IoT startup makes battery-free sensors

[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] A startup founded by two MIT grads says that it can deploy self-powering sensors to handle low-intensity IoT tasks, eliminating the need for batteries or power cabling and adding a new level of flexibility to IoT deployments.Ben Calhoun and Dave Wentzloff are the founders of Everactive, an IoT-device startup whose sensor modules can create their own power from a variety of sources, including indoor solar that gathers energy from artificial lighting, and thermal-gradient differential using waste heat to generate electricity. These techniques don’t generate a lot of power but don’t need to for Everactive’s purposes.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: 6 top videoconferencing services put to the test

We compared Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, BlueJeans, and GoToMeeting in real-world tests to see which videoconferencing platforms perform best for business users. Here’s how they stack up.

CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel

Schneider Electric makes green play with super-efficient UPS

Data-center operators, perhaps stung by accusations that they're power hogs, are making a major push to be green. Both Microsoft and Google have promised their data centers will be carbon neutral by 2030, while AWS is targeting 2040.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE expands GreenLake services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced several expansions of its managed GreenLake services during its HPE Discover conference this week.GreenLake is HPE’s consumption model for hardware and services. Rather than make an outright purchase, customers determine the configuration they will need and HPE installs it, with a slight overprovisioning just in case. If the customer ends up needing more hardware capacity, it’s just turned on. Until then, it just sits there, unused, and at no charge.To read this article in full, please click here

AI tackles workload management challenges in the data center

As data center workloads spiral upward, a growing number of enterprises are looking to artificial intelligence (AI), hoping that technology will enable them to reduce the management burden on IT teams while boosting efficiency and slashing expenses.AI promises to automate the movement of workloads to the most efficient infrastructure in real time, both inside the data center as well as in a hybrid-cloud setting comprised of on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. As AI transforms workload management, future data centers may look far different than today's facilities. One possible scenario is a collection of small, interconnected edge data centers, all managed by a remote administrator.To read this article in full, please click here

AI tackles data-center workload management

As data center workloads spiral upward, a growing number of enterprises are looking to artificial intelligence (AI), hoping that technology will enable them to reduce the management burden on IT teams while boosting efficiency and slashing expenses.AI promises to automate the movement of workloads to the most efficient infrastructure in real time, both inside the data center as well as in a hybrid-cloud setting comprised of on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. As AI transforms workload management, future data centers may look far different than today's facilities. One possible scenario is a collection of small, interconnected edge data centers, all managed by a remote administrator.To read this article in full, please click here

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Sparking the next cycle of IT spending

Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending?  Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission.  It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys.  You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000.  We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong?  Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel unveils new type of network accelerator chip

Intel on Monday expanded its network processor roadmap with the announcement of the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Think of it as the next step in the SmartNIC market, because Intel does.The announcement was made at the Six Five Summit 2021, where Navin Shenoy, the head of Intel's Data Center Group, announced its intention to create the new processor family specifically for cloud workloads.There has been a move toward dedicated networking chips, called SmartNICs, that offload the work of network traffic processing from the CPU, thus freeing up the CPU to do its primary task. Mellanox released one in 2019 and was soon bought by Nvidia. Xilinx released one a year later and will soon be under the ownership of AMD.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco bolts together enterprise and industrial edge with new routers

Cisco has extended its family of Catalyst networking gear with routers designed to integrate remote, industrial-edge network resources.The new Catalyst 5G Industrial Router family includes three modular routers and a gateway that run Cisco's core operating system, IOS XE, and support a variety of network access technologies such as SD-WAN, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, 4G, Private LTE, FirstNet and Wi-SUN. The ultimate goal is to let customers tie together enterprise networks and SD-WANs with remote operations so IT can build, secure and manage a unified edge.To read this article in full, please click here

The great cloud computing surge

Driven in part by the pandemic, cloud computing adoption has reached new heights. These five articles take a close look at the implications.

