Outside of the consumer market, real examples of the Internet of Things (IoT) often disappoint because in the end, they are limited by one or more of the IoT’s constraints: tens of billions of devices, cheap to acquire, cheap to deploy, security and ubiquitous connections.I spoke with Dave Kjendal, Senet’s vice president of engineering and CTO, because he has built products and networks that meet these constraints. It was insightful because Senet has produced products using the entire IoT stack. Senet’s evolution began in 2009 with low-cost fuel oil tank sensors communicating over the unlicensed airwaves to optimize delivery routes. The company now operates a general purpose LoRaWAN IoT network that covers one-fortieth of the United States. LoRaWAN is an implementation of low-power, wide-area networks designed to transmit small messages at a frequency of about one an hour. It serves about 55 percent of IoT WAN connectivity. It is a different technical approach than what the mobile carriers promise with 3GPP, which is yet to be standardized.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating interesting, new business opportunities. This week, Plantronics announced a new noise-as-a-service portfolio called Habitat Soundscaping. The solution set is designed to counteract the productivity-killing side effects of open offices.Habitat Soundscaping sounds a bit crazy, so let’s hear them out.Plantronics has been around since the early 1960s when it launched lightweight aviation headsets. Its business opportunities expanded from pilots to include astronauts, call center agents, knowledge workers and mobile professionals. Headsets evolved from big clunky proprietary interfaces through 2.5 and 3.5 mm jacks to USB to Bluetooth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Any innovative technology faces a battle of doubt. When Amazon first rolled out AWS, few could imagine servers running in the cloud. Before Salesforce, many thought CRM to be too critical to run as SaaS. I find SD-WANs to be facing a similar battle. It’s inconceivable to many that an SD-WAN could replace MPLS. This is particularly true for security teams.At one recent client, a chemical company, the team was looking to transition from MPLS to SD-WAN. The security group, though, could not accept the fact that SD-WANs met the requirements stipulated by CFATS (Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards) guiding the chemical industry.It was a classic example of professionals getting hooked into the implementation and failing to consider alternative approaches to addressing the same need. CFATS professionals assume MPLS and firewalls to be mandated by the standard. MPLS being the de facto transport. As for firewalls, “Organizations understand and feel safe with firewalls,” says Nirvik Nandy, my partner and the president and CEO, of Red Lantern, a security and compliance consultancy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Zeiss provides an effective way to clean and preserve valuable optics. Whether used with camera lenses, eyeglasses, sunglasses, telescopes, or spotting scopes, these non-abrasive pre-moistened wipes are safe and effective. These ammonia-free wipes are appropriate for anti-reflective coatings and may also be used to clean laptop, GPS, tablet, or cell phone screens without leaving streaks. Designed for a single use, these wipes come in individual disposable packets. The wipes are highly rated on Amazon, where it currently averages 4.7 out of 5 stars (read reviews). Its typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced 13% to $25.99 for a pack of 400. See the discounted Lens Cleaning Wipes now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's lowest price to date on Amazon, the Roomba 690 is currently discounted $50. Roomba loosens, lifts, & suctions dirt while navigating around furniture and clutter. Clean and schedule from anywhere. It's WiFi compatible and works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you ask a group of 10 people what SD-WAN is, there’s a good chance you will get 10 different answers. So, which one is right? Well, that depends on your perspective. If you take all the marketing and jargon out of the equation it will be something like this: Continue reading
The traditional approaches to data storage reduction aren’t creating the necessary density savings that will be required in the future, some scientists say. We’re creating a lot of ones and zeros these days, and we will be generating many more.To handle that, researchers say data should be completely re-written. It should use a four-symbol code, rather than classic two-symbol binary. That, coupled with chemical solutions for carrying the media, along with light, will greatly shrink data storage density, researchers say.Chemists at Case Western Reserve University say the current approach, which is to make existing storage, like drives, more compact—pushing the data closer together by reducing space, for example—isn’t the way to go.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hybrid cloud architectures are currently very popular as a way for enterprises to move to the cloud without abandoning their existing data center investments. At first glance, the strategy makes sense, but there’s a very real danger that the hybrid cloud’s popularity will turn out to be little more than a transitional stage, potentially distracting companies from optimizing either their on-premise data centers or their migration to the cloud.The many meanings of ‘hybrid cloud’
Making things more complicated, the term “hybrid cloud” can have a number of meanings, but at the root it covers any combination of traditional and cloud architectures. That can mean anything from a traditional data center shop running a couple of non-strategic, standalone applications in the cloud to complex architectures with some core applications residing on-premise and others in various cloud implementations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This premium wall-charger from Anker features 5 ports that pump out 63W of power — enough for the whole family to simultaneously charge multiple devices at the highest speed possible. Right now it’s discounted 70% to just $27 on Amazon, where it averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 500 customers. Right now when you buy this item you’ll also activate a 10% discount on other select Anker products including their power bank and bluetooth speaker. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Founded in 1971, City Furniture got its start when Kevin Koenig and his brothers constructed wood bed frames in a garage. They started with a single showroom, Waterbed City, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but have now grown to 27 locations across the state and operate under the brands of City Furniture and Ashley Furniture HomeStore brands. The company currently has an older Cisco 802.11g Wi-Fi network that it uses for bar code scanning and inventory management and was reaching the end of its life. City Furniture had big plans to digitize the company by moving its point-of-sale (POS) operations and capabilities to Wi-Fi-enabled tablets so the employees could transact business from anywhere in the store. Also, it wanted to use VoIP to take calls from iPads anywhere in the showroom, as well as access radio apps. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Keep your PS4 or PS4 Slim compact, organized and functioning properly with this vertical stand from Pecham. It features an integrated cooling fan, dual controller changing and a USB hub for powering & charging your phone or other devices as needed. Pecham's stand currently averages 4.6 out of 5 stars from over 185 people on Amazon (82% rate the full 5 stars: read reviews here), where its list price of $29.99 has been reduced 43% to just $16.99. See this deal now on Amazon. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the summer solstice in the rear view mirror, those of us north of the equator are preparing for the true summer heat to arrive in force this next month. While BBQs, boating, and your preferred beverage may be the first things on your mind for this next month, many folks in the data center world greet summer with a different attitude entirely. For starters, the period from June to August is Outage Season. Data from previous years shows more centers head offline during this time period than any other 3-month span of your calendar. This includes both poor performing infrastructure to full-scale outages. In addition, data center managers often fight higher energy bills due to hotter external temperatures that drive up the heat inside your facility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Computer scientists are developing a mind-reading computer that deciphers symbols that people have looked at.The device accurately replicates shapes seen. The computer scans brain activity, then successfully redraws those numerals and symbols, say scientists working on the project.It’s a “step towards a direct ‘telepathic’ connection between brains and computers,” said the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in a May news article. And indeed, should it work reliably, it would be a significant improvement on simple Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans, which just read activity in parts of the brain and are used primarily for research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Amazon is raking in the lion's share of money spent by public-cloud users, Oracle is doubling down on its hybrid-cloud strategy, appealing to enterprises that want to put data and applications behind their firewall while taking advantage of cloud pricing models and technology.Oracle has greatly expanded the services available through its on-premises Cloud at Customer offering so that they are essentially at parity with what the company has on its public cloud. The company announced Tuesday that a broad portfolio of SaaS (software as a service) applications as well as PaaS (platform as a service) and Oracle Big Data Machine services are now available via Cloud at Customer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As any IT person knows and likely learned the hard way, you pay for every bit of data you transmit back and forth to your cloud provider. So, what do you do if you want to put a few petabytes in the cloud? The bill could hit the thousands of dollars, and it will take days to transfer it all—even under ideal circumstances.Amazon introduced a decidedly low-tech but practical solution two years ago called Snowball. It was a storage appliance they shipped to you, which you connected to your data center network, transferred all the data at very high speeds, then sent the device back to an Amazon data center, where they transferred the data for you. It’s reminiscent of the old Sneakernet, but it worked. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intent-based networking pioneer Apstra announced today that it has entered into a distribution agreement with Tokyo Electron Device (TED) for the Japanese market.For those who don’t know Apstra, the company came to market with an intent-based networking solution for the data center in June 2016. Since then, Cisco’s “Network Intuitive” launch, which was all about intent-based networking, has made intent-based networking a household term (at least for households with Cisco engineers in them). Cisco’s solution is focused at the campus and Apstra at the data center, but the two companies are working with the same vision of automating network operations using intent rather than manual processes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle is the latest legacy software vendor looking to reorganise its sales teams to be more focused on cloud services, as it announces 1,000 job openings in EMEA.Oracle is targeting "people from diverse backgrounds and profiles with between two to six years work experience", the official press release states.This follows some positive financial results for Oracle, as it posted a 66 percent year-on-year growth in cloud revenues for Q4 2016. That figure comes in at $1.4 billion and includes PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, which has been boosted by the recent NetSuite acquisition. By comparison AWS posted revenues of $3.66 billion in its latest results back in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are reportedly in talks about possibly teaming up to develop data center software products, according to The Information, which cited anonymous sources.Unfortunately, the article doesn’t have much if any detail on what that product would be. The speculation is it might be a stack-like product, since VMware already provides what would be the base software for such a product and stacks are becoming the in thing.Already there is OpenStack, the open-source product that runs cloud services in a data center, and Microsoft just shipped Azure Stack, its answer to OpenStack that will allow the same features of its Azure public cloud to run within a company’s private data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Producing professional reports on-demand from a back-end database, especially one connected to a Web application, remains one of the sticky wickets in Web development. Commercial products are few and their eye-popping cost can be a barrier to entry for independent developers or smaller IT shops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)