RackWare offers a management and automation platform that enterprises use to manage their computing resources to more closely follow demand. RackWare’s core proposition is that its management suite delivers cost savings to customers of a suggested 40 to 50 percent. Additionally, RackWare promises to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability to their customers.The company today released a new take on its management suite that aims to extend the existing core RackWare offering. The new platform promises to offer enterprises a single solution (they refrained from calling it a single pane of glass) to move applications, protect those same applications and manage all the different applications across the totality of their infrastructure. Justifying the move, RackWare points to a recent IDC report that suggests 70 percent of heavy cloud users are considering a hybrid cloud strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
RackWare offers a management and automation platform that enterprises use to manage their computing resources to more closely follow demand. RackWare’s core proposition is that its management suite delivers cost savings to customers of a suggested 40 to 50 percent. Additionally, RackWare promises to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability to their customers.The company today released a new take on its management suite that aims to extend the existing core RackWare offering. The new platform promises to offer enterprises a single solution (they refrained from calling it a single pane of glass) to move applications, protect those same applications and manage all the different applications across the totality of their infrastructure. Justifying the move, RackWare points to a recent IDC report that suggests 70 percent of heavy cloud users are considering a hybrid cloud strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Welcome to the rise of the digital enterprise, where vendors and customers engage via applications and data is the new currency. Digital enterprises operate with radically different datanomics than conventional physical businesses. Here, digital information is the business.A successful digital enterprise is constantly updating applications in response to user context, market and environment—all of which is quantified, measured and delivered with data. Everything and everyone is personified by a digital footprint. Learning that the user just bought a new house requires change in recommendation from renters to home insurance. Reduction in price by a competitor or a new promotion needs a fast response. It is increasingly clear that a company’s ability to generate high-quality apps more rapidly is a critical differentiator. Fast is the new big.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2004, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's Kirk Bresniker set out to make radical changes to computer architecture with The Machine and drew out the first concept design on a whiteboard.At the time Bresniker, now chief architect at HP Labs, wanted to build a system that could drive computing into the future. The goal was to build a computer that used cutting-edge technologies like memristors and photonics.It's been an arduous journey, but HPE on Tuesday finally showed a prototype of The Machine at a lab in Fort Collins, Colorado.It's not close to what the company envisioned with The Machine when it was first announced in 2014 but follows the same principle of pushing computing into memory subsystems. The system breaks the limitations tied to conventional PC and server architecture in which memory is a bottleneck.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2004, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's Kirk Bresniker set out to make radical changes to computer architecture with The Machine and drew out the first concept design on a whiteboard.At the time Bresniker, now chief architect at HP Labs, wanted to build a system that could drive computing into the future. The goal was to build a computer that used cutting-edge technologies like memristors and photonics.It's been an arduous journey, but HPE on Tuesday finally showed a prototype of The Machine at a lab in Fort Collins, Colorado.It's not close to what the company envisioned with The Machine when it was first announced in 2014 but follows the same principle of pushing computing into memory subsystems. The system breaks the limitations tied to conventional PC and server architecture in which memory is a bottleneck.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week Dell and EMC held its first joint customer event since the two tech giants merged. The not-so-originally named Dell-EMC World was a forum for the newly formed company to showcase how it can help its customers navigate the complex world of digital transformation.The final keynote of the event was by the always-entertaining and equally brilliant Chad Sakac, head of the Converged Platform group. He entertained the crowd by flying onto the stage dressed as Captain Canada, a superhero from the 1970s.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the next year or two, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will add support for Intel Optane memory and storage to its latest Unix servers.Optane is a new form of storage and memory that could replace today's SSDs and DRAM. It is significantly faster and denser than both.One new system that can be configured with Optane is HPE's new Integrity i6 server, which was released this week. Integrity i6 is based on Intel's Itanium 9700 processors, code-named Kittson, and runs the HP-UX OS. The server can also be linked to HP's all-flash 3Par storage arrays, which are due to get Optane support later.Optane has stringent hardware and OS requirements. The first Optane products were low-capacity storage drives for PC caching and worked only with Intel's Kaby Lake chips and Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New research finds that 25% of all physical servers -- and 30% of all virtual servers -- are comatose. These are systems that have no activity in the last six months.The problem with comatose, or zombie, physical servers is well known. Past studies have routinely put the number of undead enterprise physical servers in the 20% to 30% range. But this latest research looked at virtual servers as well, and they may represent a significant cost to IT departments.[ Further reading: The march toward exascale computers ]
That's because users may be paying licensing fees on their virtual servers, as well as on the software they support, said the researchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprises' HP-UX OS has been around for more than 30 years, and users may be looking to move on from the Unix-based OS.Now HPE is offering a way out of the ancient OS using containers, which are small buckets running instances of applications. The containers will be offered with the Linux OS.HPE will provide containers to transition from conventional mainframe-style OSes to new hardware like x86-based Xeon servers. In this case, HPE is trying to get users to transition from Itanium chips.Intel started shipping its last Itanium 9700 chips -- codenamed Kittson -- on Thursday. Correspondingly, HPE announced new Integrity i6 servers with the new chips. But the future of HP-UX servers is uncertain because Intel has no new Itanium chips beyond Kittson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Is it possible that a writer at The Onion has previously toiled as a network engineer … or systems administrator? He or she at least did their homework to produce a “story” headlined: “Network Engineer Would Be Systems Manager If He Could Do It All Over Again.”From the “story.”
