An interesting alliance has been struck, with Nvidia partnering with IT consultancy Accenture and helpdesk vendor ServiceNow to offer what the vendors are calling the AI Lighthouse, a program designed to help ServiceNow customers quickly adopt generative AI tools.The IT service management and customer service markets seem a natural fit for generative AI. When customers or employees need help with something, that’s where generative AI can shine.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell Technologies is the latest IT vendor to jump on the generative AI bandwagon with a range of new AI offerings that span its hardware, software and services lineup.In May, Dell announced plans to develop integrated AI services in partnership with Nvidia. That service has come to fruition with this portfolio, dubbed Dell Generative AI Solutions. As part of the program, the company announced validated designs with Nvidia that are aimed at helping enterprises deploy AI workloads on premises. The new offerings also include professional services to help enterprises determine where and how to best use generative AI services.Typically, Nvidia GPUs go into servers for AI functions. But Dell's news isn't limited to servers. Dell is also announcing Precision workstations with expanded Nvidia GPU configurations to help users accelerate generative AI workloads locally on their devices.To read this article in full, please click here
Five companies that manufacture semiconductors for smartphones, automobiles and more have announced that they will form a company designed to advance the open source RISC-V architecture, in a move widely seen as being designed to reduce their dependence on licensed technology from Arm.The companies — Qualcomm, Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, NXP Semiconductors and Nordic Semiconductors — have yet to name this joint venture, but said in a statement issued Friday that the company will be registered in Germany, and that its focus will be on providing reference architectures and establishing industry solutions. The initial focus, according to the statement, will be on the automotive industry, but plans are in place to expand into mobile and IoT use cases.To read this article in full, please click here
Schneider Electric and Compass Datacenters have announced a partnership that's aimed at expanding the two companies' production capabilities for modular data centers. They're building a 110,000 square-foot facility where they'll integrate Schneider’s power management equipment with Compass’s prefabricated data center modules in an effort to speed deployments across the US.It’s an ideal match. Schneider makes the infrastructure that runs data centers, such as power generators and HVAC systems, and Compass designs and builds data centers for hyperscalars and cloud service providers worldwide. Compass builds standard-design data centers as well as the newer modular type, which is gaining in popularity.To read this article in full, please click here
When working on the Linux command line, you can start a task, move it to the background, and, when you’re ready to reverse the process, bring it back to the foreground. When you run a command or script in the foreground, it occupies your time on the command line – until it’s finished. When you need to do something else while still allowing that first task to complete, you can move it to the background where it will continue processing and spend your time working on something else.The easiest way to do this is by typing ^z (hold the Ctrl key and press “z”) after starting the process. This stops the process. Then type “bg” to move it to the background. The jobs command will show you that it is still running.To read this article in full, please click here
As data, applications, and workloads continue to move to the cloud, demand for IaaS networking is surging. The market for cloud-based IaaS networking will reach $19.4 billion in total global revenues this year, according to IDC, with a compound annual growth rate of 28% projected through 2026.Increasing cloud-native application architectures, distributed workloads, and their respective integration needs are the biggest drivers of IaaS cloud networking adoption, says IDC analyst Taranvir Singh."Traditional network architectures, transports and operational models are no longer able to meet the growing requirements and objectives of enterprises’ modern networking needs," he says. "Networks need to be aligned with cloud principles."To read this article in full, please click here
Aiming to bolster its assessment of Internet traffic health Cisco said it would buy startup Border Gateway Protocol monitoring firm Code BGP for an undisclosed amount.Privately held Code BGP will slide into Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence product portfolio and bring a cloud-based platform that among other features, maintains an inventory of IP address prefixes, peerings and outbound policies of an organization via configured sources, like BGP feeds. BGP tells Internet traffic what route to take, and the BGP best-path selection algorithm determines the optimal routes to use for traffic forwarding.Then, the system lets customers see and interact with this inventory in real-time through an open API and bring real-time detection of BGP hijacking, route leaks, and other BGP issues according to the company. Adding such capabilities will let ThousandEyes further expand its BGP monitoring and incident analysis capabilities to maintain health of the Internet as well as key applications and services, according to Joe Vaccaro vice president of products for Cisco’s ThousandEyes in a blog about the acquisition. To read this article in full, please click here
