When Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, the idea behind the company was simple – promote the use of Ubuntu Linux as a desktop operating system. Fourteen years later, things have gotten a lot more complicated, as the prominent open source software vendor eyes the IoT market.Canonical’s still flying the flag for desktop Linux, but the company’s real business is in the cloud – it claims that Ubuntu accounts for about 60% of all Linux instances in the major public clouds – and it’s hoping to make its mark in the next-buzziest part of the technology sector, the Internet of Things.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Nvidia gets broad support for cutting-edge Volta GPUs in the data center + A lack of cloud skills could cost companies moneyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s no surprise that many network engineers are also fans of Star Trek. Personally, I have been a Trekkie for as long as I can remember. One of the appealing things about Star Trek is that it pushed the limits of what’s possible. In fact, many technologies we take for granted today were previewed on Star Trek over 50 years ago. Things such as wireless communications, immersive videoconferencing and tablet computers were all used regularly on the Starship Enterprise long before we used them down on Earth.+ Also on Network World: Star Trek medical tricorder closer to becoming reality + This week, the next wave of Star Trek kicked off with “Discovery” airing on CBS. As the dawn of this new era begins, I thought it would be fun to look back at the top seven quotes from Star Trek’s most logical person, Spock, which network managers should embrace. Incidentally, I chose seven because of the Galileo 7 episode, which was Spock’s first command.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Allow me to wax poetic about software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN):Ode to an SD-WAN I love your complexityAnd lack of deterministic behaviorI need your connectivityBut not new network layersOnly I can comprehendYour brittleness and insecurityAnd in the bitter endLike ATM fade in obscurityWhile SD-WANs are a hot topic currently, in reality, I believe that WANs will ultimately wane and give way to “wide area inter-networks." SD-WANs are already multi-network use cases (e.g. connecting branch networks to the corporate network). Right now, they are simple overlays, but over time, performance and functionality demands will require them to interact with the underlay network (and other layers). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How should open computing standards, such as the protocols and languages that make up much of the core of the internet, be decided on and handled? It’s not an easy question to answer. But the answer has vast and potentially severe ramifications for almost every company on the planet (at least if you rely on your website for doing any percentage of your business). A recent kerfuffle with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization responsible for standardizing much of the web that most people use on a daily basis, has caused many to ask for the shut-down of the W3C and the creation of a new standards body. But is that actually a good idea?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The 2nd generation Echo costs just $99, and has a 2.5” downward-firing woofer and 0.6” tweeter powered by Dolby to deliver crisp vocals and dynamic bass throughout the room. You can play music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and more. With Amazon Music, you can search by lyrics, time-period, or let Alexa pick the music for you. You can also listen to audiobooks from Audible, podcasts, radio stations or news briefs. Make calls, set alarms and timers, ask questions, check your calendar, weather, traffic, and sports scores, manage to-do and shopping lists, control smart home devices, and more. Multiple Echo devices around your house work together -- ask Alexa to play your favorite music on all Echo's, or different styles in different rooms. The new Echo won't ship until October 31, but if you order now and select 2-day shipping, you'll have it on your doorstep the day it's released. See it on Amazon here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can’t escape the IoT momentum these days. The Internet of Things is being used for everything from saving the rhino from poaching to leveraging stray dogs to fight crime. (No, really, I’m not kidding… check the links!) But even as vendors spend billions to try and grab IoT market share, it’s not always clear exactly how their business customers are supposed to actually benefit from IoT. (The challenges can be equally hard to understand). According to a thoughtful new report from Forrester, the answer lies in three fundamental business scenarios:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Competition in the 21st Century economy is fierce. Consumers are more tech-savvy than ever, as we all carry around more computing power in our pockets than Neil Armstrong took to the moon—and potential customers pay attention to differentiated experiences. Increasingly for all businesses, investing in agile software development is a way to achieve that differentiation.In other words, in the 21st Century, every business is a software business.All that software that’s enabling this transformation toward digital experiences has to run somewhere, and it turns out a hybrid cloud strategy gives businesses maximum choice when it comes to what runs where.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data center workloads for AI, graphics rendering, high-performance computing and business intelligence are getting a boost as a Who's Who of the world's biggest server makers and cloud providers snap up Nvidia's Volta-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators.Nvidia is rallying its entire ecosystem, including software makers, around the new Tesla V100s, effectively consolidating its dominance in GPUs for data centers.IBM, HPE, Dell EMC and Supermicro announced at the Strata Data Conference in New York Wednesday that they are or will be using the GPUs, which are now shipping. Earlier this week at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in Beijing, Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur said they would be using Nvidia's HGX reference architecture to offer Volta architecture-based systems for hyperscale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rapid technological development not only fuels business innovation, but also disrupts traditional business models. In order to keep pace with the latest technology trends, businesses must employ the right professionals who combine technology expertise with business acumen. Unfortunately, corporations often lack this kind of talent to help make the right technology decisions and avoid costly and potentially disastrous mistakes. According to the Global Knowledge 2017 IT Skills and Salary Report, there are significant skills shortages in key ICT sectors, such as, security and cloud computing. These findings highlight the difficulties that recruiters face in times where the demand for ICT talent far exceeds the supply. Scouting, recruiting and retaining talent in such a competitive environment is a challenge; however, the criticality of it calls for a contingency plan to build a pipeline of professionals that can boost the future of businesses and the economy in the digital age.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Edge computing and fog networks must be programmed to kick in when the internet fails during disasters, a scientific research team says. That way, emergency managers can draw on impacted civilians’ location data, social networking images and tweets and use them to gain situational awareness of scenes.Routers, mobile phones and other devices should continue to collect social sensor data during these events, but instead of first attempting to send it through to traditional cloud-based depositories operated by the social network — which are unavailable due to the outage — the geo-distributed devices should divert the data to local edge computing, fog nodes and other hardened resources. Emergency officials can then access it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
