After about half a decade, Intel is wiping the confusing E5 and E7 monikers off its Xeon chips and rebranding them to bring more clarity about the performance and features that come with the processors.Xeon chips are used in servers and workstations like Mac Pro. Xeon chips being released mid-year will be broken down into Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze processors.The naming scheme -- derived from metals -- is a mix of Olympic medals and branding of credit cards from companies like Delta. A person familiar with Intel's plans earlier said the chips will likely be widely referred to as Xeon-P, Xeon-G, Xeon-S, and Xeon-B, with the P for Platinum, G for Gold, etc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The technology issues involved in supporting about 27 distinct DHS information systems and databases hinder the effort by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track people who overstay their visas.That was the chief conclusion of a scathing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) report on the status of ICE’s ability to track visa overstays.+More on Network World: DHS warns on immigration spoofing scam+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Snagging an internship at Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Google is certainly reason for celebration, but interns can also fare pretty darn well at enterprise-oriented vendors such as Juniper Networks, VMware and Salesforce.com.The latest report from online jobs site Glassdoor on highest paying internships features at least 15 tech companies in the top 25, depending upon how you define a tech company.Facebook is No. 1 on the list with median monthly pay of $8K, not to mention lots of perks, from free food to housing accommodations in some cases.Amazon and Apple both have median intern pay of $6,400 per month, and Google follows close behind with $6K per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In detailing its third quarter 2017 financial discussion Extreme CEO Ed Meyercord said the company was “locked and loaded” as it worked toward combining and integrating the two companies – Avaya and Brocade it is in the process of purchasing.Extreme a lot of work ahead as it combines Brocade's data center business and the network technology of Avaya Holdings– which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy – both of which it said it would acquire in March. Extreme added that it has now integrated another buy it made, Zebra wireless with great success. Extreme said that in the third quarter alone four of its top 10 deals came from the Zebra side.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most enterprises across the globe are currently at some stage of the digital transformation journey, and there is no doubt that cloud is a key driving factor. No sector is immune to the impact of digital transformation, particularly as the influx of digital and data-driven challengers shows no sign of abating and legacy businesses find themselves forced to modernize rapidly, sometimes just to maintain their competitive position.Enterprises face myriad challenges when it comes to moving applications and data to the cloud. On the one hand, there is increasing pressure to reap the benefits of cloud services. These include the agility to increase infrastructure capacity with no additional capital expenses and to quickly deploy new services as mandated by the business needs. On the other hand, enterprises have legacy systems and applications that cannot be virtualized or migrated to the cloud. In addition, in many sectors, such as financial services, there is a raft of governance, compliance and regulatory (GRC) requirements that impact cloud strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco kept the checkbook open by making a second purchase in less than a week, this time grabbing the analytics and data science technology from Saggezza for an undisclosed amount.On May 1 Cisco padded its SD-WAN portfolio with SD-WAN player Viptela for $610 million.Saggezza is a privately held company founded in 2006. The name Saggezza derives from the Latin word for wisdom, or insight, according to the company’s website. It’s products, TruVantage – aimed at financial institutions and Lube Insights – a cloud-based application offer data analytics support for IT operations, visualization applications and business process optimization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, the second of the two “star” franchises that form such a foundational part of nerd culture. Consequently, this is a special Star Wars edition of your faithful Raspberry Pi roundup.It’s easy to see what Star Trek “means” as a part of nerdery – it’s a mostly hopeful vision of the future, where the adults mostly act like adults and the better angels of our natures win out much more often than our demons. Star Wars is harder to pin down. As lots of people have said, it’s really more fantasy than sci-fi, but it’s one where many have chosen to let their imaginations roam freely.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day + Raspberry Pi roundup: Searching for Pi, steampunk laptops, Code Angels, and a visit to Competitor CornerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Several years ago, I was asked, “How do we actually make money from digital transformation?” In response, I tactfully answered with a question: If you want to put away more money in your retirement fund, how do you do that? The answer is simple: Make more money while spending the same (or even better, spend less), and put the difference into your retirement account.Deriving financial value from a digital transformation is simply leveraging digital capabilities to drive more revenue and saving on your operating expenses. How digital can drive incremental revenue
The first way to grow a business is to acquire new customers who will bring new revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Get a digital transformation for only $199.95, but only if you call to order in the next 15 minutes!”OK, so I haven’t seen an ad like this on late night TV—well, at least not yet. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the term “digital transformation” may be the greatest selling tool the enterprise technology industry has created in a generation.Everywhere you turn, someone is selling something using the term "digital transformation." The truth is, many of the things technology companies are selling are incredible new technologies that do, in fact, play a vital role in your digital transformation journey and are worthy of your consideration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A top executive responsible for shaping Intel's PC roadmap will now run the company's data center business.Navin Shenoy -- previously senior vice president and general manager of the company's Client Computing Group -- has been appointed the general manager of Intel's Data Center Group (DCG). He will replace the well-respected Diane Bryant, who was group president of DCG.Bryant is taking a leave of absence for six to eight months, and will be given a new position on returning, Intel said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat presented a vision during today's keynote address at the Red Hat Summit that it believes Ansible can and will be the foundation for enterprise-wide automation. Red Hat, by the way, recently acquired Ansible.Although the vision appears enticing at first glance, the broad statements about unifying the enterprise data center under Ansible really don't ring true.What is Ansible?
Ansible describes its technology in the following way:Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 2,400 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon."
