The OpenStack Foundation has announced the general availability of the 18th iteration of its cloud platform, called OpenStack Rocky. The major new functionalities to the platform are faster upgrades and enhanced support for bare metal infrastructure.Bare-metal cloud is a term for cloud services that come with zero software. When you rent an instance on Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, you get a virtualized environment that is run on a hypervisor and shared with another, unknown user. This often causes performance issues, since you never know what kind of neighbor you will get each time.To read this article in full, please click here
High-quality, reliable network hardware and data center cabling are requirements for a high-performing technology infrastructure and for a successful IT team that helps drive more business. It’s the life cycle for your network.However, in these days of shrinking budgets and rising demands, CIOs, IT professionals, and buyers are being pressured to do more while reducing costs. How can this be done?Having the right approach when it comes to network hardware and data center cabling is a powerful way to enable your IT organization to do a lot more while optimizing your budget. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The IT value within the life cycle There are many nuances to a hardware investment that some organizations don’t take into account. The opportunity to reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) spends exists, but it requires incorporating pre-owned hardware into the equation.To read this article in full, please click here
Over the last few years, I have been sprawled in so many technologies that I have forgotten where my roots began in the world of data center. Therefore, I decided to delve deeper into what’s prevalent and headed straight to Ivan Pepelnjak EVPN webinar hosted by Dinesh Dutt.I knew of the distinguished Dinesh since he was the chief scientist at Cumulus Networks and for me; he is a leader in this field. Before reading his book on EVPN, I decided to give Dinesh a call to exchange our views about the beginning of EVPN. We talked about the practicalities and limitations of the data center. Here is an excerpt from our discussion.To read this article in full, please click here
Ready or not, the upgrade to an important internet security operation may soon be launched. Then again, it might not.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will meet the week of Sept. 17 and will likely decide whether or not to give the go ahead on its multi-year project to upgrade the top pair of cryptographic keys used in the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol — commonly known as the root zone key signing key (KSK) — which secures the Internet's foundational servers.[ RELATED: Firewall face-off for the enterprise ] Changing these keys and making them stronger is an essential security step, in much the same way that regularly changing passwords is considered a practical habit by any Internet user, ICANN says. The update will help prevent certain nefarious activities such as attackers taking control of a session and directing users to a site that for example might steal their personal information.To read this article in full, please click here
Future 5G-based wireless networking equipment and data center equipment will combine antennas and the corresponding radio guts into one microprocessor unit, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology say.Integrating all of the wireless elements that one needs in a radio will reduce waste heat and allow better modulation, according to the group, which has been working on a one-chip, multiple transmitter and receiver package design. Longer transmission times and better data rates will result, they say.“Within the same channel bandwidth, the proposed transmitter can transmit six- to ten-times higher data rate,” says Hua Wang, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in a news article on the university’s website about the idea.To read this article in full, please click here
Fully baked products weren’t the only technologies on display at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week; VMware previewed three in-the-works projects related to edge computing, artificial intelligence and enterprise blockchain.The first is Project Dimension, which aims to deliver the functionality of VMware’s cloud offerings to the edge as a managed service. Project Dimension will combine the elements of VMware Cloud Foundation – including software-defined services for compute, storage, network and security, along with cloud management capabilities – in a hyperconverged form factor that’s operated by VMware. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Just as VMware Cloud on AWS manages a customer’s infrastructure in the Amazon cloud, Project Dimension will manage a customer’s on-premises data-center and edge locations, such as branch offices and warehouse sites.To read this article in full, please click here
The semiconductor world is buzzing over the news that custom semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the foundry born when AMD divested itself of its fabrication facilities, announced the sudden decision to drop its 7nm FinFET development program and restructure its R&D teams around “enhanced portfolio initiatives.”For now, GlobalFoundries will stick to 12nm and 14nm manufacturing. All told, approximately 5 percent (of roughly 18,000 employees) will lose their jobs. But it also sets back AMD, a GlobalFoundries customer, in its bid to get ahead of Intel, which has struggled for two years to get to 10nm and won’t get there until 2020.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] “The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law,” said Thomas Caulfield, who was named CEO of GlobalFoundries last March, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
The semiconductor world is buzzing over the news that custom semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the foundry born when AMD divested itself of its fabrication facilities, announced the sudden decision to drop its 7nm FinFET development program and restructure its R&D teams around “enhanced portfolio initiatives.”For now, GlobalFoundries will stick to 12nm and 14nm manufacturing. All told, approximately 5 percent (of roughly 18,000 employees) will lose their jobs. But it also sets back AMD, a GlobalFoundries customer, in its bid to get ahead of Intel, which has struggled for two years to get to 10nm and won’t get there until 2020.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] “The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law,” said Thomas Caulfield, who was named CEO of GlobalFoundries last March, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
What is rapidly aging and largely male? If you said the heavy metal music scene, you wouldn’t be wrong (c’est moi), but that’s not the answer in this instance. It’s data center staffing.In its recent report on data center efficiency, Uptime Institute focused primarily on outages and the improvement in power efficiency, but there were other interesting findings, such as this:Data center staff are getting older on average, and women show no interest in the job.[ Now read: 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for ] New skills needed for hybrid IT environments According to the report, there is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment. New skills, such as overseeing and managing SLAs for off-premises workloads, are needed, but people don’t have them. Just 35 percent of survey respondents reported that they did not have any of the hiring or staffing issues identified by Uptime.To read this article in full, please click here
