Fire is to blame for a small but significant number of data-center outages including a March 28 fire that caused severe damage to a data center in France, and an analysis of global incidents highlights ongoing concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries and their risk of combustion.The use of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries in data centers is growing. Now commonly used in uninterruptible power supplies, they are expected to account for 38.5% of the data-center battery market by 2025, up from 15% in 2020, according to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.To read this article in full, please click here
Kyndryl, the managed IT services provider that spun out of IBM, has announced layoffs that could affect its own internal IT services.“We are eliminating some roles globally — a small percentage — to become more efficient and competitive,” said a Kyndryl spokesperson, without giving the exact number of employees affected due to the layoffs.“These actions will enable us to focus our investments in areas that directly benefit our customers and position Kyndryl for profitable growth,” the spokesperson said, adding that the company was in the process of undergoing transformation to streamline and simplify its processes and systems.Bloomberg first reported about the layoffs.To read this article in full, please click here
With data center servers running hotter and hotter, the interest in liquid cooling is ramping up with vendors announcing servers that feature self-contained systems and businesses with expertise in related technologies jumping in.Liquid cooling is more efficient than traditional air cooling, and Supermicro is using it to cool the hottest processors in a new server designed as a platform to develop and run AI software.The SYS-751GE-TNRT-NV1 server runs hot. It features four NVIDIA A100 GPUs that draw 300W each and are liquid-cooled by a self-contained system.Some liquid cooling systems rely on water that is piped into the data center. The self-contained system doesn’t require that, so it makes the servers more widely deployable.The system is quiet, too; its running noise level is 30dB.To read this article in full, please click here
By: Michael Tennefoss, VP of IoT and Strategic Partnerships, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.Moving IoT workloads to the cloud, and securely exchanging data between cloud IoT services and both legacy and new IoT devices, can entail months of custom engineering. Most IoT vendors send sensor and actuator data in non-interoperable or proprietary formats that must be reformatted to make them usable by cloud applications. Additionally, legacy IoT devices lack modern cybersecurity mechanisms and cloud-compatible software stacks. Replacing legacy devices with new ones is cost prohibitive, while the engineering work to make IoT data payloads usable can be significant. And these expenses may be recurring, e.g., when new IoT devices from different vendors are added over time, post-acquisition of a new company, or following a site refresh.To read this article in full, please click here
A trend to extend the lifespan of servers beyond the typical three- to five-year range has companies such as Microsoft looking to add a few years of use to hardware that would otherwise be retired.The latest company to adopt this strategy is Paris-based Scaleway, a European cloud services provider that's sharing details about how it plans to get a decade of use out of its servers through a mix of reuse and repair.Scaleway decided the carbon footprint of new servers is just too large – server manufacturing alone accounts for 15% to 30% of each machine’s carbon impact. Reusing existing machines, rather than buying new ones, could significantly reduce e-waste.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise networking and application security company F5 is rolling out two new features to help businesses simplify different management tasks for today’s complex, multicloud environments.The core problem with multicloud is heightened complexity and its associated costs in management headaches and security weaknesses. Distributed deployments, the company said in its announcement of the new capabilities this week, decrease visibility into the workings of complex systems, making it easier for security holes to go unnoticed.F5’s new Distributed Cloud App Connect and Distributed Cloud Network are aimed squarely at addressing those problems via APIs designed to knit various applications and services together in a single-pane-of-glass management console.To read this article in full, please click here
As commercial availability of quantum computers moves closer to reality, researchers and vendors are investing in efforts to create quantum-secured networks.Quantum networks use entangled photons or other particles to ensure secure communications, but they are not, in and of themselves, used for general communication. Quantum networks are expensive and slow. And though nobody can listen in on the messages without breaking the entanglement of the photons, hackers can still try to attack the systems before the messages get into the quantum network, or after they leave it.Instead, quantum networks today are largely used for quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses quantum mechanics to secure the transmission of symmetric encryption keys. According to a June report by quantum industry analyst firm IQT research, the worldwide market for quantum networks will near $1.5 billion in 2027 and grow to more than $8 billion by 2031, and QKD will be the main revenue driver, followed by a rise in networks that use emerging quantum repeaters to connect quantum computers together and quantum sensor networks.To read this article in full, please click here
