One of the big issues facing public cloud vendors is convincing companies to take on-premises workloads and move them to a public cloud data center. Oracle is trying to enable that shift with a new set of products that allow customers to get the same hardware that Oracle runs in its data centers behind their own firewalls. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison unveiled the Big Data@Customer and Exadata@Customer machines on Sunday, building on the company's Cloud@Customer hardware offering.It's a move by the company to take advantage of Oracle's expertise building hardware and combining it with software to reach customers as they're in the process of migrating to the cloud. Ellison expects on-premises and cloud workloads will have to coexist for at least 10 years, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM sold off its x86 server business two years ago to Lenovo, thinking it was exiting a cut-throat, low-margin business. But the cloud has only intensified x86 server chip sales, and IBM is paying attention.The company is adapting a new range of Power servers -- which typically run powerful systems -- for the cloud. The Power E870C and E880C servers, announced Monday, are flexible in handling many tasks and can scale for distributed computing and cloud integration.The new servers, which support Ubuntu Linux and Unix, sound similar to x86 servers powering internal and external clouds at companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But IBM is packing in an extra set of features to make these systems reliable and flexible for public and private clouds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's retail outlets, creatively known as Microsoft Store, has been its answer to the wildly successful Apple Stores that helped push a lot of Apple product into the hands of consumers, especially Macs.Up to now, the more than 100 Microsoft Stores have been focused on the consumer market. However, Microsoft announced an expansion of the stores to include what it calls SMB Zones, providing small and mid-sized businesses with a chance to check out business-oriented products and technology and also get some consultations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
According to Emerson, makers of this UP500W Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, their customers save up to 33% in energy costs every year using programmed heating and cooling schedules. The Sensi thermostat makes it easy to remotely control and schedule the comfort of your home using your phone, tablet or PC. You can start with a preloaded schedule that reflects common daily patterns and quickly adapt it to your unique schedule, or you can use the intuitive swipe controls to build a customized daily schedule in seconds. When your schedule changes, the app gives you continuous control to make adjustments, from across the room or across the world. And because it doesn't require a “C-wire” in most applications, Sensi works with most heating and cooling systems in the US and Canada. If you're an Alexa user (Amazon Echo, Dot, etc), you'll find it's fully compatible with your "smart home". Sensi averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 customers on Amazon (read reviews). It's typical list price of $129 has been reduced to $106.88.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you hear that grating sound of value clash among cloud providers? It’s the sound of attempted differentiation, that reason you buy Starbucks instead of Dunkin Donuts, Peet’s or perhaps Tim Horton’s brew. Brand thinkers want us to choose something we like because they know once we do, we will stay. We’re creatures of habit. We dislike the qualification process of choosing new vendors for coffee, as well as IT gear and services.Much marketing focus is going towards incremental services bundles that make one cloud vendor seem, or actually be, better than the offerings of another. Determine the value of the cloud services you need
The first smoke cloud that obscures actual value of cloud services is the dizzying value calculator. This device, when present (and it’s often missing), allows you to plug in what you predict (you can predict, can’t you?) your ongoing costs will be for a particular set of data processing needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Windows 10 brought a lot of changes to Microsoft's flagship desktop operating system when it debuted on July 29, 2015, and it has changed even more since then. With the release of the Anniversary Update in August (Build 1607 for Current Branch users, at Build 14393.105 as I write this), even license activation has changed. Here's what most users of the business-oriented Windows 10 Enterprise will see if they check their Activation screen:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Few enterprise IT transformations can match the importance of today’s long migration from on-premises, client-server computing to cloud computing. This week at Oracle’s mammoth OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle will make it abundantly clear that it intends to become a leader in all three flavors of cloud -- not only SaaS, where the company has already demonstrated strength, but also in PaaS and IaaS, where Oracle is a new player.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle CTO Larry Ellison ordered himself some new business cards on stage at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday, just by having a conversation. As part of his keynote address to attendees, Ellison took the time to show off a new set of tools for creating intelligent chatbots that integrate with Oracle's software. It's aimed at making it easier for businesses to build bots that let users connect with their enterprise software, and help businesses connect with consumers. Chatbots are a hot topic in the tech industry, with companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack all building tools that companies can use to create intelligent, automated conversation partners. Their growing popularity comes down to a few factors, including the proliferation of smartphones, fast internet connections and messaging apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has warned of a high priority security hole in its IOS software that could have let attackers snatch memory contents from a variety of products that could lead to the disclosure of confidential information.
