Last month, IBM quietly quietly announced it's planning to release a 24-core Power 10 processor specifically for the benefit of an Oracle database, and Oracle doesn’t know why.An announcement dated Dec. 13 called "a statement of general direction" detailed IBM’s plans around the Power S1014 server. The S1014 server is a single-socket, 4U rack mounted server with 16 NVMe SSDs and a maximum memory capacity of 64GB. The document said in part:"IBM intends to announce a high-density 24-core processor for the IBM Power S1014 system (MTM 9105-41B) to address application environments utilizing an Oracle Database with the Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licensing model. It intends to combine a robust compute throughput with the superior reliability and availability features of the IBM Power platform while complying with Oracle Database SE2 licensing guidelines."To read this article in full, please click here
By David Hughes, Chief Product and Technology Officer, at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.As we enter 2023, the events of the last couple of years have left their mark with staffing shortages, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruption, and geo-political unrest. These dynamics have accelerated or even forced business transition and, in some cases, caused a rethinking of fundamental business models. The network now plays an even stronger role, powering the transformation journey that’s needed to thrive during uncertainty and preparing organizations for what comes next in 2023. (You can also register for the webinar where we'll cover these topics more in depth.)To read this article in full, please click here
Network admins and engineers have enough work on their plates, especially considering increasing numbers of access points amid the hybrid workforce. They’re also grappling with ever-more sophisticated cybersecurity threats across a highly complex network that now includes data centers, clouds and edge computing.Yet, there’s little forgiveness from end users when there is network disruption leading to down time. High availability and low latency are crucial.Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies — such as machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and enhanced automation — can provide relief for overstretched IT teams, while ensuring highly performing networks.To read this article in full, please click here
Many organizations modernize or upgrade their network only when it’s time for a refresh. However, transformation doesn’t have to be a wholesale, do-it-all-at-once project to start improving customer and employee experiences today.For example, a large food retailer was happy with its existing Wi-Fi network vendor. “It was a good product, it served us well for over a decade,” said the organization’s network architect.Although the company typically has a five-year refresh cycle, its IT leaders became open to making a change after seeing a demo of Juniper Mist™ AI, a wired and wireless network platform. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize user experiences and simplify network operations.To read this article in full, please click here
Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network architecture that rolls SD-WAN and security into a single, centrally-managed cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployment, improved security, and better performance.According to Gartner, SASE’s benefits are transformational because it can speed deployment time for new users, locations, applications, and devices, as well as reduce attack surfaces and shorten remediation times by as much as 95%.With the pandemic, adoption of SASE has been on an upward swing. Gartner predicts in its most recent SASE roadmap that 80% of enterprises will have adopted a SASE or SSE architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021. (Security service edge, or SSE, is a security-focused subset of SASE that’s basically SASE without SD-WAN.)To read this article in full, please click here
Despite the challenges posed by economic turmoil, epidemics, and political upheaval, network researchers are continuing to blaze new trails in innovation, performance, management, and security. In sum, 2023 is shaping up as a year of network evolution and transformation.Here are eight network technologies you will want to pay particularly close attention to.1. Unified SASE: Addresses hybrid workforce, hybrid clouds
Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tightly integrates security and networking into a single platform. The technology uses a single-pass scanning architecture combined with a unified policy that's configured via a unified console that draws from a unified data lake. "This is significant for organizations to continue to provide a consistent and assured user experience while protecting users, devices, sites, and data amid the rapidly evolving dynamics coming in 2023," says Kelly Ahuja, CEO of networking and cybersecurity firm Versa Networks.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has formally introduces its 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Sapphire Rapids) and the Intel Max Series CPUs and GPUs, which isn’t much of a secret as we have documented the processors here already, but there are a few new features to go along with them.Those new features include a virtual machine (VM) isolation solution and an independent trust verification service to help build what it calls the “industry’s most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio.” To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has punched up the power and sustainability features of its Unified Computing System family with new UCS servers based on Intel’s latest generation processors.Intel introduced those processors—the 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors and the Xeon CPU Max Series—this week after months of delays. The new processors include a new micro-architecture, up to 60 cores per chip, plus support for DDR5 memory, PCI Express Gen 5, CXL 1.1, HBM2E memory and a of special-purpose accelerators for storage, networking, analytics, AI, and CPU-core load balancing.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a lot more to working with files on Linux than creating, listing and updating them. After all, files can be Linux commands (i.e., binaries), scripts, images, simple text files, pointers to other files or folders. You might remember the "everything is a file" description of Unix and Linux systems.Even sockets and named pipes are files in their own way. Sometimes only the owner can see and use files, sometimes everyone can and sometimes select individuals will also have access. Here are some of the subtleties.Listing files
