Network World Data Center Archives - Page 61 of 172

DoE plans world’s fastest supercomputer

The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (1018) floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing, the Aurora supercomputer will cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]To read this article in full, please click here

Exec: How SDN, SD-WAN, security fit in VMware’s strategy

It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the company’s core products.Most recent is a milestone release of the company’s NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMware’s primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.To read this article in full, please click here

How did Facebook go down despite multiple data centers?

The Mercury retrograde kicked in big time on Wednesday as Facebook suffered an eight hour-outage that also affected Instagram and Facebook Messenger.No one was believed to be harmed; a few might have even had offline interactions with other human beings. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space Facebook said it wasn’t an attack, like a Denial of Service attack, and has since issued a statement attributing it to a configuration error.To read this article in full, please click here

The noise in fiber could be used to increase data capacity

Increasing the capacity of fiber-optic cables might one day be possible through the exploitation of a part of the signal commonly thought of as substandard. That imperfect element in a carrier, called “noise” is usually something one tries to avoid—it can muddy the accurate reading of the data.However, scientists now suggest that one could, in fact, embrace the rubbishy, and thus far unusable, part of the signal to hold data and allow it to be decoded. The ordinarily data-obscuring hubbub could potentially be harnessed and used to increase data capacity in light waves.“Information is encoded in the correlated noise between spatially separated light waves,” writes Oliver Morsch in an article on the website of ETH Zurich, a technical and scientific university. “The new coding technology, developed by ETH researchers, makes it possible to make better use of the transmission capacity of optical fibers.”To read this article in full, please click here

Data center giants announce new high-speed interconnect

A group of big names in the data center space have linked arms to develop yet another high-speed interconnect, this one designed to connect processor chips.It's called Compute Express Link, or CXL, which is aimed at plugging data-center CPUs into accelerator chips. Members of the alliance that developed the spec are Intel, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, HPE, Cisco, and Dell-EMC, plus Huawei and Alibaba.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] Where are IBM, AMD, Nvidia, Xilinx, or any of the ARM server vendors such as Marvell/Cavium? They have their own PCIe-nased spec, called CCIX. The group consists of AMD, Arm, Mellanox, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia grabs Mellanox out from under Intel’s nose

After months of speculation, Mellanox found a suitor -- and it was a surprise, to say the least. GPU leader Nvidia snatched up the networking vendor for $6.9 billion, topping a rumored previous offer of $6 billion from Nvidia’s nemesis, Intel.The acquisition ends months of rumors of a suitor for Mellanox. Intel, Microsoft, and Xilinix were all reportedly bidding for the Israeli company, which specializes in high-speed networking. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Mellanox Technology was formed in 1999 by a former Intel executive and was a pioneer in the early adoption of InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Facebook gets into the fiber-optic connectivity business

When you think of Facebook services, high-speed connectivity is not the first thing that comes to mind. But the social media giant is doing just that, offering high-capacity fiber-optic routes to sell unused capacity between its data centers for third parties.Facebook has created a subsidiary called Middle Mile Infrastructure to sell excess capacity on its fiber, starting with new fiber routes between its data center campuses in Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. The company made the announcement in a blog post by Kevin Salvadori, director of network investments.To read this article in full, please click here

4 Tips for Easier Edge Deployments

There are plenty of reasons for organizations to embrace edge computing. By moving applications, data, and computing services to the edge of a network, as opposed to a large data center or cloud, organizations can lower operating costs, improve application performance, reduce network traffic, and achieve real-time data analytics.As more organizations come to know the advantages of edge of network devices, many are eyeing deployments. In fact, according to the IDG 2018 State of the Network, 56% of networking professionals have plans for edge computing in their organizations.To read this article in full, please click here

The data center is being reimagined, not disappearing

I have documented more than once that the data center is not going away; it’s being reimagined. And now comes a report with greater details on that change.Spiceworks has released its 2019 State of Servers report that examines on-premises server infrastructure in the workplace, including purchase plans, brand prevalence, and perceptions. The results of the survey, which was conducted in February and included 530 IT buyers from organizations across North America and Europe, show that 98 percent of businesses currently run on-premises servers, and 72 percent of businesses plan to purchase new server hardware within the next three years. To read this article in full, please click here

7 building blocks of the modern data center

Learn the key aspects of today's data center, from hyperconvergence to flash storage to hybrid connections.

