With internet traffic set to triple over the next five years or so, according to recent estimates from Nokia and Cisco Systems, Nokia thinks the time is right for a new range of high-end routers that can boost core capacity by a factor of six—and even help 10-year-old devices to double their capacity.Nokia predicts that by 2022, total internet traffic will reach 330 exabytes per month. (That's 330 million terabytes). For its part, Cisco forecasts it will grow at 24 percent per year from a base of 96 exabytes per month in 2016 to 278 exabytes per month in 2021.That traffic growth will be driven by three things, according to Nokia: cloud services, 5G mobile networks, and the Internet of Things.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s been a lot of news lately about Amazon opening physical stores. These news articles keep interrupting my regular stream of stories about digital transformation. Or are these topics the same?Digital transformation involves using technology to improve performance and/or experience. The tool kit to do this is largely software-based and includes improved integration and workflow, analytics, mobility, social media and IoT devices.Due to Amazon.com's advantage in price and selection, the company has become a retailing behemoth at the expense of local retail. Store closures are about to hit a 20-year high, and malls are dying. This is unfortunate because retail centers provide more benefits than shopping. They are gathering places and contribute tax revenue for their municipalities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SD-WAN is taking off.A year ago we announced 100 paying, deployed EdgeConnect SD-WAN customers. Earlier this month, we announced our 400th customer deployment, representing a quadrupling of our SD-WAN customer base in just 12 months.We are seeing our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution deployed globally, across a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and transport. Our customers are simplifying and consolidating their WAN edge infrastructure, reducing operating costs and delivering an improved IT experience to their distributed workforce.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Picture this: The networking stack on the main pump controller has crashed, and you need to reboot it -- but it's 20 meters underground, on another continent -- and there's no-one on site to hit 'reset'.Or you're bowling along the highway and one of the processor cores in your self-driving car gets zapped by a cosmic ray (yes, this could actually happen). The software can't tell whether the resulting error is a transient glitch or a hardware fault, so limits you to 50 kilometers per hour for safety: No fun with a monster truck hurtling up behind you.Chip designers such as ARM and Imagination Technologies are applying industrial safety design techniques to their processor cores so that they can get themselves out of situations like this. You could soon feel the benefit even if you don't run a subterranean pumping station in Azerbaijan, nor yet have a self-driving car in your garage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Watch out for attacks by Hidden Cobra, aka North Korean government hackers, the DHS and the FBI warned in a joint technical alert. The US government didn’t tiptoe around the issue, instead pointing the finger of blame at North Korea for a series of cyberattacks dating back to 2009.Who the heck is Hidden Cobra? You probably already know about these cyber actors who are usually referred to as the Lazarus Group. Back in 2014 when the hackers targeted Sony Pictures Entertainment, the group was publicly referring to itself as Guardians of the Peace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For a truly distinct flavor, smokers offer you a wealth of custom cooking options. Simply choosing a different type of wood chip can vastly alter the flavor of whatever food you’ve placed on the grates. This Dyna-Glo smoker offers you not only these delicious benefits but those associated with using charcoal as your fuel source as well. This product’s vertical design includes six height-adjustable cooking grates and 1,176 inches of cooking space. The offset functionality of this smoker is designed to keep direct heat away from the food, helping to prevent food on the bottom racks from cooking too fast. The heavy-duty steel body construction features a high-temp, powder-coat finish that ensures a long life, while the smoker’s charcoal and wood chip tray is made with heavy gauged, porcelain-enameled steel for hours of maintenance-free cooking. It averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 600 people (read reviews). The list price of the smoker is currently reduced 43% to a very reasonable $124.44. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Samsung Chromebook Plus adapts to whatever you’re doing. Use it like a laptop to reply to emails or to work on a paper. When you need a break, flip the screen so you can play games or catch up on your latest book. Make your ideas personal and your notes clear with the built-in pen. Whether you’re doodling, sketching, or personalizing a photo, the built-in pen will help you get every detail just right. You can even use the pen to take a screenshot, magnify, or unlock the screen. The sleek metal body of the Samsung Chromebook Plus is comfortable to carry as a tablet and easy to fit in your bag while you’re on the go. Samsung's Chromebook Plus has 4GB of RAM, a 32GB hard drive, and a quad HD 12.3” screen (2400 x 1600). Its typical list price has been reduced by a generous $71 to $378.74. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Things don’t always go as planned with new technologies. Two new research reports document the struggles, disappointments and false starts that challenge enterprise storage pros as they modernize their infrastructures for digital business.451 Research asked enterprise IT pros to rank their most pressing storage pains. “Data/capacity growth” landed in the top spot, according to the firm’s research brief. “Meeting disaster recovery requirements” and “high cost of storage” ranked second and third, respectively, among survey respondents.“The core challenges in storage are shifting; public cloud is beginning to assume the burden of inexorable data growth, and the emphasis is moving to other areas, such as effectively managing data and storage across both on- and off-premises locations,” according to Simon Robinson, research vice president at 451 Research and author of the report, Top three storage pain points for enterprise customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two security firms have released reports about the malware which was used in the December 2016 Ukraine power outage, warning that the partial power outage in Kiev may have been test run; the malware could be leveraged against other countries, including the US.The malware, dubbed Crash Override in the Dragos report (pdf) and Industroyer in the ESET report (pdf), has nothing to do with espionage and everything to do with cyber-sabotage.Crash Override, Dragos says, “is the first ever malware framework designed and deployed to attack electric grids.” It could be “leveraged at multiple sites simultaneously.” Dragos founder Robert M. Lee told Reuters, “The malware is capable of causing outages of up to a few days in portions of a nation's grid, but is not potent enough to bring down a country's entire grid.