The Amazon spans 2.1 million square miles of rain forest spread over nine countries. And on its edges are miles of agricultural fields, whose farmers routinely burn in order to control pests and weeds, and to encourage new growth.Brazil is the largest cattle exporter in the world with over 200 million head of cattle. Ranchers often set fires to clear land for grazing, reports the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. However, these long-practiced techniques have raised concerns of the threat that accidental forest fires could pose during drought years. Climate change, which is beginning to show its effects around the world, could exacerbate this threat.To read this article in full, please click here
SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here
SAN FRANCISCO—VMware has uncorked a variety of software products and services aimed at letting customers more quickly and securely build and manage hybrid-cloud environments.More apps will be built and deployed in the next five years than in the last 40 to support workloads including analytics and connecting IoT devices, said Kip Colbert, vice president and cloud CTO for VMware, and that will require more expansive hybrid-cloud platform.RELATED: How Notre Dame is going all in with Amazon’s cloud
VMware used its VMworld customer event here to expand its cloud role to Dell/EMC and broadened its role with Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware's Cloud portfolio, its underlying hybrid-cloud platform, already supports Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud services, plus more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware. Of these, 10 million are in the cloud, Colbert said.To read this article in full, please click here
San Francisco – VMware has announced an initiative that will help make it easier for current vSphere customers to build and manage Kubernetes containers as the platform evolves.The company, at its VMworld customer event, announced VMware Tanzu which is made up of myriad new and existing VMware technologies to create a portfolio of products and services aimed at enterprises looking to more quickly build software in Kubernetes containers.Learn how to make hybrid cloud work
VMware believes that Kubernetes has emerged as the infrastructure layer to accommodate a diversity of applications. VMware says that from 2018 to 2023 – with new tools/platforms, more developers, agile methods, and lots of code reuse – 500 million new logical apps will be created serving the needs of many application types and spanning all types of environments. To read this article in full, please click here
If you were wondering what prompted Nvidia to shell out nearly $7 billion for Mellanox Technologies, here’s your answer: The networking hardware provider has introduced a pair of processors for offloading network workloads from the CPU.ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 are cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions, respectively, designed to take the work of network processing off the CPU, freeing it to do its processing job.[ Learn more about SDN: Find out where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters. ]
The company promises up to 200Gbit/sec throughput with ConnectX and BlueField. It said the market for 25Gbit and faster Ethernet was 31% of the total market last year and will grow to 61% next year. With the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), a lot of data needs to be moved around and Ethernet needs to get a lot faster.To read this article in full, please click here
For decades, Linux users have been renaming files with the mv command. It’s easy, and the command does just what you expect. Yet sometimes you need to rename a large group of files. When that is the case, the rename command can make the task a lot easier. It just requires a little finesse with regular expressions. [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ]
Unlike the mv command, rename isn’t going to allow you to simply specify the old and new names. Instead, it uses a regular expression like those you'd use with Perl. In the example below, the "s" specifies that we're substituting the second string (old) for the first, thus changing this.new to this.old.To read this article in full, please click here
Actions speak louder than words. Reliable actions build lasting trust in contrast to unreliable words. Imagine that you had a house with a guarded wall. You would feel safe in the house, correct? Now, what if that wall is dismantled? You might start to feel your security is under threat. Anyone could have easy access to your house.In the same way, with traditional security products: it is as if anyone is allowed to leave their house, knock at your door and pick your locks. Wouldn’t it be more secure if only certain individuals whom you fully trust can even see your house? This is the essence of zero-trust networking and is a core concept discussed in my recent course on SDP (software-defined perimeter).To read this article in full, please click here
Even though Brother International is a supplier of many IT products, from machine tools to head-mounted displays to industrial sewing machines, it’s best known for printers. And in today’s world, those printers are no longer stand-alone devices, but components of the internet of things.That’s why I was interested in this list from Robert Burnett, Brother’s director, B2B product & solution – basically, the company’s point man for large customer implementations. Not surprisingly, Burnett focuses on IoT security mistakes related to printers and also shares Brother’s recommendations for dealing with the top five.To read this article in full, please click here
All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.2 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
VMware has deep relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of VMware’s AppDefense endpoint security. Pivotal has a deeper relationship in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company, spun out Pivotal in 2013.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco today warned its Unified Computing System (UCS) customers about four critical fixes they need to make to stop nefarious agents from taking over or attacking their systems.The problems all have a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).The critical bugs are found in the Cisco UCS Director and UCS Director Express for Big Data packages.To read this article in full, please click here