The Open Compute Project is quickly gaining ground

Eight years ago, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project (OCP), an open-source hardware initiative to design the most energy-efficient server gear for massive, hyperscale data centers. The promise was flexibility of hardware and software and designs for greater power efficiency.Very quickly, Intel, Rackspace, Goldman Sachs and Sun Microsystems' co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim joined with Facebook to launch the OCP project, with Microsoft joining in 2014.The project has hummed along quietly with no sales figures until now, thanks to supply chain market research specialists IHS Markit. It surveyed both Facebook, Microsoft, and Rackspace, as founding partners, and looked at sales to customers beyond those three.To read this article in full, please click here

New chemistry-based data storage would blow Moore’s Law out of the water

Molecular electronics, where charges move through tiny, sole molecules, could be the future of computing and, in particular, storage, some scientists say.Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) point out that a molecule-level computing technique, if its development succeeds, would slam Gordon Moore’s 1965 prophesy — Moore's Law — that the number of transistors on a chip will double every year, and thus allow electronics to get proportionally smaller. In this case, hardware, including transistors, will conceivably fit on individual molecules, reducing chip sizes much more significantly than Moore ever envisaged.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] “The intersection of physical and chemical properties occurring at the molecular scale” is now being explored, and shows promise, an ASU article says. The researchers think Moore’s miniaturization projections will be blown out of the water.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware preps milestone NSX release for enterprise-cloud push

Looking to ease deployments of software-defined networks while reinforcing automation and security for hybrid and multicloud customers, VMware has taken the wraps off of a major release of its NSX-T Data Center software.While the NSX-T 2.4 announcement includes over 100 upgrades, VMware said the release anoints NSX-T as the company’s go-to platform for future software-defined cloud developments.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “This is NSX-T’s coming out party—it is now our primary platform and includes all the tools, services, security and support for future growth,” said Tom McCafferty, VMware’s senior director of product marketing for NSX.To read this article in full, please click here

How to move to a disruptive network technology with minimal disruption

Disruptive network technologies are great—at least until they threaten to disrupt essential everyday network services and activities. That's when it's time to consider how innovations such as SDN, SD-WAN, intent-based networking (IBN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) can be transitioned into place without losing a beat.To read this article in full, please click here

How to adopt a disruptive network technology with minimal disruption

What is Linux? Everything you need to know about the open-source operating system

Linux is a tried-and-true, open-source operating system released in 1991 for computers, but its use has expanded to underpin systems for cars, phones, web servers and, more recently, networking gear.Its longevity, maturity and security make it one of the most trusted OSes available today, meaning it is ideal for commercial network devices as well as enterprises that want to use it and its peripherals to customize their own network and data center infrastructure.[ Also see Invaluable tips and tricks for troubleshooting Linux. ] That in turn makes Linux skills highly sought after by IT hiring managers. For example, many of the new technologies associated with DevOps, such as containers, infrastructure, and SDN controllers, are built on Linux.To read this article in full, please click here

What is Linux? Everything you need to know about the open-source operating system

Cisco warns on HyperFlex security vulnerabilities

Cisco this week identified two “High” security vulnerabilities in its HyperFlex data-center package that could let attackers gain control of the system. HyperFlex is Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure that offers computing, networking and storage resources in a single system. More about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The more critical of the two warnings – an 8.8 on Cisco’s severity scale of 1-10 – is a command-injection vulnerability in the cluster service manager of Cisco HyperFlex Software that could let an unauthenticated, attacker execute commands as the root user.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco warns on HyperFlex security vulnerabilities

VMware’s ongoing reinvention

VMware’s introduction of x86 server-virtualization technology was a game-changing event in the history of enterprise computing. But if you look at VMware’s corporate messaging today, it’s almost as if server virtualization has been scrubbed from the lexicon. Instead, VMware highlights its multi-cloud strategies, software-defined data centers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructures, security, SD-WAN, containers, blockchain, IoT and more.To read this article in full, please click here

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