4G LTE Internet is an under-utilized asset for your company’s network… and your sanity.As someone who’s owned a business telecom, Internet, and cloud brokerage for 14 years [shameless plug], I’ve had my share of drama surrounding circuits taking too long to install. Whether it’s fiber taking a year to get built-out, or a T1 taking 6 weeks to install (when our customer’s business was relocating in 4), being at the mercy of an ISP’s unexplainable, bureaucratic timeline has been the most stressful part of my job.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s safe to say the Internet of Things (IoT) era has arrived, as we live in a world where things are being connected at pace never seen before. Cars, video cameras, parking meters, building facilities and anything else one can think of are being connected to the internet, generating massive quantities of data.The question is how does one interpret the data and understand what it means? Clearly trying to process this much data manually doesn’t work, which is why most of the web-scale companies have embraced artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to create new services that can leverage the data. This includes speech recognition, natural language processing, real-time translation, predictive services and contextual recommendations. Every major cloud provider and many large enterprises have AI initiatives underway.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nextcloud today released a preview of Nextcloud 13, its online file storage solution for enterprise and individual users.What makes this release so interesting? End-to-end file encryption.When we’re talking about the needs of big businesses, keeping files secure is absolutely critical. There has been no shortage of data breaches and hacks in recent months – reliable encryption and security is absolutely vital to reducing those problems. + Also on Network World: 4 ways to simplify data management + From Jos Poortvliet, member of the Nextcloud, team:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The coming year looks promising for IT pros on the hunt for new positions. Employers are forging ahead with hiring plans, and it remains a job-seeker’s market. IT salaries are set to increase in 2018, particularly for talent that possesses hard-to-find skills.In the networking arena, certain skills will be especially lucrative – Cisco network administration, Linux/UNIX administration, VoIP administration, and Windows, according to Robert Half Technology.Job candidates with these four in-demand talents may see an additional 5% to 10% bump in starting salary, according to the recruiting and staffing specialist’s 2018 Salary Guide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A poll from Europe finds two in three IT decision makers say their organization is losing out on revenue because their firm lacks specific cloud expertise.The report, compiled by cloud hosting provider Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found nearly three quarters of IT decision makers (71 percent) believed their organizations have lost revenue due to a lack of cloud expertise. On average, this accounts for 5 percent of total global revenue, no small amount of money. + Also on Network World: 10 most in-demand tech skills + Also, the survey found 65 percent believed they could bring greater innovation to their company with “the right cloud insight.” And 85 percent said greater expertise within their organization would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Almost all enterprise-class organizations are sitting atop a pile of existing network infrastructure, dealing with the headaches of a complex hardware lifecycle. Many would like to find a smooth path to a virtual networking future in which hardware is no longer a barrier to change, but instead a gateway to flexible network options. Ask enterprise IT decision makers these days to select from a menu of connectivity options and odds are the top choice will be an “All of the above” response. They want bandwidth on demand, a manageable number of connectivity options to suit a distributed workforce, scalability, and the lowest cost. That networking nirvana may not be as far in the future as you once thought.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For years Microsoft has talked about, previewed and at some times delayed the release of its Azure Stack hybrid cloud computing platform.But this week at its Ignite conference in Orlando Microsoft announced that Azure Stack is now shipping to customers, and in doing so the company is pitching its hybrid cloud platform as being about more than just connecting customer data centers to the public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Azure Stack: Microsoft’s private-cloud platform and what IT pros need to know about it +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT) differentiate it from industrial automation. IoT devices are inexpensive. IoT devices can be ubiquitously connected everyplace and anyplace. IoT devices have inexpensive or zero-cost deployment. It explains why we see so few IoT networks and why most of the industrial IoT forecasts are measurements of industrial automation that we have had for decades.The first one, with the exception of the issue of strong security, is easy. The second two, though, in New Jersey parlance — says easy does hard.Ubiquitous connectivity is talked about, and there is a glimmer of hope presented by Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Senet that focus on both low-cost technology and a business model for entrepreneurial partners to deploy networks. But waiting for carriers to perfect and deploy 5G networks to build IoT solutions will delay innovators and prevent early adopters from building proof-of-concept and prototype networks essential for the iterative learning of technical methods, business cases and making financial projections of the benefits of IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The /proc file system first made its way into some Unix operating systems (such as Solaris) in the mid-1990s, promising to give users more and easier access into the kernel and to running processes. It was a very welcome enhancement — looking and acting like a regular file system, but delivering hooks into the kernel and the ability to treat processes as files. It went well beyond what we could do with ps and other common commands for examining processes and the system they run on.When it first appeared, /proc took a lot of us by surprise. We were used to devices as files, but access to processes as files was new and exciting. In the years since, /proc has become more of a go-to source for process information, but it retains an element of mystery because of the incredible detail that it provides.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Everything about the modern doctor’s office feels primitive. It’s one of the few businesses that requires I use my telephone for scheduling — unless it’s about lab results. For that, they prefer fax. Even the doctor’s tools, such as the blood pressure cuff, scale and stethoscope, are largely the same as the equipment used in my childhood.I get that the industry needs to be cautious regarding change and that legal requirements further complicate matters, but changes are overdue. Because medical professionals are unlikely to adopt unproven tech, the evolution will most likely come from existing tech being used in other applications.Let’s take a look at how things might change in healthcare technology:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here