Dell's drive into open networking accelerated on Monday with the announcement of the first switches to ship with OS10, the company's network operating system that's based on open source.At Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, the company introduced two data-center switches running OS10 Enterprise Edition, an enhanced version of the open-source OS that Dell announced early last year.The software is based on technologies from the Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project and is already available through an extended beta to customers who already have hardware. The Enterprise Edition is a complete software platform, including Dell's networking stack, but its open-source foundation means it can be extended with third-party software, said Jeff Baher, Dell EMC's executive director, networking.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
It’s best practice that every year we see our primary care doctor for a full physical exam. According to the CDC, regular health check-ups can help find problems before they start and improve the chances of treatment and recovery from illnesses. So, with just an annual exam, we should be in great shape, right? Most Americans, of all ages, are in poorer health when compared to their counterparts in comparable countries. So, where’s the disconnect, and what lessons can those of us in the technology industry take away?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you think you’re sick of the iPhone 8 rumors, pity Apple CEO Tim Cook, who acknowledged during a Q&A following the company’s earnings results announcement this past week that “earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones” did in fact “pause” purchases of current models.451 Research, issuing smartphone demand survey findings this week, concurred with Cook's assessment, noting that while Apple remains the preferred manufacturer among planned smartphone buyers surveyed, much fewer of them are planning purchases in the next 90 days as they anticipate iPhone 7s, iPhone 7s Plus and possibly a 10th-anniversary premium phone. 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
Advocates for strong net neutrality rules enforced by a powerful federal regulator may be on the ropes, but they are striking a defiant tone as they look to whip up grassroots opposition ahead of the effort to dismantle the FCC's open internet order.Later this month, the FCC is planning to hold a vote at its May 18 meeting that would begin consideration of an order reclassifying broadband service under communications law such that the commission would significantly limit its authority to police ISPs.The distinction in service classification is arcane, but in a practical sense the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to undo the legal underpinning of his predecessor's 2015 open internet order, which expanded the commission's oversight authority over the broadband sector, and established net neutrality rules that have been upheld in federal court.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
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
For the first time in history, U.S. households with landlines – such as mine -- are now in the minority, according to survey numbers from a federal government report released this morning.From that report issued by the National Center for Health Statistics:The second 6 months of 2016 was the first time that a majority of American homes had only wireless telephones. Preliminary results from the July–December 2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that 50.8% of American homes did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) —an increase of 2.5 percentage points since the second 6 months of 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon has begun warning customers that it’s getting out of the email game and that you need to act soon if you want to keep your Verizon.net email address.One alternative is to actually keep that Verizon.net address, but have Verizon acquisition AOL manage it for you. So your address would be [email protected] on the surface, but AOL underneath due to Verizon ending its email service. (See also: "How to keep your Verizon email account from being killed off")But if this whole situation might be prompting you to make a clean break from your carrier’s email system, here are a few free messaging services that you might want to consider, some more obvious than others. I’ve taken a fresh spin through each of the email systems to collect the latest info on them, figuring at least a good chunk of the 4.5 million email accounts controlled by Verizon will be moving elsewhere sooner than later.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco today said it would offer its virtual switch users technology to get around VMware’s recent elimination of support for third party virtual switches such as Cisco’s Nexus 1000V.VMware in March announced that going forward it would no longer support third party virtual switch (vSwitch) programs and that customers should just work with VMware’s vSphere products.+More on Network World: Cisco grabs-up SD-WAN player Viptela for $610M+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco, the acquisition machine, is at it again. It’s been about three months since the company plunked down $3.7 billion for AppDynamics, so I’m sure all that cash was burning a hole in Chuck Robbins pockets and making another acquisition seem long overdue. Well, speculation about who Cisco might buy next ended yesterday when the company announced its intent to acquire SD-WAN vendor Viptela for $610 million. The price tag seems fairly modest for a company that was valued at $875 million about a year ago. Even at the lower price, Viptela investors should be satisfied with the return, given the total investment in the company was about $110 million. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NetOps focuses on the philosophies, practices and tools in building and operating the network to deliver and respond quickly to application and user service needs. In my previous post, I described NetOps and why you should care. Ties from NetOps to agile software development and DevOps are essential, as these practices are now the source of many of the requests for network changes.The methods of NetOps can help you to create a network that is not only available with high levels of reliability, performance and security, but is also agile in configuration, capacity and operations. In short, NetOps enables the network to be both available and agile.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
A U.S. appeals court has denied a request by broadband trade groups to rehear its decision last June to uphold the Federal Communications Commission's controversial 2015 net neutrality rules.The court's decision on Monday is a hollow victory for net neutrality supporters. Just last Wednesday, new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to repeal the rules at the agency, without a court ordering him to do so.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net
But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An effective DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure is a critical component of system uptime, which is essential to the viability and continuity of web services. For complex websites, a third of page load time can be attributed to DNS lookups. Inadequate or improperly configured DNS can have a potentially catastrophic impact on a company’s online presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Perhaps new research that found more iPhone buyers opting for legacy models over the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus will give Apple a little nudge to make sure there's really incentive to buy the forthcoming iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) instead of going with the 7 or 7 Plus later this year.Not that Apple necessarily is going to take any cues from research outfits like Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, but anything to ensure that the next flagship iPhones aren't dull is worth at least pointing out...IPHONE 8 BATTERY LIFE
Battery life is far from a glamorous topic, but really, what's more important in terms of an iPhone upgrade for most users? As Apple Insider reports, citing the relentless KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could be planning to use a logic board format that will allow for more space in the iPhone 8 chassis, and that could mean room for a more powerful and longer lasting battery. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hundreds of thousands of internet gateway devices around the world, primarily residential cable modems, are vulnerable to hacking because of a serious weakness in their Simple Network Management Protocol implementation.SNMP is used for automated network device identification, monitoring and remote configuration. It is supported and enabled by default in many devices, including servers, printers, networking hubs, switches and routers.Independent researchers Ezequiel Fernandez and Bertin Bervis recently found a way to bypass SNMP authentication on 78 models of cable modems that ISPs from around the world have provided to their customers.Their internet scans revealed hundreds of thousands of devices whose configurations could be changed remotely through the SNMP weakness that they found and dubbed StringBleed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Everyone loves the latest and greatest technology. A new iPhone comes out, and people camp out at the stores to buy one. Microsoft releases a new version of Xbox, and they’re sold out for months.Sometimes, though, the newest thing doesn’t make sense because the incremental value of the innovation is limited. In technology, this doesn’t happen very often, but I believe there’s a current “latest and greatest” that provides limited value—and that’s the 2x2 Wave 2 access points (AP) that are now available from many of the mainstream Wi-Fi providers.Before I explain my opinion on this, it’s worth doing a quick refresh of Wave 1 versus Wave 2 because it’s important to understand the principals of Wave 2. Below are the benefits of 802.11ac Wave 2 versus Wave 1: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here