VMworld 2018Image by Getty ImagesVMworld 2018 kicked off this week in Las Vegas, where VMware and its partners are digging into virtualization, SDN, hyperconvergence, AI, containers and more. Here are some of the new products being announced and displayed at the show.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”[See our review of VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and check out IDC’s top 10 data center predictions. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters] Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft is offering extended support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to customers who shift these platforms from on-premises into Microsoft’s Azure cloud.The scheduled ends of extended support for the 2008 versions of Server and SQL Server are Jan. 14, 2020 and July 9, 2019, respectively. But if customers move these workloads into the Azure cloud, they get three extra years of support at no extra cost beyond the price of the Azure service.In the past, when the end-of-life clock started ticking, organizations made a mad dash to upgrade operating systems and SQL servers in order to keep their systems supported. Some organizations chose to continue running their applications completely unsupported, unpatched and un-updated – a very bad thing to do in this age of viruses, malware and cyberattacks.To read this article in full, please click here
Every data center admin knows that dealing with excess heat is one of the biggest, most expensive factors involved in running a modern data center.For decades, engineers have been looking for new ways to mitigate the issue, and now Norway is building a brand-new town designed to turn the problem into an opportunity to lower costs, reduce energy usage, and fight climate change.[ Read also: Data center cooling market set to explode in the coming years | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] Hug your servers ... to stay warm According to Fast Company, the town of Lyseparken, now under construction near Bergen, Norway, is being built to use the excess heat generated by a new data center in the heart of the community to keep a nearly 6.5 million square feet of nearby planned business and office space—and eventually up to 5,000 homes—warm. It works like this:To read this article in full, please click here
I’ve long felt Japan has been severely overlooked in recent years due to two “lost decades” and China overshadowing it — and supercomputing is no exception.In 2011, Fujitsu launched the K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. Calling it a computer really is a misnomer, though, as is the case in any supercomputer these days. When I think “computer,” I think of the 3-foot-tall black tower a few feet from me making the room warm. In the case of K, it’s rows and rows of cabinets stuffed with rack-mounted servers in a space the size of a basketball court.With its distributed memory architecture, K had 88,128 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 cabinets. Fujitsu was a licensee of Sun Microsystems’ SPARC processor (later Oracle) and did some impressive work on the processor on its own. When it launched in 2011, the K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list, at a computation speed of over 8 petaflops. It has since been surpassed by supercomputers from the U.S. and China.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft and Salesforce have separately announced plans to release some key software products as open source for anyone to use in their data centers.Microsoft plans to release its Open Network Emulator (ONE), a simulator of its entire Azure network infrastructure that it uses as a way to find and troubleshoot problems before they cause network outages. The announcement was made by Victor Bahl, a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research, on a Microsoft podcast.To read this article in full, please click here
Whether users are looking to stabilize cloud-connected resources, better manage remote networks or simply upgrade a timeworn wide area environment, software-defined-WAN (SD-WAN) technologies are what’s on the purchasing menu.The proof lies in the fact that this segment of the networking market will hit $4.5 billion and grow at a 40.4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022. In 2017 alone, SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83.3% in 2017 to reach $833 million, according to IDC's recent SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast. [ Click here to find out more about SD-WAN and why you’ll use it one day and learn about WANs and where they’re headed. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] A related report from researchers at the Dell’Oro Group predicts revenue from SD-WAN software components, including controller and virtual network functions, will grow almost twice as fast as the hardware components. Over the next five years, SD-WAN software revenue will grow at a 41% compounded annual growth rate, compared to 21% for hardware.To read this article in full, please click here
One year ago Charlie Giancarlo took the helm of Pure Storage, which in fiscal year 2018 reported its first billion-dollar year.Giancarlo was a managing director and senior advisor at Silver Lake Partners before joining Pure Storage. Prior to that, he held multiple executive positions at Cisco, where he helped steer the company into markets such as Ethernet switching, VoIP, Wi-Fi and telepresence.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] Giancarlo talked with Network World's Ann Bednarz about what Pure is doing to keep the storage industry moving forward, and how the experience he gained during Cisco’s growth spurt is helping. To read this article in full, please click here
The cloud continues to grow in popularity as businesses look to take advantage of digital trends. However, the term “cloud” is multi-definitional and means different things to different types of organizations. In the small business segment, cloud likely means software as a service (SaaS), as those organizations want turnkey applications offered on a pay-as-you-go model. For larger companies, cloud means public infrastructure as a service, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Private clouds are alive and kicking For large businesses, the cloud likely means hybrid where private data centers make up most or even all of the cloud infrastructure. The ZK Research 2018 Global Cloud Forecast projected that by 2020, there would be more workloads in private clouds than in public clouds or available as legacy on-premises workloads. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.)To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco’s strategy of diversifying into a more software-optimized business is paying off – literally.The software differentiation was perhaps never more obvious than in its most recent set of year-end and fourth quarter results. (Cisco's 2018 fiscal year ended July 28.) Cisco said deferred revenue for the fiscal year was $19.7 billion, up 6 percent overall, “with deferred product revenue up 15 percent, driven largely by subscription-based and software offers, and deferred service revenue was up 1 percent.”[ Related: Getting grounded in intent-based networking] The portion of deferred product revenue that is related to recurring software and subscription offers increased 23 percent over 2017, Cisco stated. In addition, Cisco reported deferred revenue from software and subscriptions increasing 23 percent to $6.1 billion in the fourth quarter alone.To read this article in full, please click here