VMware is going through an annual ritual it calls “workforce rebalancing,” which has resulted in a few hundred employees being let go including with four senior executives, which might be concerning as executive churn is often a sign of trouble.On Jan. 25, the California Employment Development Department disclosed that VMware had cut 159 people in the Palo Alto office earlier in January. For a company of more than 22,000, that’s nothing, although there were likely cuts in other offices around the world as well.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“We can confirm that there have been a limited number of changes to our workforce this month,” a VMware spokesperson said via email. “This is a part of regular workforce rebalancing that ensures resources across VMware’s global businesses and geographies are aligned with strategic objectives and customer needs. We have an active employee support program to ensure, where possible, impacted employees will be redeployed to open roles within VMware. We continue to recruit in areas of strategic importance for the company.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is going through an annual ritual it calls “workforce rebalancing,” which has resulted in a few hundred employees being let go including with four senior executives, which might be concerning as executive churn is often a sign of trouble.On Jan. 25, the California Employment Development Department disclosed that VMware had cut 159 people in the Palo Alto office earlier in January. For a company of more than 22,000, that’s nothing, although there were likely cuts in other offices around the world as well.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“We can confirm that there have been a limited number of changes to our workforce this month,” a VMware spokesperson said via email. “This is a part of regular workforce rebalancing that ensures resources across VMware’s global businesses and geographies are aligned with strategic objectives and customer needs. We have an active employee support program to ensure, where possible, impacted employees will be redeployed to open roles within VMware. We continue to recruit in areas of strategic importance for the company.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is going through an annual ritual it calls “workforce rebalancing,” which has resulted in a few hundred employees being let go including with four senior executives, which might be concerning as executive churn is often a sign of trouble.On Jan. 25, the California Employment Development Department disclosed that VMware had cut 159 people in the Palo Alto office earlier in January. For a company of more than 22,000, that’s nothing, although there were likely cuts in other offices around the world as well.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“We can confirm that there have been a limited number of changes to our workforce this month,” a VMware spokesperson said via email. “This is a part of regular workforce rebalancing that ensures resources across VMware’s global businesses and geographies are aligned with strategic objectives and customer needs. We have an active employee support program to ensure, where possible, impacted employees will be redeployed to open roles within VMware. We continue to recruit in areas of strategic importance for the company.To read this article in full, please click here
Merger and acquisition activity surrounding data-center facilities is starting to resemble the Oklahoma Land Rush, and private-equity firms are taking most of the action.New research from Synergy Research Group saw more than 100 deals in 2019, a 50% growth over 2018, and private-equity companies accounted for 80% of them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
M&A activity broke the 100 transaction mark for the first time in 2019, and that comes despite a 45% decline in public company activity, such as the massive Digital Reality Trust purchase of Interxion. At the same time, the size of the deals dropped in 2019, with fewer worth $1 billion or more vs. 2018, and the average deal value fell 24% vs. 2018.To read this article in full, please click here
If anyone was still wondering how serious IBM is about being a major cloud player that question was resoundly answered this week when its current cloud and cognitive-software leader Arvind Krishna and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to be CEO and president, respectively, to replace long-time CEO Virginia Rometty.Krishna, 57, was a principal architect of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat last year and is currently IBM’s senior vice president of Cloud and Cognitive Software, which has become the company’s palpable future. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The Red Hat acquisition not only made Big Blue a bigger open-source and enterprise-software player, but mostly it got IBM into the lucrative hybrid-cloud business, targeting huge cloud competitor Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others. Gartner says that market will be worth $240 billion by next year.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says it will offer a Kubernetes-based “container-as-a-service” for its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) environment.The turnkey system, called HyperFlex Application Platform (HXAP), is Kubernetes at its core and includes all manner of integrated tools such as container networking, storage, a load balancer and more to let customers install, manage, and maintain a complete platform for cloud-native application development, Cisco stated.See predictions about what's big in IT tech for the coming year.
HyperFlex is Cisco’s HCI that offers computing, networking and storage resources in a single system.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says it will offer a Kubernetes-based “container-as-a-service” for its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) environment.The turnkey system, called HyperFlex Application Platform (HXAP), is Kubernetes at its core and includes all manner of integrated tools such as container networking, storage, a load balancer and more to let customers install, manage, and maintain a complete platform for cloud-native application development, Cisco stated.See predictions about what's big in IT tech for the coming year.
