A new managed WAN service from AWS promises to make it faster and easier for enterprises to build, manage, and monitor a global network that seamlessly connects cloud and on-premises environments.AWS Cloud WAN, which the company previewed in December, lets customers link cloud resources in on-premises data centers, branch offices or colocation sites and manage that environment through a single dashboard. Using the dashboard, networking teams can apply policies, automate configuration and security tasks across their entire network.To read this article in full, please click here
T-Mobile is still the fastest 5G provider in the US by some distance, but all three of the major national mobile service providers recorded major increases in their average connection speed between March and June of this year, according to a report released today by Opensignal.Much of the across-the-board increase, the report said, is due to the carriers beginning to use the mid-band 5G spectrum that was auctioned off recently by the FCC. Opensignal said that areas where C-band spectrum is available have seen noticeable improvements to average connection speeds.Other areas of mid-band spectrum, however, are the reason why T-Mobile continues to boast a substantial lead over both AT&T and Verizon in Opensignal’s speed tests. T-Mobile averages 171Mbps over a 5G connection, compared to 72Mbps for Verizon and 53Mbps for AT&T, thanks in large part to its early acquisition of 2.5GHz spectrum, the researchers said.To read this article in full, please click here
Interest in zero-trust security has heightened significantly over the past two years among organizations looking for better ways to control access to enterprise data in cloud and on-premises environments for remote workers, contractors and third parties.Several factors are driving the trend, including increasingly sophisticated threats, accelerated cloud adoption and a broad shift to remote and hybrid work environments because of the pandemic. Many organizations have discovered that traditional security models where everything inside the perimeter is implicitly trusted, does not work in environments where perimeters don’t exist and enterprise data and the people accessing it are increasingly distributed and decentralized.To read this article in full, please click here
Ericsson, in partnership with Qualcomm and Thales, announced today that it is jointly planning trials of a satellite-based 5G network, using low-earth orbit satellites to provide globally available connectivity.The idea is to provide a backup service to terrestrial 5G, offering coverage in remote areas where 5G may not be deployed for some time. The companies said in a joint statement that they expect national governments to be among the primary users of such a service, for national security and public safety networks.
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There are probably a lot of Linux users who have never encountered the eval command. In fact, it’s not really a "command", but a bash built-in that’s meant to process the value of a variable as a command. For example, if you set up a variable that includes the command to display the current time in Sydney, Australia, it would probably look like this:$ dt="TZ='Australia/Sydney' date"You could then run it like this:$ eval $dtThu Jul 7 06:32:14 AM AEST 2022Doing that can save you the trouble of memorizing the date command syntax and specifying a time zone, but let’s look a little more closely at eval to see what else it can do for you.To read this article in full, please click here
New Wi-Fi standards appear in such rapid succession that it’s often difficult to evaluate the differences between Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi 6E—all of which are standards adopted in commercial products. And now there’s Wi-Fi 7.Chinese networking-equipment vendor H3C has released what it says is a Wi-Fi 7 router even though the Wi-Fi 7 standard isn’t expected to be finalized until 2024.What is Wi-Fi 7?
Wi-Fi 7 or 802.11be is the next Wi-Fi standard being worked on by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that promises speeds of a whopping 46Gbps, nearly five times faster than Wi-Fi 6, as well as reduced latency. Wi-Fi 7 (also known as Extremely High Throughput) is expected to deliver higher spectrum efficiency, higher power efficiency, better interference mitigation, higher capacity density, and higher cost efficiency. To read this article in full, please click here
Chinese networking equipment vendor H3C has released what it says is the first Wi-Fi 7 router on the market, well in advance of the standard becoming final, which isn't expected to happen before 2024.The H3C Magic BE18000, announced in June, uses the same 802.11be wireless protocols that are being designed for use as Wi-Fi 7. H3C said that the BE18000 can operate in the 6GHz band and offers a peak throughput of 18,443Mbps, using the newly widened 320MHz channels designed for use with Wi-Fi 7. The router is designed around the latest chipset from Qualcomm, the first designed for Wi-Fi 7, which was released in May.To read this article in full, please click here
Why the heck would a hardware and chip company like Broadcom buy a software company like VMware?Wall Street and industry analysts haven't exactly jumped with joy over the pending deal, after all. Companies sometimes do stupid things; that seems to be the consensus. But with this deal, that may not be the case at all. Broadcom may be responding to the fundamental shifts in the industry, both in computing and in networking.