Reflecting wistfully on what he might have made of himself had he chosen a different profession, Dynatrend Solutions network engineer Alan Miller said Wednesday that he would be a systems manager if he had the chance to go back and do it all over again.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's the end of the line for Intel's Itanium chip, a troubled processor family that spawned many product delays and bad blood between HP and Oracle.Intel on Thursday started shipping its latest Itanium 9700 chip, code-named Kittson, in volume. It's the last of the Itanium chips, which first appeared in early 2001.Beyond Kittson, there will be no more chips coming from the Itanium family, an Intel spokesman said in an email. That ends a tumultuous, 16-year journey for Itanium, which Intel once envisioned as a replacement for x86 chips in 64-bit PCs and servers.Support for Itanium has dwindled over the past decade, which has led to its gradual death. Server makers stopped offering hardware, software development stalled, and Intel has been openly asking customers to switch to x86-based Xeon chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You won't need to buy a rack of 400 servers if you have one high-powered Nvidia DGX-1 supercomputer with a Volta GPU sitting on your desktop.The DGX-1 supercomputer -- which looks like a regular rack server -- gets most of its computing power from eight Tesla V100 GPUs.The GPU, the first one based on the brand-new Volta architecture, was introduced at the company's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on Wednesday."It comes out of the box, plug it in and go to work," said Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during a keynote speech.But the DGX-1 with Tesla V100 computer is expensive. At US$149,000, it's worth some people's life savings. But Huang encouraged people to order it, saying the box will ship in the third quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It goes without saying that mainframes are powerful. These computers can perform more operations per second than any other commercial system, which is why most banks (not to mention many government agencies, insurance companies, retailers and other businesses that manage massive amounts of data) rely on Big Iron for their indispensable data analytics functions.And to say analytics are indispensable is underselling their value. Data analysis is an absolutely integral part of the new economy, and any organization seeking an edge needs an edge in analytics. Mainframes are a good match to provide the speed that leading companies are looking for, but many companies are still held back by their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the course of researching a marketing campaign aimed at IT professionals, I have interviewed dozens of such workers over the past year. Some are middle-aged; some are very young. I’ve talked to men and women in all parts of the country who worked at large and small firms.One thing that struck me is that I have not met a single one who was relaxed. They are all stressed and have no time. They are tortured souls who are constantly checking their phones. They live their lives on the edge of disaster.Perhaps this isn’t true across the board. A 2016 survey from TEKsystems showed that IT workers were less stressed than a few years ago. Yet even in that survey, the workers’ job satisfaction was low with less than one half agreeing that they were doing the most satisfying work of their careers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the umpteenth time, Dell Technologies has reiterated that PCs are important to the company, and it won't quit the market.But PCs occupied only a few minutes of CEO Michael Dell's opening keynote at Dell EMC World in Las Vegas on Monday. PCs are the engine that keep enterprises chugging, he said.Instead, Dell spent time educating attendees about the new Dell Technologies and its products. It's been less than a year since the US$67 billion Dell-EMC merger was finalized, and a lot of focus was on answering burning questions about the company's future.Dell did say the company would offer the PC-as-a-service worldwide by the end of the year, with more details about the program to be shared on Tuesday. HP and Microsoft are offering PC-as-a-service options, allowing customers to buy devices and support and pay on a monthly basis. That option reduces the hardware acquisition and support costs for companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just a few years back, Dell said it didn't want to mimic sloppy behemoths like IBM or HP and, instead, wanted to be lean and focus on the mid-market.But after a US$67 billion merger with EMC in 2016, the new company called Dell Technologies is a full-bodied systems integrator, offering hardware, networking, storage, and services.In the meanwhile, the company's rivals slimmed down. The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise focuses on data-center hardware, while IBM focuses on software.Dell Technologies is taking a page from Alphabet, a bunch of autonomous companies like Google working together. Dell Technologies includes hardware company Dell and storage provider EMC, with many independent operational units that have combined to strengthen the company's infrastructure stack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtually all digital transformation strategies focus on the network edge, as the goal is to enable agility and autonomy where technology and business meet. This edge is composed of internal and external users and their devices on the wireless network, as well as those who may interface over the Internet via VPN or even through mobile apps or websites that facilitate users. + Also on Network World: 3 telltale signs it's a real digital transformation +
The focus on the edge has changed significantly as business explore customer and employee engagement, the Internet of Things, and the integration of layers of business intelligence and analytics over the top. Multidisciplinary teams are now needed to ensure there is alignment between the business and IT, and full participation is required to get the right requirements up front. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a regular reader of Reddit’s section devoted to system administration, I have come to understand that subject lines such as “Found a leaky ethernet port” do no always mean what one might assume they mean. Today’s example:
“This is going to be a fun couple of days,” bemoans the Redditor who discovered this leak. “It's been raining for two days straight and it's expected to continue for another two.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The legal ping-pong battle between Cisco and Arista Thursday found Cisco on the winning side as In the International Trade Commission ruled that Arista switches infringe on two core Cisco patents that the company says are key technologies in its network switching pantheon.+More on Network World: Arista gets important win over Cisco in patent battle+Mark Chandler, senior vice president, General Counsel and Secretary of Cisco wrote in a blog post of the Commission’s specific ruling that Arista was:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The legal ping-pong battle between Cisco and Arista Thursday found Cisco on the winning side as In the International Trade Commission ruled that Arista switches infringe on two core Cisco patents that the company says are key technologies in its network switching pantheon.+More on Network World: Arista gets important win over Cisco in patent battle+Mark Chandler, senior vice president, General Counsel and Secretary of Cisco wrote in a blog post of the Commission’s specific ruling that Arista was:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here