The chief obstruction to data center growth is not the availability of land, infrastructure, or talent. It's local power, according to commercial real estate services company CBRE In its 2023 global data center trends report, CBRE says the market is growing steadily and demand is constantly rising, but data center growth has been largely confined to a few select areas, and those areas are running out of power.No region embodies this more than Northern Virginia, which is the world's largest data center market with 2,132 megawatts (MW) of total inventory. Its growth happened for a couple of reasons. First, proximity to the US federal government. Second, because there's a major undersea cable to Europe in Northern Virginia, and data centers want to be as close to it as possible to minimize latency.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM debuted an AI-powered dashboard for tracking carbon emissions used by its cloud computing services, saying that the new Cloud Carbon Calculator can be used to help enterprises with compliance and reduce harmful carbon emissions.The calculator can be accessed via IBM’s cloud dashboard, where it provides a range of graphs and charts to track total carbon emissions created by a customer’s use of IBM’s cloud, breaking it down on a per-service, per-department and per-location basis.The ability to identify carbon emissions in a granular way should let customers identify particularly CO2-heavy workloads, areas or departments and change their cloud profile in order to minimize emissions, according to IBM. The main idea is to identify emissions “hot spots,” which the calculator does via machine learning and algorithmic functions developed in partnership with Intel.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which is capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts, is in its early stages, but is expected to increase rapidly as organizations find new uses for the technology.“The generative AI frenzy shows no signs of abating,” says Gartner analyst Frances Karamouzis. “Organizations are scrambling to determine how much cash to pour into generative AI solutions, which products are worth the investment, when to get started and how to mitigate the risks that come with this emerging technology.”To read this article in full, please click here
Nitel’s newest service offering takes the company’s existing network-as-a-service out of North America and into the international market, as the company announces the availability of its SASE capabilities and NaaS to 34 global regions.Nitel’s key offering is a full as-a-service network, leveraging relationships with data carriers — wired or wireless — at the local level to deliver basic connectivity, and then fold that into a robust enterprise networking suite, complete with SASE and private networking. The idea is to provide a more or less out-of-the-box network product that allows small and medium-size companies to hand the vast majority of their connectivity issues off to Nitel, which manages configuration and provisioning. In addition, Nitel provides SASE-standard security features like antimalware sandboxing, zero trust network access, data loss prevention and content filtering.To read this article in full, please click here
Reducing energy use and keeping qualified staff are top of mind for data center operators, according to Uptime Institute’s latest annual global data center survey.“Digital infrastructure managers are now most concerned with improving energy performance and dealing with staffing shortfalls, while government regulations aimed at improving data center sustainability and visibility are beginning to require attention, investment, and action,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director, Uptime Intelligence.To read this article in full, please click here
AI is nothing without lots of data, so high-speed, high-capacity storage is a must. Lenovo is the latest vendor to come out with new storage systems that are optimized for read-intensive enterprise AI workloads and large dataset workloads.Lenovo’s ThinkSystem DG enterprise storage arrays use all-flash storage and quad-level cell (QLC) architecture, the densest flash storage available. They’re capable of up to six times faster performance and up to 50% less cost compared to HDD arrays, Lenovo asserts. Its ThinkSystem DM3010H array is aimed at SMB customers and designed to offer better scalability and flexibility for a wide range of workloads, including file services, virtualization, backup and archive and other I/O applications, according to Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here
