Jeff Immelt candidly told Boston’s business and political elite yesterday about what GE hoped to get from the company’s move to Boston. He said GE moved to Boston for two reasons: to win the Internet of Things and rethink how companies work in this winner-take-all technology innovation economy.He also said he liked Boston because of the chip the tech community has on its shoulder; an obvious reference to the Silicon Valley’s domination of nearly every segment of technology. The Boston technology ecosystem, arguably the richest and most diverse R&D center in the world seems to have lost the DNA for growing big tech companies like the personal Internet, social or the sharing economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Your electric bills could soar if you kept Nvidia's monster DGX-1 computer running continuously for one month.
The DGX-1 supercomputer can deliver the computing power of 250 two-socket servers in a desktop box, claimed Nvidia, which introduced the system Tuesday at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.
The computer can deliver about 170 teraflops of performance, and multiple boxes on a rack could deliver 2 petaflops of performance. The fastest computer in the world delivers a peak performance of about 10 petaflops.
Nvidia says DGX-1 is about 56 times faster than a server with two Intel Xeon-E5 2697 v3 chips, which can deliver about 3 teraflops of performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Banks are neglecting to analyze the highly useful data being generated by new kinds of consumer-facing products, like apps, says an expert in the financial IT sector.Many financial institutions are overlooking key intelligence and indicators that they could be taking advantage of to re-invent themselves and ultimately compete with future disruption, thinks Deanne Yamato-Tucker, who heads Xavient Information Systems’ banking and financial services practice. Banking disruption could include peer-to-peer, blockchain and services like Bitcoin, for example.“Banks need to address the threat from new entrants such as PayPal, Google, Amazon, Apple, and P2P FX,” Yamato-Tucker told me in an e-mail. But they’re not managing their data properly to do so, she thinks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Change is still afoot in Software Defined Networking, but it is now at least clear that SDN is here to stay, that SDN will be the way we build networks going forward. In this Network World Spotlight special report, pulled together by the editors of Network World, we analyze key developments and gauge where organizations stand today in their SDN planning.Inside you’ll find:* Controller Market Consolidation. There are still many types controllers available, but the market is rallying around OpenDaylight and the Open Network Operating System.* Crossroads for OpenFlow? Once conflated with SDN, OpenFlow progress seems to have stalled. Does OpenFlow still have a significant role to play?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. In recent weeks I've written about several vendors in the software defined wide area networking (SD WAN) space. There's one thing I've learned as I've talked with these companies: each one takes an approach to wide area networking that plays to the company's strengths. Silver Peak just had a major announcement pertaining to SD WAN, and not surprisingly, this company is building on its deep expertise in WAN acceleration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back in March, the issue was raised whether disaggregation – decoupling network software from hardware for lower cost, choice and flexibility – could play in the enterprise as well as the service provider realm.The answer, judging by recent events, is that it can. But currently to a lesser extent than it does with service providers, who will still reap most of the benefits of initial enterprise deployments.Announcements by Pica8, Ciena and AT&T that they plan to offer bare metal and white box switches, and virtual network functions as customer premises equipment, do signal that enterprises are indeed a target for disaggregation. But penetration is currently limited to that – CPE supplied and managed by service providers for the purpose of connecting that enterprise to its service network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The term "software defined networking" (SDN) certainly means different things to different people. To the giant web companies, SDN means having the ability to create custom network software to enable functions that are unique to that organization. This requires dedicated software engineers and a networking team large enough to run and support the custom networks. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 companies that have the resources, size, and scale for this model of SDN to make sense.For businesses below this tier – service providers and enterprises – SDN means the promise of automation and cloud scale but also a high level of complexity, sometimes more complexity than the original network. A good rule of thumb for IT initiatives is that solutions should never be more complicated than the problem they're intended to solve. This is one reason SDN deployments have been slow despite the fact that almost every organization I talk to today is interested in the technology. For SDNs to become pervasive in the non-web-scale tier, they must become easier to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two hardware vendors this week unveiled products to bring commodity switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to enterprises through service providers.Bare metal switch supplier Pica8 this week rolled out a Power-over-Ethernet switches to be sold into enterprises by service providers as managed service customer premises equipment (CPE). And Ciena announced availability of the 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, an Ethernet CPE platform with virtualized network function (VNF) integration. Pica8
The offerings address a desire by service providers, like AT&T, to sell bare metal white box switches into the customer premises for cost, flexibility, performance and SDN programmability advantages, and to offer service as VNFs on that hardware. Pica8 says this market – bare metal as CPE – is six months old and that this week’s PoE offerings are merely the latest in an existing CPE portfolio to onboard enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This week the fifth Open Networking Summit was held in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. As in years past, the event held an "SDN Idol" competition where several vendors entered an SDN-related product for a set of judges to vote on to create a set of finalists. The four finalists then demonstrated their entries at the event and a final winner was chosen.In addition to myself, the judges included Jim Smith, GM of Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff for AT&T, and Geng Lin, CTO of Corporate Networks for Google. The judging criteria involved understanding the business value, technology value, and differentiation against the competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SANTA CLARA -- Even though service providers are well on their way with SDNs, enterprise adoption of the technology is slowed by a host of issues.
