Over the past two years, institutions of higher education (IHEs) have undergone a tremendous amount of change. The future is more uncertain than ever. To prepare for the future, today’s institutional leaders must navigate the complexities of hybrid-first learning and operations to create flexible, high-quality digital experiences.Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a leading focus of IT investment for higher education leaders with the aim of enhancing the student experience, improving the financial health of their organization, and driving institutional excellence. But without a network capable of meeting these expectations and IT staff equipped to manage this complex IT landscape, institutions risk delivering a poor end-user experience.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here
There are quite a few ways on Linux to get a list of the users logged into the system and see what they are doing. The commands described in this article all provide very useful information.users
The users command displays a simple list of logged-in users. In this example, one user is logged in twice and is, therefore, listed twice.$ users
nemo popeye shs shs
Note that the users are listed in alphabetical order.who
The who command provides additional information. The login terminal is identified along with the login date and time. The final field displays the terminal or the IP address of the connecting system.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD has announced plans to work with French chip designer SiPearl to build exascale-level supercomputing systems that use SiPearl's Arm-based Rhea processor with AMD's Instinct GPU accelerators.SiPearl is a relatively small startup that began operation in 2019 with a license for Arm’s Neoverse high-performance technology. It has forged a number of alliances with partners including Intel, Nvidia, HPE, and Graphcore.SiPearl is also involved with the European Processor Initiative (EPI), a consortium selected by the European Union to support the development of a European microprocessor specifically for high performance computing (HPC), as well as emerging applications such as artificial intelligence. The EPI's goal is to develop an Arm-based processor for an exascale supercomputer by 2023.To read this article in full, please click here
Supercomputers are super expensive, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced plans to make supercomputing accessible for more enterprises by offering scaled down, more affordable versions of its Cray supercomputers.The new portfolio includes HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, which are based on the Frontier exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs. These servers come with the full array of hardware, including compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software, and flexible power and cooling options.To read this article in full, please click here
Frontier, which became the first exascale supercomputer in June and ranked number one among the fastest in the world, retained that title in the new TOP500 semiannual list of the world’s fastest.Without any increase in its speed—1.102EFLOP/s—Frontier still managed to score 2.5 times faster that the number two finisher, Fugaku, which also came in second in the June rankings. An exascale computer is one that can perform 1018 (one quintillion) floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOP/s).Despite doubling its maximum speed since it was ranked number three in June, the Lumi supercomputer remained in third-place.There was just one new member of the top-ten list, and that was Leonardo, which came in fourth after finishing a distant 150th in the TOP500 rankings in June.To read this article in full, please click here
While not a very well known Linux command, ac can provide very useful stats on user login time. In its simplest form, it will show you how much time users have spent on the system in the time period covered by the wtmp file. All you have to type is “ac” to get a figure showing overall login time for all users.$ ac
total 8360.60
The figure above indicates that users spent a total of 8,360.6 hours on the system. Looking at the wtmp file with the who command, we can see that the saved logins started on June 6th – a little more than 6 months earlier.$ who /var/log/wtmp | head -2
shs tty2 2022-06-06 16:00 (tty2)
shs pts/1 2022-06-06 16:23 (192.168.0.12)
To look at the times by user, add the -p (people) argument.To read this article in full, please click here
Recently during a research interview with a small but fast-growing business, for the first time I encountered an organization with a “no-network-vendor” network. That is, instead of using Cisco or Dell or even a white-box solution for switching and routing, the company deployed only Fortinet equipment for its entire network. That is, every network component is part of the security infrastructure for them.They built the network this way not just to bake security into its core (a great idea in itself) but also for:
ease of management: they have one tool, it manages every component
ease of deployment: they have only two or three versions of each appliance, all the same except for capacity and port count
ease of expansion to new locations: every site is the same as any other site of similar size
They have a small stock of replacement appliances on the shelf, with which they provide rapid recovery for all locations. They could easily also consume security-operations center as-a-service, and use professional services for nearly all the rest of their network operations. In essence, their security solution could become their complete network solution as well.To read this article in full, please click here
A diploma and certifications are great to have, but hands-on experience can take you even further than your educational accomplishments. Playing around with the technology might help you retain information better, too. So don’t just read how to do something, but actually do it.You probably don’t have a rack full of enterprise routers and switches to play around with, but there are some free and budget-friendly ways to get experience. You just need some time and eagerness to learn.Here are eight ideas to get you some of that hands-on experience with networking, starting with simpler projects and progressing to more complex ones. Some of the earlier tasks may just take just a few minutes, while others are more for a weekend project.To read this article in full, please click here
By: Todd Johnson, Director of Vertical Marketing at Juniper Networks. Delivering an exceptional customer experience has never been more challenging. Retailers need to leverage technology to embrace new consumer habits and shopping styles while also meeting their in-store expectations with enhanced and personalized experiences and an interactive physical shopping journey.To understand the emerging demands for retail customer experience, Juniper conducted two surveys: the Juniper Workplaces and Public Spaces Enterprise IT Survey and the Juniper Remote Workplaces and Public Spaces Consumer Survey.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware has added more security features to its forthcoming on-demand multi-cloud networking and security service called Northstar that it previewed during its August VMware Explore 2022 conference.VMware said then that Northstar will provide a central console for turning up networking and security services across private clouds and VMware Cloud deployments that run on public clouds. It will include VMware services such as Network Detection and Response, NSX Intelligence, advanced load balancing and Web Application Firewall. Within Northstar, Network Detection and Response support will provide scalable threat detection and response for workloads deployed in private and/or public clouds.To read this article in full, please click here