IoT cloud services: How they stack up against DIY

Eager to cash in on the massive potential for IoT-based data storage and analytics, public-cloud vendors are diving headlong into the IoT market, offering enterprises everything from individual building blocks to fully managed services and every combination in between. Tech Spotlight: Cloud Computing Cloud or bust: IT leaders go all in on cloud computing (CIO) Migrating to hosted Exchange: Do’s and don’ts (Computerworld) AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure: How their security features compare (CSO) From legacy to the cloud: The 3 stages of enterprise modernization (InfoWorld) IoT cloud services: How they stack up against DIY (Network World) The amount of data that is expected to be generated by IoT devices is staggering. IDC predicts that by 2025, there will be 55.9 billion connected devices worldwide, 75% of which will be connected to an IoT platform. IDC estimates the amount of data generated from IoT devices will be 79.4 zettabytes by 2025.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco upgrades intent-based-networking performance, security, analytics

Cisco brought new features to its DNA Center network-control platform that promise to improve performance, management analytics and security for its enterprise network customers.The new software features integration of a ThousandEyes agent that bulks-up the platform’s network-intelligence monitoring, a two-fold increase in the number of clients the system can support, and improved security and operational capabilities.NaaS is the future but it's got challenges DNA Center is the heart of Cisco’s intent-based networking strategy and is the vendor’s core-networking control platform supporting myriad services from analytics, network management and automation to assurance setting, fabric provisioning, and policy-based segmentation for wired and wireless enterprise networks. To read this article in full, please click here

New NVMe spec brings new support for hard drives

The new NVM Express 2.0 has been released and with it a surprise: The non-volatile memory express protocol—best known for handling SSD speeds—is now offering full-blown support for traditional hard-disk drives.This is quite unexpected because SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The first flash-based SSDs used SATA/SAS physical interfaces borrowed from existing hard drive-based enterprise server/ storage systems. However, none of these interfaces and protocols were designed for high-speed storage media and the SATA/SAS bus became a bottleneck for the much faster SSD.To read this article in full, please click here

Why the cloud will never eat the data center

Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual.  Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers.  That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them?  It would have to be a data-center change.To read this article in full, please click here

What you can find out asking which, whereis and whatis in Linux

The which, whereis and whatis commands on a Linux system provide information about commands. They provide related but not identical information. In this post, we’ll check out the differences and provide a script for getting information that’s available from all three commands. We’ll also explore some sample commands for looking at secondary (i.e., not section 1) man pages.which The which command will show you the file-system location for a command’s executable. This is the file that is read and run whenever you type the command name.$ which date /usr/bin/date $ which shutdown /usr/sbin/shutdown Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux The which command will also report on your aliases and show you the commands they invoke.To read this article in full, please click here

New Cisco servers embrace hybrid cloud

Cisco has added a new class of servers to its Unified Computing System that are more flexible and outfitted with management software geared to hybrid cloud.The UCS X-Series is the first major redisign since UCS hit the market in 2009. The company says the modular hardware architecture is future-proofed because it can accomodate new generations of processors, storage, nonvolatile memory, accelerators, and interconnects as they come along. Prior UCS chassis were either blade systems for power efficiency or rack systems for expandability, but the UCS X-Series combines both in the same chassis.This means the single server type is able to support a broader range of tasks, from virtualized workloads, traditional enterprise applications, and databases to private cloud and cloud-native applications. The individual modules are interconnected into a fabric that can support IP networking, Fibre Channel SAN, and management connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here

Supermicro launches liquid cooling initiative

Super Micro Computer, a.k.a. Supermicro, is adding a range of liquid cooling solutions to its server products. Working with customers, Supermicro will design, implement and test the latest liquid cooling technologies at the rack level. Customers who implement liquid cooling can improve data center PUE (power usage effectiveness) and TCO by more than 40% by cutting power costs, the company says.The cooling is for new systems coming to market. Like most OEMs that support liquid cooling, Supermicro isn’t recommending retrofits to existing installations. It cites two reasons: One, it would be expensive, as you’d have to drill into the rack and server chassis to make room for the cooling piping. And two, the entire rack or cluster would have to be inactive while the retrofit was being done, and most firms won’t tolerate that.To read this article in full, please click here

Experimental Morpheus CPU is ‘mind-bogglingly terrible’ to crack

To many of us, Morpheus is a character played by Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix movies. To others, Morpheus is the Greek god of sleep and dreams. To others still, Morpheus is a digital synthesizer from the early ‘90s that developed a cult following.The Morpheus we’re discussing today, however, is of far greater relevance to enterprise IT professionals who constantly are searching for ways to protect their networks from the ever-present threat of hackers.Developed by a team at the University of Michigan, this Morpheus is a CPU that ingeniously protects against hacking attempts by using encryption that changes every few milliseconds, which prevents intruders from getting a fix on how a system is set up. This makes cracking the encryption nearly impossible and is sure to drive hackers crazy.To read this article in full, please click here