The data center must rapidly change. Companies are increasingly moving toward hybrid IT models, with some workloads in the cloud and others staying on premises. The burden of ever-growing apps and data is placing pressure on infrastructure in both worlds, but especially the data center.Organizations are struggling to reach the required speed and flexibility — with the same public-cloud economics — from their on-premises data centers. That’s likely because they’re dealing with legacy systems acquired over the years, possibly inherited as the result of mergers and acquisitions.These complex environments create headaches when trying to accommodate for IT capacity fluctuations. When extra storage is needed, for example, 67% of IT departments buy too much, according to Futurum Research. They don’t have the visibility into resources, nor the ability to effectively scale up and down.To read this article in full, please click here
If a company wants to be successful, it needs a customer relationship management platform that makes it easy to manage sales and service customers. Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market, so learning how to develop and implement it will make you a valuable asset in any industry. If you want to develop frameworks that lead to successful sales, then this $39.99 Salesforce bundle is for you. To read this article in full, please click here
Aruba has expanded its switch portfolio to include new software and switches that bring the company’s automation and software intelligence to campus networks.The HPE company is offering up a new release of its switch software – AOS-CX 10.4 – and the Aruba stackable CX 6300 and modular CX 6400 Series switches. The company also said it had integrated its switch-configuration software, NetEdit, into its Network Analytics Engine (NAE). NAE uses embedded analytics and automation to simplify management, accelerate troubleshooting of application-performance issues and remediate common network problems, Aruba stated. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
AOS-CX is the network operating system software that Aruba introduced with its first core switch – the 19.2Tb/sec 8400 programmable, modular campus core and aggregation switch in 2017. Aruba describes AOS-CX as a cloud-native, programmable software package that can automate and simplify many critical and complex network functions such as end-to-end network monitoring, troubleshooting, network performance and security-related issues. To read this article in full, please click here
WAN edge infrastructure is one of the most rapidly changing areas of IT, driven largely by the unabated migration of business applications to SaaS offerings and to public clouds or IaaS instances. As reported recently by Forbes, 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be hosted in the cloud by 2020[1]. No longer centrally hosted solely in corporate data centers, applications are now hosted anywhere, and often in multiple locations. SaaS and IaaS providers strategically host their services in multiple data centers around the globe in metropolitan cities where business users are located. Connecting users to the closest SaaS and IaaS instances minimizes data transmission latency or delay and delivers the highest cloud application performance to end users. To read this article in full, please click here
Cyber crime is responsible for a staggering amount of damage and chaos around the world. Want to be a part of the solution? Then train for a career in this demanding field with The A to Z Cyber Security and IT Certification Training Bundle.This e-training bundle is perfect for anyone who has an interest in putting a stop to cyber crime. It includes twelve courses that’ll introduce students to ethical hacking methods, show them how to test a network for weaknesses, and identify problems so they can be fixed prior to being exploited. It’s fast, flexible, and you can even apply your training in preparation for several certification examsTo read this article in full, please click here
Clear battle lines are emerging between the various hybrid cloud market participants. For both vendors and enterprises, the stakes are high and there will be clear winners and losers in the years ahead as cloud moves from hyperbole to an operating model.On one side, we have the hyperscale cloud providers fighting it out for market share in public cloud, but with a noticeable increase in focus on offering on-prem solutions and then we have the server vendors on the other side, bridging from their installed base of on-premises infrastructure into cloud via hybrid models using open source as well as legacy virtualization platforms as the pathway to modernized IT architecture.To read this article in full, please click here
News flash: Mainframes still aren't dead.On the contrary, mainframe use is increasing, and not to run COBOL, either. Mainframes are being eyed for modern technologies including blockchain and containers.A survey of 153 IT decision makers found that 50% of organizations will continue with the mainframe and increase its use over the next two years, while just 5% plan to decrease or remove mainframe activity. The survey was conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Ensono, a hybrid IT services provider, and Wipro Limited, a global IT consulting services company.
