Pluribus Networks has significantly upgraded its switch-fabric software to provide a better handle on distributed, containerized enterprise-cloud resources.The upgrades add three new fabric-monitoring capabilities—FlowTracker, KubeTracker, and Virtualized Packet Broker Service—to Netvisor One, the company’s virtualized Linux-based NOS that provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking and distributed fabric intelligence.The NOS virtualizes switch hardware and implements the company’s Adaptive Cloud Fabric software-defined networking package. Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and can be deployed across a data center or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms, or hyperconverged infrastructures, the company said.To read this article in full, please click here
The seq command is handy for generating number sequences on Linux.It requires at least one number as an argument and, given that, it will provide all the numbers from 1 to whatever number you specify. However, that's just the command's simplest use. With additional arguments, seq can be surprisingly useful, especially when you use the generated numbers to drive a loop or do a calculation.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux
The seq command below illustrates the most basic use of this command:To read this article in full, please click here
The usual suspects—bar one—spent big on the latest FCC auction for 5G spectrum, with AT&T and Dish headlining the winning bidders.At the top of the list was AT&T, which spent over $9 billion to acquire 1,624 licenses in the 3.45-3.98GHz range, according to the FCC. Each license represents the right to use 10MHz of that spectrum in a given geographical subdivision of the country.What is 5G?
Close behind AT&T at $7.3 billion was Dish, which acquired 1,232 individual licenses. T-Mobile spent almost $2.9 billion on 199 licenses, and U.S. Cellular spent nearly $580 million on 380 licenses to shore up its own 5G spectrum holdings.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has rolled out new wired and wireless gear aimed at amping up core campus wired and wireless networks to better support surging demand for remote connectivity.The company has added more powerful switches to the high end of its core enterprise Catalyst family—the biggest powered by Cisco’s high-performance Silicon One processors—as well as its Catalyst and Meraki wireless boxes to add Wi-Fi 6E support. It also announced private 5G as a service.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks has added firewall-as-a-service, policy, and segmentation features to its cloud-based security family that lets enterprise customers control and protect on-premises or cloud-based resources.The new Juniper Secure Edge package expands and strengthens brings key enterprise security features to Juniper’s core cloud-based management platform Security Director Cloud, but also bolsters the vendor’s secure access service edge (SASE) strategy. What is SDN and where it’s going
Security Director Cloud learns customers’ policies and configurations and syncs them with on-prem firewalls. It includes zero-touch provisioning and configuration wizards for secure connectivity, content security and advanced threat prevention. It also includes Security Director Insights, which correlates attack details with threat intelligence—including attack information gathered from other vendors’ products—to update security policies automatically.To read this article in full, please click here
Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here
A US Commerce Department report says the computer chip shortage is even worse than thought; at one point in 2021 there was just a five-day supply worldwide, and there's no sign the situation will improve anytime soon.
Facebook’s parent company Meta said it is building the world's largest AI supercomputer to power machine-learning and natural language processing for building its metaverse project.The new machine, called the Research Super Computer (RSC), will contain 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 4,000 AMD Epyc Rome 7742 processors. It has 2,000 Nvidia DGX-A100 nodes, with eight GPU chips and two Epyc microprocessors per node. Meta expects to complete construction this year.World's fastest supercomputer is 3x faster than No. 2
RSC is already partially built, with 760 of the DGX-A100 systems deployed. Meta researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research with the goal of eventually training models with trillions of parameters, according to Meta.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to offer branch offices and hybrid workers secure access to corporate collaboration, Cisco is melding its Webex software with a key component of its SD-WAN package.Webex collaboration software is being added to the applications supported by Cloud OnRamp--a key part of Cisco’s enterprise SD-WAN offering that links branch-offices or individual remote users to cloud applications. It includes application-aware firewalls, URL-filtering, intrusion detection/prevention, DNS-layer security, and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) Threat Grid, as well as network services such as load-balancing and Wide Area Application Services, according to Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is expanding its Catalyst family of switches for enterprises that need to blend industrial and operational technology (OT) systemsThe the ruggedized Catalyst Industrial Ethernet 9300 1RU rack-mountable switch is based on the same programmable Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC found in other Catalyst 9000 and features 28 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Up to eight of the units can be stacked together and managed as one system.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors
The 9300 runs the same IOS XE operating system as other Catalyst boxes and can be centrally controlled via DNA Center, Cisco’s principal networking-control platform that features myriad services from analytics, network management, and automation capabilities to assurance setting, fabric provisioning, and policy-based segmentation.To read this article in full, please click here
