There’s a cloud option out there for almost every IT workload, but a survey from the Uptime Institute indicates that about two-thirds of enterprise computing is still done in company-owned data centers.The study, which polled more than 1,000 IT professionals and data center workers via email earlier this year, found that 65% of enterprise workloads were running in data centers owned or operated by those enterprises, and that that number is just about the same as it was in 2014.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office + Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here's howTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s an all-too-familiar story: Naïve but well-intentioned people get taken advantage of by an OEM that over-engineers and/or over-charges for equipment during a Request for Proposal (RFP).Remember the cautionary tale about the West Virginia officials accused of wasting $5 million of federal money on enterprise-class Cisco routers that weren’t needed? While that story is 4 years old now, the significance isn’t lost because it remains top of mind when IT staffers kibitz about how the RFP process can go wrong—awfully wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tomorrow's leadersImage by ThinkstockWith today’s push across the education landscape for more emphasis on STEM studies, it’s not surprising that top leaders and innovators in technology would be a draw as college commencement speakers. Here’s a roundup of some of the bigger names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In announcing its Q1 earnings yesterday Juniper company executives were delighted about the company’s returns on its cloud computing directions.In the results conference call Juniper CEO Rami Rahim said cloud computing sales grew 25% year-over-year and noted that four of the company’s top 10 accounts were cloud-related. Specifically, the cloud vertical earned $331.6 million in the first quarter, over $264.8 million a year ago.“As the industry evolves, cloud architectures are no longer the exclusive domain of the cloud providers. Customers across all verticals are developing strategies for moving to cloud service delivery models and this aligns with our strategy to power the cloud transformation,” Rahim said [Seeking Alpha has a full transcript of the call here]. “The cloud is a massive paradigm shift that is reshaping all industries, and I'm excited about the opportunity we have in front of us.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the recent past, I've had the opportunity to speak with representatives of Cobol-IT, Compuware, Heirloom Computing, TmaxSoft and a few others who have targeted enterprises still using mainframes.A few of them, such as Compuware, are focused on adding rapid application development and deployment (aka DevOps) to the mainframe, making the environment seem relevant today.+ Also on Network World: Why banks love mainframes + Most of the others, however, are focused on convincing enterprises that it is finally time for them to abandon the mainframe and move those workloads to industry-standard x86 systems running Windows or Linux or, perhaps, to midrange Unix systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the banking sector, the concept of “open” can seem contradictory. Banks traditionally have a “duty of care” to protect their assets rigorously, as required by regulators and customers. Yet today banks are faced with increasingly complex requirements.The blending of the financial and technology sectors has created a world in which banks protect our assets, but they are also asked to constantly innovate, create new customer channels or services, and maintain compliance across a changing regulatory landscape. To keep pace and remain competitive, banks must take another page from the technology world and embrace open architectures. + Also on Network World: Financial services firm adopts agile for digital development + APIs are a mainstay of today’s technology and start-up culture, and they are a primary mechanism for building open architectures and platforms. From Yahoo to Facebook, Google, Amazon and more, industry vanguards and emerging companies alike have allowed third parties to access and build upon their codes and platforms via APIs. While giving peers and, in some cases, competitors “access to the house” might seem counterintuitive, the results are remarkable—continuous, rapid innovation, continued product development, and an open ecosystem of knowledge sharing.To read this article in full Continue reading
It’s a great time to be in information technology.While that statement is true, not everyone clearly understands why (or perhaps has the fortitude to make it so). In the face of a massive movement to public cloud—by 2020, 92 percent of world’s workloads will be in cloud, with 68 percent in public and 32 percent in private—many in IT feel their value in the workplace eroding along with their identity.That feeling doesn’t need to be reality. Businesses are changing the way they operate and are transforming to leverage IT more strategically. IT has a real opportunity to lead this transformation, not let the transformation happen to them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Going greenImage by ThinkstockData center providers know all too well that it’s not easy being green. According to a 2016 report by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), data centers are responsible for close to 2 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Ensuring the integrity of these systems is a major challenge for data centers looking to create sustainable operations for their facilities and the companies who rely on them, but some simple steps can make all the difference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tencent Holdings has opened a data center in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, with four more planned outside China as part of its bid to grow its cloud business outside the country.The proposed data centers in Frankfurt, Mumbai, Seoul and Moscow are targeted at Chinese companies looking to expand overseas and international companies expanding their businesses in China or other parts of the world, the Chinese internet giant said Tuesday. The centers are expected to go into operation this year.Rival Alibaba has also set up data centers outside China to expand its cloud business outside the country.The new investment aims to meet growing demand worldwide for the company's cloud services from online games and finance, video and other internet-related industries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel doesn't make its own discrete GPU but has built something that specializes in processing 4K graphics. But that product isn't powerful enough to run Crysis, if you were wondering.The chipmaker showed off its Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week. It has the build of a GPU but is designed for server applications and not for PCs.The VCA 2 is aimed at cloud streaming 4K video, graphics, and virtual reality content. Servers with the graphics accelerator installed could be used to stream video or broadcast content.The VCA 2 uses the 4K-capable Iris Pro Graphics P580 graphics chip and three Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 processors. The P580 is also used in Intel's mini-PC called Skull Canyon, which is designed for gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s not at all uncommon for competitors to snipe at one another but it still makes for good reading and it provides an interesting look into a company’s strategy – and perhaps a signal to a competitor they are in for a fight.Today’s round comes from Juniper which has a piece of marketing out there that says: “In March 2017, Extreme Networks announced it will acquire Brocade's data center networking business. This acquisition has hindered Brocade/Extreme's ability to meet your long-term goals. They can no longer deliver networking solutions that will help you embark on your digital transformation journey. Juniper Networks can.