Telepresence has become a very intelligent business strategy, especially for companies that are spread across multiple sites or those with clients in many locations that they need to deal with on a fairly regular basis. Using what is in essence a fairly simple robot, anyone can transport himself to another location, move around through offices and interact face-to-face with people they might not otherwise ever meet. Granted they’re going to look something like large iPads held up by a couple metal rods riding on top of self-propelled vacuum cleaners, the experience is still surprisingly effective.I’ve recently had a chance to transport myself using one of the Beam presence systems built by Suitable Technologies. I sat in my office in the mountains in Virginia while being transported to an office suite in Palo Alto, California and interacted with two members of the staff. I had previously spoken with one of the same company’s customers at yet another location to get a feel for how they were using their Beams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Telepresence has become a very intelligent business strategy, especially for companies that are spread across multiple sites or for those that have clients in many locations that they need to deal with on a fairly regular basis. Using what is in essence a fairly simple robot, anyone can transport himself to another location, move around through offices and interact face to face with people they might not otherwise ever meet. Granted they’re going to look something like large iPads held up by a couple metal rods riding on top of self-propelled vacuum cleaners, but the experience is still surprisingly effective.I recently had a chance to transport myself using one of the Beam presence systems built by Suitable Technologies. I sat in my office in the mountains in Virginia while being transported to an office suite in Palo Alto, California, and interacted with two members of the staff. I had previously spoken with one of the same company’s customers at yet another location to get a feel for how they were using their Beams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developing an IoT security competency and implementing an IoT risk assessment program should be an important strategic focus for any company implementing an IoT strategy.A great race is underway among companies in the industrial sectors to be leaders in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm. Companies are off and running in their plans to execute IoT strategies, and many are already connecting all manner of “things” to gather and analyze data about product usage and performance, factory output, maintenance issues, etc.The proof is in the spending. A June 2017 report by research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) said spending on IoT in 2017 was expected to grow 17% compared with the previous year, reaching more than $800 billion. By 2021, IDC said, global IoT spending is expected to reach about $1.4 trillion, including hardware, software, services, and connectivity that enable IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Garmin's vivosmart is the touchscreen activity tracker with wrist-based heart rate and a full suite of smart notifications. The sleek band is comfortable to wear all day, and the always-on display shows your stats, even in sunlight. With a built-in heart rate sensor and altimeter, it tracks and displays steps, distance, calories, heart rate, floors climbed and activity intensity. Receive text, call, email, calendar and other alerts on your wrist when paired with your phone. The full featured activity tracker averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 2,600 reviewers, and is discounted right now down to just $79.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Does IoT stand for “internet of threats”? One senator says it might soon, and warned that the internet of things could “pose a direct threat to economic prosperity, privacy and our nation’s security.”Indeed, security issues plaguing IoT devices have long been a concern, and last week congressional Democrats introduced a bill designed to help mitigate what are seen as widespread vulnerabilities. But while the effort is noble and may help raise awareness of the issues, there are lots of reasons why the Cyber Shield Act of 2017 won’t end up doing much to actually solve the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s zombie season again! Not only was The Walking Dead back with new episodes this month, but neighborhoods around the country are about to be crawling with zombies (most can be staved off with a little chocolate).In business, unfortunately, zombie season has been in full swing for some time. This is an era of digital disruption, and it’s completely changed the way business is done, but not everyone has gotten on board. Companies are persisting with outdated business models, investing in outdated products, and committed to outdated delivery methods. To me, these companies are zombies, dead without knowing it. They may be moving forward, but don’t let the motion fool you, they’re only moving toward obsolescence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my last column, I wrote about how the standard computing platform is being reimagined by reconfigurable computing and how hyper-scale cloud companies are leading the way with the use of SmartNICs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Now, let’s look at why FPGAs are so powerful in this context, the major challenge of working with FPGAs, and how vendors and companies are addressing the challenge.Why FPGAs?
What is it about FPGAs that makes them so different and yet so powerful compared to CPUs? One of the main reasons is that they are completely reconfigurable. Unlike ASICs, such as CPUs, the logic in the FPGA is not static but can be rearranged to support whatever workload you want to support. With an ASIC, you need to commit to a certain feature set up front, as this cannot be changed once the chip is produced. With an FPGA, you need to commit to the capabilities that the FPGA will provide with respect to available logic gates and Look-Up Tables (or LUTs), which are the tables that define how logic gates are combined to support a given function. But, what the FPGA does is entirely up to the FPGA solution developer Continue reading
Extreme Networks today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Brocade’s data center switching, routing and analytics business, completing one of the most remarkable and unlikely turnaround stories in tech history.In the technology industry, rising from the ashes is very rare. Once a vendor, no matter how big, starts to slide, it generally has a bad outcome. Consider all the giants in networking alone that went from 800-pound gorillas to a puff of smoke seemingly overnight. Names including Lucent, Nortel, 3Com, Cabletron, Marconi and Fore Systems, once seemingly mighty powers that could never be toppled, are now all gone. Some vendors have avoided that fate by going private to revamp the company without the pressure of meeting Wall Street expectations every quarter. Recent examples of this are Polycom, Riverbed, Dell and Solar Winds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s an often-impenetrable alphabet soup of protocols, standards and technologies around the Internet of Things. Here’s our attempt to wipe away some of the fog, in the hopes of making the language of IoT just a little bit clearer.6LoWPAN – Possibly the most tortured acronym of even this distinguished group, 6LoWPAN is “IPv6 over low-power personal area networks.” Sheesh. The idea is to placate people that say it’s not really the “Internet” of Things without Internet protocol, so it’s essentially the IPv6 version of Zigbee and Z-wave.AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) – AMQP is an open source standard that allows disparate applications to talk to each other across any network and from any device. AMQP is a part of numerous commercial middleware integration offerings, including Microsoft’s Windows Azure Service Bus, VMware’s RabbitMQ, and IBM’s MQlight. It was initially developed by the financial sector for fast M2M communication, but has begun to be used in IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An overview of events