Listing files on Linux is easy. You use the ls command. On the other hand, commands like ls, ls -l, ls -a and ls -ltr work very differently:To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a lot more to working with files on Linux than creating, listing and updating them. After all, files can be Linux commands (i.e., binaries), scripts, images, simple text files, pointers to other files or folders. You might remember the "everything is a file" description of Unix and Linux systems.Even sockets and named pipes are files in their own way. Sometimes only the owner can see and use files, sometimes everyone can and sometimes select individuals will also have access. Here are some of the subtleties.Listing files
Listing files on Linux is easy. You use the ls command. On the other hand, commands like ls, ls -l, ls -a and ls -ltr work very differently:To read this article in full, please click here
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) might be the last place you’d expect an enterprise product to debut, but AMD unveiled a new server accelerator among the slew of consumer CPUs and GPUs it launched at the Las Vegas show.AMD took the wraps off its Instinct MI300 accelerator, and it’s a doozy.The accelerated processing unit (APU) is a mix of 13 chiplets, including CPU cores, GPU cores, and high bandwidth memory (HBM). Tallied together, AMD's Instinct MI300 accelerator comes in at 146 billion transistors. For comparison, Intel’s ambitious Ponte Vecchio processor will be around 100 billion transistors, and Nvidia’s Hopper H100 GPU is a mere 80 billion transistors.To read this article in full, please click here
Gigabyte has split in two, breaking off its enterprise business as a subsidiary called Giga Computing Technology that's focused on sales and support for its data-center products.The Taiwanese company is well known for its motherboards and GPU cards for gaming, but also for several form factors of servers. Breaking out Giga Computing into a separate unit enables it to better cater to the needs of enterprise customers, according to Daniel Hou, CEO of the new business. “This is just another extension of our long-term plan that will allow our enterprise solutions better react to market forces and to better tailor products to various markets,” Hou said in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft on Monday said it is acquiring composable infrastructure services provider Fungible for an undisclosed amount in an effort to augment its Azure networking and storage services.Microsoft’s Fungible acquisition is aimed at accelerating networking and storage performance in datacenters with high-efficiency, low-power data processing units (DPUs), Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Core, wrote in a blog post. Data processing units or DPUs are an evolved format of smartNIC that are used to offload server CPU duties onto a separate device to free up server cycles, akin to hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA).To read this article in full, please click here
You need to see your backups the way bad actors do: an invaluable resource that can be turned against your organization if you don’t protect them correctly.Ransomware attacks focus on backup servers to either encrypt their data so they can’t restore other systems or to capture company IP and use it for extortion. Neither is a good outcome, so do everything you can to protect your backup data. Here’s how.Encrypt backups
Encrypted backup data cannot be used to extort your company. Attackers might be able to exfiltrate it, but it will be useless without the keys. Encryption technology has evolved to a point that this can be handled with relative ease, allowing you to encrypt all backups wherever they are stored.To read this article in full, please click here
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China accounts for nearly 20% of global manufacturing trade and holds a large share of many global value chain inputs. With Connectivity being a challenge, until recently businesses have had to choose between two evils: Either a stable yet cumbersome process with large local telcos, or an unstable, unpredictable network that does not enable smooth communication with apps, cloud workloads, and teams. If your business suffers from communication issues in China, you’re not alone. About 90% of global businesses face these challenges, which result in costly workloads and provisioning. We’ve identified several main challenges:To read this article in full, please click here
Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here
The pandemic has changed how we work, probably forever. Most employees with jobs that can be done effectively from home have no intention of returning full time to the office. They find that their work-life balance is much more balanced without the long commutes and constant interruptions that accompany office work.According to a McKinsey/Ipsos survey, 58 percent of American workers had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week in 2022, while 38 percent were not generally required to be in the office at all.To read this article in full, please click here
AI-enabled management platforms and infrastructure are beginning to make their way into enterprise networks. I say “beginning” because despite lots of AI-washing marketing efforts over the last few years, a lot of what has been characterized as “AI-driven” or “powered by AI” hasn’t really materialized. It's not that these systems don’t do what the marketers say, so much as they don't do it in the way they imply.Even some tools that do truly employ AI in meaningful ways, and with visibly different results than are possible without it, don’t feel qualitatively different from what has come before. They may be better, for example by dramatically reducing the number of false positives in alert traffic, but not different.To read this article in full, please click here
Now that ransomware organizations are specifically targeting on-site backup servers, it’s even more important that enterprises defend them vigorously.Here are nine steps to protect your backups and why you should take them.Patch religiously
Make sure your backup server is among in the first group to receive the latest operating system updates. Most ransomware attacks exploit vulnerabilities for which patches have been available for a long time, but that didn’t get installed. Also, subscribe to whatever automatic updates your backup software provides, again to take advantage of whatever new protections they might include.To read this article in full, please click here