The mainframe has been declared “dead”, “morphed” and “transformed” so many times over the years sometimes it’s sometimes hard to believe the Big Iron still has an identity in the enterprise world.But clearly it does and in a major way, too. [ Lessons on diversity in IT: 10 professional organizations focused on diversity in tech • Being Black in IT: 3 tech leaders share their stories • Gender gapped: The state of gender diversity in IT • Māori participation in IT: diversity insights for CIOs everywhere • IT snapshot: Ethnic diversity in the tech industry ]
Take recent news as an example: According to IBM, 75% of the top 20 global banks are running the newest z15 mainframe, and the IBM Systems Group reported a 68% gain in Q2 IBM Z revenue year-over-year.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has further broadened the cloud-integration options available to its SD-WAN customers with new connectivity options to AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services.With these additions, Cisco’s goal is to ensure cloud-destined traffic gets into the cloud network faster, improving management, performance, security and reducing the latency that can impact cloud workloads.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN?
“Hybrid cloud is the norm and Cisco’s plan is bringing the networking support to improve app performance and add security without adding pain—it’s the right direction,” said Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research.To read this article in full, please click here
With the recent release of the linear tape–open 9 (LTO-9) standard, tape drives with increased capacity and speed should be available soon, but that doesn’t mean users of tape drives should rush to buy them.Here are some of the pros and cons to weigh when considering whether an upgrade is in order.Tape drives are a very reliable way to write data to storage, and are very good at holding onto data for multiple decades. They make an excellent medium for long-term storage and for shipping large amounts of data across long distances (a FedEx truck has unlimited bandwidth).[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
What tape is not good at is going slow. LTO-8 has a compressed transfer speed of 900MB/s, which is significantly faster than most any backup you're going to send to it. It's definitely faster than any incremental backup that will be sent to it, and that comprises most backups. That makes tapes as the initial target of backups problematic.To read this article in full, please click here
IDC released two surveys last week with seemingly contradictory results, but there is an underlying pattern: For now, on-premises hardware sales are dipping, while cloud sales are booming.In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the global server market grew 19.8% year over year in the second calendar quarter of 2020 to $24.0 billion, while worldwide server shipments grew 18.4% to nearly 3.2 million units in the same time period.
READ MORE: IT employment takes a hit but overall remains healthyTo read this article in full, please click here
Network executives are making strides in their ongoing efforts to reduce network management tool sprawl, but there's still plenty of room for improvement on the road to a consolidated, platform-based toolset.Nearly two-thirds of enterprises (64%) in EMA's Network Management Megatrends 2020 report indicated they use between four and 10 tools, and another 17% use more than 10 tools. And that's just the tools that companies will admit to.To read this article in full, please click here
The Federal Communications Commission will take steps toward auctioning off two more frequency ranges in the 3.1GHz to 4.9GHz band for commercial use, following up on auctions that created more bandwidth for 5G and other wireless services.
5G resources
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Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling
5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul
CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises
The first frequency range sits between 3.3GHz and 3.5GHz, is 100MHz wide and would become available nationwide. The first step toward redistributing the band would be to remove allocations in that range that are now held by non-governmental entities and reassign them to bandwidth between 3.45GHz and 3.55GHz or between 2.9GHz and 3GHz, the commission said in an announcement.To read this article in full, please click here
Among many options for low-power, relatively short-ranged connectivity, two technologies stand out – near-field communication and Bluetooth low energy. Both have relatively low deployment costs and are simple to use.NFC is best known for being the technology behind many modern smart cards. NFC chips need to be very close – within a few centimeters – to a reader for a connection to be made, but that’s an upside in its primary enterprise use case, which is security and access control.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Bluetooth LE is a low-power derivative of the main Bluetooth standard, offsetting lower potential throughput with substantially reduced energy consumption and the consequent ability to fit into a wider range of potential use cases.To read this article in full, please click here
Like other hot new areas of enterprise tech, edge computing is a broad architectural concept rather than a specific set of solutions. Primarily, edge computing is applied to low-latency situations where compute power must be close to the action, whether that activity is industrial IoT robots flinging widgets or sensors continuously taking the temperature of vaccines in production. The research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that by 2022, 90 percent of industrial enterprises will employ edge computing.To read this article in full, please click here
Edge computing means different things to different players. But one thing is constant: Location matters.Edge computing enables autonomous mining equipment to react to unexpected conditions a mile below the surface, even when disconnected from a network. When a hotel guest places a food order from a mobile phone and wants to have it delivered poolside, edge computing makes it possible to steer servers to the guest's lounge chair.To read this article in full, please click here
After months of teasing and rumor, GPU and AI vendor Nvidia announced it would purchase Arm Holdings from its parent company SoftBank for $40 billion. The purchase includes $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing. That will break the piggy bank because Nvidia had $10.9 billion in cash on hand as of the most recent quarter.Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $31.4 billion in 2016. At the time, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said it was an investment in the Internet of Things. But SoftBank, known for its profligate spending on acquisitions and investments, made some bad investments in WeWork and Uber, among others, and was saddled with $25 billion in debt.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo Data Center Group on Thursday introduced four new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) products aimed at a variety of workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), SAP HANA, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes.HCI products have grown in popularity because they are easily deployed and can get a variety of workloads up and running quickly. HCI is available either in hardware/appliance form or as software. HCI hardware vendors are the usual suspects – HP Enterprise, Dell, Lenovo – while the software vendors include Nutanix and VMware.Lenovo is focused on ready-to-deploy HCI solutions from both software firms. It boasts that its hardware is easy to deploy and manage with simple updates, automatic scalability and a consumption-based use model.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco Meraki added to its SD-WAN portfolio with support for workloads running in Microsoft Azure cloud environments.Specifically, Cisco said it has integrated its SD-WAN Powered by Cisco Meraki offering with Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN service, which will let customers automate secure connectivity between Meraki MX appliances at branch locations directly with the Azure service, regardless of geographical location.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN?
