As the year winds down it's a good time to take a quick look ahead at what the new year might bring in order to be better prepared to make smart decisions.Nowhere is that more important than in IT, where the choices enterprise leaders make will have implications not only for themselves and their customers, but also for the overall economy, which depends more and more on corporate networks delivering business-critical services reliably.Here, we take a look how some of the most critical technologies will fare in 2020.What’s hot for Cisco in 2020
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Cisco is expected to continue its cloud, security, and SD-WANefforts in 2020, but there are hurdles to overcome. “Overall, I think it’s clear that Cisco needs to get into the cloud in a more effective way," said analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. "I think their recent reorg shows they understand that. Cloud Interconnect is a sideshow. What’s needed is infrastructure-independent development and deployment, which would relegate Cloud Interconnect to nothing but a network gateway.” (Read more.)To read this article in full, please click here
With some pretty important holidays right around the corner, you might need to be reminded how much longer you have to prepare.Fortunately, you can get a lot of help from the date command. In this post, we’ll look at ways that date and bash scripts can tell you how many days there are between today and some event that you’re anticipating.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
First a couple hints at how this is going to work. The date command’s %j option is going to show you today’s date as a number between 1 and 366. January 1st, as you’d expect, will be displayed as 1 and December 31st will be 365 or 366 depending on whether it’s leap year. Go ahead and try it. You should see something like this:To read this article in full, please click here
As the industry gets ready to gear up for 2020 things have been a little disquieting in networking land.That’s because some key players – Arista and Juniper in particular – have been reporting business slowdowns as new deals have been smaller than expected and cloud providers haven’t been as free-spending as in the past.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Worldwide IT spending has been on the slow side, Gartner said in October that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2019, an increase of 0.4% from 2018, the lowest growth forecast so far in 2019. The good news: global IT spending is expected to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending, Gartner stated.To read this article in full, please click here
In the cloud-services market, bare metal offerings have lagged behind virtualized ones, mostly because the use of the cloud for things like elastic apps and developer environments are better suited to instances with a native operating system.The term “bare metal” simply means no software of any kind, not even a hypervisor. Customers provide their own operating environments, and the provider offers nothing more than CPUs, memory, and storage. Up to now, IBM has led the charge with bare-metal services because SoftLayer, the major data-center provider it acquired in 2014, was heavily involved in that business.To read this article in full, please click here
Hard drives aren’t going to be capacious enough for future data archiving and retrieval requirements, scientists believe, as applications such as artificial intelligence, wide-scale Internet of Things connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality take hold. Glass could be the answer.Encoding in glass would have advantages over hard drives and other mediums, experts suggest. Holding capacity is greater, and the slivers of quartz being experimented with don’t need cooling or dehumidifying environments.Microsoft Research, working in the UK along with the University of Southampton, announced that it has been able to store an entire movie on a quartz, glass-based storage medium. The team stored and retrieved a full-length Superman film on a small slab of the special material that measures about 3 inches square and less than a tenth of an inch thick. .To read this article in full, please click here
We’re two for two! This week Gartner published its 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and I’m proud to report that once again Silver Peak has been positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.Last year Gartner published the inaugural 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, providing enterprise decision makers with a comprehensive assessment of the changing requirements for a modern WAN, Gartner listened to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewed each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzed their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The published report talks about Gartner’s view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in the rapidly changing WAN edge infrastructure market.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper has taken the wraps off new software and switches that are designed to broaden user options in deploying software-defined branch offices and enterprise networks.The company bolstered its Contrail SD-WAN cloud package to include support for SD-LAN-specific operations, such as provisioning of new devices and managing branch office LANs.