David Heinemeier Hansson, co-owner and CTO at SaaS vendor 37signals, is quitting the cloud and wants everyone to know about it. In a series of blog posts, Hansson has challenged the cloud business model, rebutted assumptions associated with cloud computing, and argued that the consolidation of power among hyperscalers is not necessarily a good thing.It might seem counterintuitive for a SaaS vendor to be publicly taking pot shots at the cloud and suggesting that other companies re-consider their cloud investments. Has Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, gone off the rails?Hansson’s argument is simple: By pulling server workloads off the Amazon AWS infrastructure, purchasing new hardware from Dell, and running his business from a colocation facility, he will save millions of dollars.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia launched its GPU Technology Conference with a mix of hardware and software news, all of it centered around AI.The first big hardware announcement is the BlueField-3 network data-processing unit (DPU) designed to offload network processing tasks from the CPU. BlueField comes from Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition, and is a SmartNIC fintelligent-networking card.BlueField-3 has double the number of Arm processor cores as the prior generation product as well as more accelerators in general and can run workloads up to eight times faster than the prior generation. BlueField-3 can accelerate network workloads across the cloud and on premises for high-performance computing and AI workloads in a hybrid setting.To read this article in full, please click here
“Tickled pink” is Bob Metcalfe’s reaction to his latest accolade – the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award for inventing and commercializing Ethernet. The award was announced today and will be presented at a ceremony June 10 in San Francisco.With his trademark sense of humor, Metcalfe says, “It’s a big surprise and a delight. I’ve received other awards in the past so I’m familiar with the notion that I have a new obligation to behave myself and live up to the standard of the award and be a role model based on that.”The award carries a $1 million prize. “My wife suggests I spend it on her,” Metcalfe quipped, before adding that he hasn’t worked out the details but will probably pour most of it into his family foundation (after he fills up his boat with diesel fuel).To read this article in full, please click here
Arista Networks has taken its first direct step into WAN routing with new software, hardware and services, an enterprise-class system designed to link critical resources with core data-center and campus networks.The package, called the Arista WAN Routing System ties together three new components—enterprise-class routing hardware, software for its CloudVision management platform called Pathfinder, and the ability to set up neutral peering points called Transit Hubs. This trio enables setting up carrier-neutral and cloud-adjacent facilities to provide self-healing and path-optimization links across core, aggregation, and cloud networking interconnects, according to Doug Gourlay, vice president and general manager of Arista’s Cloud Networking Software group in a blog about the new package.To read this article in full, please click here
The ninth season of Formula E World Championship racing is under way, with events slated this spring everywhere from Berlin to Jakarta to Portland, Oregon. Formula E has all of the thrills and spills of IndyCar or F1 racing—sleek aerodynamic vehicles, talented drivers, spirited competition. But there’s one key difference: the cars are electric.In traditional auto racing, the skills of the driver are certainly important, but so is the strategy of when to make a pit stop for fuel and tires as well as the real-time communication between driver and pit crew. Similarly, in Formula E the driver is the star of the show, but data analytics running in the background plays an important role.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft investment in ChatGPT doesn’t just involve money sunk into its maker, OpenAI, but a massive hardware investment in data centers as well which shows that for now, AI solutions are just for the very top tier companies.The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI dates back to 2019, when Microsoft invested $1 billion in the AI developer. It upped the ante in January with the investment of an additional $10 billion.But ChatGPT has to run on something, and that is Azure hardware in Microsoft data centers. How much has not been disclosed, but according to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft had already spent “several hundred million dollars” in hardware used to train ChatGPT.To read this article in full, please click here
Palo Alto Networks has added a variety of new features to its SASE and SD-WAN packages to help enterprises streamline network operations and better secure distributed WAN resources.The updates center around new automation capabilities in Palo Alto’s Prisma SASE, IoT support for its Prisma SD-WAN, and a new connector for its zero-trust offering. Coined by research firm Gartner, secure access service edge (SASE) refers to a network architecture that integrates SD-WAN and security functionality in a unified cloud service.To read this article in full, please click here
There's a rumbling in the cloud as network professionals increasingly seek to reclaim what they believe is their rightful place in the enterprise management hierarchy.Network knowledge is now widespread within many other IT disciplines. "This means it's now sometimes easy for other teams to assume that they know all they need to know about networking, so they don't need to bother the network team," observes Josh Stephens, CTO of multi-cloud network automation provider BackBox.Network pros have unique perspectives.