The essence of IT Operations Management for the last 30 years (ever since the advent of distributed systems in the mid 1980’s) has been to understand what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” and to then alert on the anomalies. Events are anomalies.Now events come from an incredible variety of sources. Every element of the entire stack (disks, storage arrays, network devices, servers, load balancers, firewalls, systems software, middleware and services and applications) are capable of sending events.Events tend to come in two broad forms. Hard faults and alarms related to failures in the environment (this disk drive has failed, this port on this switch has failed, this database server is down), and alerts that come from violations of thresholds set by humans on various monitoring systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
InnoGear's 24 LED solar light can automatically light up your home, yard, garage, driveway, patio, deck, or any other area that gets sun during the day. The motion sensor will be triggered when someone or something enters its 16 feet range with a 90 degree angle, for an increased sense of security around your home. These lights are waterproof and made of a durable ABS material. Right now a pack of 4 lights is discounted 53% down to just $27.99. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the public cloud continues to grow at the expense of on-premises data centers, not everything that moves to the cloud stays there. Some data comes back, for a variety of reasons. And while apps are moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, data is not.That’s the findings of a recent report by 451 Research commissioned by Schneider Electric, entitled “Customer Insight: Future-Proofing Your Colocation Business.” It finds, for example, that global operational square footage hosting cloud infrastructure will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2020, while the amount of on-premises enterprise data center capacity will drop four percentage points, from 77 to 73 percent in the same time period.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Halloween so fast approaching, it’s time for a little focus on the spookier side of Linux. What commands might bring up images of ghosts, witches and zombies? Which might encourage the spirit of trick or treat?crypt
Well, we’ve always got crypt. Despite its name, crypt is not an underground vault or a burial pit for trashed files, but a command that encrypts file content. These days “crypt” is generally implemented as a script that emulates the older crypt command by calling a binary called mcrypt to do its work. Using the mycrypt command directly is an even better option.
$ mcrypt x
Enter the passphrase (maximum of 512 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Enter passphrase:
Enter passphrase:
File x was encrypted.
Note that the mcrypt command creates a second file with an added ".nc" extension. It doesn't overwrite the file you are encrypting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Few industries are as impacted by consumer demand as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of sectors reliant on in; when consumers demand a new gadget or a new service, an innovative startup springs up seemingly overnight to meet those demands. Similarly, few consumer goods are as customizable or responsive to changing user preferences as the gadgets and software that make up the commercial IoT. So how can savvy IoT enthusiast rely on consumer demand to better the IoT businesses?One can’t find success in the field of IT or within the IoT in general without understanding how crucial consumer demand is to the industry as a whole. More than anything else, this demand is driving the extraordinarily rapid development of the IoT, which could reach a dizzying 50 billion connections by 2020, according to Brookings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With all the hype it’s getting, you might think the Internet of Things (IoT) simply couldn’t gain any more momentum. Well, think again, because new market research and a wave of global IoT investments from sovereign nations and top-name companies keeps on accelerating the IoT momentum.Growth, growth and more growth
First off, IHS Markit has published a new ebook in which it predicts serious growth for IoT: “The number of connected IoT devices worldwide will jump 12 percent on average annually, from nearly 27 billion in 2017 to 125 billion in 2030.”According to the ebook, titled “The Internet of Things: a movement, not a market,” (pdf) that growth “is impacting virtually all stages of industry and nearly all market areas — from raw materials to production to distribution and even the consumption of final goods.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Storage has long been one of the biggest line items on the IT budget. Rightly so, given that data is valuable asset and the lifeblood of every business today. Critical applications consume data as quickly as they get it, and many companies are also using their data to find new insights that help them develop novel products and strategies.Regardless of how hot a file is when it is created, in time, its use cools. As a business matures, more and more cool, cold and even frigid data continues to pile up. With analytics now offering new insights on old data, however, no one wants to delete old files or send them to offline archival storage. This means buying more and more capacity is a given, just as death and taxes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
All-flash storage has become increasingly popular in data centers as a means of much faster data access than traditional hard disk, but its growth has been impeded by cost and storage density. There was too much of the former and too little of the latter.Every memory, storage and server vendor is working full out to address that issue, and it has turned into quite an arms race, which benefits the customer. So much so that Gartner predicts that within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays will improve in performance by a factor of 10 while doubling in density and cost-effectiveness.Also on Network World: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises?
IBM has just made its contribution to that growth. It has announced advances in flash storage that it claims will provide a three-fold increase in density in the same physical space for its FlashSystem 900 flash arrays, while reducing data capacity costs by 60 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way
The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember when Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was all the rage? That’s the concept of workers being able to bring their own mobile phones and tablets into the workplace and use them for business-related functions. That quickly evolved into bring your own applications, where workers or lines of business would go get their own apps via the cloud.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools
So, what else can non-technical people go get on their own? How about a network? That may seem a bit farfetched, as I’ve never seen an application developer bring a router into the office. But that’s exactly what Tempered Networks is enabling with the introduction of Bring Your Own Network (BYON). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stream audio from your Bluetooth device to any non-Bluetooth enabled receiver, speaker, or car stereo with this adapter from Etekcity, which is currently discounted 62% down to just $18.88. Simply connect the receiver to your speaker system via a traditional RCA or 3.5mm aux audio input, and pair with your Bluetooth device. Its compact design makes it super portable, and its long lasting battery provides up to 10 hours of streaming before needing a re-charge. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here