It looks like Microsoft is looking to give itself the gift of networking in the form of an acquisition — Mellanox. But it may have to get in line.An Israeli financial publication called TheMarker reports that Microsoft not only has an interest in acquiring the network chip maker, but it also has reportedly engaged Goldman Sachs to handle negotiations. The rumors first popped up before Christmas, and understandably there has been little activity since.But Microsoft may not be the only vendor looking to grab Mellanox. Data Centre Dynamics in the U.K. reported last month that three other firms — Xilinx, Intel, and Broadcom — could also be interested in acquiring the company. As far back as October, CNBC was reporting that Mellanox was looking for a buyer.To read this article in full, please click here
As everyone who carries a mobile phone has no doubt already learned the hard way, even the most sophisticated devices can be hobbled by a lack of power. And those power issues are especially problematic when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), where many IoT devices exist in hard-to-reach locations with little access to external power sources.Whether implanted in a cardiac patient’s heart or a climate-monitoring installation in a remote rain forest, many IoT devices must rely on internal batteries for a long, long time.That means IoT devices need two things:
High-capacity batteries that hold sufficient power to run the device in a small space, and with a long shelf life so they don’t lose that power over time
Power-efficiency improvements so they consume less of that precious battery juice
[ Also see our list of the most powerful Internet of Things companies and learn about the Industrial Internet of Things. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
IoT batteries getting a lot of attention
To a large extent, the IoT’s ability to work in difficult-to-reach locations will depend on how well those two requirements are met in the coming Continue reading
Todays interenet of things market includes countless consumer gadgets such as routers, Internet-connected video cameras and smart TVs, as well as innumerable enterprise IoT devices for business, scientific and industrial applications.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Looking to hasten the adoption of all things edge computing, fog and Industrial Internet of Things, the OpenFog Consortium (OFC) and the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) are combining forces.The IIC membership, which includes Cisco, Juniper and Microsoft looks to transform business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things, while the OFC addresses fog computing and the bandwidth, latency and communications challenges associated with IoT, 5G and AI applications.To read this article in full, please click here
The disciplines of networking, security and regulatory compliance are challenges for all organizations, but especially so for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) for a variety of reasons.A primary challenge is in implementing technology solutions, most of which are point solutions that operate in silos. This leads to “swivel chair” operations where networking and security professionals have to consult multiple separate consoles to keep tabs on how well everything is performing and whether cyber threats are bringing risk to the business. The lack of integration of the siloed solutions can leave gaps in coverage and cause extra work for those in charge of the network.To read this article in full, please click here
When I think of restaurant technology, I think of stoves and dishwashers and maybe fancy molecular gastronomy gadgets like the stuff that former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold likes to talk about.Apparently, however, even this kind of “Modernist Cuisine” is now old school when it comes to restaurant tech. The new, new thing is combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize the front-of-the-house systems in order to predict demand, track inventory, and improve order and billing accuracy. Overall, IoT promises to help restaurants leverage IoT and AI to streamline operations, boost employee happiness, and innovate in areas beyond creating delicious new dishes.To read this article in full, please click here
I’m beginning to understand why Thomas Kurian left Oracle to try and right the foundering ship that is Google Cloud Platform. He reportedly butted heads with the boss (that would be Larry Ellison) over a desire to make Oracle products more readily available on competitive cloud platforms, and this announcement reflects that. It’s a nice bit of news if you are an Oracle customer, but not if you use a competitive product.Last week at KubeCon, the company announced the Oracle Cloud Native Framework, which is designed for organizations looking to build hybrid cloud architectures across both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure.It’s something all of the competition is doing, of course. Oracle’s efforts are best compared to Microsoft and IBM, since they also had legacy systems and customers to move to the cloud as well.To read this article in full, please click here
An investigation by an outside firm that specializes in all manner of corporate investigations has found no evidence that motherboards sold by Super Micro Computer but made in China had secret chips implanted in them for spying or backdoor access.Like every other OEM, Super Micro, based in San Jose, California, sources many of its components from China. There have been issues raised in the past about Chinese-owned hardware companies. IBM faced some initial resistance when it sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, especially since many government agencies — including the Defense Department — used IBM hardware.But Super Micro was rocked last October when Bloomberg BusinessWeek ran a lengthy feature article alleging that tiny chips were being secretly stashed on Super Micro motherboards for the purpose of providing backdoors for hackers to illegally access the servers.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s pretty much just simple energy loss that causes heat build-up in electronics. That ostensibly innocuous warming up, though, causes a two-fold problem:Firstly, the loss of energy, manifested as heat, reduces the machine’s computational power — much of the purposefully created and needed, high-power energy disappears into thin air instead of crunching numbers. And secondly, as data center managers know, to add insult to injury, it costs money to cool all that waste heat.For both of those reasons (and some others, such as ecologically related ones, and equipment longevity—the tech breaks down with temperature), there’s an increasing effort underway to build computers in such a way that heat is eliminated — completely. Transistors, superconductors, and chip design are three areas where major conceptual breakthroughs were announced in 2018. They’re significant developments, and consequently it might not be too long before we see the ultimate in efficiency: the cold-running computer.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM and Nvidia further enhanced their hardware relationship with the announcement of a new turnkey AI solution that combines IBM Spectrum Scale scale-out file storage with Nvidia’s GPU-based AI server.The name is a mouthful: IBM SpectrumAI with Nvidia DGX. It combines Spectrum Scale, a high performance Flash-based storage system, with Nvidia’s DGX-1 server, which is designed specifically for AI. In addition to the regular GPU cores, the V100 processor comes with special AI chips called Tensor Cores optimized to run machine learning workloads. The box comes with a rack of nine Nvidia DGX-1 servers, with a total of with 72 Nvidia V100 Tensor Core GPUs.To read this article in full, please click here