How you back up your database depends three factors: how the database is delivered to you, the backup logistics of the database, and the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO) you are attempting to meet. This article covers how the database is delivered.There are three ways databases can be delivered: as software on a server you own; as platform-as-a-service (PaaS); and as a serverless service. Let’s take a look at them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Traditional database software
Until a few years ago the way all databases were delivered was by buying a license for a product and installing it on a server or VM of your choice. You were responsible for everything, including the security and administration of the server, the storage, the application itself, and (of course) the backup of the database. To read this article in full, please click here
Intel is collaborating with Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), a startup specializing in immersion cooling for server hardware, in an effort that seeks to take immersion cooling mainstream.The two companies announced a multi-year partnership that involves working with data center customers to develop and implement advanced immersion cooling techniques for future data centers. The two will look to test the safety and reliability of the technology for immersion-cooled racks running Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Read more: Intel under attack, fighting back on many frontsTo read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks is expanding its portfolio of cloud-based, AI-driven services aimed at managing and controlling intelligent enterprise SD-WAN networks.The latest additions build on Session Smart Routing (SSR) software Juniper acquired when it bought 128 Technology in 2020 for $450 million. SSR promises to reduce the costs of running WANs and SD-WANs by making intelligent routing decisions based on sessions and application needs running over individual traditional tunnels.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo’s latest addition to the ThinkEdge portfolio of edge-computing devices packs Nvidia GPUs with AI capabilities into a ruggedized design that’s roughly the size of a laptop.The ThinkEdge SE450 is a 2U, 300mm (12 inches) unit that includes a third-generation Xeon Platinum processor and up to four single-width or two double-width GPUs, along with six NVMe SSDs and 1TB of DDR4 memory, making it one of the first Nvidia-certified Edge systems. There is also a slightly larger model that’s 360mm (14.2 inches).
Read more: 4 essential edge-computing use casesTo read this article in full, please click here
True and false are common concepts in all forms of computing. They’re critical to Boolean logic after all, but did you know that true and false are also commands on Linux? Do you know how to use them?The simplest explanation is that the true command generates an exit code of 0 and that the false command generates an exit code of 1. This explanation, however, doesn’t provide much detail on how these commands can best be used.In this post, we’ll look at how the true and false commands work and how you might put them to use on the command line or in your scripts.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise firewalls have been the quintessential security device for decades, standing guard at the perimeter, inspecting all inbound and outbound traffic for malware. So, what happens to firewalls as the perimeter fades away? They evolve.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Network performance monitoring has become more complex now that companies have more workloads in the cloud, and network teams are finding visibility into the cloud isn’t on par with what they have into their on-prem resources.
Tech Spotlight: Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud hurdles — and how to address them (CIO)
5 top hybrid cloud security challenges (CSO)
16 irresistible cloud innovations (InfoWorld)
How to choose a SaaS management platform (Computerworld)
Migration to the cloud introduced infrastructure that isn’t owned by the organization, and a pandemic-driven surge in remote work is accelerating the shift to the cloud and an associated increase in off-premises environments. Container-based applications deployed on cloud-native architectures further complicate network visibility. For these reasons and more, enterprises need tools that can monitor not only the data center and WAN but also the internet, SaaS applications and multiple providers’ public cloud operations.To read this article in full, please click here
The cloud is no longer some distant, separate place. Yes, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google maintain unimaginably vast expanses of servers in cloud data centers around the world – as do thousands of SaaS providers. But those clouds and the services they deliver have become so entwined with customers’ on-prem operations, they’re now vital components of almost every enterprise IT estate.This intermingling takes many forms. For starters, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now enable you to snap off a piece of their platforms in the form of racks of managed servers that live in your data center, preloaded with the same software that powers public clouds. Some of these on-prem cloud outposts can offer access to the gamut of services hosted by the cloud mothership.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise firewalls have been the quintessential security device for decades, standing guard at the perimeter, inspecting all inbound and outbound traffic for malware. So, what happens to firewalls as the perimeter fades away? They evolve.Today’s firewalls are an essential piece of the enterprise security puzzle. They’ve become the foundational device upon which security vendors have stacked all of their advanced features. Cloud-based, next-generation firewalls (firewall-as-a-service) are a core component of any secure access service edge (SASE) deployment. VPN remote access for work-at-home employees typically terminates at a firewall. And firewalls play a key role in zero-trust network access (ZTNA), serving as the device that enforces access control policies and network segmentation rules.To read this article in full, please click here