Hard drive makers are staving off obsolescence to solid-state drives (SSDs) by offering capacities that are simply not feasible in an SSD. Seagate and Western Digital are both pushing to release 20TB hard disks in the next few years. A 20TB SSD might be doable but also cost more than a new car.But Showa Denko K.K. of Japan has gone one further with the announcement of its next-generation of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media for hard drives. The platters use all-new magnetic thin films to maximize their data density, with the goal of eventually enabling 70TB to 80TB hard drives in a 3.5-inch form factor.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Showa Denko is the world’s largest independent maker of platters for hard drives, selling them to basically anyone left making hard drives not named Seagate and Western Digital. Those two make their own platters and are working on their own next-generation drives for release in the coming years.While similar in concept, Seagate and Western Digital have chosen different solutions to the same problem. HAMR, championed by Seagate and Showa, works by temporarily heating the disk material during the write Continue reading
If the industry needed more evidence that IoT devices and applications are taking over the world, Cisco this week said that by 2023 machine-to-machine communications will make up 50% or about 14.7 billion of all networked connections compared to 33% (6.1 billion) in 2018 and 3.1 percent in 2017.The M2M findings were just a part of Cisco’s annual forecast of networking trends now called the Cisco Annual Internet Report. The report replaces the Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and looks at everything from 5G and Wi-Fi growth to broadband trends collected from actual network traffic reports and independent analyst forecasts.To read this article in full, please click here
In my most recent blog post, I talked about the difficulty SD-WAN vendors have in finding their voice and clearly differentiating their value. My point was that if Wendy’s, Burger King, and McDonald’s could figure out how to differentiate their burgers and fries, we should be able articulate why customers choose our solutions over the 60+ vendors competing for their business. I started out talking about the business reasons why companies select Silver Peak. Now it’s time to talk about our differentiation at a product level.How is our SD-WAN edge platform, Unity EdgeConnect™, unique? I’ll frame the differentiation around what our customers are telling us. You’ll notice a significant emphasis on our ability to improve application performance for any type of application traversing any type of transport. We’re the only company that first tries to fix problems with the underlying network, allowing customers to fully leverage all of their circuits, even in instances of degraded performance. Unlike others, we don’t just re-route packets in the event of transport brownouts and blackouts.To read this article in full, please click here
When SD-WAN was introduced, it was widely seen as an MPLS alternative. Today just about any credible, Internet-based SD-WAN solution can be used to replace a regional MPLS network. The bigger question is what happens the day after you networked your regional offices.How will your SD-WAN deliver predictable application experience overseas or where Internet routing is unpredictable? How will your SD-WAN adapt to the cloud and mobile users, the new tenants of the modern enterprise? In short, understanding how your SD-WAN will accommodate the unpredictable is essential if you hope to future-proof your WAN.To read this article in full, please click here
Arista confirmed what had been rumored for the past few weeks, that it has acquired software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud-software vendor Big Switch Networks for an undisclosed amount.The move gives Arista a package of software technology that should complement Arista’s drive to meld data-center and campus networks with the multicloud deployments. To read this article in full, please click here
The popularity of Amazon’s cloud computing platform continues to grow. That means that opportunities for IT professionals in this sector are likely to be plentiful, but only those with the proper skills will be considered for jobs. So, if you're trying to climb above the competition, you'd be remiss to look over the AWS Solutions Architect Certification Bundle, currently discounted by over 90% today.To read this article in full, please click here
If you buy what the telcos are telling you, 5G will bring you gigabit per second speeds and sub-10-millisecond latency. It's a pity that you really won't see anything like that in the real world. Here's the real 5G story.
