As IT professionals know, enterprise server farms are huge energy consumers, and the larger they are, the more voracious their appetite.Quantum computing could help because it is not only supposed to solve complex problems exponentially faster than classical computing, it’s also supposed to do so while consuming less energy. However major barriers—such as creating the extremely low temperatures required to enable superconductivity that is used in quantum-computing components—stand in the way.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Now researchers at MIT are working on a tiny device that could help enable quantum computing and drastically reduce server-farm costs. The roots of this device—made from a superconducting nanowire—stretch back to a similar concept developed in the mid-1950s by an MIT electrical engineer who died tragically young before his vision could become reality.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’d like to know what systems and devices are attached to your local network—whether out of security concerns or simple curiosity, Linux has some really great commands for providing answers. In this post, we’ll probe a small network and see how devices can be identified.nmap
The first tool we’ll use is nmap, which stands for Network Mapper, an open source tool for exploring networks and doing some serious security auditing. It was designed to work quickly even on large networks and provide information using raw packets to identify hosts, services, and sometimes even operating systems.The simple scan shown below is detecting systems and devices on the local network. The “/24” portion of the target address indicates that all hosts in the 192.168.0.x IP address range are to be included.To read this article in full, please click here
If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own. We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work. We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right? Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that? Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware. Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize. That just doesn’t scale. Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic Continue reading
VMware and Nvidia have expanded their alliance to support Nvidia GPU-based applications on VMware's new vSphere 7 Update 2. The upgraded version of vSphere 7 will support the new Nvidia AI Enterprise offering, a suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks that enables GPU-accelerated applications to run in VMware virtual machines and containers.VMware's vSphere 7 U2 adds support for Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU and its multi-instance GPU feature, which allows for partitioning of the cores on an A100 for use by multiple users, much in the same way VMware partitions CPU cores out to multiple users.
Read more: Highflying Nvidia widens its reach into enterprise data centers To read this article in full, please click here
Soon after data centers began transitioning from hard drives to solid-state drives (SSD), the NVMe protocol arrived to support high-performance, direct-attached PCIe SSDs. NVMe was followed by NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), which was designed to efficiently support hyperscale remote SSD pools, effectively replacing direct-attached storage (DAS) to become the default protocol for disaggregated storage within a cloud infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
One of the great debates in networking has been whether to use wired connectivity—which brings speed—or wireless—which delivers mobility. Recent versions of Wi-Fi deliver speeds comparable to wired, removing this debate. Wired connections are still faster, but for most user applications, including video, there is no experience difference. Looking ahead, next-generation wireless will be well North of 1Gbps, making it a no-brainer to use wireless.The next big decision: What kind of wireless?In the past, there was only one option, and that was Wi-Fi. Now there is another option coming into play, and that’s 5G. Not 5G like the kind one has attached to your mobile phone, but private 5G used within enterprise environments.To read this article in full, please click here
Rivals Intel and Nvidia are on the same side when it comes to the funding of a startup that promises to make flash storage orders of magnitude faster.The two are among numerous investors in Pliops, which is developing a specialized storage processor that it says allows applications to access data kept in flash storage up to 100 times faster than with traditional approaches while using a fraction of the electricity required by traditional hardware.
Read more: NVMe over Fabrics creates data-center storage disruptionTo read this article in full, please click here
What is the ideal role of SD-WAN in a SASE architecture?Both SD-WAN and SASE hold great promise, sharing the common goal of securely connecting users to the data and applications critical to doing their jobs and demonstrating the tightening linkage between networking and security investments. Without the right security private cloud, however, SD-WAN lacks the necessary complement that will help organizations fully realize a SASE architecture, especially for addressing remote workers.SD-WAN’s RoleLeveraging the concept of a virtualized network overlay to connect branch offices, SD-WAN allows organizations to better tap the public Internet and low-cost broadband to save on expensive, legacy MPLS connections. Various analysts estimate SD-WAN can help enterprises cut costs by as much as 65% compared to traditional alternatives. SD-WAN benefits run deeper than just infrastructure savings, also including increased network availability, better traffic prioritization, and more intelligent path selection.To read this article in full, please click here
One thing is clear about Xilinx: It isn't waiting around for is acquisition by AMD to close. The latest initiatives from the company are a new SmartNIC card and an FPGA platform app store that features ready-to-deploy solutions aimed at key markets, such as data analytics, video and image processing, machine learning, and security.The new Alveo SN1000 line features integrated "composability" features that allow for customization. Enterprise users can add their own custom networking functions, as needed, to supplement the SmartNIC's core networking capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here
John Deere, the $35.5 billion maker of farm equipment, is planting the seeds of company-owned 5G cellular networking in some of its manufacturing plants after investing half-a-million dollars in wireless licenses at an FCC auction last year.