READ MORE: Data center workloads become more complex despite promises to the contraryTo read this article in full, please click here
Whether you’re interested in managing a team or you just want to better communicate your goals with your colleagues, project management skills will come in handy. Many people learn how to manage a team on the job, and while hands-on experience is invaluable, learning a structured approach to project management will make your team much more effective. If you want to learn the skills necessary to keep your team running at peak efficiency, this $29 bundle is for you.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware has taken another step to integrate its virtual kingdom with Amazon Web Services' world with an on-premise service that will let customers automate database provisioning and management. The package, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is available now for customers running VMware vSphere 6.5 or later and supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Other DBs will be supported in the future, the companies said.To read this article in full, please click here
Three major digital infrastructure providers have announced a merger that will create a solutions powerhouse, with the real winners being their channel partners, Dell and Cisco.AHEAD, Data Blue, and Sovereign Systems announced plans to merge their firms, creating a company with around $1.3 billion in revenue and a wide range of skills. All three firms specialize in modernizing digital business infrastructure and assisting enterprise clients transition to cloud computing, but each has its own area of specialty, and those areas complement one another.AHEAD specializes in enterprise service management, DevOps, monitoring and analytics, and security. Data Blue covers managed services and provides deep networking expertise. Sovereign Systems specializes in cloud, VMware, and ServiceNow expertise. While all three firms operate in multiple industries, the combined company will be especially deep in healthcare, insurance, and financial services.To read this article in full, please click here
A new and growing title in IT, infrastructure software manager is becoming a vital role for organizations, especially those embarking on digital transformations.
Tech companies are always looking for more ways to increase efficiency, and today, DevOps is the way they're doing it. For the uninitiated, DevOps is a series of practices that brings software development teams together with IT operations professionals so they may create products that are both reliable and efficient. If you want to work in software development, then knowing DevOps could make all the difference.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises unaware of the role IPv6 plays on remote users’ devices run the risk that these machines might access banned sites despite using VPNs that are meant to restrict what they access.This hole stems from the fact that some of these remote-access VPNs are configured to inspect and apply security controls only to IPv4 traffic as it passes through a VPN concentrator without enabling similar protections for IPv6 traffic.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
This leaves IPv6 traffic free to access the Internet directly without those controls being applied. Known as IPv6 VPN breakout, the issue is well known yet often remains overlooked.To read this article in full, please click here
Beamforming is a technique that focuses a wireless signal towards a specific receiving device, rather than having the signal spread in all directions from a broadcast antenna, as it normally would. The resulting more direct connection is faster and more reliable than it would be without beamforming.Although the principles of beamforming have been known since the 1940s, in recent years beamforming technologies have introduced incremental improvements in Wi-Fi networking. Today, beamforming is crucial to the 5G networks that are just beginning to roll out.To read this article in full, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises some big benefits for organizations, such as greater insights about the performance of corporate assets and finished products, improved manufacturing processes, and better customer services. The nagging security issues related to IoT, unfortunately, remain a huge concern for companies and in some cases might be keeping them from moving forward with initiatives. One possible solution to at least some of the security risks of IoT is microsegmentation, a concept in networking that experts say could help keep IoT environments under control.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Nutanix announced the general availability of its integrated private cloud as-a-service solution with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), as well as a new integration with the popular IT management platform ServiceNow.Nutanix’s strategy has been to integrate its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software with all of the big server-hardware vendors in addition to selling its own hardware appliances. Nutanix shared the news at its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen.HPE’s services are sold under the GreenLake brand, its metered on-premises service meant to counter the allure of the cloud. Customers can get ProLiant hardware under GreenLake without massive upfront acquisition costs and pay only for their use of the hardware.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware has wrapped up its $2.1 billion buy of cloud-native endpoint-security vendor Carbon Black and in the process created a new security business unit that will target cybersecurity and analytics to protect networked enterprise resources.When VMware announced the acquisition in August, its CEO Pat Gelsinger said he expected Carbon Black technology to be integrated across VMware’s product families such as NSX networking software and vSphere, VMware's flagship virtualization platform. “Security is broken and fundamentally customers want a different answer in the security space. We think this move will be an opportunity for major disruption,” he said. To read this article in full, please click here
There have been significant changes in wide-area networks over the past few years, none more important than software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, which is changing how network pros think about optimizing the use of connectivity that is as varied as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), frame relay and even DSL.What is SD-WAN?
As the name states, software-defined wide-area networks use software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers and remote branches or cloud instances. Like its bigger technology brother, software-defined networking, SD-WAN decouples the control plane from the data plane.To read this article in full, please click here
The Vitis unified software platform from FPGA vendor Xilinx is the result of five-year project to create software development tools using familiar languages like C++ and Python to develop a wide range of applications for its reprogrammable chip.The beauty of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) is their configurable, adaptable nature. That's also what makes programming them a king-sized challenge. They're difficult to work with for an unskilled programmer who is not well versed in hardware, and they often require esoteric languages.Vitis supports heterogeneous architectures including Xilinx’s Zynq SoCs, MPSoCs, and Versal ACAPs. Vitis is designed to enable highly optimized, domain-specific acceleration to a wide array of applications, from cloud deployments, to machine learning and AI, to IoT and desktop applications. Think of it as being for Xilinx what CUDA is to Nvidia.To read this article in full, please click here