By 2033, over 4,000 miles of underground fiber will be beneath sea water, and hundreds of data centers will be affected, reseachers at University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon say. The conduits carrying the internet cables and the cables themselves are not designed for it — they’re water-resistant but not waterproof. That means global communications will get disrupted if action isn’t taken to mitigate the risk, the experts say.New York, Miami, and Seattle are the three major U.S. conurbations that the group says are most susceptible to metro-area cable inundation. However, the effects would ripple through the internet. And Los Angeles would be hit in its long-haul installations.To read this article in full, please click here
On one of the biggest shopping days of the year for Amazon.com the company’s web site crapped out intermittently for hours yesterday.Instead of Prime Day purchases, many customers just got error messages and pictures of the dogs of Amazon, along with a message from Amazon that read: "Sorry, we're experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again in a few seconds. Your items are still waiting in your cart," or “"Uh-Oh. Something went wrong on our end." [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network.] Prime Day started at 3PM ET and the problems emerged almost immediately after. Around 5 p.m., Amazon tweeted acknowledgement of the problem stating: “Some customers are having difficulty shopping and we are working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime day in the US, customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year.”To read this article in full, please click here
It’s hard to remember a time when people thought Amazon was nuts for going into the cloud computing business, since it was so far removed from the company’s core ecommerce business. No one is laughing now.It seems history could repeat itself. According to an article in The Information, Amazon is rumored to be targeting a new industry, albeit one dominated by a giant player and multiple healthy competitors — the network switching business. The move would put it in direct competition with Cisco, HPE, Juniper Networks, and Arista.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme Networks is contending for greater influence from the data center to the network edge, but it has some obstacles to overcome.The company is still grappling with how to best integrate, use and effectively sell the technologies it has acquired from Avaya and Brocade in the past year, as well as incorporate and develop its own products to do battle in the cloud, mobile and edge computing environments of the future. Remember, too, that Extreme bought wireless player Zebra Technologies in 2016 for $55 million.[ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it.] In terms of results that Wall Street watches, Extreme Networks grew revenue 76% to $262 million in its recent fiscal third quarter. According to Extreme, those gains were fueled mostly by growth from its acquisitions and around an 8% growth in its own products. To read this article in full, please click here
Once again research is showing that rumors of the demise of the data center are greatly exaggerated. One study shows across-the-board growth in IT spending, while a second predicts that the financial services sector is really set to explode.Market research firm IHS Markit surveyed IT managers at 151 North American organizations and found that most of them expect to at least double the amount of physical servers in their data centers by 2019.“We are seeing a continuation of the enterprise DC growth phase signaled by last year’s respondents and confirmed by respondents to this study. Enterprises are transforming their on-premises DC to a cloud architecture, making the enterprise DC a first-class citizen as enterprises build their multi-clouds,” wrote Clifford Grossner, senior research director in the cloud and data center research practice at IHS Markit.To read this article in full, please click here
A 75-mile, quantum-secured, high-speed fiber link has been built in the United Kingdom, the largest internet supplier there has said.Particles of light, known as photons, carry encryption keys over the same connection as data. Hijacking those photons within the link immediately notifies the system that the keys have become bad — the thief interfering with those keys alters them and then they can’t be used by the interceptor — and the traffic becomes garbled instantly.It’s “virtually un-hackable,” said Gavin Patterson, outgoing BT chief executive, announcing the link at Internet of Things World Europe that I attended in London last month.To read this article in full, please click here
China’s Baidu made two big moves that are going to make it a major player in the artificial intelligence (AI) space: an extremely powerful new chip designed to compete with Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and a wide-spanning alliance with Intel.First, the company introduced the Kunlun, a cloud-to-edge range of AI chips built to accommodate high-performance requirements of a wide variety of AI scenarios. The announcement was made at Baidu Create, a developer show that is starting to look an awful lot like Google I/O in terms of content and sessions.Kunlun leverages Baidu’s AI ecosystem, which includes AI scenarios such as search ranking and deep learning frameworks, including its open source deep learning framework called PaddlePaddle. Kunlun can be used in everything from autonomous vehicles to data centers.To read this article in full, please click here
Seasonal softness and a looming tariff dispute between China and the U.S. put a dampener on the chip market, and it only looks to be getting worse with China interfering in the business of a U.S. company.Last week, Micron Technology, the number four chip vendor, according to IHS Markit, said China is blocking sales of some of its memory products. While based in Boise, Idaho, and having a large fabrication plant there, Micron also makes a lot of products in China for the Chinese market. And Micron is currently in a legal battle with Taiwanese chip maker United Microelectronics over alleged patent violations in China.Last week, a Chinese court granted a preliminary injunction banning Micron subsidiaries in China from manufacturing or selling DRAM modules and NAND flash chips used in solid-state drives. The good news, according to Micron, is that the injunction covers only 1 percent of its revenue.To read this article in full, please click here
Server virtualization is one of those technologies that’s simple in concept and profound in its impact on enterprise data centers.What if, instead of running one operating system instance and one application per server, you could add a layer of software, known as a hypervisor, that enables you to run multiple operating system instances and associated workloads on a single physical server?[ See where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] That’s the idea behind server virtualization, and the idea dates back to IBM mainframes in the 1960s and was popularized by VMware, which introduced virtualization software for x86 servers in the early 2000s. Since then, other vendors have developed their own server-virtualization platforms and the industry as a whole has created advanced management, automation and orchestration tools that make deploying, moving and managing virtual machine (VM) workloads a breeze.To read this article in full, please click here
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is widely viewed as a massively expensive and burdensome privacy regulation that can be a major headache and pitfall for American firms doing business in Europe. Many firms, including Facebook, have sought ways around the law to avoid having to deal with the burden of compliance.Well, there is no weaseling out now. Last week, with no fanfare, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB375, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the California equivalent of GDPR that mirrors the EU law in many ways.To read this article in full, please click here