Ansible was founded to provide a new way to think about managing systems and applications that better fit this new world. Historically, management vendors and home-grown scripting solutions were created to manage stacks of software on servers. In contrast, Ansible was created to orchestrate multi-tier applications across clouds. From configuration to deployment to zero-downtime rolling upgrades, Ansible is a single framework that can fully automate today’s modern enteprise apps.
OUR DIFFERENCE
Simple, agentless & powerful. Ansible’s simple, YAML-based automation syntax is quick Continue reading
I recently participated in a webinar, and one of the questions I was asked made me think about a great first topic for this blog: What are the key drivers to keep an application and “lift and shift”?If you’re in a company that has a plan to move to the cloud, you’ve probably been asked what it is going to take to move an existing application to the cloud. In one of my previous roles, our CIO gave us the mandate that we were going to move everything out of one of our expensive data centers to the cloud within two years, so I saw a lot of “lift and shift” requests. But not a single one of those requests resulted in a lift and shift.Let’s review the benefits of running in the cloud and then see if we can characterize the types of applications that will run well in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SSDs operate the fastest when inside a computer. Micron's new SolidScale storage system uproots SSDs from servers and pushes them into discrete boxes while reducing latency.SolidScale is a top-of-the-rack storage system that will house many SSDs. It will connect to servers, memory, and other computing resources in a data center via gigabit ethernet, and will use the emerging NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) 1.0 protocol for data transfers.The new storage system is faster than regular storage arrays, Micron claimed. SolidScale can deliver data more than two times faster than a standard all-flash array.SolidScale is a step in decoupling SSDs from servers and putting them into shared storage in data centers. It also provides a power-efficient way of packing fast storage into tight spaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Xen Project has fixed three vulnerabilities in its widely used hypervisor that could allow operating systems running inside virtual machines to access the memory of the host systems, breaking the critical security layer among them.Two of the patched vulnerabilities can only be exploited under certain conditions, which limits their use in potential attacks, but one is a highly reliable flaw that poses a serious threat to multitenant data centers where the customers' virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.The flaws don't yet have CVE tracking numbers, but are covered in three Xen security advisories called XSA-213, XSA-214 and XSA-215.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Welcome to ITSM and Beyond, a new blog inspired by honest conversations with CIOs and the fundamental way they have pursued transformative information technology and IT Service Management (ITSM) strategies.It must be human nature to attempt to be a prognosticator, since it seems we are constantly trying to predict the future. Sometimes it’s something simple and immediate, such as predicting tomorrow’s weather. Other times we look farther into the future, like trying to predict where our careers will take us. Regardless of what we are trying to predict, if we can do so accurately, then we will make good decisions and be successful in meeting our goals and objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember scrambling like mad for new technology?I know people who camped out overnight to secure their place in line for the latest version of a smartphone. Others significantly overpaid or added their names to pre-order lists months in advance—just to make sure they had the most up-to-date device. When the iPad2 was released back in 2011, some stores sold out within 10 minutes even though it was estimated that 60 percent of consumers purchasing the tablet already owned the original version launched only the year before. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat’s annual summit opened today with the announcement of three new products aimed with uncharacteristic directness at developers, rather than the company’s usual target of IT operations staff.Openshift.io is the company’s free SaaS development environment, specifically designed for cloud-native apps, that lets geographically far-flung teams work together and automatically containerizes code for easy deployment. The environment builds on open source projects like Kubernetes-focused development platform fabric8, IDE Eclipse Che, and automation server Jenkins.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led + Which Linux distros should newbies use?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has padded its SD-WAN portfolio with fellow player Viptela for $610 million.The deal will be a homecoming for Viptela’s top execs as current CEO Praveen Akkiraju is a former Cisco and Dell EMC. Co-founders of Viptela Amir Khan and Khalid Raza were engineers at Cisco.“Cisco has been providing SD-WAN technology and services to customers for several years; the Cisco IWAN solution delivers an on-premises SD-WAN solution for customers needing advanced routing features and other advanced network services, and Cisco Meraki provides a cloud-based solution for customers needing maximum simplicity and unified threat management functionality in their SD-WAN solution. Acquiring Viptela will enable us to expand our portfolio, with increased functionality delivered through the cloud,” wrote Rob Salvagno Vice President of Corporate Business Development at Cisco wrote in a blog post on the deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Greg Downer, senior IT director at Oshkosh Corp., a manufacturer of specialty heavy vehicles in Oshkosh, Wisc., wishes he could tip the balance of on-premises vs. cloud more in the direction of the cloud, which currently accounts for only about 20% of his application footprint. However, as a contractor for the Department of Defense, his company is beholden to strict data requirements, including where data is stored."Cloud offerings have helped us deploy faster and reduce our data center infrastructure, but the main reason we don't do more in the cloud is because of strict DoD contract requirements for specific types of data," he says.In Computerworld's Tech Forecast 2017 survey of 196 IT managers and leaders, 79% of respondents said they have a cloud project underway or planned, and 58% of those using some type of cloud-based system gave their efforts an A or B in terms of delivering business value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Less than one-fifth of enterprise IT assets are in the cloud, but it looks like more are on the way.One-third of data-center professionals and IT practitioners plan to deploy workloads in the cloud in the next year, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, an advisory group focused on improving critical infrastructure.Companies still rely mostly on their own infrastructure and multi-tenant data centers, including collocation facilities, the survey found. Sixty-five percent of IT assets are in-house, and only 13 percent in the cloud.But the move to the cloud continues. The survey found 67 percent of respondents had seen at least some workloads that would have run internally in the past move to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here