2020! What could better motivate you to push ahead with your resolutions and organization’s digital transformation than a new year AND a new decade. As you put together your digital strategy, check out a new transformation-empowering (and transformational) technology category Gartner coined the Secure Access Service Edge or SASE (pronounced “Sassy”). SASE converges wide area networking and identity-based security into a cloud service targeted directly to your branch offices, mobile users, cloud services, and even IoT devices, wherever they happen to be. The result: consistently high WAN performance, security, productivity, agility, and flexibility across the global, mobile, cloud-enabled enterprise.To read this article in full, please click here
People skilled in the use of cloud based platforms are in demand. If you want to transition your career path into this specialized field, then The Complete 2020 Microsoft Azure Certification Prep Bundle, discounted by over 90 percent, may be the most convenient route.This package is ideal for anyone who wants to work in the growing cloud computing sector. It includes eleven beginner-friendly courses that introduce students to the popular Microsoft Azure platform as well as advanced topics in data analysis, security, and integration. And, since it’s all delivered via the web, it’s far more affordable when compared with other forms of education.To read this article in full, please click here
Man pages provide essential information on Linux commands and many users refer to them often, but there’s a lot more to the man pages than many of us realize.You can always type a command like “man who” and get a nice description of how the man command works, but exploring commands that you might not know could be even more illuminating. For example, you can use the man command to help identify commands to handle some unusually challenging task or to show options that can help you use a command you already know in new and better ways.Let’s navigate through some options and see where we end up.Using man to identify commands
The man command can help you find commands by topic. If you’re looking for a command to count the lines in a file, for example, you can provide a keyword. In the example below, we’ve put the keyword in quotes and added blanks so that we don’t get commands that deal with “accounts” or “accounting” along with those that do some counting for us.To read this article in full, please click here
IoT equipment designers shooting for efficiency should explore the potential for using buildings as antennas, researchers say.Environmental surfaces such as walls can be used to intercept and beam signals, which can increase reliability and data throughput for devices, according to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).Researchers at CSAIL have been working on a smart-surface repeating antenna array called RFocus. The antennas, which could be applied in sheets like wallpaper, are designed to be incorporated into office spaces and factories. Radios that broadcast signals could then become smaller and less power intensive.To read this article in full, please click here
The ease with which internet of things devices can be compromised, coupled with the potentially extreme consequences of breaches, have prompted action from legislatures and regulators, but what group is best to decide?Both the makers of IoT devices and governments are aware of the security issues, but so far they haven’t come up with standardized ways to address them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“The challenge of this market is that it’s moving so fast that no regulation is going to be able to keep pace with the devices that are being connected,” said Forrester vice president and research director Merritt Maxim. “Regulations that are definitive are easy to enforce and helpful, but they’ll quickly become outdated.”To read this article in full, please click here
The only thing constant is change, and data centers are no exception. As data architects attempt to anticipate future data center needs – while delivering the required SLAs to the business – the solution is often to over-provision resources so that the infrastructure can absorb any changes or periodic spikes in demand.But today change happens much more frequently, whether it’s onboarding new applications or reaching new heights in data growth. Most often, organizations expect immediate implementation of those changes In today’s environment of flat or declining budgets, IT can no longer afford to over-provision its way.Composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) enables organizations to respond to changes almost instantly while at the same time reduce costs. This in turn helps IT better align changing business needs and allocate IT resources on the fly.To read this article in full, please click here
Predictive maintenance is, arguably, the most hyped application of IoT technology currently available to the enterprise user, and it’s easy to understand why: Getting greater insight into industrial machinery, fleets of vehicles or anything else that can be digitally instrumented seems to offer a fairly direct path to savings through lower maintenance costs and less downtime.But it’s not as simple as just grafting sensors onto existing equipment, according to experts, and reaping the benefits of predictive maintenance isn’t an automatic win for the asset-heavy businesses that can profit most from this IoT implementation.To read this article in full, please click here
The fourth quarter of the calendar year tends to be great for component makers like Intel and AMD because of holiday consumer sales, but this most recent Q4 period saw them both enjoy bang-up server sales, too.Q4 was “kind of a quirky quarter,” said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel gained share overall, while AMD gained share in server, desktop and notebook markets. How? Increased demand across the board, for starters, at a time when customers aren’t typically buying servers.“The only surprise was how strong the quarter was,” McCarron said. “It was a very strong fourth quarter, multiple records were set. The main ones that count were: server revenues were records for Intel and AMD, and total CPU record.”To read this article in full, please click here
Firewalls continuously evolve to remain a staple of network security by incorporating functionality of standalone devices, embracing network-architecture changes, and integrating outside data sources to add intelligence to the decisions they make – a daunting wealth of possibilities that is difficult to keep track of.Because of this richness of features, next-generation firewalls are difficult to master fully, and important capabilities sometimes can be, and in practice are, overlooked.Here is a shortlist of new features IT pros should be aware of.To read this article in full, please click here
What you need to know -- and do -- about the tech-driven deglobalization trend and how it’s effecting change. Your career depends on understanding how nationalism and regulations impact business.
Well, that was short.Intel is ending work on its Nervana neural network processors (NNP) in favor of an artificial intelligence line it gained in the recent $2 billion acquisition of Habana Labs.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Intel acquired Nervana in 2016 and issued its first NNP chip one year later. After the $408 million acquisition by Intel, Nervana co-founder Naveen Rao was placed in charge of the AI platforms group, which is part of Intel's data platforms group. The Nervana chips were meant to compete with Nvidia GPUs in the AI inference training space, and Facebook worked with Intel “in close collaboration, sharing its technical insights,” according to former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.To read this article in full, please click here
Combining 4G and 5G cellular services with SD-WAN can give enterprise IT pros connectivity options that are faster than wired alternatives such as MPLS and that provide benefits including rapid provisioning, improved reliability and more bandwidth for less money.Branch offices, which are undergoing dramatic changes in the amount of traffic they generate and where that traffic goes, can particularly benefit from 4G and 5G, and one enabler is software-defined WAN.To read this article in full, please click here