There was an old joke: "To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer." Now it seems the reverse is true. The reliability of data center equipment is vastly improved but the humans running them have not kept up and it's a threat to uptime.The Uptime Institute has surveyed thousands of IT professionals throughout the year on outages and said the vast majority of data center failures are caused by human error, from 70 percent to 75 percent.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
And some of them are severe. It found more than 30 percent of IT service and data center operators experienced downtime that they called a “severe degradation of service” over the last year, with 10 percent of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million.To read this article in full, please click here
Linux provides several handy commands for viewing both files and processes in a branching, tree-like format that makes it easy to view how they are related. In this post, we'll look at the ps, pstree and tree commands along with some options they provide to help focus your view on what you want to see.ps
The ps command that we all use to list processes has some interesting options that many of us never take advantage of. While the commonly used ps -ef provides a complete listing of running processes, the ps -ejH command adds a nice effect. It indents related processes to make the relationship between these processes visually more clear – as in this excerpt:To read this article in full, please click here
The Internet of Things and 5G could be among the benefactors of an upcoming $20 million U.S. government cash injection designed to come up with new architectures to replace existing public internet.FABRIC, as the National Science Foundation-funded umbrella project is called, aims to come up with a proving ground to explore new ways to move, keep and compute data in shared infrastructure such as the public internet. The project “will allow scientists to explore what a new internet could look like at scale,” says the lead institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a media release. And it “will help determine the internet architecture of the future.”To read this article in full, please click here
Common sense dictates that if your business wants to scale upwards, it needs to secure more sales. However, building a solid base of satisfied customers who will recommend your services is impossible if your sales team struggles with an overly complicated CRM platform. Rather than spending thousands of hours fumbling with complex CRM tools, you can optimize your sales efforts with PipelineDeals’ easy-to-use platform, and your business can sign up for a 14-day free trial or customized demo now. To read this article in full, please click here
Floor space is often at a premium in a cramped data center, and Schneider Electric believes it has a fix for that: a wall-mounted server rack.The EcoStruxure Micro Data Center Wall Mount is a 6U design, meaning it has the capacity of six rack units. Schneider is pushing its space-saving option as an edge solution. The company's EcoStruxure IT Expert remote management and vulnerability assessment service will be available for the wall-mount units, even when installed in non-secured edge locations.
READ MORE: Micro-modular data centers set to multiplyTo read this article in full, please click here
Managing the Wide Area Network (WAN) for Redmond Inc., a supplier of industrial and commercial products – from salt that’s used to protect winter roadways to organic dairy products and health items – is an easier job today for the company’s technical project manager Aaron Gabrielson than it was a year ago.Redmond manages a phone system, point of sale and fax centrally out of headquarters in Heber City, Utah, which means each of Redmond’s 10 branch sites across the Midwest need a reliable connection back to headquarters in Utah. That’s easier for some sites, like those in Salt Lake City, than others, such as rural areas where there may only be a handful of workers on a farm.To read this article in full, please click here
The average consumer constantly thinks about money, and yet, many misconceptions and unknowns plague our minds when our own personal finances are brought up. Financial literacy is an often neglected topic despite it making a major impact on our lives and our future. If terms like CD rates, mortgages, APR, and taxes leave you scratching your head in confusion, then GOBankingRates.com is here to help.GOBankingRates.com is your one-stop source for financial education. It offers a wealth of information (pun intended) from financial experts on everything money-related, from opening a bank account and credit card to investing in stocks for the first time. GOBankingRates.com demystifies money and provides step-by-step guidance on how to take control of your financial journey and live richer.To read this article in full, please click here
Network World’s annual State of the Network study provides a comprehensive view of technology adoption trends among network IT.This definitive research focuses on technology implementation objectives and reveals how leading objectives change the way IT decision-makers do their jobs, as well as the way their organizations function.Survey results reveal trends about how network teams collaborate with other departments in the corporate structure, what factors derive technology investment, which way IT spending is moving and more.This year Network World is looking for IT pros’ experience with technologies including 5G, SD-WAN, Wi-Fi and Edge ComputingTo read this article in full, please click here
In today's data-driven world, high performance computing (HPC) is emerging as the go-to platform for enterprises looking to gain deep insights into areas as diverse as genomics, computational chemistry, financial risk modeling and seismic imaging. Initially embraced by research scientists who needed to perform complex mathematical calculations, HPC is now gaining the attention of a wider number of enterprises spanning an array of fields."Environments that thrive on the collection, analysis and distribution of data – and depend on reliable systems to support streamlined workflow with immense computational power – need HPC," says Dale Brantly, director of systems engineering at Panasas, an HPC data-storage-systems provider.To read this article in full, please click here