READ MORE: SD-WAN creates new security challengesTo read this article in full, please click here
Amazon and Verizon will offer the ability to run AWS-based applications with ultra-low latency via the former’s new Wavelength edge service, the companies announced this week at AWS re:Invent, letting organizations realize the benefits of edge computing without having to roll their own edge devices.The idea is a pretty simple one: Place small data centers running AWS’ software next to Verizon’s 5G points of presence. What this means is that applications running in that 5G coverage area can send their data to those remote edge data centers for rapid processing, as opposed to traveling across Verizon’s network, to the Internet at large, to AWS, and all the way back down the chain.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to further nudge the data-center crowd into the cloud world, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of its long-awaited Outposts hybrid-cloud service this week.Outposts delivers on-premises hardware and services that enables AWS cloud services inside enterprise data centers. That on-premises market is huge according to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy who told the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference audience 97% of the $3.7T IT market is still on-prem and that the industry is still at the very early stages of a shift from on premises to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
With the WAN in transition, incumbents make their move through acquisitions, while startups continue to innovate at the edge. Insider Pro looks at why SD-WAN is so hot.
Cisco is taking its integration with Amazon Web Services to a new level, announcing plans to integrate its SD-WAN, network services and security wares with the cloud giant's hybrid cloud environment, including its new Outposts offering. Outposts offers AWS-designed hardware that lets customers run compute and storage on premises, while connecting to AWS’s cloud services. Each Outpost has a pair of networking devices, each with 400 Gbps of connectivity and support for 1 GigE, 10 GigE, 40 GigE, and 100 Gigabit fiber connections. AWS announced the general availability of Outposts at its annual AWS re:Invent symposium, held this week in Las Vegas. To read this article in full, please click here
IBM hopes to reduce the complexity of moving workloads to the cloud through Cloud Paks,’ its series of specialized packaged offerings that enterprise can implement relatively quickly. But is it enough?
Amazon’s initial foray into the heavily hyped world of quantum computing is a virtual sandbox in which companies can test potential quantum-enabled applications and generally get to grips with the new technology, the company announced Monday.The product is named Braket, after a system of notation used in quantum physics. The idea, according to Amazon, is to democratize access to quantum computing in a small way. Most organizations aren’t going to own their own quantum computers for the foreseeable future; they’re impractically expensive and require a huge amount of infrastructure even for the limited proof-of-concept models at the current cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here
Ampere Computing, the semiconductor startup led by former Intel president Renee James that designs Arm-based server processors, is preparing to launch its next-generation CPU by mid-2020.The upcoming chip will have 80 cores, much more than the 32-core processor the company shipped last year and vastly more than x86 CPUs by Intel and AMD. Ampere’s design is different. Instead of multiple threads per core, each core is single threaded.Jeff Wittich, Ampere’s senior vice president of products, said that was by design, to avoid some of the CPU vulnerabilities that crept into x86 chips but also to avoid the “noisy neighbor” problem in cloud service-provider networks.To read this article in full, please click here
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HP Enterprise has partnered with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a unit of the Department of Energy, to create AI and machine learning-systems for greater data-center energy efficiency.The Department of Energy lab will provide HPE with multiple years’ worth of historical data from sensors within its supercomputers and in its Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) High-Performance Computing (HPC) Data Center, one of the world's most efficient data centers. This information will help other organizations to optimize their own operations, said NREL.To read this article in full, please click here
MPLS is showing its age in the era of digital transformation. SD-WAN’s agility, low cost, and direct branch office cloud access increasingly make more sense for global, cloud-enabled organizations. The big question for many IT leaders is: Can SD-WANs and their Internet last-mile connections match MPLS’s availability to serve as an MPLS alternative?The short answer? Yes. Here’s why.MPLS’s Last-Mile Availability Problem
MPLS has long been known for its uptime. As managed services that’s no surprise; the telcos do a very good job keeping an eye on the core of their networks. But what’s often a surprise to outsiders is the problem MPLS services have with the last mile. The high cost of MPLS services makes it impractical to equip branch offices with redundant last-mile MPLS connections, and without redundancy delivering on uptime is challenging. And even with Internet backup, failover is often manual or slow enough to disrupt the user experience.To read this article in full, please click here
The date command on Linux systems is very straightforward. You type “date” and the date and time are displayed in a useful way. It includes the day-of-the-week, calendar date, time and time zone:$ date
Tue 26 Nov 2019 11:45:11 AM EST
As long as your system is configured properly, you’ll see the date and current time along with your time zone.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The command, however, also offers a lot of options to display date and time information differently. For example, if you want to display dates in the most useful format for sorting, you might want to use a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here