HyperFlex is Cisco’s HCI that offers computing, networking and storage resources in a single system.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has denied reports that its Xeon supply chain is suffering the same constraints as its PC desktop/laptop business. CEO Bob Swan said during the company's recent earnings call that its inventory was depleted but customers are getting orders.The issue blew up last week when HPE – one of Intel's largest server OEM partners – reportedly told UK-based publication The Register that there were supply constraints with Cascade Lake processors, the most recent generation of Xeon Scalable processors, and urged HPE customers "to consider alternative processors." HPE did not clarify if it meant Xeon processors other than Cascade Lake or AMD Epyc processors.To read this article in full, please click here
Steve Jobs rather famously said he hated the enterprise because the people who use the product have no say in its purchase. Well, Apple's current management has adopted the enterprise, ever so slowly, and is now shipping its first server in years. Sort of.Apple introduced a new version of the Mac Pro in December 2019, after a six-year gap in releases, and said it would make the computer rack-mountable for data centers. But at the time, all the attention was on the computer’s aesthetics, because it looked like a cheese grater. The other bit of focus was on the price; a fully decked Mac Pro cost an astronomical $53,799. Granted, that did include specs like 1.5TB of DRAM and 8TB of SSD storage. Those are impressive specs for a server, although the price is still a little crazy.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has taken the wraps off of new tools it says will boost on-premises or cloud application performance by helping IT and devops work together to automate and more quickly resolve software problems.The new tools include a package from Cisco AppDynamics that lets customers track the key components users interact with as they use enterprise applications. Cisco paid $3.7 billion for AppDynamics three years ago for its application-performance monitoring and problem-resolution automation technology. The idea was to develop products and applications that would give customers better end-to-end visibility of the IT infrastructure, including cloud, devices, security, network, compute and applications.To read this article in full, please click here
Hybrid cloud environments can deliver an array of benefits, but in many enterprises, they're becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage. To cope, adopters typically turn to some type of management software. What soon becomes apparent, however, is that hybrid cloud management tools can be as complex and confounding as the environments they're designed to support.A hybrid cloud typically includes a mix of computing, storage and other services. The environment is formed by a combination of on-premises infrastructure resources, private cloud services, and one or more public cloud offerings, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, as well as orchestration among the various platforms.To read this article in full, please click here
Hybrid cloud environments can deliver an array of benefits, but in many enterprises, they're becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage. To cope, adopters typically turn to some type of management software. What soon becomes apparent, however, is that hybrid cloud management tools can be as complex and confounding as the environments they're designed to support.A hybrid cloud typically includes a mix of computing, storage and other services. The environment is formed by a combination of on-premises infrastructure resources, private cloud services, and one or more public cloud offerings, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, as well as orchestration among the various platforms.To read this article in full, please click here
Proactively fixing a network problem before it becomes a full-blown nightmare is the goal of new software Cisco has added to its Data Center Network Assurance and Insights suite.Cisco Assurance is a key component of the company’s intent-based networking initiative that maintains a continuous validation and verification that the network is doing what the customer expects. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Network Insights is software Cisco customers use to monitor and record hardware and software telemetry data over time to identify anomalies in the fabric and help automate troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, capacity planning and remediation, according to Cisco. For example, Network Insights can watch over network component usage patterns and audit logs, events, and faults as well as latency conditions from Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure or Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) network fabrics.To read this article in full, please click here
With the conceivable exhaustion of Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years – the search is on for new paths that lead to reliable incremental processing gains over time.One possibility is that machines inspired by how the brain works could take over, fundamentally shifting computing to a revolutionary new tier, according to an explainer study released this month by Applied Physics Reviews.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“Today’s state-of-the-art computers process roughly as many instructions per second as an insect brain,” say the paper’s authors Jack Kendall, of Rain Neuromorphics, and Suhas Kumar, of Hewlett Packard Labs. The two write that processor architecture must now be completely re-thought if Moore’s law is to be perpetuated, and that replicating the “natural processing system of a [human] brain” is the way forward.To read this article in full, please click here
Companies deploy an average of three to five different cloud services. With an increased emphasis on security and regulatory compliance, the capability to manage these disparate systems is crucial.
This week's Patch Tuesday marked the end of the line for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (and 2008 R2). No more fixes will be issued for the two aged operating systems, unless you purchase a pricey extended service license.On the Windows 7 front, Microsoft has done a good job getting Windows 10 deployed through its aggressive (perhaps too aggressive) upgrade program. According to StatCounter, Windows 10 now accounts for 65% of the worldwide desktop Windows market share, and Windows 7 is down to 27%.
RELATED: What to know before upgrading to Windows Server 2019To read this article in full, please click here
Until a few years ago, physical servers were a bedrock technology, the beating digital heart of every data center. Then the cloud materialized. Today, as organizations continue to shovel an ever-growing number of services toward cloud providers, on-premises servers seem to be on the verge of becoming an endangered species.Serverless computing is doing its share to accelerate the demise of on-premises servers. The concept of turning to a cloud provider to dynamically manage the allocation of machine resources and bill users only for the actual amount of resources consumed by applications is gaining increasing acceptance. A late 2019 survey conducted by technical media and training firm O'Reilly found that four out of 10 enterprises, spanning a wide range of locations and industries, have already adopted serverless technologies.To read this article in full, please click here
Cumulus Networks has announced a partnership with HPE that will see its NetQ management software run on HPE's network storage products.Under the deal, HPE's StoreFabric M-Series Ethernet switches will run Cumulus's Linux operating system and NetQ, a move that Cumulus said in a statement will deliver “a flexible networking fabric that is predictable, scalable, and reliable."[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Combining the M-Series switches with Linux and NetQ will offer enterprises a high-bandwidth, low-latency way to connect primary, secondary, hyperconverged, NAS, or object-storage systems, and is an ideal way to build an Ethernet Storage Fabric (ESF), the company added.To read this article in full, please click here
Sources in Asian memory chipmakers are projecting that NAND flash contract prices will rise by 40% in 2020 due to product ramps and increased demand, according to the Taiwanese publication DigiTimes.The article, now locked behind a subscription wall, cited sources at Taiwanese memory makers. However, the biggest makers of NAND flash are not Taiwanese, like Samsung, Toshiba, and Micron. This would impact memory cards, USB flash drives, and solid-state drives. It noted the contract price of SSDs had been falling for a few years and only started to rise after production issues reduced NAND output in the second quarter of 2019.To read this article in full, please click here