Big Switch has rolled a variety of new software packages aimed at simplifying customer networks and helping them manage on-premises and hybrid-cloud data-center growth.The products include a version of its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) for Amazon Web Services virtual private cloud (VPC) management, adding support for Global VPCs (G-VPCs), and a cloud-based version of its Multi-Cloud Director (MCD). VPCs provide the on-demand access to a pool of shared cloud-computing resources.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
Big Switch’s flagship BCF software lets customers manage physical switches as a single fabric that includes security, automation, orchestration and analytics. BCF can run on a variety of certified switches from Dell EMC, HPE and others. In addition, BCF Controller natively supports integration with various Cloud Management Platforms such as VMware (vSphere, NSX Manager, vSAN) and OpenStack. BCF also supports container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, all via a single interface. To read this article in full, please click here
Data backup and restoration can be somewhat of a black-box effort. You often don’t know whether you fully nailed it until disaster strikes, and there is always room for improvement, especially as cloud and hybrid options grow. We asked four network professionals to share what made them realize they should do more to bolster their organization’s backup and recovery processes, and how they made that happen. Here are their stories.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Breakthroughs in the manipulation of light are making it more likely that we will, in due course, be seeing a significantly faster and more secure Internet. Adoption of optical circuits in chips, for example, to be driven by quantum technologies could be just around the corner.Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have just announced a dramatic leap forward in the methods used to accurately place light sources in atom-thin layers. That fine positioning has been one block in the movement towards quantum chips.To read this article in full, please click here
While it may not be obvious to the casual user, Linux file systems have evolved significantly over the last decade or so to make them more resistant to corruption and performance problems.Most Linux systems today use a file system type called ext4. The “ext” part stands for “extended” and the 4 indicates that this is the 4th generation of this file system type. Features added over time include the ability to provide increasingly larger file systems (currently as large as 1,000,000 TiB) and much larger files (up to 16 TiB), more resistance to system crashes and less fragmentation (scattering single files as chunks in multiple locations) which improves performance.To read this article in full, please click here
While cellular wireless is often thought of as a carrier service, IT organizations can benefit from deploying private LTE technology to complement or even replace Wi-Fi and for specific use cases such as supporting IoT devices that generate large data sets and that are spread out over large areas.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
While cellular wireless is often thought of as a carrier service, IT organizations can benefit from deploying private 4G LTE technology to complement or even replace Wi-Fi and for specific use cases such as supporting IoT devices that generate large data sets and that are spread out over large areas.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Way before IoT became a buzzword, industrial verticals had connected systems – now, networking industrial devices to enterprise IT is unlocking great potential, and big challenges.
Most IT networking professionals are so busy with their day-to-day responsibilities that they don’t have time to consider taking on more work. But for companies with an industrial component, there’s an elephant in the room that is clamoring for attention. I’m talking about the increasingly common convergence of IT and operational technology (OT) networking and security.Traditionally, IT and OT have had very separate roles in an organization. IT is typically tasked with moving data between computers and humans, whereas OT is tasked with moving data between “things,” such as sensors, actuators, smart machines, and other devices to enhance manufacturing and industrial processes. Not only were the roles for IT and OT completely separate, but their technologies and networks were, too.To read this article in full, please click here
About a cubic yard of freshwater mixed with seawater provides almost two-thirds of a kilowatt-hour of energy. And scientists say a revolutionary new battery chemistry based on that theme could power edge data centers.The idea is to harness power from wastewater treatment plants located along coasts, which happen to be ideal locations for edge data centers and are heavy electricity users.“Places where salty ocean water and freshwater mingle could provide a massive source of renewable power,” writes Rob Jordan in a Stanford University article.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia is boasting of a breakthrough in conversation natural language processing (NLP) training and inference, enabling more complex interchanges between customers and chatbots with immediate responses.The need for such technology is expected to grow, as digital voice assistants alone are expected to climb from 2.5 billion to 8 billion within the next four years, according to Juniper Research, while Gartner predicts that by 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017.The company said its DGX-2 AI platform trained the BERT-Large AI language model in less than an hour and performed AI inference in 2+ milliseconds, making it possible “for developers to use state-of-the-art language understanding for large-scale applications.”To read this article in full, please click here