When it comes to multicloud decision-making, IT, cloud, cybersecurity, and network professionals all bring different perspectives and talents to the table. "IT teams have a deep understanding of the organization's overall technology, while cloud teams have expertise in cloud-based technology solutions, and cybersecurity teams have a thorough understanding of [cloud] security risks," says Dan Dulac, vice president of solutions strategy at network infrastructure provider Extreme Networks. Combining the insights of these experts, along with network professionals, is the best way for organizations to make informed decisions about their multicloud strategy, he says.To read this article in full, please click here
Aruba Networks, Microsoft Azure and open-source vendor reelyActive have teamed-up to make it easier to bring IoT device data to cloud applications.The package, Aruba IoT Transport for Azure, brings together three separate components to make it work:
Aruba Access points that incorporate both Wi-Fi and IoT radios to serve mobile connectivity, connect to IoT devices, and function as embedded IT-to-IoT gateways simultaneously and securely.
HPE Aruba Networking IoT Transport for Azure service that encodes IoT-device data streamed through the access points into a format compatible with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, which centrally ingests, provisions, and manages device data.
reelyActive Pareto Anywhere for Microsoft Azure a new free open-source converter that reformats IoT data and units of measurement such as temperature and power into a universal format compatible with Microsoft analytics, Power BI and other Azure applications. The tool abstracts the original data format so that the data seen by applications are intelligible, consistent streams of immediately consumable data in recognizable units of measurement. Azure applications can directly consume data from a heterogeneous mix of BLE, 800MHz and 900MHz EnOcean specialized IoT devices that plug into the USB port on HPE Aruba Networking access points without a dedicated on-premises gateway.
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A significant change to Intel's high performance computing roadmap gives competitors AMD and Nvidia plenty of time to grab market share.Intel has a pair of processors called CPU Max and GPU Max. Both feature high bandwidth memory (HBM) on the die which greatly increases performance. The successor to the GPU Max, known as Rialto Bridge, was due later this year or early next year.Instead, Intel cancelled Rialto Bridge, and its successor – Falcon Shores – isn't coming until 2025. Longer term, Intel plans to have one processor, called an XPU, that will combine CPU and GPU cores on one die, but that will come after Falcon Shores.To read this article in full, please click here
In a move that highlights how the ongoing US-China chip war is disrupting the global semiconductor supply chain, the US is taking measures to address a gap in restrictions imposed on Chinese server maker Inspur Group that leaves US companies free to continue supplying Inspur’s affiliates, of which there are dozens, according to a report by Bloomberg.Inspur sells servers targeted at AI and big data workloads, and does business worldwide, including in the US, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific.To read this article in full, please click here
One very interesting trick that you may not know is that you can type a line of text (presumably a command) on the Linux command line and immediately save it to a file by pressing just three keys. The editor that will open up will depend on your $EDITOR setting that you can view using the command shown below:$ echo $EDITOR
nano
If you prefer to use a different editor, use a command like this before typing or moving back to the command that you want to save:$ export EDITOR=vi
And don't forget to save this change to your .bashrc (or other start-up file) if you want to make this change permanent. For example:To read this article in full, please click here