The hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from $38.27 billion in 2017 to $97.64 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period, according to Markets and Markets.The research firm said the hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming a leading cloud solution, as it provides various benefits, such as cost, efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity. One of the many reasons is the need for interoperability standards between cloud services and existing systems.Unless you are a startup company and can be born in the cloud, you have legacy data systems that need to be bridged, which is where the hybrid cloud comes in.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and IBM said the companies would meld their data-center and cloud technologies to help customers more easily and securely build and support on-premises and hybrid-cloud applications.Cisco, IBM Cloud and IBM Global Technology Services (the professional services business of IBM) said they will work to develop a hybrid-cloud architecture that melds Cisco’s data-center, networking and analytics platforms with IBM’s cloud offerings. IBM's contribution includea a heavy emphasis on Kubernetes-based offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Cloud Private as well as a catalog of IBM enterprise software such as Websphere and open source software such as Open Whisk, KNative, Istio and Prometheus.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and IBM said the companies would meld their data-center and cloud technologies to help customers more easily and securely build and support on-premises and hybrid-cloud applications.Cisco, IBM Cloud and IBM Global Technology Services (the professional services business of IBM) said they will work to develop a hybrid-cloud architecture that melds Cisco’s data-center, networking and analytics platforms with IBM’s cloud offerings. IBM's contribution includea a heavy emphasis on Kubernetes-based offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Cloud Private as well as a catalog of IBM enterprise software such as Websphere and open source software such as Open Whisk, KNative, Istio and Prometheus.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has released two critical warnings about security issues with its SD-WAN and DNA Center software packages. The worse, with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.3 out of 10, is a vulnerability in its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center software that could let an unauthenticated attacker connect an unauthorized network device to the subnet designated for cluster services.
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A successful exploit could let an attacker reach internal services that are not hardened for external access, Cisco stated. The vulnerability is due to insufficient access restriction on ports necessary for system operation, and the company discovered the issue during internal security testing, Cisco stated.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s getting harder to find people to design, build and manage data centers.The sector is facing a staffing crisis, said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute, which just released its annual data-center survey. “We all know that that the data-center skills shortage is real. I think what we’re seeing in this data is that it’s getting a little worse,” Lawrence said.
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This year, 61 percent of respondents said they've had significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff, up from 55 percent last year.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware punched up its data-center network virtualization capabilities by announcing it would buy Avi Networks load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology for an undisclosed amount.Founded in 2012 by a group of Cisco engineers and executives, Avi offers a variety of software-defined products and services including a software-based application delivery controller (ADC) and intelligent web-application firewall. The software already integrates with VMware vCenter and NSX, OpenStack, third party SDN controllers, as well as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker.To read this article in full, please click here
Western Digital has announced a project called the Zoned Storage initiative that leverages new technology to create more efficient zettabyte-scale data storage for data centers by improving how data is organized when it is stored.As part of this, the company also launched a developer site that will host open-source, standards-based tools and other resources.The Zoned Storage architecture is designed for Western Digital hardware and its shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which hold up to 15TB of data, as well as the emerging zoned namespaces (ZNS) standard for NVMe SSDs, designed to deliver better endurance and predictability.To read this article in full, please click here
After a rather long period of silence, Oracle announced an update to its server line, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8, which features hardware and software enhancements that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, as well as support for hybrid cloud.Oracle acquired a hardware business nine years ago with the purchase of Sun Microsystems. It steadily whittled down the offerings, getting out of the commodity hardware business in favor of high-end mission-critical hardware. Whereas the Exalogic line is more of a general-purpose appliance running Oracle’s own version of Linux, Exadata is a purpose-built database server, and they really made some upgrades.To read this article in full, please click here
The energy storage capacity in uninterruptable power supply (UPS) batteries, languishing often dormant in data centers, could provide new revenue streams for those data centers, says Eaton, a major electrical power management company.Excess, grid-generated power, created during times of low demand, should be stored on the now-proliferating lithium-backup power systems strewn worldwide in data centers, Eaton says. Then, using an algorithm tied to grid-demand, electricity should be withdrawn as necessary for grid use. It would then be slid back onto the backup batteries when not needed.[ Read also: How server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ]
The concept is called Distributed Energy and has been gaining traction in part because electrical generation is changing—emerging green power, such as wind and solar, being used now at the grid-level have considerations that differ from the now-retiring, fossil-fuel power generation. You can generate solar only in daylight, yet much demand takes place on dark evenings, for example.To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud computing gained popularity for its ease-of-deployment and flexible resource consumption, and while that works for many critical applications, it is not a panacea for every app an enterprise supports. That’s why as cloud adoption continues to rise, some companies are opting to bring workloads back on-premise in certain scenarios.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Cloud computing gained popularity for its ease-of-deployment and flexible resource consumption, and while that works for many critical applications, it is not a panacea for every app an enterprise supports. That’s why as cloud adoption continues to rise, some companies are opting to bring workloads back on-premise in certain scenarios.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