The workplace is changing rapidly as employees embrace mobility, applications are in the cloud, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are instrumented for continuous connectivity — and this is affecting how organizations must think about secure access. Regardless of the scenario, organizations want solutions that deliver better productivity for whomever (or whatever) is connecting, a consistent user experience, compliance with corporate policies and regulatory requirements, and strong end-to-end security.This is the playing field for Pulse Secure, a company that has built a broad portfolio of access products and services that are available as a unified platform. Pulse Secure has considered practically every use case and has built a range of solutions to solve the secure connectivity challenges that IT organizations face. The company claims to have more than 20,000 customers and a presence in 80 percent of global enterprises — maybe even yours.To read this article in full, please click here
The data-center network is a critical component of enterprise IT’s strategy to create private and hybrid-cloud architectures. It is software that must deliver improved automation, agility, security and analytics to the data center network. It should allow for the seamless integration of enterprise-owned applications with public cloud services. Over time, leading edge software will enable the migration to intent-based data-center networks with full automation and rapid remediation of application-performance issues.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
HPE and Rackspace are building on their alliance from last November, when they first introduced an OpenStack-based pay-per-use system designed to compete with public cloud providers.The two now offer pay as you go to Rackspace’s VMware and Kubernetes private cloud services. Rackspace launched its Kubernetes private cloud managed service just last month. The initial pay-as-you-go system was for standard server-side apps. This new feature adds Kubernetes container management as an option.Rackspace has deployed HPE’s new GreenLake Flex Capacity service to provide the pay-as-you-go pricing model. GreenLake is one of many programs by enterprise hardware vendors to provide on-demand pricing to companies looking to rein in data center costs.To read this article in full, please click here
The SD-WAN market is hot, with all of the usual networking suspects (Cisco, VMware, AT&T, Citrix, etc.) staking a claim. But make no mistake, this is a market sector that was built, defined, and refined by startups.A few early movers have already been taken off the table, snatched up by incumbents seeking to modernize their networking portfolios: Cisco acquired Viptela for $610 million; VMware bought VeloCloud for an estimated $449 million; NTT purchased Virtela for $525 million, and Riverbed, which was a leader in the precursor WAN optimization space, acquired Ocedo (price undisclosed) to help it manage its transition to a software-defined future.To read this article in full, please click here
I assume that by now you’ve heard the news that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has stepped down for reportedly violating the company's strict policy against having relationships with employees. As CFO Bob Swan takes the reigns, the question of who will replace Krzanich is front and center.Several analysts I’ve spoken to even before this happened said they think Intel needs to look to the outside for its next CEO. In its 50-year history, the company has had only six CEOs, all of them insiders. Intel has a reputation as a tough place to work; nobody treads water at Intel. In the volatile Silicon Valley, I found Intel was a place where people either came and went fast or hung around forever. If you are cut out for its culture, expect to be promoted up the food chain rather quickly.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a shake-up – and a scandal – in the Top500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.The U.S. has retaken first place in the Top500 list after five years of dominance by China. Computers built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy have pushed the previous two record-holders, both Chinese, into second and fourth place.[ Now see who's developing quantum computers.] But the previous fourth placeholder, Japan’s Gyoukou, is nowhere to be found, after one of its creators was arrested on suspicion of fraud.To read this article in full, please click here
With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2019 this fall, it’s time for enterprise IT pros who work in Microsoft shops to start planning their migration to the new operating system.As with any major release, it takes time to get familiar with what’s new and to start getting hands-on experience implementing new features. In this case, the enhancements include improved security and enhanced data-center capabilities.[ 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. ] So far among those who have been experimenting with the Insider Preview of Windows Server 2019 the most areas commonly deployed first are:To read this article in full, please click here
A free supply of already-cooled deep-sea water is among the benefits to locating pre-packaged data centers underwater, believes Microsoft, which recently announced the successful launch of a submarine-like data center off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland.The shipping-container-sized, self-contained server room, called Project Natick, submerged earlier this month on a rock shelf 117 feet below the water’s surface also has the benefit of potentially taking advantage of bargain-basement real estate near population centers — there’s no rent in open sea.“Project Natick is an out-of-the-box idea to accommodate exponential growth in demand for cloud computing infrastructure near population centers,” John Roach writes on Microsoft’s website.To read this article in full, please click here
Last month there were rumors that Qualcomm was looking to exit the data center business and abandon the Centriq processor, an ARM-based 48-core chip designed to take on Intel in the enterprise server market. The news seemed surprising, given Qualcomm had put years of work into the chip and had only just launched it a few months earlier.Now Bloomberg adds further fuel to the fire with a report that the company is preparing to lay off almost 280 employees, and most of them are in the data center group. Bloomberg got wind of the layoffs due to filings with the state governments in North Carolina and California, which require advanced notice of significant layoffs.To read this article in full, please click here
Water cooling for enterprise servers is slowly creeping in from the fringes to the mainstream of data center use as vendors and end users alike realize the limitations of air cooling. With increased compute density, fans just don’t cut it anymore, and water cooling is far more efficient.Several vendors have adapted their cabinets to accommodate water-cooling systems, and now Lenovo is the latest to get religion on the subject with Neptune, a series of technologies for the data center. The company announced the new system at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Neptune is a three-pronged approach, borrowed from the legend of the Roman god of the seas Neptune, who wields a three-pointed spear. It offers direct-to-node liquid cooling, rear door heat exchangers, and hybrid cooling that mixes air and liquid, all of which is documented in a lighthearted blog post by the company.To read this article in full, please click here