Chief among them is cultural inertia. Large enterprises in particular are loathe to change anything, be it technology, operational processes or organizational structure, especially if the need to do so is unclear or viewed as potentially risky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SANTA CLARA -- Just as the industry is becoming more comfortable with SDNs, the NSA says it’s using them too.The embattled National Security Agency, which has been surreptitiously collecting phone records on all of us for many years as part of a secret surveillance operation, is implementing an OpenFlow SDN for its own internal operations. No mention was made whether an OpenFlow SDN also supports the agency’s surveillance operations – it’s doubtful the NSA would open up on the underpinnings of its spy network.But internally, the agency faces the same issues any large enterprise IT shop faces: do more, faster and at less cost with fewer people. And with a lot of oversight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At this week’s Open Network Summit, Google spoke for the first time publicly about its custom data center network. For nearly a decade, we’ve been hearing, reading and writing about how Google was building its own switches and writing its own software to handle the tremendous traffic load on its search engine and applications because vendor offerings were either not up to the task, too expensive, or both.This week we found out how they did it. In a keynote presentation at ONS, Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and Technical Lead for Networking, described the company’s data center network architecture, capabilities and capacity for a rapt audience thirsting for information on software-defined networking implementations and experiences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SANTA CLARA – Microsoft’s Azure couldn’t scale without SDN.The Microsoft cloud, through which the company’s software products are delivered, has 22 hyper-scale regions around the world. Azure storage and compute usage is doubling every six months, and Azure lines up 90,000 new subscribers a month.Fifty-seven percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure and the number of hosts quickly grew from 100,000 to millions, said CTO Mark Russinovich during his Open Network Summit keynote address here this week. Azure needs a virtualized, partitioned and scale-out design, delivered through software, in order to keep up with that kind of growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SANTA CLARA -- AT&T is considering offering bare metal switches and servers to consumers as customer premises equipment for the carrier’s services.
At the Open Network Summit conference here, Andre Fuetsch, AT&T senior vice president, Architecture & Design, said the economics of commodity bare metal switching, as well as the scale, performance and programmability, make it appealing for the carrier to sell into the customer premises.
+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: AT&T lays out 'radical' network changes with SDN+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SDN start-up PLUMgrid has named a former Cisco veteran as its new CEO.Larry Lang, who left Cisco in 2009 after a 16-year career, is PLUMgrid’s new CEO. He replaces founder Awais Nemat, who has been appointed chairman of the board of directors.Lang held various positions in enterprise and service provider management and marketing at Cisco. His last role there was vice president and general manager of the company’s Services and Mobility business unit, responsible for Cisco’s mobile Internet strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s enterprise SDN controller is still in controlled release a year after it was first supposed to be generally available and months after an updated GA date. The APIC Enterprise Module shipped in February in controlled release to “multiple” customers who are using it in production, Cisco says, including IBM, which is using it on behalf of German airliner Lufthansa.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAN DIEGO -- Cisco is out to prove it has an SDN for everyone.At its Cisco Live conference, the company unveiled offerings to drive programmability across its product line to address the requirements of enterprises, service providers and mega-scale data centers.The additions are to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) EVPN and NX-OS programmable network options. ACI is targeted at the mass market – commercial, enterprise and public sector customers – while BGP EVPN is aimed at service providers and programmable NX-OS at mega-scale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Senior Director of Technical Marketing and Solutions Engineering at Cisco, Frank D’Agostino leads the development and technical go-to-market strategy for Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the company’s portfolio of Software Defined Networking tools. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently spoke with D’Agostino about what the company is learning as customers adopt SDN. (D’Agostino was formerly VP of WW Technical Operations for Nicira Networks, the company VMware bought to drive its SDN strategy.)
Is there a profile emerging of what a typical ACI customer looks like in terms of the types of challenges they’re trying to address?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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.
Organizations are excited about the business value of the data that will be generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). But there’s less discussion about how to manage the devices that will make up the network, secure the data they generate and analyze it quickly enough to deliver the insights businesses need.
Software defined networking (SDN) can help meet these needs. By virtualizing network components and services, they can rapidly and automatically reconfigure network devices, reroute traffic and apply authentication and access rules. All this can help speed and secure data delivery, and improve network management, for even the most remote devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Cisco Live fast approaching, many third-party vendors who rely on Cisco and its installed base for their own business are announcing products before and at the show. Two are start-ups Glue Networks, a developer of SDN software for Cisco router WANs, and Avi Networks, a maker of application delivery controller software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here