AI workloads are expected to put unprecedented performance and capacity demands on networks, and a handful of networking vendors have teamed up to enhance today’s Ethernet technology in order to handle the scale and speed required by AI.AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft announced the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), a group hosted by the Linux Foundation that’s working to develop physical, link, transport and software layer Ethernet advances.The industry celebrated Ethernet’s 50th anniversary this year. The hallmark of Ethernet has been its flexibility and adaptability, and the venerable technology will undoubtedly play a critical role when it comes to supporting AI infrastructures. But there are concerns that today’s traditional network interconnects cannot provide the required performance, scale and bandwidth to keep up with AI demands, and the consortium aims to address those concerns.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise networking hardware vendor EnGenuis will release one of the first Wi-Fi 7-enabled access points for business use, the company announced this week.The ECW536 uses the Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 chipset, and features a 4x4x4 antenna configuration. It’s got two 10Gb ethernet ports, and boasts several security enhancements, including business-class encryption protocols, RADIUS and isolated guest access.The main draw, however, is Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be, is the latest and greatest Wi-Fi specification, although official certification from the IEEE isn’t expected to start until the second half of 2024. The key upgrades in Wi-Fi 7 include wider channels (up to 320MHz), 4K quadrature amplitude modulation rather than 1K, and muiltilink operation, which uses multiple radio bands at the same time to serve one connection. All that adds up to a substantially increased theoretical throughput peak, at 46Gbps.To read this article in full, please click here
Fortinet has released two new high-speed, next generation firewalls designed to protect data center assets.The 387Gbps 3200F series and 164Gbps 900G series feature support for the vendor’s AI-Powered Security Services, which blend AI and machine-learning technologies to make customers aware of cyber threats and act on protecting resources much more quickly, according to Nirav Shah, vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet.FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services use real-time data from Fortinet’s threat researchers at FortiGuard Lab to monitor for new dangers. “We look at terabytes of data every day, and that's where we run our AI and machine learning to see different things – whether we need to enable AI-powered services with IPS, or utilize sandbox technologies to mitigate them,” Shah said. “If you look at the cybersecurity industry, and the amount of data that we see, and the patterns and other things that we need to recognize to find the threats – [it] is extremely tough if you do it manually.”To read this article in full, please click here
Linux systems use a number of file system types – such as Ext, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, JFS, XFS, ZFS, XFS, ReiserFS and btrfs. Fortunately, there are a number of commands that can look at your file systems and report on the type of each of them. This post covers seven ways to display this information.To begin, the file system types that are used on Linux systems are described below.File system types
Ext4 is the fourth generation of the ext file system, released in 2008 and pretty much the default since 2010. It supports file systems as big as 16 terabytes. It also supports unlimited subdirectories where ext3 only supports 32,000. Yet it’s backward compatible with both ext3 and ext2, thus allowing them to be mounted with the same driver. Ext4 is also very stable, widely supported and compatible with solid state drives.To read this article in full, please click here
Thanks to the mania surrounding AI as well as the impact of inflation, spending on servers and storage for cloud deployments climbed in the first quarter of this year. Looking ahead, cloud infrastructure sales are expected to grow over the next four years while on-premises spending will diminish, reports IDC.The research firm’s quarterly enterprise infrastructure tracker finds that spending on compute and storage infrastructure products in the first quarter increased 14.9% year over year to $21.5 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outpace the non-cloud segment, which declined 0.9% in 1Q23 to $13.8 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
If you've been considering a memory upgrade for your systems, now might be the time to do it. The lengthy decline of memory prices has nearly stopped, and while that doesn’t mean prices are going to go up just yet, it's likely to happen down the road.DRAM and NAND flash memory makers have had to endure a severe downturn in average selling prices over the past six months, as part of the typical cyclical nature of memory sales. But a new report by technology industry analyst firm TrendForce says price declines for some forms of memory have slowed to almost zero.To read this article in full, please click here
Cradlepoint this week shared its strategy to couple 5G wireless with its secure access service edge (SASE) platform to provide wireless WAN and hybrid WAN environments with cloud management and SIM-based security capabilities.The platform builds off Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Exchange 5G SD-WAN and will incorporate zero trust and cloud-based security technology Cradlepoint acquired recently with its acquisition of Ericom. The company plans to roll out the updates in phases over the next 12 months, with its Cellular Intelligence component available now.To read this article in full, please click here