The government agency that gave us the Internet 50 years ago is now looking to drastically increase network speed to address bottlenecks and chokepoints for compute-intensive applications.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Pentagon, has unveiled a computing initiative, one of many, that will attempt to overhaul the network stack and interfaces that cannot keep up with high-end processors and are often the choke point for data-driven applications.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
The DARPA initiative, Fast Network Interface Cards, or FastNICs, aims to boost network performance by a factor of 100 through a clean-slate transformation of the network stack from the application to the system software layers running on top of steadily faster hardware. DARPA is soliciting proposals from networking vendors. .To read this article in full, please click here
After years of shifting applications to the public cloud, enterprises realize it’s not the right fit for every app and are pulling some of them back to private clouds, forcing the businesses to adopt a hybrid strategy. But it’s not an easy process and one that may require formal training and certifications for the IT pros tasked with this important transition.“A huge desire to move to the cloud, and pressure from lines of business to move to the cloud, have created an experience gap that has led to serious missteps and forced IT teams to repatriate workloads they had put in the cloud back into the data center,” says Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at IT research firm ESG. “IT’s level of competence, experience, and education in how to integrate with the cloud is woefully inadequate.”To read this article in full, please click here
At its Memory and Storage Day 2019 in Seoul last week, Intel made several announcements concerning its Optane persistent storage as well as NAND flash capacity.Optane is a new form of non-volatile memory from Intel that has the storage capacity of a solid state drive (SSD) but speed almost equal to DRAM. It sits between memory and storage to act as a large, fast cache. While some come in a PCI Express card design, the predominant design is DRAM memory sticks that plug into the motherboard. And they cost a fortune. A 512GB Optane stick will run you $8,000.See how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency
Intel announced a new generation of Optane memory codenamed "Alder Stream," which it said has a 50x lower failure rate than 3D NAND and also triples the transfers per second compared to the current generation of Optane on the market today.To read this article in full, please click here
For Michael Soler, a senior infrastructure manager at Westcon-Comstor, a major IT distributor, moving to a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) was as much about taking control of the network as it was about saving money.The move accomplished both, according to Soler. “It’s been a very successful story,” says Soler. “We have gained visibility, and this means control. I can see which users are using which applications, and we can look at bandwidth. We wanted to save money and we greatly succeeded.”Of course, there is more to the story than that. Soler says moving to an SD-WAN platform, built by Silver Peak, accomplished many goals at once. These included:To read this article in full, please click here
If you’ve ever had to restart a time-consuming process because your SSH session was disconnected, you might be very happy to learn about an interesting tool that you can use to avoid this problem — the screen tool.Screen, which is a terminal multiplexor, allows you to run many terminal sessions within a single ssh session, detaching from them and reattaching them as needed. The process for doing this is surprising simple and involves only a handful of commands. [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ]
To start a screen session, you simply type screen within your ssh session. You then start your long-running process, type Ctrl+A Ctrl+D to detach from the session and screen -r to reattach when the time is right.To read this article in full, please click here
While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.
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I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco this week warned its IOS and IOS XE customers of 13 vulnerabilities in the operating system software they should patch as soon as possible.All of the vulnerabilities – revealed in the company’s semiannual IOS and IOS XE Software Security Advisory Bundle – have a security impact rating (SIR) of "high". Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to, conduct a command injection attack on, or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device, Cisco stated. "How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you"
Two of the vulnerabilities affect both Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software. Two others affect Cisco IOS Software, and eight of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XE Software. The final one affects the Cisco IOx application environment. Cisco has confirmed that none of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XR Software or Cisco NX-OS Software. Cisco has released software updates that address these problems.To read this article in full, please click here
IoT needs edge computing. The world is on pace to hit 41.6 billion connected IoT devices generating 79.4 zettabytes of data in 2025, according to research firm IDC. To make the most of that data, enterprises are investing in compute, storage and networking gear at the edge, including IoT gateways and hyperconverged infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
Current wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, won’t provide enough support for the billions of internet of things (IoT) sensors and networks that are expected to come on stream in the next few years, say researchers. More speed, efficiency and bandwidth will be needed. Plus, the equipment must cost significantly less than existing gear, including upcoming 5G equipment.To address the issue, scientists at University of Waterloo are developing a stripped-down version of millimeter wave technology.“A growing strain will be placed on requirements of wireless networks,” the researchers say in an article announcing a new low-power, low-cost 5G network technology that it calls mmX. They say the technology is specifically geared towards IoT.To read this article in full, please click here