After almost a year and a half of delays, Intel has begun to ship its 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, code-named Sapphire Rapids, to customers, and it has set January 10, 2023 as the formal launch date.The launch is a formality because, according to an Intel spokesperson, the new Xeons are already shipping to customers—OEMs—now, but it falls to those OEMs to announce their product release plans.CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the company’s earnings call last week that the company was ramping up production for launch and that he expected the new Xeons to see the fastest ramp to one million units ever.The challenge for Intel wasn’t in design, it was manufacturing. This will be the first generation of chips using Intel 7 fabrication, an advanced 10nm design that took years to get right.To read this article in full, please click here
Adoption of public cloud IaaS platforms like AWS and Azure, and PaaS and SaaS solutions too, has been driven in part by the simplicity of consuming the services: connect securely over the public internet and start spinning up resources. But when it comes to communicating privately with those resources, there are challenges to address and choices to be made.The simplest option is to use the internet—preferably an internet VPN—to connect to the enterprise’s virtual private clouds (VPC) or their equivalent from company data centers, branches, or other clouds.However, using the internet can create problems for modern applications that depend on lots of network communications among different services and microservices. Or rather, the people using those applications can run into problems with performance, thanks to latency and packet loss.To read this article in full, please click here
In the year since it spun out of IBM, Kyndryl has made a number of big strides in establishing itself as a core infrastructure service management player, but challenges remain.For example, while it has substantially expanded its partnerships and technology, its financial situation hasn’t shown a similar bump. Just this week the company reported second quarter revenues of $4.2 billion, a year-over-year drop of 9%. The company has reported similar results in other recent quarters. “Currency and energy-costs impacts are superseding the operational progress we’re making,” Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner told Wall Street analysts during the firm’s 2Q 2023 call this week. “And while the risk of a global recession has clearly increased, we continue to see broadbase demand for digital transformation in infrastructure services.”To read this article in full, please click here
You know it better than anyone: the network has become essential infrastructure for any successful enterprise. COVID-19, migration to multicloud, and new application requirements have only amplified pressure on enterprise IT to deliver high-availability, secure network services anywhere, anytime, and on any device.This isn’t a passing fad. Several key trends will drive network growth and complexity for years to come, including:
The growing popularity of hybrid and fully remote work models
Resource gaps exasperated by the great resignation
Dramatic growth in video and cloud meetings
An increase in data security regulations
To address these challenges and best position themselves for the future, enterprises must implement more intelligence in the network. Modern AIOps uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist IT in managing, troubleshooting, and fixing network problems. As a result, AIOps is becoming a key success factor in managing modern enterprise networks.To read this article in full, please click here
AMD announced third quarter results this week, and while it posted a $64 million loss in terms of overall operating income—mainly due to its acquisition of Xilinx—but large gains in the company’s data center, embedded and gaming segments provided an encouraging note.Total revenue rose by 29% for the third quarter of 2022, to $5.56 billion from $4.31 billion one year ago. Gross profit also rose in year on year terms, from $2.08 billion in last year’s third quarter to $2.35 billion for the past three months. The decline in operating income was caused by much higher operating expenses, which more than doubled in the third quarter, rising from $1.14 billion a year ago to $2.42 billion in the most recent figures.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has introduced the 11th generation of its ProLiant servers designed for a range of modern workloads, including AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, graphic-intensive applications, machine learning, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and virtualization.The new ProLiants have three processor options: AMD Epyc “Genoa” generation processors, Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” generation processors, and Ampere Altra and Altra Max cloud-native processors.Compared to the previous server generation, the new HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers support twice as much I/O bandwidth and 33% more high-performance GPU density per server to support AI and graphic-intensive workloads than the prior generation.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Red Hat have expanded their partnership to include a new combination that lets customers more easily turn-up and manage bare-metal containerized workloads.The companies have integrated Cisco’s cloud-operations management platform, Intersight, and Red Hat OpenShift Assisted Installer, which controls OpenShift clusters, to handle the complex and time-consuming process of networking a containerized environment.Nearly 80% of enterprises have adopted containers in production environments, and containers are especially effective when they are migrated across different hybrid-cloud domains—on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, network edge, and public clouds, wrote Dhritiman “DD” Dasgupta, vice president of product management for Cisco’s Cloud and Compute team in a blog about the integration. To read this article in full, please click here
NetApp announced Tuesday that its on-premises and cloud storage offerings are now unified under the umbrella of a single platform, called BlueXP, which serves as a control plane for each of its products and simplifies the management of enterprise storage for organizations.BlueXP—which is a free upgrade for its customers—is a reaction to the reality that more and more companies’ storage environments are hybrids these days, combining cloud and on-premises storage, according to NetApp. Businesses of almost any size that have been in operation for more than a decade or so are, more often than not, involved in digital transformation efforts that move at various paces, said company senior vice president and general manager for cloud storage Ronen Schwartz.To read this article in full, please click here
Security is the name of the game at Cisco’s Partner Summit gathering this week with the rollout of a new firewall and added data-loss prevention (DLP) and passwordless authentication features to its security wares. On the firewall front, Cisco announced the Secure Firewall 3105 it says is built specifically for hybrid workers and small branch offices. Available early next year, the 1U 3105 supports 10Gbps throughput, 7Gbps IPSec throughput and 3,000 VPN peers. The box is the new low-end for the Secure Firewall 3100 family, including the 3110, 3120, 3130 and the high-end 3140, which supports 45Gbps throughput.To read this article in full, please click here