Archive

Category Archives for "Network World Data Center"

Cisco calls on Arista to stop selling products in US after agency reverses patent finding

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has revoked its November 2016 finding that Arista’s redesigned products don’t infringe a key Cisco patent -- as a result Cisco called on Arista to stop importing those products and recall others sold with redesigned software.The finding is the latest round in a high-stakes battle between Cisco and Arista over patents and copyrights that has been going on since 2014. In the summer of 2016 the US Trade Representative began an import ban as well as a cease and desist order covering Arista products imposed by the International Trade Commission in June where it ruled that Arista had infringed on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Infrastructure monitoring: Turn data into knowledge and minimize slowdowns

It’s 2 a.m., and a hospital’s system has slowed to a crawl. Lives are at stake. For the harried system admins looking for the source of the slowdown, time is of the essence.The hospital’s system has servers attached through a SAN to storage devices. But where’s the weak link? The administrator cannot afford to waste time analyzing server performance when the problem may be in a storage device or the SAN. He needs information that enables him to conduct his root cause analysis as quickly as possible.Perhaps you don’t have to worry about whether someone will live or die when your IT infrastructure fails. However, when it’s slow or down, it fails to deliver a satisfying user experience. Also, it’s likely that your company’s operations falter, costs increase, and your bottom line suffers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rated insecurity: Faux Cat 6 cable sold on Amazon

Many of you are on Wi-Fi, but this is salient to you. Amazon’s enormous sales site is marketing Cat 5 and Cat 6 Ethernet cable with aluminum conductors, as well as “plenum-rated” cable that bears no UL markings and is likely fraudulent. This comes after a run of apparently bogus Apple chargers and cables. Why do you care? Several reasons:  Some of the Ethernet cable sold uses either copper-coated or copper-mixed aluminum. Numerous specs call for the conductors to be solid copper. Why? Copper meets conductivity specs and won’t heat up under load. Organizations using Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) to power remote Wi-Fi access points (quite common these days) risk having the cable catch fire due to overheating, or just melt and short—especially on long cable runs. Plenum-rated cables are self-extinguishing. This means if you put a nail through one (we hope accidentally), then a jacket surrounding the cable prevents setting something in the surrounding area on fire. If you add the two factors together, cable that heats up and jackets that don’t extinguish a possible flame, then the sprinklers turn on. We hope.  Whilst perusing the listings, I came across numerous enticing examples. Why enticing? Because their cost Continue reading

‘Found a nasty bug in my (Cisco) ASA this morning’

The above headline on a post to Reddit piqued my interest this afternoon because it was in that site’s section devoted to system administration and those people know a bug when they encounter one.The Redditor elaborates: “I found a bug in my ASA today. Eth 0/2 was totally unusable and seemed ‘blocked.’ These Cisco bugs are really getting out of hand. I'm just glad I didn't open this port up to the web.”Scare quotes around blocked? Gratuitous mention of the web. I smelled a ruse before even opening the first of three pictures.No. 1, labeled “checking layer 1:”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What does the future hold for the IT services industry?

It would probably be an understatement to say the IT services industry is spooked by the recent financial results reported by major IT services providers. Both the top and the bottom lines have been under pressure. The medium-term future, and even the shorter term, have become unpredictable. Results are inconsistent, and companies have softened their guidance on future growth rates.At the same time, tech spend around the world is increasing. At the NASSCOM Product Conclave in Bangalore a couple of months ago, I was struck by the buoyancy of the start-up market. India alone is home to more than 5,000 start-ups, and this number is slated to more than double by 2020. There is no doubt the tech love affair will continue to heat up as new innovations continue to spring from both unlikely garages and sophisticated computer labs alike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This year’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

This is the eleventh year I’ve compiled this particular collection of trivia, which will come in handy someday if I’m ever on Jeopardy and the category is 1980s/1990s technology and related stuff.  A big year for such stuff, 1992 saw the release of Linux under GNU, the sending of the first SMS message, IBM trotting out the ThinkPad and Simon, which was the first mobile phone to include PDA features (smartphone). The year also saw the launch of iconic videogame franchises Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. And, perhaps worst of all, Microsoft unleashed upon the world the scourge that is PowerPoint. Here’s the full list:IBM debuts ThinkPad Raymangold Known for its minimalist design, the ThinkPad laptop was launched by IBM in 1992 and became a  workplace staple for Big Blue before it sold the line to Lenovo in 2005. For years the ThinkPad was the only laptop allowed aboard the International Space Station and there are reportedly some still in use up there. I am typing on a practically new Earth-bound model right now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM scores most patents in 2016, Apple just misses top 10

The five companies that earned the most U.S. patents last year are the same five companies that dominated the 2015 ranking of top patent recipients: IBM, Samsung, Canon, Qualcomm and Google. IBM earned the No. 1 slot for the 24th consecutive year with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in 2016. Samsung, again ranked second, earned 5,518 patents, and Canon came away with 3,665. Rounding out the Top 5 just as they did in 2015 are Qualcomm with 2,897 patents and Google with 2,835 patents. Overall, 2016 saw 304,126 utility patent grants, which is the most on record in a single year, according to data compiled by IFI CLAIMS Patent Services.  IFI, which specializes in patent analysis, tracks utility patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and each year it releases its annual ranking of the top 50 recipients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2017’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

Early 90s notablesImage by Nintendo, Pan Books, Michael Hughes, Paramount PicturesA big year for technology – and technology-related events – 1992 saw the release of Linux under GNU, the sending of the first SMS message, IBM trotting out the ThinkPad and Simon, which was the first mobile phone to include PDA features (smartphone). The year also saw the launch of iconic videogame franchises Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. And, perhaps worst of all, Microsoft unleashed upon the world the scourge that is PowerPoint. For previous versions of this series, please see: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, HPE led $88B enterprise infrastructure market in ’16, Synergy says