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 company says that having a piece of wireless spectrum more or less to itself is key to updating certain of its production facilities. Deere bought citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) licenses in five Iowa and Illinois counties at that give it virtually unfettered use of the local CBRS bandwidth for private 5G.To read this article in full, please click here
Overall Internet traffic on Comcast’s network spiked substantially at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020, but normalized over the subsequent months, according to a report released today by the internet service provider.As the largest individual home ISP in the U.S., Comcast’s data on Internet usage represents a useful snapshot into overall home connectivity during the pandemic.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Nearly two-thirds of Americans--62%--reported working from home at some point during the current crisis, double the figures for the previous March, the report found. And 93% of households with school-age children reported that those children engaged in distance learning.To read this article in full, please click here
The latest Insider Pro and Computerworld Salary Survey reveals the current salaries for dozens of tech titles, the IT skills most in demand (and those not), the tech hiring expectations for the coming year, and what matters most to IT pros in their current jobs.
Juniper Networks continues to integrate and expand its portfolio of cloud-based, AI-driven services that are aimed at helping customers manage and control enterprise networks. At the core of those services is technology Juniper gained in its acquisition of wireless and AI software maker Mist in 2019 for $405 million. Mist's technology includes an AI-based engine called Marvis that uses machine learning to automatically identify, adapt to, and fix network issues.
Read more: Juniper's big push: AI in all areas of enterprise networkingTo read this article in full, please click here
Over the last decade, a number of technological trends have come together that will transform our industrial society and introduce a high level of automation to many of our processes. Robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the cloud, and digital twins technology are ushering in the era of Industry 4.0. Asset-intensive industries are moving quickly to take advantage of these technologies, including manufacturing, ports, mines, utilities, railways, airports, logistics, intelligent highways, and smart cities. The list is long and growing quickly.To read this article in full, please click here
Fresh off a solid quarterly earnings report, Extreme Networks is set for an active 2021, according to Ed Meyercord, president and CEO of the networking company. Extreme plans to roll out a range of new products to expand its universal networking family, which offers customers standardized hardware products that can be deployed across edge, aggregation, and wiring-closet environments. Also on tap are upgrades to the company's core ExtremeCloud IQ cloud management platform, which has seen six straight quarters of customer growth and currently manages about 1.5 million networking elements.To read this article in full, please click here
Pure Storage, the all-flash storage-array vendor, has expanded its Purity software base and is also expanding its line of storage products.Pure has three storage lines, the FlashArray//X, the FlashBlade, and the FlashArray//C lines, all managed by its Purity software line. The updated Purity software adds Windows-application acceleration for the FlashBlade and FlashArray lines and delivers ransomware protection across file, block and native cloud-based apps, among other features.
Read about backup and recovery:
Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference
How to pick an off-site data-backup method
Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet?
The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space
The new version of Purity also adds granular monitoring so administrators get real-time visibility into the most active users on a network and see who is stressing the storage system.To read this article in full, please click here
Bill Holmes, facilities manager at the Corona, Calif., plant that produces the iconic Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, remembers all too well walking the factory floor with a crude handheld vibration analyzer and then plugging the device into a computer to get readings on the condition of his equipment.While all of the woodworking was done by hand when Leo Fender founded Fender Musical Instruments Corp. 75 years ago, today the guitar necks and bodies are produced with computer-controller woodworking routers, then handed off to the craftsmen who build the final product. Holmes says he is always looking for the latest technological advances to solve problems (he uses robotics to help paint the guitars), and there's no problem more vexing than equipment breakdowns.To read this article in full, please click here
A few months back, Samsung and Xilinx co-introduced an SSD with a Xilinx FPGA processor on-board, making computational storage very real. The SSD meant data could be processed where it resided rather than moving it to and from memory.Now they’ve introduced High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated with an artificial intelligence (AI) processor, called the HBM-PIM. The new processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture brings AI processing capabilities inside the memory rather than moving contents in and out to the processor, to accelerate large-scale processing in data centers, high-performance computing (HPC) systems and AI-enabled mobile applications.To read this article in full, please click here
Since Wi-Fi transmits over the airwaves, it’s of course much more susceptible to interference than the wired network. There can be interference from your own network or neighbor's, non-Wi-Fi wireless devices, microwaves, and even radar systems. Since there are so many possibilities, tracking down or fixing the interference can be quite a task, but knowing where to start can help.
Wi-Fi resources
Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest?
How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you
Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6
Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for
The symptoms of interference issues can easily be mistaken for symptoms of other, more apparent problems such as poor Wi-Fi coverage. If so, maybe you blindly add more access points (AP) and, not knowing that you already had interference, that can actually cause more interference. So, try to find the root causes of any symptoms and be very intentional about the changes you make.To read this article in full, please click here