The PowerShell Get-WindowsFeature command—or, more properly, cmdlet—can retrieve a list of Windows features, including server roles, that are installed on a server or workstation running Windows, making it a handy tool for server admins.Learning about it can point up its value and how a broader knowledge of PowerShell commands may lead to more efficient administration of Windows servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Tim Ferrill By default, the output of the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet provides something of a hierarchical view with individual features having boxes checked or not depending on their installation status. (Click to expand the image at left.) This is great for quickly eyeballing a single server to get an idea of what functions it provides, but as the list contains upwards of 250 roles and features, it starts to lose practicality when you are looking for a specific set of features or want to inventory multiple servers in a single pass.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks has rolled out a cloud-based service that uses AI to manage everything from network inventory and configuration details to device status and contract information.Juniper Support Insights securely gathers network information from Juniper’s Junos switching and routing portfolio, including ACX, EX, MX, PTX, QFX, and SRX Series platforms and provides it to the Juniper cloud. Learn more about 5G and WiFi 6 What is 5G? How is it better than 4G? How to determine if WiFi 6 is right for you What is MU-MIMO? Why do you need it in your wireless routers? When to use 5G, when to use WiFi 6 How enterprises can prep for 5G networks The Junos devices can connect directly to the cloud or via Lightweight Collector, an on-premises appliance that can link up to 20,000 devices to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
There are quite a few ways to search through compressed text files on Linux systems without having to uncompress them first. Depending on the format of the files, you can choose to view entire files, extract specific text, navigate through file contents searching for content of interest, and sometimes even edit content. IFirst, to show you how this works, I compressed the words file on one of my Linux systems (/usr/share/dict/words) using these commands:$ cp /usr/share/dict/words . $ 7z a words.7z words $ bzip2 -k words $ gzip -k words $ xz -k words $ zip words.zip words How to use the grep command on Linux The -k options used with the bzip2, gzip, and xz commands kept these commands from removing the original file, which they would by default. The resultant files then looked like this:To read this article in full, please click here
VMware is once again a standalone company as it has officially split with its parent firm, Dell and untied the knot that has held them together since 2016.The move is widely seen as a way for both companies to work with new partners and expand their respective technologies while keep close ties to each other.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] It also has financial impacts. According to the Financial Times, Dell Technologies will shed its 81% stake in publicly traded VMware, creating an independent software company with a stock market value of nearly $64 billion. Dell’s remaining hardware operations have an implied value of $33 billion, based on its latest share price. To read this article in full, please click here
Zero Trust relies on continuously re-authorizing users, applications, and devices to establish myriad “perimeters of one” in the environment, but the name isn’t quite accurate.Zero Trust doesn’t literally mean zero trust; it means zero implicit trust. You—whether that means a person, or a software or hardware system—are not to be trusted simply by virtue of where you are on the network; there is no network perimeter within which you are automatically trusted to connect to services. And you are not to be trusted now just because you were trusted when you first gained access to the network; gaining admission once is not the same thing as ongoing trust. And you are not to be trusted to make the new service connection you are trying to make now just because you were trusted to make the previous one.To read this article in full, please click here
There could be as many as 15 billion IoT devices connected to enterprise infrastructure by 2029, according to Gartner. These devices will generate massive amounts of operational data that needs to be translated from their original protocols, aggregated, and analyzed in order to deliver real-time actionable alerts as well as longer-term business insights.For organizations with significant IoT deployments, edge computing has emerged as an effective way to process sensor data closest to where it is created. Edge computing reduces the latency associated with moving data from a remote location to a centralized data center or to the cloud for analysis, slashes WAN bandwidth costs, and addresses security, data-privacy, and data-autonomy issues.To read this article in full, please click here