Despite more and more companies outsourcing workloads to the public cloud, legacy technology stalwarts Cisco and HPE remain the most popular enterprise infrastructure vendors, new estimates from Synergy Research suggest. Synergy tracked enterprise infrastructure spending across seven categories for the 12 months leading up to the end of Q3 2016: Data center servers; switches & routers; network security; voice systems, WLAN; UC Apps and telepresence. In aggregate it estimates revenues were $88 billion across these segments, with spending down about 1% from the same time period in 2015. +MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This company is transferring 50 Petabytes of data to Amazon's cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Compuware Total Test brings unit testing to mainframe Cobol development

Compuware, a supplier known for its focus on making mainframes a home for today's applications, not a hospice, recently announced an enhancement to its Total Test agile development tool. The goal is to provide DevOps tools to the mainframe world.Compuware Total Test Here's what Compuware has to say about Total Test: The world’s largest enterprises run their business on Cobol—but can’t nimbly update that code in response to changing business needs due to quality concerns, antiquated processes and loss of application expertise. Compuware is addressing this critical issue with the first fully automated mainframe unit testing solution that empowers in-house, outsourced, expert and novice developers alike to immediately validate code changes. This Java-like unit testing effectively eliminates the notion of Cobol as “legacy” code that can’t be updated with the same speed and confidence as other code—providing large enterprises with unprecedented agility. The release of Topaz for Total Test underscores Compuware’s leadership of a mainframe renaissance encompassing agile, DevOps, continuous delivery and the generational shift in platform stewardship. As a result of this innovation, enterprise IT organizations can now ease and accelerate the entire mainframe application lifecycle. Features include:To read this article in full or to leave Continue reading

Don’t play games with your data center: Shift from Intel CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs

Central processing units (CPUs) from vendors such as Intel and to a lesser extent AMD have been staples in the data center for decades. Both companies have done an outstanding job making CPUs faster and containing more cores so businesses can run computationally intensive processes on them. However, digital technologies such as deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are driving the need for a new model of computing beyond the capabilities of CPUs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Important features of PowerShell

I think it's time to talk in depth about some of the most important features of PowerShell: Providers and modules. (Snap-ins have also been important, but they are being gradually phased out.) These are really the core of the universe when it comes to all of the commands available for use within PowerShell, so I want to teach you what they are, how they work and how to use them in your daily activities. Let's dive in!Introducing modules and snap-insTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IDG Contributor Network: How mainframes prevent data breaches

2016 was a strange year marked by everything from election surprises to a seemingly endless spate of celebrity deaths. But when historians look back at this mirum anno—weird year—it may end up being known as the year of the data breach. Of course, this sort of thing isn’t restricted to 2016, but its impact on the world was hard to ignore. Among government organizations, the IRS and FBI suffered data breaches, and corporate victims included LinkedIn, Target, Verizon and Yahoo. Literally millions of people had their private information exposed to black hats, thieves and other ne’er-do-wells of the digital world. This epidemic of data theft calls upon security experts to get serious about creating new solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why monitoring needs to be reinvented

Why do we monitor things (user experience, transactions, applications, virtual servers, physical servers, datastores, etc.)? Because we want them to work well all of the time.Does everything in your environment work well as you expect it to all of the time?Well, of course not. What if we reinvent monitoring so that we can help make that happen?Consider the following analogy: An airplane can fly itself from its origination to its destination and land itself without human intervention. If we flew commercial airliners the way we run enterprise IT, planes would be dropping out of the sky left and right—and only be 30 percent full (maybe this would be a good thing).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016

A significantly zany yearImage by Reuters/ Thomas PeterAs we close out the year and look at some of the, shall we say more interesting, stories of the year we find quite a tech collection. Everything from NASA’s poop challenge and the most significant advances in Ethernet’s illustrious history to the rise of robot doctor overlords. Take a look at 30 of the year's weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

On being a 24/7 organization and the 2016 leap second

If the cloud is real, software important, and system reliability paramount, then non-stop computing, computing across time zones, and invisibly short repair times ought to be mandatory, wouldn’t you think? Of many requirements lain in litigation, regulatory compliance, and other “best practices,” there is one that doesn’t seem to make the checklists. Let me lay it out for you: Can you get support 24/7/365.25?You get bonus points for knowing leap seconds are coming. Why? Because among other things, Kerberos time synchronization mandates pretty accurate timing. We’re about to insert a leap second into your life on western New Year’s Day. You may have zones that celebrate other years, but to be in sync with the time standards in the United States, there will be an extra second. The earth is slowing down. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The new rulers of the cybersecurity realm: Automation, Analytics Artificial Intelligence

It may be a brave new world in 2017 but it’s also a darn scary one for IT security professionals.READ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 5 enterprise technologies that will shake things up in 2017+Just take a look at some recent Gartner assessments of the security situation: By 2020, 60% of digital businesses will suffer major service failures, due to the inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk. By 2020, 60% of enterprise information security budgets will be allocated for rapid detection and response approaches, which is an increase from less than 30% in 2016. By 2018, 25% of corporate data traffic will flow directly from mobile devices to the cloud, bypassing enterprise security controls. Through 2018, over 50% of IoT device manufacturers will not be able to address threats from weak authentication practices. So what technologies are going to change this scenario back in favor of IT? The new security AAA: Automation, analytics and artificial intelligence say proponents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 12.19.16

New products of the weekImage by Cybereason.Our roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Cloud Foundry Training PlatformImage by altorosTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

1 … 96 97 98 99 100 … 172