About a year ago it was becoming clear to Johnsonville Sausage’s IT department that it had to modernize its wide area network to get costs down and simplify the overall enterprise network environment to effectively move the business forward. To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
About a year ago it was becoming clear to Johnsonville Sausage’s IT department that it had to modernize its wide area network to get costs down and simplify the overall enterprise network environment to effectively move the business forward. The company embarked on a two-pronged path that moved its US and global business and industrial networks toward a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) environment -- eliminating costly MPLS links -- and a more automated, controlled system that has restored quality of life back to IT, said Johnsonville Sausage Global Network Operations Manager Anthony Wild.To read this article in full, please click here
Researchers at Purdue University have made progress towards an elusive goal: building a transistor that can both process and store information. In the future, a single on-chip component could integrate the processing functions of transistors with the storage capabilities of ferroelectric RAM, potentially creating a process-memory combo that enables faster computing and is just atoms thick.The ability to cram more functions onto a chip, allowing for greater speed and power without increasing the footprint, is a core goal of electronics design. To get where they are today, engineers at Purdue had to overcome incompatibilities between transistors – the switching and amplification mechanisms used in almost all electronics – and ferroelectric RAM. Ferroelectric RAM is higher-performing memory technology; the material introduces non-volatility, which means it retains information when power is lost, unlike traditional dielectric-layer-constructed DRAM.To read this article in full, please click here
It has been almost a year since I first wrote about Stateless, Inc., a startup devoted to bringing software-defined interconnects (SD-IX) to colocation data centers. At that time, the company was just announcing its plans to reinvent the means to connect workloads across data centers, hyperscale clouds and on-premises footprints using SD-IX. The intent was to give colo service providers a simpler way to quickly deploy network services for their tenants. Those plans have come to fruition and the company has announced the general availability (GA) of its Luxon SD-IX platform.To read this article in full, please click here
IT generally requires a good reason to disrupt a smooth working environment, which is why some hardware sits deployed for decades. Even though Windows Server 2016 is relatively young, there’s a decent argument to be made for upgrading a Server 2016 environment to Server 2019, the most recent release.There’s a longer span between Windows Server releases than the desktop version of the software because of slower migration habits on the server side, and this means bigger changes between releases. Windows Server 2016 was the first server OS built on the Windows 10 kernel, and some of the changes were rather rough. Windows Server 2019 is markedly faster, and it has a number of changes under the hood, from security to hybrid cloud integration. Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what are the most compelling arguments for upgrade.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco this week issued software to address multiple critical authentication exposures in its Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) software for its Nexus data center switches.DCNM is a central management dashboard for data-center fabrics based on Cisco Nexus switches and handles a number of core duties such as automation, configuration control, flow policy management and real-time health details for fabric, devices, and network topology.To read this article in full, please click here
Containers are breaking backups around the world, but there are steps you can take to make sure that the most critical parts of your container infrastructure are protected against the worst things that can happen to your data center.At first glance it may seem that containers don’t need to be backed up, but on closer inspection, it does make sense in order to protect against catastrophic events and for other, less disastrous eventualities.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Container basics
Containers are another type of virtualization, and Docker is the most popular container platform. Containers are a specialized environment in which you can run a particular application. One way to think of them is like lightweight virtual machines. Where each VM in a hypervisor server contains an entire copy of an operating system, containers share the underlying operating system, and each of them contains only the required libraries needed by the application that will run in that container. As a result, many containers on a single node (a physical or virtual machine running an OS and the container runtime environment) take up far fewer resources than the same number of VMs.To Continue reading
UK chip designer Kaleao has re-launched as Bamboo Systems with some pre-Series A funding and claims its Arm-based server chips will be considerably more power efficient than the competition.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Bamboo is targeting the x86 servers, which have a 95% market share, rather than Marvell with its ThunderX2 and Ampere Systems with the eMAG Arm processors. The company argues that the two Arm processors are no different than x86.To read this article in full, please click here
Hot trends in networking for the coming year include SD-WAN, Wi-Fi 6, multi-domain control, virtual networking and the evolving role of the network engineer into that of a network progrmmer, at least according to Cisco.They revolve around the changing shape of networking in general, that is the broadening of data-center operations into the cloud and the implications of that change, said Anand Oswal, senior vice president of engineering in Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business.To read this article in full, please click here