+More on Network World: Cisco buys into containers with Container X acquisition+
Specifically Cisco said the vulnerability is due to “insufficient condition checks in the part of the code that handles [Internet Key Exchange] IKEv1 security negotiation requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IKEv1 packet to an affected device configured to accept IKEv1 security negotiation requests.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Co-workers peering at their smartphones more than ever isn’t an optical illusion, and you’re not imagining seeing a bunch of shiny bald pates or lustrous weaves of hair where there were once friendly faces. Smartphone use increased more over the past year compared to tablets and PCs.That’s among the tidbits in a new comScore study on application use.Other revelations from the report corroborate why audible alerts from smartphones are less common and it's become unusual to hear the beeps of text messages in some places—such as commuter railway cars: Large numbers of people are rejecting notifications, comScore suggests in research it published this month. “Push notification fatigue” is to blame, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A security researcher going by Minxomat scanned IPv4 addresses and then released a list of nearly 800,000 open FTP servers, meaning no authentication is required to access them. His scan revealed that 4.32 percent of all FTP servers in the IPv4 address space allowed “anonymous” users to log in with no password.“This is a list of all (796,578) FTP servers directly connected to port 21 in the IPv4 address space that allow anonymous logins,” Minxomat wrote on GitHub. “The login must be completed in less than five seconds to qualify for this list.”If an FTP server was meant to be public, he did not include it in the list. In his post describing “mass-analyzing a chunk of the internet,” Minxomat said he set up filters to exclude other results such as “POS system firmware update servers and printers (firmware|printer).”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google this week is expected to release Allo, an AI-powered app previewed in May at the Google I/O confab that's aimed at adding more pizzazz to text messaging.
Google said back then that it planned to release the app by the end of summer, and that would be this Wednesday, Sept. 21. Reliable mobile news blogger Evan Blass has tweeted "Hello, Allo (launches this week)," and Google watchers have been quick to rehash this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has patched a vulnerability similar to one exploited by a cyberespionage group believed to be linked to the U.S. National Security Agency.The vulnerability affects networking devices running Cisco's IOS, IOS XE and IOS XR operating systems that process IKEv1 (Internet Key Exchange version 1) packets. When exploited, it allows remote unauthenticated attackers to extract contents from a device's memory, potentially leading to the exposure of sensitive and confidential information.IKE is a key exchange protocol used by several popular features including LAN-to-LAN VPN (Virtual Private Network), remote access VPN, Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN) and Group Domain of Interpretation (GDOI). It is likely to be enabled on many Cisco devices in enterprise environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Everyone is familiar with the military use of drones. You’ve probably heard about Amazon’s plans to deliver commercial goods to consumers via drones. And Google is reportedly developing solar-powered drones that will deliver high-speed Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Larry Ellison has a message for Amazon Web Services: Oracle is going to give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud market."Amazon's lead is over," he said during his keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward."To that end, the company he co-founded is launching a set of new cloud datacenters that are aimed at providing more powerful compute instances to help it compete against the likes of AWS, Azure and other cloud players. The generation 2 datacenters will be capable of bringing a variety of performance improvements to customers who want to run high-performance workloads in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is now more than just a PC company. At industry events, the company's keynotes feature drones flying around, robots walking on stage and musicians creating tunes from wearables. The chip maker is helping BMW build an autonomous car, will sell modems to Apple, and is leading the development of next-generation 5G cellular networks. For all these new markets, it will provide chip and data-center technologies.
The transformation is happening partly under the leadership of Venkata Renduchintala, president of the Client and Internet of Things (IoT) Businesses and Systems Architecture Group at Intel. As Intel's second-in-command, he helped cut struggling products like mobile CPUs and sharpened the company's focus on IoT, servers, and connectivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle has agreed to acquire Palerra, a vendor of software for securing cloud services, as part of its strategy to provide customers comprehensive identity and security cloud servicesPalerra offers a Cloud Access Security Broker product called Loric that offers a combination of visibility into cloud usage, data security, user behavior analytics, and security configuration, with automated incident responses."We think this is an important addition to our overall cloud security portfolio," Larry Ellison, Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer said in his keynote Sunday at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. "It [Security] is job one at Oracle. We'll keep building, and when we find a supplier out there who is doing good work, we'll buy them."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Department of Transportation has ordered that Samsung Galaxy Note7 smartphones can only be carried by crew and passengers on planes if the phones are switched off and are not connected to charging equipment.The order follows an official recall announced Thursday of 1 million Note7 smartphones by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, following concerns about faulty batteries in the devices which could overheat and even explode.People can now travel with the smartphones on aircraft only if they disable all applications like alarm clocks that could accidentally activate the phone, protect the power switch to prevent the phone from being inadvertently activated or turned on, and store the device in carry-on baggage or on their person, and not in checked baggage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The iPhone 7 is already off to a booming start. Shortly after pre-orders began, Apple's carrier partners were blown away by unprecedented demand. Most notably, T-Mobile said that pre-orders were up 400% relative to the iPhone 6. Just yesterday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere added that the iPhone 7 is now the most pre-ordered device in T-Mobile history. On top of that, Sprint relayed that iPhone 7 pre-orders this year are up an astonishing 375% compared to last year. Suffice it to say, the iPhone 7 may very well set a new weekend sales record, though as we covered earlier, Apple won't be releasing specific sales figures this year.Speaking to the popularity of the iPhone 7, most prospective buyers hoping to walk into an Apple retail store and pick up the iPhone 7 model of their choice may be in for a rude awakening. According to a statement from Apple, all in-store stock of the iPhone 7 Plus and the Jet Black iPhone 7 are already sold out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here