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stumbling and surveyingHere are 9 tools that provide important details on known and unknown aspects of your Wi-Fi network. Each of these tools gives you the basic wireless details: SSIDs, signal strength, channels, MAC addresses and security status. Some can even reveal “hidden” or non-broadcasted SSIDs, display the noise levels, or display statistics on successful and failed packets of your wireless connection. Two of the tools include Wi-Fi password cracking tools as well, useful for educational or penetration testing purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With simple touch control, the Etekcity living color lamp can be adjusted to provide the perfect lighting. The white LED lamp provides up to 3 adjustable brightness levels for your reading and studying convenience. The base can be illuminated in virtually any hue with simple color spectrum touch and drag control. Turn on only the base of the lamp to use it as a soft and soothing night light. Whether used for studying, reading, or relaxing, the living color lamp will provide high-quality LED illumination that champions energy efficiency for lower usage and costs. The bright LED lighting also minimizes eye fatigue, allowing you to finish the task at hand without getting a migraine. The Etekcity LED lamp is a #1 best-seller on Amazon with 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 500 people (read reviews). The typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced 47% to just $15.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hitachi is an interesting organization. A huge conglomerate with total revenues of over $80 billion per annum, it employs over 300,000 people worldwide and has an incredibly broad range of contributing businesses in the power, industrial, urban development and healthcare spaces to name just a few.+ Also on Network World: Smart city tech growing in the U.S. + One of the businesses within the Hitachi Group is the Hitachi Insight Group (HIG), an organization focused on digital solutions within the broader Internet of Things (IoT) space. HIG offers the Lumada IoT platform, a solution that serves both public and private sector customers across three distinct categories: IoT, Energy IoT and Smart City.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you keep up with technology news, you’ve been hearing a lot lately about how enterprises are moving more and more key workloads from their own on-premise data centers to the public cloud. In fact, it happens so much that even the biggest transitions are hardly news anymore. Man bites dog? What does make people pay attention, though, is when the opposite happens: When a major product or service moves from running in the public cloud to an on-premise data center. And that’s exactly what happened last week when CNBC broke the news that Facebook plans to move its WhatsApp service from IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud service to its proprietary data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This is one of those stories that isn’t very sexy, but it is important. The PCI Express 3.0 data transfer standard has been around longer than it should have, and now it seems the PCI-SIG that develops the standard is making up for it with two new specs in two years. The SIG—a consortium of 700 hardware vendors, including IBM, Intel and HP Enterprise—develops the spec, which is the standard for moving data around within a computer. Plug-in peripherals, like video cards and SSDs, use the PCI Express bus for data transfer. + Also on Network World: SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing + PCI Express 3.0, or PCIe, was finished in 2010, and motherboards began to appear in 2011. The 4.0 spec should have been done within three years but only now is being finished because if there’s one way to screw up development, it’s to have it done by committee, and 700 cooks can really spoil the broth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, 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 or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe.As organizations move more of their infrastructure to the cloud, they are ending up with hybrid cloud applications. Part of the application runs in the traditional data center, and part runs in a cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. In addition, organizations often need to connect SaaS services to resources that continue to reside inside their datacenters.Applications that run in this mode typically use a connecting software gateway between the data center component and the cloud component, for example, Mule ESB or OneSaaS. This gateway allows the components to share data and work together seamlessly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether or not you work in the IT department, you have likely experienced the pain of migrating from one system to another. When you buy a new laptop, or a new phone, you’re faced with having to backup and replicate your old data to your new system, or start from scratch with none of the files you might need on your new device.Imagine this problem at enterprise scale. Moving terabytes of data is a daunting task that also requires planning and downtime when IT has to add a new storage system, upgrade or replacement. Just like with our smartphones, the old system likely still has some value, but since data can’t move easily from one system to the other, the equipment we’re leaving behind often remains as a backup to the backup copy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nayana, a web hosting company in South Korea, suffered a ransomware attack over the weekend which resulted in more than a hundred Linux servers and thousands of websites being infected with Erebus ransomware. The initial ransom amount was astronomically high.Yesterday, I came across the news that a South Korean web hosting company had been infected by ransomware, but it was extremely short on details. The ransomware was Erebus; the attack occurred on Saturday and thousands of sites were reportedly infected.Today, Aju Business Daily provided more details. Nayana reportedly said 153 of its Linux servers were infected with Erebus. In turn, about 3,400 sites on the web hosting company’s servers were also infected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has partnered with a software-defined storage startup to create a hybrid cloud storage platform customized for HPE servers. HPE and Hedvig, started by a former Amazon and Facebook engineer credited with creating the Cassandra database, announced that HPE will offer Hedvig’s software-defined storage with HPE’s Apollo 4200 servers to create a distributed storage platform.+ Also on Network World: Software-defined storage: Users reveal the best (and worst) features + The platform is available in 48- and 96-terabyte configurations. They are aimed at enterprises deploying private, hybrid and multi-data center clouds. Hedvig also said the combination supports private cloud storage for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and other hypervisors. The storage platform also supports hybrid cloud storage services running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It may not come as much of a surprise, but the latest numbers from International Data Corp. make it official: The server market is cratering. According to IDC, server vendor revenue plummeted 4.6 percent year over year the first quarter of 2017.The pain was widespread, IDC said, with market leader HPE seeing revenue drop 15.8 percent year over year to $2.9 billion. Number two vendor Dell was the only bright spot, notching 4.7 percent year-over-year growth to $2.4 billion (the growth may have come from Dell’s purchase of EMC’s data center business). But Cisco revenues fell 3 percent to $825 million, IBM dropped a whopping 34.7 percent to $745 million, and Lenovo tumbled 16.5 percent to $727 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here