Most data center operators are not prioritizing power and other "green" issues. While enterprises are making incremental improvements toward energy-efficient initiatives, they're advancing at a very slow rate, according to new research data.Supermicro surveyed more than 5,000 IT professionals for its Data Centers and the Environment report. One of the goals of the annual report is to help IT leaders to lessen the long-term environmental impact of their data center equipment purchases.Those surveyed said total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) are their primary measures of success. Less than 15% said that energy efficiency, corporate social responsibility, and environmental impact are key considerations for their facilities. At the same time, 22% of respondents noted that environmental considerations are too expensive to be considered a priority.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco will continued to build up its internal-electronics tools with its planned purchase of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology designer Exablaze for an undisclosed amount.Exablaze, founded in 2013, specializes in low-latency FPGAs used to construct logically reconfigurable digital circuits for networking gear in high-performance environments such as data centers, high-frequency trading (HFT), big-data analytics, high-performance computing and telecommunications. Exablaze products include FPGA-based switches and network interface cards (NICs), as well as picosecond-resolution timing technology.To read this article in full, please click here
Upcoming space commercialization will require hardened edge-computing environments in a small footprint with robust links back to Earth, says vendor OrbitsEdge, which recently announced that it had started collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise on computing-in-orbit solutions.OrbitsEdge says it’s the first to provide a commercial data-center environment for installing in orbit, and will be using HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge System in a hardened, satellite micro-data-center platform that it’s selling called SatFrame.To read this article in full, please click here
Upcoming space commercialization will require hardened edge-computing environments in a small footprint with robust links back to Earth, says vendor OrbitsEdge, which recently announced that it had started collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise on computing-in-orbit solutions.OrbitsEdge says it’s the first to provide a commercial data-center environment for installing in orbit, and will be using HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge System in a hardened, satellite micro-data-center platform that it’s selling called SatFrame.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says it wants to change the future of the Internet and has rolled out the new silicon, hardware and software it says will move toward that goal.The centerpiece of Cisco’s strategy revolves around its custom Silicon One chip technology and new Cisco 8000 Series carrier-class routers built on that silicon, which the company says has been in development for more than five years, at a cost of over $1 billion. The 8000s feature a new operating system – IOS XR7 that runs the boxes and handles security.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum
The Cisco Silicon One Q100 optical-routing silicon brings up to 10Tbps of network bandwidth in its first iteration – with a future goal of 25Tbps – and support for large non-blocking distributed routers, deep buffering with rich QoS and programmable forwarding. To read this article in full, please click here
Few areas of the enterprise face as much churn as the edge of the network. Experts say a variety of challenges drive this change – from increased SD-WAN access demand to cloud interconnected resources and IoT, the traditional perimeter of the enterprise is shifting radically and will continue to do so throughout 2020.One indicator: Gartner research that says by 2023, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, up from less than 10% in 2019.To read this article in full, please click here
Research firm Gartner is holding its IT Infrastructure, Operations, and Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) in Las Vegas this week, and a few news announcements from the show give an indication as to where data-center technology is headed.First up, Schneider Electric and Iceotope formally introduced their integrated rack with chassis-based immersive liquid-cooling designs. The deal was announced in October but now the details are out. In addition to Schneider and Iceotope, the alliance also includes Avnet, an electronic-component distributor.To read this article in full, please click here
Quantum computing is still in its infancy, but you wouldn’t know it judging from the investments pouring into the space.Startup Rigetti has raised nearly $120 million in VC funding; the U.S. Department of Energy has committed $218 million to advance quantum information sciences; and incumbents such as Microsoft and IBM have launched accelerator programs for quantum startups.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s that time of year again when those of us in the press make our annual prognostications for the coming year. Some things we saw coming; the rise of the cloud and the advance of SSD. Others, like the return of many cloud migrations to on-premises or the roaring comeback of AMD, went right by us. We do our best but occasionally there are surprises.So with that, let’s take a peek into the always cloudy (no pun intended) crystal ball and make 10 data-center-oriented predictions.IoT spawns data-center growth in urban areas
This isn’t a hard prediction to make since it’s already happening. For the longest time, data centers were placed in the middle of nowhere near renewable energy (usually hydro), but need is going to force more expansion in major metro areas. IoT will be one driver but so will the increasing use of data center providers like Equinix and DRT as interconnection providers.To read this article in full, please click here
As the year winds down it's a good time to take a quick look ahead at what the new year might bring in order to be better prepared to make smart decisions.Nowhere is that more important than in IT, where the choices enterprise leaders make will have implications not only for themselves and their customers, but also for the overall economy, which depends more and more on corporate networks delivering business-critical services reliably.Here, we take a look how some of the most critical technologies will fare in 2020.What’s hot for Cisco in 2020
IDG
Cisco is expected to continue its cloud, security, and SD-WANefforts in 2020, but there are hurdles to overcome. “Overall, I think it’s clear that Cisco needs to get into the cloud in a more effective way," said analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. "I think their recent reorg shows they understand that. Cloud Interconnect is a sideshow. What’s needed is infrastructure-independent development and deployment, which would relegate Cloud Interconnect to nothing but a network gateway.” (Read more.)To read this article in full, please click here