The Internet of Things (IoT) has already firmly embedded itself into America’s homes, industries, and infrastructure, and now it’s tackling that final frontier of the market, the office. Increasingly, America’s savviest businesses are adopting IoT tech into their office environments to ease their employees’ workloads, save serious money on overhead and by reducing fraud, and to gather valuable data which can be used to optimize their operations.So how exactly are IoT solutions being applied to office dilemmas, and is the increasingly trendy “smart office” anything more than a temporary fad? A quick look at the union between smart tech and America’s workspaces shows that this phenomenon is anything but temporary, and will fundamentally reshape how we work and run our businesses well into the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fiber Channel (FC) storage networks have always been somewhat of a black box. Servers and storage devices are plugged in, and things magically seem to work.For the most part, storage-area networks (SANs) are reliable and perform well – and they better because the applications that rely of FC-SANs are typically the most important ones in the company. But what happens when things aren’t working? A poorly performing SAN might mean that the database with critical customer information isn’t available or financial records can’t be pulled up. Also on Network World: 10 Most important open source networking projects
Historically, troubleshooting SANs has been difficult because the FC switches give off little data that can be used to identify the source of a problem. Typically, engineers would need to deploy a physical test access port (TAP) or packet broker in front of the product to capture the data. This may seem like a reasonable strategy until one prices out TAPs and learns the price per port is about 5-10x a FC port. Companies that go down this route often buy a few and deploy them only when there is a problem. This causes the engineering team to always be in Continue reading
Cisco and Google have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.It’s the latest partnership for Google’s cloud since former VMware CEO Diane Greene took over management of the company’s cloud operations. Google has inked similar pacts with VMware and hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix.For Cisco though, the deal with Google marks an evolution in the company’s cloud strategy, one that has gone through many iterations in recent years.A closer look
Since the dawn of the hyper-scale IaaS public cloud movement, Cisco has pivoted its cloud strategy a handful of times. The company initially made an effort to build an Intercloud, a network of its partner providers running Cisco gear that would be interconnected and allow customers to shift workloads around. In the face of massive growth from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, that strategy went by the wayside.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While many of today’s always-connected tech devices take advantage of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturers and application developers are starting to discover the benefits of doing more compute and analytics on the devices themselves.This on-device approach helps reduce latency for critical applications, lower dependence on the cloud, and better manage the massive deluge of data being generated by the IoT. An example of this trend is the recently announced Nest Cam IQ indoor security camera, which uses on-device vision processing to watch for motion, distinguish family members, and send alerts only if someone is not recognized or doesn’t fit pre-defined parameters. By performing computer vision tasks within the camera, Nest reduces the amount of bandwidth, cloud processing, and cloud storage used versus the alternative of sending raw streams of video over the network. In addition, on-device processing improves the speed of alerts while reducing chances of annoying, recurrent false alarms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Production downtime’s days are limited thanks to the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Machine-embedded, network-connected sensors along with the collection of massive amounts of data will allow for self-healing manufacturing, scientists say.That’s the concept behind an enthusiastic research project called SelSus currently being explored by multiple European academic institutions and manufacturers, including Ford.Also on Network World: How industrial IoT is making steel production smarter
The idea that the team proposes is to not just detect weaknesses during production, but to also fix the potential issues automatically through a kind of mathematically calculated self-healing. The scientists say diagnostics should supply recommendations before a piece of equipment has failed. That self-healing aspect would take equipment monitoring to the next level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From an infrastructure perspective, Fidelity Investments uses a combination of private cloud hosted in company data centers plus multiple public cloud platforms, leading to the question, how to manage this hybrid infrastructure?One key is being flexible, say Maria Azua Himmel, senior vice president of distributed systems at the 71-year old multi-national with $2.13 trillion in assets under management.Azua is attempting to implement strategies among Fidelity’s application developers to ensure that when new apps are built they can be run in almost any environment, whether it be one of the public clouds the company uses or inside its own data centers. To do this Azua is advocating for the use of application containers and software-defined infrastructure that can be controlled via application programming interfaces (APIs).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud revolution began in the Linux and Unix world, and for a long time the cloud wasn’t a welcoming environment for workloads that run on Windows Server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
To understand where we are going, we first must understand where we have been. This applies equally well to the history of nations across the globe as it does to computers and computer networking.With that in mind, we’re taking a slow (somewhat meandering) stroll through the history of how computers talk to each other. Last time, we talked a bit about dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) – popular through the 1980s and the bulk of the 1990s.Also on Network World: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it
Today, I’d like to talk about one of the most influential, but rarely discussed, networking protocol suites: PARC Universal Packet (PUP).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is trying to be the brains behind the increasingly brawny presence of IoT in all corners of the business world, using its AI expertise to offer insight into piles of new data, provision new implementations, and help drive decision-making.The company thinks that its Watson AI is the ideal back-end for IoT, which is an area that few companies are addressing so directly. There’s a great deal of uptake around technology that connects new devices to the network, but comparatively little that actually does meaningful work on the floods of new data provided as a consequence.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: REVIEW: Turbonomic, VMware virtualization management tools + Cisco snaps up streaming-data startup PerspicaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Is a smartphone a thing?The question isn’t as silly as it may sound, at least in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and this week’s partnership between Apple and General Electric. According to Apple, the deal calls for the two companies to “deliver powerful industrial apps designed to bring predictive data and analytics from Predix, GE’s industrial IoT platform, to iPhone and iPad.