The selection process for our roundup of 10 data-center virtualization startups to watch began with 33 recommendations and nominations that were sent via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribers to the Startup50 email newsletter.Several of those startups had to be eliminated right off the bat not because they wouldn’t be a good fit for this roundup – they would be – but because they had already been covered in previous roundups, including those focused on storage, hybrid cloud and business continuity.To read this article in full, please click here
Data-center virtualization is about much more than servers these days. Everything from storage to applications to entire infrastructure stacks are being virtualized by startups seeking to push virtualization throughout the entire IT stack.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Cloud computing is changing everything – just ask Juniper CTO Bikash Koley.Along with that notion Koley says that there are a number of certainties about the future of building out large cloud infrastructures: Multicloud is a real inflection point for enterprises and service providers; there will be private cloud;s and that the way all infrastructure will be built going forward will be different from the way things are done today.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ]
juniper
Bikash KoleyTo read this article in full, please click here
The ss (socket statistics) command provides a lot of information on network activity by displaying details on socket activity. One way to get started, although this may be a bit overwhelming, is to use the ss -h (help) command to get a listing of the command's numerous options. Another is to try some of the more useful commands and get an idea what each of them can tell you.One very useful command is the ss -s command. This command will show you some overall stats by transport type. In this output, we see stats for RAW, UDP, TCP, INET and FRAG sockets.
$ ss -s
Total: 524
TCP: 8 (estab 1, closed 0, orphaned 0, timewait 0)
Transport Total IP IPv6
RAW 2 1 1
UDP 7 5 2
TCP 8 6 2
INET 17 12 5
FRAG 0 0 0
Raw sockets allow direct sending and receiving of IP packets without protocol-specific transport layer formatting and are used for security appliications such as nmap
TCP provides transmission control protocol is the primary connection protocol
UDP (user datagram protocol) is similar to TCP but without the error checking
INET includes both of the above (INET4 and INET6 can be Continue reading
IDG
To help IT pros attain top performance for their software-defined data-center networks (SDDCN), we have identified 10 crucial technology areas to watch and evaluate during 2019.SDDCN performance requires advanced network software to provision, manage and secure high-speed traffic flows, and network administrators need automated solutions to monitor and deliver reliable quality of service to critical applications.To read this article in full, please click here
The rise of SD-WANs has been well documented by every analyst firm that covers network technology. I have the market growing from $1.0 billion in 2017 to over $9.5 billion in 2022, indicating the market is about to go through an accelerated phase of growth. Given SD-WANs can help save money and improve network agility, it seems like a no-brainer to evolve to an SD-WAN.However, the path to an SD-WAN isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors to be considered, including the use of broadband, how to optimize the links, network architecture, and the impact of moving the on-premises infrastructure out to the cloud. If anything is missed, application performance could be severely degraded, which would negate the return on investment of the project.To read this article in full, please click here
Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ]
But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here
By now you’ve heard countless stories for how insecure public Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, bars, and large venues can be too dangerous for users – malware can infect personal devices, hackers can acquire usernames and passwords, and ransomware can hold private data hostage.In places like airports, potentially millions of travelers are at risk to these types of cyberattacks because of open networks. According to an assessment by Coronet in a CNBC article, you can put a stop to these problems by not joining an open, public Wi-Fi network at all – or if you do, update your device software and use different passwords for different accounts in the event you do get hacked.To read this article in full, please click here
Software-defined WAN traffic is exploding, and so is the number of technology providers competing for enterprise SD-WAN customers. Here are some key issues to consider as IT pros investigate SD-WAN deployment options and weigh the importance of features such as application prioritization, multicloud support and integrated network security.SD-WAN technologies and services are designed to combine multiple physical WAN links into one logical network and provide traffic prioritization to accelerate application performance. Using network abstraction, SD-WAN improves the economics of branch connectivity by enabling organizations to leverage inexpensive circuits, such as the Internet, to address growing bandwidth requirements. SD-WAN is relatively easy to deploy and manage as it maps new services – application prioritization, security, management – on top of existing physical networks.To read this article in full, please click here
Two more signs it’s a hybrid cloud world: This week, Red Hat, in the process of being bought by IBM, acquired a startup that specializes in managing storage across multi-cloud environments. And Amazon launched a raft of hybrid storage services, as well as a service that allows customers to run Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in your own data center.[ Read also: AWS does hybrid cloud with on-prem hardware, VMware help ]
Red Hat acquires data storage startup NooBaa
IBM is not expected to close the planned $34 billion purchase of Red Hat until the second half of 2019, so in the meantime, Red Hat continues on its way, grabbing cloud startups it sees as strategic. This week, it announced its acquisition of NooBaa, which specializes in managing data storage services across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.To read this article in full, please click here