When the coronavirus pandemic forced shutdowns across the world, industries faced a disaster unlike ever before. Facilities and IT systems were operational, yet people could not physically access them. According to a 2021 McKinsey survey, Industry 4.0 technologies were a lifesaver, with 94% of respondents saying they helped keep operations running and more than half (56%) reporting they were critical to doing so.COVID-19 put Industry 4.0 and digital transformation into third gear, while preparing enterprises for the post-pandemic era. However, these technologies depend on connectivity, and legacy solutions such as wired connections or WiFi are not up to the challenge. To read this article in full, please click here
NetApp used its virtual NetApp Insight 2021 conference as the launchpad for several new technologies and enhancements to existing products, as well as to announce an acquisition. All are meant to bolster the on-prem storage supplier’s cloud offerings.First up, NetApp introduced ONTAP 9.10 Enterprise Data Management software, which includes upgrades that protect against ransomware and enhanced detection and recovery capabilities. The new software also features expanded data management capabilities and NVMe/TCP support.NVMe traditionally works over a network fabric, but there are bottlenecks – namely, you have to build the fabric. NVMe/TCP allows the same storage devices to be shared among data centers through the Internet protocol over the existing network.To read this article in full, please click here
Among the greatest component shortages bedeviling everyone is that of GPUs, both from Nvidia and AMD. GPUs are used in Bitcoin farming, and with massive farms around the world gobbling up every GPU card, getting one is nigh impossible or prohibitively expense.So customers need to squeeze every last cycle out of the GPUs they have in service. An Israeli company called Run:AI claims it has a fix with a pair of technologies that pool GPU resources and maximize their use.The technologies are called Thin GPU Provisioning and Job Swapping. Not the most creative of names but they describe what the two do in tandem to automate the allocation and utilization of GPUs.To read this article in full, please click here
Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation. Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t. To explore why, first let’s take a look at the technology.To read this article in full, please click here
The growing impact of hybrid work is resulting in a reassessment of the IT network infrastructure including the ability to glean analytic details from remote workers and ensure collaboration assets are working properly.Going forward, organizations should expect Cisco products that will help to further lock down networks and support application-monitoring and collaboration environments for hybrid workers, Todd Nightingale, the company’s executive vice president and general manager for enterprise networking cloud told Network World head of his keynote at this week’s Cisco WebexOne 2021 virtual conference.To read this article in full, please click here
Open RAN is a push for industry standards in the design of gear that’s used in the radio-access segment of telecom cellular networks and is particularly relevant to the buildout of 5G infrastructure. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises Radio-access networks (RAN) serve to connect the base stations that transmit and receive traffic to from endpoints like cell phones and laptops and provide the link toward the carrier core network.To read this article in full, please click here
Expect the unexpected – that’s just one of the core premises IT leaders need to embrace in the next few years, according to Gartner's top strategic predictions for 2022 and beyond.IT leaders need to be able to move in multiple strategic directions at once, said Daryl Plummer, distinguished research vice president and Gartner Fellow, to the virtual audience at the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, held this week.Network certs: Significant raises for the right ones “Resilience, opportunity and risk have always been components of good business strategy, but today these issues hold new meaning,” Plummer said. “This year’s predictions embody how resilience must be built in more non-traditional ways, from talent to business modularity, while opportunity and risk must be viewed with a greater sense of urgency.”To read this article in full, please click here
It can take years for a CPU to go from design to silicon, so Arm is helping developers get a jump on things by putting virtual models of its chip designs in the cloud. The virtual models will allow developers to write and test applications before the actual silicon ships.Dubbed Arm Total Solutions for IoT, the project is a full-stack solution intended for Internet of Things applications and use cases. Arm says the early access for developers, OEMs and service providers, as well as the reduction in product design cycles, could accelerate deployments by up to two years.Arm doesn’t make chips the way Intel and AMD do. It makes designs and licenses them to more than 800 OEMs, which are responsible for everything from embedded devices to servers. Once Arm releases the basic chip design to its partners, the partners then add their own IP to differentiate from the competition, which takes time.