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Why did VMware acquire Wavefront? The start of the answer to this question comes with an understanding of what Wavefront is (or was). Wavefront was started by former Google engineers who set out to build a monitoring system for the commercial market that had the same features and benefits as the monitoring system that Google had built for itself.Due to the massive scale of Google, such a system would have to have two key attributes: The ability to consume and process massive amounts of data very quickly. In fact, the Wavefront website make the claim, "Enterprise-grade cloud monitoring and analytics at over 1 million data points per second." The ability to quickly find what you want in this massive ocean of data So, it is clear that the folks at Wavefront viewed modern monitoring to be a big data problem, and it is clear that some people at VMware were willing to pay a fair amount of money for a monitoring system that took a real-time and highly scalable approach to monitoring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
MIT is selling half of its 16 million valuable IPv4 addresses – an increasingly scarce stash it has held since the birth of the Internet. While details of the sale have not been made public, at least some of those addresses have already been transferred to Amazon.MIT says it will use the proceeds of the sale to finance its own IPv6 network upgrades and “support activities focused on the future of the Internet and the global cyber-infrastructure.”From an announcement by Next Generation MITnet. Fourteen million of these IPv4 addresses have not been used, and we have concluded that at least eight million are excess and can be sold without impacting our current or future needs, up to the point when IPv6 becomes universal and address scarcity is no longer an issue. The Institute holds a block of 20 times 10^30 (20 nonillion) IPv6 addresses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple is building a new data center in Denmark, and it has some interesting ideas on how to power the data center with renewable energy, while also giving back to the community.Excess heat generated by the data center will be captured and returned to the local district's heating system, which will warm up homes in the community.The data center in the Jutland region will be partly powered by recycling waste products from farms. Apple is working with Aarhus University on a system that passes agricultural waste through a digester to generate methane, which is then used to power the data center.The digester reaction turns some of the waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer, which Apple returns to local farmers to use on their fields. It's a "mutually beneficial relationship," Apple said in its environment report for 2016, released this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Visibility and security controls for internet-based applications such as social media, file sharing and email have been widely adopted at the perimeter. As we transition from the legacy perimeter security model to a cloud security model, there is a need to ensure we don’t forget the principles we have established. Virtualization has changed how applications are built, deployed and used. It has also created challenges to how security is applied and deployed for these environments. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the result of these challenges has driven new innovation in the cloud security space.+ Also on Network World: The tricky, personal politics of cloud security + Discovering and mapping application communications and dependencies is one of the first steps in defining and creating security policies for east-west data center traffic. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of understanding about these relationships, making east-west security policies difficult to implement and often prone to misconfiguration. As a result, we still see an abundance of successful attacks and the loss of critical data, even with traditional perimeter security models in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The internet never forgets, which means data that should have been deleted doesn't always stay deleted. Call it "zombie data," and unless your organization has a complete understanding of how your cloud providers handle file deletion requests, it can come back to haunt you.Ever since the PC revolution, the concept of data deletion has been a bit misunderstood. After all, dragging a file to the Recycle Bin simply removed the pointer to the file, freeing up disk space to write new data. Until then, the original data remained on the disk, rediscoverable using readily accessible data recovery tools. Even when new data was written to that disk space, parts of the file often lingered, and the original file could be reconstructed from the fragments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Choosing the right database for the job can be a daunting task, particularly if you’re entertaining the full space of SQL and NoSQL options. If you’re looking for a flexible, general-purpose option that allows for fluid schemas and complex nested data structures, a document database might be right for you. MongoDB and Couchbase Server are two popular choices. How should you choose?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If you’re a storage admin, it might seem like there’s a new flash storage system being pitched at your inbox every week. Maybe a few times a week, in fact. Perhaps you’re also investigating the cloud, and whether your enterprise would want to go with a hybrid, private or public cloud implementation. Chances are you already have a lot of storage in your infrastructure from past purchases, and when you add it all up, you could be sitting on quite a diverse collection of resources—and those resources may be significantly underutilized today.The diversity of storage types presents many options, which creates a real challenge for admins—but only because all those different resources could not be seamlessly connected until now. With storage solutions that deliver ultra-fast performance, such as all-flash arrays, some that save with low cost, cloud capacity for cold (inactive) data, and numerous other shared storage resources, most enterprise IT teams have the right resources to serve a wide variety of different data demands. The challenge is knowing what data needs which resource, then continually aligning data to the right resource as its needs change over time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, Continue reading
NOTE: This story was originally published in September 2013 and updated in April 2017.Bringing IT in-house and setting up dedicated on-premises servers can be intimidating for a small business, especially given the recent focus on online services. Moreover, resources designed to help tend to assume a medium-sized or enterprise installation, which may not necessarily work well for setting up a small server room or even a closet for a branch office.With some understanding of the basics, though, setting up your own server room for your small business network need not be an arcane process. Here are some tips for getting started.Rack-mount equipment makes sense It's not uncommon for small businesses to begin operation by stacking server hardware and network appliances on a desk or shelf. Though such a deployment is inexpensive, the pile of equipment invariably expands into an unmanageable mess with the growth of the company. Exposed equipment is also completely open to physical tampering and is a ticking time bomb for accidents such as coffee spills, dust or even workers tripping over wires.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here