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HP Enterprise says it will deliver a series of servers powered by the Arm-based Altra and Altra Max by Ampere, the CPU startup run by former Intel executive Renee James.Ampere, not to be confused with the GPU processor of the same name from Nvidia, has scored some wins with cloud providers, notably Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but it had yet to land in OEM partner. Until now.Starting in Q3 2022, HPE says it will ship ProLiant RL300 Gen11 servers, available for both outright purchase and for leasing through HPE’s GreenLake consumption model. HPE says this will be the first in a series of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers using 80-core Altra and 128-core Altra Max processors.To read this article in full, please click here
Micron Technology is bucking the trend of moving to PCI Express-based storage and releasing a new SATA III-based SSD with ultradense memory storage and read optimized for faster data access.The SATA interface has been around since the beginning of the century, but it has progressed much slower than the PCIe interface and with nowhere near the leaps in performance. Among gamers, who are as obsessed with performance as someone doing AI models, PCIe drives are standard issue, and SATA drives are at best used for storage.That’s because SATA III has a throughput of about 550MB/s, while PCIe 4.0 has more than 10 times the throughput.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux fold command enables you to break a string of characters into same-size chunks, but it can also be used to provide a series of characters or strings to drive a loop. This post reviews the basic command and then demonstrates how you can use it to loop through the characters or strings that it creates.The basic use of the fold command is to take long lines of text and break them into shorter pieces. One common use is to shorten lines in a text file so that they display well in a terminal window. Lines wider than the terminal width might otherwise wrap in inconvenient places.The fold command can also be used to create a narrower file from a file with lines that are inconveniently long.To read this article in full, please click here
The drive to automate more and more network operations is a good thing, but it exposes a need for network teams to ensure their change-management processes are in order.Networks are doing more, becoming integral to zero-trust security architectures, for example, and to end-to-end enterprise optimization endeavors. Networks are also connecting more things than ever: Mobile devices and IoT nodes continue to proliferate outside data centers and IaaS environments, while inside the enterprise, VMs and containers and separate environments segregating groups of them from each other for security purposes continue to proliferate.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has introduced a service for its mainframe customers to create a cloud environment for developing and testing applications.Wazi as a Service can be used to create z/OS infrastructure instances for development and testing z/OS application components in a virtualized, containerized sandbox. The instances would run on Red Hat OpenShift on x86 hardware. The service also includes access to z/OS systems and integrates with modern source-code management platforms such as GitHub and GitLab.
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Enterprises have become comfortable switching from the purchase-and-refresh cycle for servers, storage and applications to a cloud-based as-a-service approach. So, why not take the same tack when it comes to the network?That’s the concept behind Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), which promises predictable costs, increased agility, better performance, cloud-style scalability, timely integration of new technologies, service-provider-level security, and a high degree of automation.
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HPE has upgraded its GreenLake on-premises cloud platform to include new compute offerings, services for data fabric, and disaster recovery as well as products targeting verticals including payment processing and digital engagement.GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, which can incorporate private-cloud applications into the GreenLake framework, is the biggest announcement about the platform that the company made at its ongoing Discover conference in Las Vegas. That offering opens new options for organizations that are subject to heavy regulation or those with operational concerns about putting their data in the public cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
MIT has open-sourced pa.sh (also called pash), a tool that can dramatically speed up Linux scripts by using parallelization, saving time and without risk of introducing errors.The process of parallelization first examines a script for code that can be run separately and independently, so not all scripts can benefit from the tool. But when pa.sh does find portions that can run independently, it runs them in parallel on separate CPUs. It also uses other techniques to get the code to run faster.Below is a demonstration I ran on my home Fedora box, first running a script on its own and then again using pa.sh. Note that this script was provided with the pa.sh tool and lends itself to parallelization. It’s not nearly as demanding as scripts that might process gigabytes of data in a scientific or artificial-intelligence lab, so the results are not dramatic.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is upgrading vSphere virtualization and vSAN hyperconverged software packages to better manage and efficiently meld on-prem applications with cloud-based resources.The company introduced two subscription-based offerings: vSphere+ and vSAN+ that integrate cloud connectivity into both, enabling cloud services for workloads running on vSphere, but specifically targeting on-premise apps. The packages will include all necessary components such as VMware vCenter instances, VMware ESXi hosts, Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials and support.
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Private 5G networks promise to offer low latency, high reliability, and support for massive numbers of connected devices, but enterpise deployment has been slower than expected, experts say, due to the pandemic and a slow-to-evolve device ecosystem.IDC reports that the global private LTE and 5G wireless infrastructure market totaled $1.8 billion in revenue in 2021 and will increase to $8.3 billion by 2026, but that spending will grow "slower than expected" in the next couple of years.To read this article in full, please click here
The more workloads that you migrate to the cloud, the more difficult it becomes to predict monthly cloud costs. Cloud services vendors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft can help organizations avoid capital costs for new hardware, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have made the most cost-effective decisions about the particular services that these and other cloud vendors offer.And while it is great that you’re only paying for the services you need, trying to parse your monthly bill requires the skills of a CPA, a software engineer, a commodities trader and a sharp eye for the details.To read this article in full, please click here