampere). Now, details have emerged about Japanese IT giant Fujitsu’s Arm processor, which it claims will offer better HPC performance than Nvidia GPUs but at a lower power cost.Fujitsu is developing the A64FX, a 48-core Arm8 derivative specifically engineered for high-performance computing (HPC). Rather than design general-purpose compute cores, Fujitsu has added compute engines specific to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies specific to the needs of HPC.It will go in a new supercomputer called Fugaku, or Post-K. Post-K is a reference to the K supercomputer, at one time the fastest supercomputer in the world, that ran on custom Sparc chips before RIKEN Lab, where it was installed, pulled the plug.To read this article in full, please click here
Electronics on missiles and military helicopters need to survive extreme conditions. Before any of that physical hardware can be deployed, defense contractor McCormick Stevenson Corp. simulates the real-world conditions it will endure, relying on finite element analysis software like Ansys, which requires significant computing power.Then one day a few years ago, it unexpectedly ran up against its computing limits.10 of the world's fastest supercomputers
"We had some jobs that would have overwhelmed the computers that we had in office," says Mike Krawczyk, principal engineer at McCormick Stevenson. "It did not make economic or schedule sense to buy a machine and install software." Instead, the company contracted with Rescale, which could sell them cycles on a supercomputer-class system for a tiny fraction of what they would've spent on new hardware.To read this article in full, please click here
The bumble bee brain is a better model than the human brain for neural networks that might be used to run autonomous robots, an academic team believes.“It is pretty impressive that a bee can fly over five miles, then remember its way home, with a brain the size of a pinhead,” says Professor James Marshall, of the University of Sheffield, quoted by multiple newspapers that were reporting on a presentation Marshall made to the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“It makes sense to me that we should try and mimic a bee brain in [autonomous systems], drones and driverless cars.”To read this article in full, please click here