A new research paper from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst looked at the carbon dioxide (CO2) generated over the course of training several common large artificial intelligence (AI) models and found that the process can generate nearly five times the amount as an average American car over its lifetime plus the process of making the car itself.The paper specifically examined the model training process for natural-language processing (NLP), which is how AI handles natural language interactions. The study found that during the training process, more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide is generated.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista is rolling out more products and services in its continued assault on both the campus network and enterprise hybrid-cloud environments.In particular, the company is readying a new family of what it describes as its first purpose-built campus leaf switches as well as a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point that fit into its overall grand plan called Cognitive Campus, with which the company says customers can more easily automate deployment, configuration, troubleshooting and deploying security. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ]
Arista is also fashioning an alliance with Microsoft to better support enterprise use of hybrid cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
It's hard to remember a time when semiconductor vendors haven't promised a fast, cost-effective and reliable persistent memory technology to anxious data center operators. Now, after many years of waiting and disappointment, technology may have finally caught up with the hype to make persistent memory a practical proposition.High-capacity persistent memory, also known as storage class memory (SCM), is fast and directly addressable like dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), yet is able to retain stored data even after its power has been switched off—intentionally or unintentionally. The technology can be used in data centers to replace cheaper, yet far slower traditional persistent storage components, such as hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).To read this article in full, please click here
Tiny, intelligent microelectronics should be used to perform as much sensor processing as possible on-chip rather than wasting resources by sending often un-needed, duplicated raw data to the cloud or computers. So say scientists behind new, machine-learning networks that aim to embed everything needed for artificial intelligence (AI) onto a processor.“This opens the door for many new applications, starting from real-time evaluation of sensor data,” says Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems on its website. No delays sending unnecessary data onwards, along with speedy processing, means theoretically there is zero latency.To read this article in full, please click here
Data centers are becoming more complex and still run the majority of workloads despite the promises of simplicity of deployment through automation and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), not to mention how the cloud was supposed to take over workloads.That’s the finding of the Uptime Institute's latest annual global data center survey (registration required). The majority of IT loads still run on enterprise data centers even in the face of cloud adoption, putting pressure on administrators to have to manage workloads across the hybrid infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise was already the leader in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector before its announced acquisition of supercomputer maker Cray earlier this month. Now it has a commanding lead, but there are still competitors to the giant.The news that HPE would shell out $1.3 billion to buy the company came just as Cray has announced plans to build three of the biggest systems yet – all exascale, and all at the same time for 2021 deployment.Sales had been slowing for HPC systems, but our government with its endless supply of money came to the rescue, throwing hundreds of millions at Cray for systems to be built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.To read this article in full, please click here
Benchmarks of engineering samples of AMD's second-generation Epyc server, code-named “Rome,” briefly found their way online and show a very beefy chip running a little slower than its predecessor.Rome is based on the Zen 2 architecture, believed to be more of an incremental improvement over the prior generation than a major leap. It’s already known that Rome would feature a 64-core, 128-thread design, but that was about all of the details.[ Also read: Who's developing quantum computers ]
The details came courtesy of SiSoftware's Sandra PC analysis and benchmarking tool. It’s very popular and has been used by hobbyists and benchmarkers alike for more than 20 years. New benchmarks are uploaded to the Sandra database all the time, and what I suspect happened is someone running a Rome sample ran the benchmark, not realizing the results would be uploaded to the Sandra database.To read this article in full, please click here
French IT giant Atos is the latest to jump into the edge computing business with a small device called BullSequana Edge. Unlike devices from its competitors that are the size of a shipping container, including those from Vapor IO and Schneider Electronics, Atos' edge device can sit in a closet.Atos says the device uses artificial intelligence (AI) applications to offer fast response times that are needed in areas such as manufacturing 4.0, autonomous vehicles, healthcare and retail/airport security – where data needs to be processed and analyzed at the edge in real time.[ Also see: What is edge computing? and How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers.]
The BullSequana Edge can be purchased as standalone infrastructure or bundled with Atos’ software edge software, and that software is pretty impressive. Atos says the BullSequana Edge supports three main categories of use cases:To read this article in full, please click here
French IT giant Atos is the latest to jump into the edge computing business with a small device called BullSequana Edge. Unlike devices from its competitors that are the size of a shipping container, including those from Vapor IO and Schneider Electronics, Atos' edge device can sit in a closet.Atos says the device uses artificial intelligence (AI) applications to offer fast response times that are needed in areas such as manufacturing 4.0, autonomous vehicles, healthcare and retail/airport security – where data needs to be processed and analyzed at the edge in real time.[ Also see: What is edge computing? and How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers.]
The BullSequana Edge can be purchased as standalone infrastructure or bundled with Atos’ software edge software, and that software is pretty impressive. Atos says the BullSequana Edge supports three main categories of use cases:To read this article in full, please click here