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise company Aruba is taking the wraps of a new flagship data-center switch aimed at helping to better control and secure hybrid-cloud traffic in the enterprise.The Aruba CX 10000 Series switch is a top-of-rack, L2/3 data-center box with 3.2Tbps of switching capacity, 48 ports of line rate 10/25GbE and six 40/100GbE ports, the company says. But its most intriguing component is an integrated Elba programmable data processing unit (DPU) from Pensando that helps eliminate the need for separate appliances for security and load balancing, for example.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 Pensando is a startup lead by a crew of ex-Cisco stars including its chairmen of the board, former Cisco CEO John Chambers. Others leaders of the company include former Cisco engineering icons Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, collectively known as MPLS based on their first initials. The MPLS group has founded a number of companies that were spun back into Cisco during Chamber’s time as CEO including Andiamo Systems for SAN switching, Nuova Systems for data-center switching and Insieme Networks for software-defined networking systems.To read this article in full, please click here
As organizations become less centralized they face new security challenges that require new ways of addressing threats that will change the basic fabric of network security, according to Gartner analysts.A persistent challenge adapting to these changes is the skills gap--finding IT pros with the technical know-how to meet evolving security issues, Peter Firstbrook, Gartner vice president and anayst told attendees at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas.Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth “Cybersecurity teams are being asked to secure countless forms of digital transformation and other new technologies, and if they don’t have those skilled practitioners they move toward managed or cloud-delivered services where they might not have as much control as they’d like,” Firstbrook said.To read this article in full, please click here
Digital investments, be they in AI, cloud, security, or engineering, will be among the top technology drivers for 2022, according to Gartner’s annual forecast of what it expects will be leading strategic IT trends.Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth “It is an overarching drive for organizations to do more with and scale the digital environments they have been rapidly developing during the pandemic,” said David Groombridge, research vice president at Gartner. “Most of these trends define technologies that together show how businesses will reconnect with partners and consumers to create scalable, resilient technical foundations for the future.” Gartner unwrapped its forecast at its virtual IT Symposium/Xpo Americas this week.To read this article in full, please click here
Four years after Intel first introduced Loihi, the company’s first neuromorphic chip, the company has released its second generation processor, which Intel says will provide faster processing, greater resource density, and improved power efficiency.CPUs are often called the brains of the computer but aren’t, really, since they process only a handful of tasks at once in a serial manner, nothing like what the brain does automatically to keep you alive. Neuromorphic computing attempts to replicate the functions of the brain by performing numerous tasks simultaneously, with emphasis on perception and decision makingChip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years Neuromorphic chips mimic neurological functions through computational “neurons” that communicate with one another. The first generation of Loihi chips had around 128,000 of those digital neurons; the Loihi 2 has more than a million.To read this article in full, please click here
A new auction for enormously valuable mid-band spectrum and a rollback of availability for a different piece of it illustrates the uneven progress of 5G rollouts in the U.S. and represents a challenge for enterprises looking to take advantage of 5G technology. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The mid-band is valuable because it’s in a “Goldilocks” zone of the wireless spectrum—its frequencies are high enough to support higher throughput, while also being low enough to propagate effectively across relatively large areas.To read this article in full, please click here
Four years after Intel first introduced Loihi, the company’s first neuromorphic chip, the company has released its second generation processor, which Intel says will provide faster processing, greater resource density, and improved power efficiency.CPUs are often called the brains of the computer but aren’t, really, since they process only a handful of tasks at once in a serial manner, nothing like what the brain does automatically to keep you alive. Neuromorphic computing attempts to replicate the functions of the brain by performing numerous tasks simultaneously, with emphasis on perception and decision makingChip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years Neuromorphic chips mimic neurological functions through computational “neurons” that communicate with one another. The first generation of Loihi chips had around 128,000 of those digital neurons; the Loihi 2 has more than a million.To read this article in full, please click here