The Meraki SD-WAN package is tyically aimed at what Cisco calls “lean IT environments” and includes a variety of integrated branch connectivity, security, management, orchestration and automation support.To read this article in full, please click here
Arm Ltd. last week announced the Cortex-R82, a chip that is both storage and data processing-capable, which could enable a whole new generation of storage devices that help process the data they store.Storage processor chips, such as those made by Marvell but also storage device makers like EMC, handle the I/O and disk management, but if you want to process the data, that job falls to the CPU. This means data has to be moved in and out of the drive to be processed, a job that falls to two separate devices.But there is an emerging hardware category known as computational storage where the processing is done where the data resides, rather than moving it into memory. Data is processed through various methods, like indexing and schema, eliminating the latency of data movement and freeing up the CPU. Obviously this can only be done on SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here
The stat command supplies a lot of detailed information on files.It provides not just the date/time of the most recent file changes, but also shows when files were most recently accessed and permissions changed. It tells you the file size in both bytes and blocks. It displays the inode being used by the file along with the file type. It includes the file owner and the associated user group both by name and UID/GID. It displays file permissions in both the “rwx” (referred to as the “human-readable” format) and numerically. On some systems, it might even include the date and time that a file was created (called its “birth”).[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
In addition to providing all this information, the stat command can also be used to create file listings. These listings are extremely flexible in that you can choose to include any or all of the information described above.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM and its Red Hat company have opened up what they call a one-stop-shop for customers looking to build, deploy and manage hybrid-cloud applications on-premises or in multicloud environments.With Red Hat Marketplace, enterprise customers can find and buy the tools and services they need to build cloud-native applications across public and private cloud environments through one curated repository, Red Hat executives said.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
IBM and Red Hat executives said the enterprise software and service marketplace is specifically aimed at hybrid-cloud computing customers.To read this article in full, please click here
The onset of the pandemic caught most organizations unware, and IT departments were no exception. They had to address that workers could suddenly no longer safely come into the office, doctors needed to stand up telemedicine services, and professional and amateur sports were just generally scrambling.Groups like the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center have been at the forefront of many such efforts, particularly those being undertaken by municipalities and school districts. The group helps provide technological know-how through volunteer workers, and help keep organizations connected in the wake of disasters.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
After COVID, the group has been a lot more active, according to operations director Joe Hillis.To read this article in full, please click here
Want to get work done a little faster, spend less time remembering commands and maybe even show your coworkers how clever you are? Easy. Set up several dozen bash aliases.Your days will get easier and a tad less stressful. You might even have some fun. In this post, we'll look at the various types of aliases that you can set up, and what you need to know to manage them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Why use aliases?
Using aliases helps you to avoid having to type a lot of command details, especially those that are hard to remember or require a lengthy string of options that might have to be entered in some particular order before they'll spit out just the output that you're waiting to see.To read this article in full, please click here
U.S. Army researchers are exploring the use of ultraviolet optical communications in battlefield situations because, under the right circumstances, the technology might support links that are undetectable to the enemy.One thing the researchers looked at was the effects of attenuation, the natural phenomenon of the signals getting weaker over distance. They wanted to know whether there was a distance range in which the signals were weak enough that adversaries likely couldn’t detect them, but still be strong enough that friendly receivers could. They say they observed that to be the case, but the research paper about their work doesn’t say what those distances are.To read this article in full, please click here
The term “Internet of Things” can be used to describe a huge range of different technologies, from sensors to gateways to back-end systems that organize data and keep machine-to-machine networks secure. Lots of attention is rightly paid to the way IoT systems gather data and how it moves from place to place. However, for some parts of the IoT, the issue of how to keep sensors powered may be just as important.Particularly in the case of IoT systems that feature small sensors and sensors that might be far away from each other or from the rest of the system, energy usage is a critical concern, because traditional wired power may simply not be an option.To read this article in full, please click here
All-flash storage arrays are fairly common in the most mission-critical of environments, where response time is of the essence. But if you move a step down to where archival activity takes place, there are still plenty of hard-disk/flash hybrid storage arrays.That’s because hard-disk drives have retained one advantage over flash: capacity. HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital are pushing into the 20TB range for a whole lot less than a comparable flash drive.But Pure Storage thinks the second generation of its FlashArray//C storage platform will be a hybrid flash/disk storage killer because it has the capacity to match a hybrid array with an all-flash storage setup. The pitch is that with FlashArray//C’s capacity, enterprises can do away with hard-drive-based storage, which draws much more power than an SSD and generate far more heat.To read this article in full, please click here