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The point of my blog post, "What the IoT industry can learn from Apple’s revival of the Mac," was to use Apple’s pivot to the Intel platform and compliance with the Open Group’s Unix standards as an example of the importance of a large vibrant ecosystem (created by Intel and Microsoft) is for the IoT industry to follow.Without the PC ecosystem, the Mac would be an obsolete machine exhibited in the Computer History Museum. The PC ecosystem eliminated much redundant development, letting component and product companies focus on their products’ differentiation. The IoT industry would benefit if it had a robust ecosystem the eliminated redundant development. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The ifconfig and netstat commands are incredibly useful, but there are many other commands that can help you see what's up with you network on Linux systems. Today’s post explores some very handy commands for examining network connections.ip command
The ip command shows a lot of the same kind of information that you'll get when you use ifconfig. Some of the information is in a different format – e.g., "192.168.0.6/24" instead of "inet addr:192.168.0.6 Bcast:192.168.0.255" and ifconfig is better for packet counts, but the ip command has many useful options.First, here's the ip a command listing information on all network interfaces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the social and financial buzz around the IoT continues to grow, many savvy executives and eager entrepreneurs alike are chasing IoT investment opportunities with high expectations. In this investing frenzy, few things have garnered more attention that IoT data and its business applications, and for good reason. In big data, investors from all over the world have found their next digital gold mine.So how exactly is the fight for control over lucrative IoT data playing out, and who are its biggest movers and shakers? How can companies small and large alike benefit from IoT data, and is this valuable resource really worth all of the hubbub it ceaselessly generates? A quick dive into the world of the IoT reveals the true value of its data, and shows that this new industry is only just getting started.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
General Electric outfitted 650 British Petroleum (BP) oil rigs with sensors and software that report operational data to a central GE platform that analyzes it to optimize how the rigs run – making them 2 to 4% more efficient than before. General Electric
Jim Fowler, CIO, General Electric
GE CIO Jim Fowler credits most of the improvement not with workers, but with machines. “Machines are telling people what to do more than people are telling machines what to do,” Fowler said at a meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) this week in New York. The sensors and accompanying software platform helped create incremental improvements in production and avoidance of downtime. He calls it the merging of information technology and operational technology to create value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The drive to digital transformation is causing the world to move faster than ever. And it seems businesses are experiencing a huge case of “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and adopting new technologies at a dizzying pace.A few years ago, only a few companies had invested in the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud services and DevOps. Today, they’re rapidly becoming the norm, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, for IT to maintain the current environment.Doing things manually no longer works. An experienced engineer used to be able to look at router logs, TCP dumps or other data and figure out what was going on and find the source of a problem. But now, so much data is being generated from so many sources that even the best engineers can’t keep up and know the network like they used to. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What does it take to open the world’s first self-powered data center? For Aruba S.p.A., it involved three elements:
Flowing river water
Photovoltaic solar panels
Always cold, pumped-to-the-surface underground water as the principal cooling source
Aruba’s newest data center, named the Global Cloud Data Center (IT3) is located near Milan, Italy, and claims to be 100 percent green. The 49-acre ANSI/TIA-942 Rating 4 standard facility (at 200,000 square meters) opened earlier this month.Also on Network World: Space-radiated cooling cuts power use 21%
Low-impact credentials at the site come largely because the data center has its own dedicated hydroelectric plant. The facility is located on the banks of the River Brembo, an Aruba representative told me. Electricity is generated from the running river water through the operation of turbines. That power is stored and then injected into the national grid infrastructure. Electricity is supposedly guaranteed for the campus by the national grid in exchange for the input.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As we enter the last quarter of 2017, business and IT executives are turning more of their attention to how they can use technology to accomplish their 2018 business objectives. We’ve compiled a list of five trends in cloud computing that strategic businesses will prepare for in the coming year.1. Exponential growth in cloud services solutions
Software as a Service (SaaS) opened a flexible and financially attractive door for businesses and consumers to try early cloud services. The growth of infrastructure and platform as a service (Iaas and PaaS, respectively) has expanded the number of cloud solutions available in the public and private sectors. In 2018, we expect to see many more organizations take advantage of the simplicity and high-performance the cloud guarantees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Carbon Monoxide is odorless, tasteless and invisible, and it accounts for over 72,000 cases of poisoning each year. Kidde calls their C3010D model "worry free" because its sensor and sealed battery provide 10 years of uninterrupted CO detection, and a digital display that updates every 15 seconds. The unit will chirp when its reaching the ends of its life, so you don't have to wonder. The Kidde C3010D alarm is currently discounted down to just $27.93. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For many Internet of Things observers, the IoT’s dizzying embracing and subsequent reshaping of modern business and cultural standards seems like it happened only yesterday. Yet the IoT is moving ever faster, developing at an astonishing rate and continuously reinventing itself. So what’s the next step in the long-line of IoT innovation, and how can eager investors cash in on tomorrow’s IoT fad today?Those used to the ever-changing nature of the IoT will know by now that it’s constantly changing, but will also be aware that innovation in certain areas matters much more than gradual developments elsewhere. A quick review of the 4 things reshaping the IoT’s future the most shows which industries will be most vital towards its development and offers an alluring glance of what the IoT of tomorrow will look like:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtualization management tools are becoming a must-have for enterprises that are grappling with increasingly dynamic infrastructure environments. Virtualization management tools allow for proactive capacity planning, which increases performance efficiency, keeps costs in check and avoids disruption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)