Data center developers are under pressure to expand their horizons when it comes to choosing sites for new construction. Land prices, availability of power and bandwidth, and pushbacks from neighbors are among the factors that are driving developers to seek new regions.Northern Virginia, for example, is home to more data centers than any other part of the world, with 275 and more on the way. But the region is running out of space and available power, and residents are running out of patience for these resource-intensive facilities that consume growing amounts of power and water, according to the Washington Post. To read this article in full, please click here
Google Cloud has announced services for enterprises to more easily and securely connect distributed multicloud resources.The chief service, Cross-Cloud Interconnect, provides dedicated high-speed connections between the Google network and customer networks hosted in other clouds—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or Alibaba.“Cross-Cloud Interconnect lets organizations connect to any public cloud through a highly secure, dedicated-bandwidth network that has a much lower latency than going through an internet-based VPN solution,” said Muninder Sambi, vice president and general manager of networking for Google Cloud. “With the new service, customers can run their applications on multiple clouds, they can host SaaS applications that are multicloud, and they can also migrate workloads from one cloud to another.”To read this article in full, please click here
More than a year ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was open to the possibility of having Intel manufacture Nvidia’s GPUs through Intel's foundry services program.At the time, Huang was noncommittal beyond saying that Nvidia was looking at the possibility. Now things are getting more concrete. During a question-and-answer session at the Computex tradeshow in Taipei, Taiwan, Huang said he had recently received good results for an Intel test chip based on the company's next-generation process node."You know that we also manufacture with Samsung, and we're open to manufacturing with Intel. [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger] has said in the past that we're evaluating the process, and we recently received the test chip results of their next-generation process, and the results look good," Huang said.To read this article in full, please click here
A software-development team caused quite a stir recently with a blog post describing how it abandoned a serverless architecture project in favor of a monolith—and slashed cloud infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.But this wasn’t just any team; the post was written by Marcin Kolny, a senior software-development engineer at Amazon Prime Video.Since Amazon is one of the leading advocates for serverless computing, not to mention the market leader in cloud services, the post was viewed as either a commendable act of openness or the very definition of throwing your company under the bus. Either way, it triggered a passionate back and forth on social media platforms that focused on larger questions:To read this article in full, please click here
Qualcomm has announced it is shifting its focus from providing chips exclusively for communications devices and doubling down on its efforts to support AI workloads.The company is transitioning to becoming an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Alex Katouzian, a senior vice president at Qualcomm, said during a keynote speech at the Computex show in Taipei Tuesday.AI workloads require a lot of compute power and in February, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X75, its latest 5G modem component that the company said will be the world’s first modem-RF system for 5G-Advanced — a set of specifications designed to improve speed, maximize coverage, and enhance mobility and power efficiency for mobile devices. The X75 is also reportedly able to process AI workloads 2.5 times faster than its predecessor, the X70.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia has unveiled a new DGX GH200 AI supercomputer, underpinned by its new Grace Hopper superchip and targeted toward developing and supporting large language models.“DGX GH200 AI supercomputers integrate Nvidia’s most advanced accelerated computing and networking technologies to expand the frontier of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a blog post.The supercomputer, according to Huang, combines the company’s GH200 Grace Hopper superchip and Nvidia’s NVLink and Switch System, to allow the development of large language models for generative AI language applications, recommender systems, and data analytics workloads.To read this article in full, please click here
The FCC’s latest spectrum policy announcement, which preserves 500MHz of the 12GHz band for satellite use while designating another 500MHz for terrestrial radios, is a recognition that satellite internet providers like Starlink are being heard, according to experts.The commission’s latest notice of proposed rulemaking, posted May 18, reflects a more even-handed approach than has been adopted in the past. In carving up the airwaves for C-band usage, substantial amounts of spectrum were taken away from incumbent satellite users and handed off to terrestrial operators, most notably major telecom providers.To read this article in full, please click here
You’d be hard pressed to find another technology that has been as useful, successful, and ultimately influential as Ethernet, and as it celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, it is clear that Ethernet’s journey is far from over.Since its invention by Bob Metcalf and David Boggs back in 1973, Ethernet has continuously been expanded and adapted to become the go-to Layer 2 protocol in computer networking across industries.To read this article in full, please click here
The Department of Energy has awarded $40 million to 15 vendors and university labs as part of a government program that aims to reduce the portion of data centers' power usage that's used for cooling to just 5% of their total energy consumption.The DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is providing the funding to jumpstart a program called COOLERCHIPS, an acronym for Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems.For chip cooling to account for just 5% of total energy consumption, that would translate to a PUE of 1.05. (Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is a metric to measure data center efficiency. It’s the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment.)To read this article in full, please click here
IBM is developing a SaaS package to help enterprises securely network heterogenous environments, including edge, on-prem and multicloud resources.The IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is a SaaS service that implements a virtualized Layer 3-7 environment to rapidly enable secure connectivity between users, applications, and data distributed across multiple locations and environments, according to Andrew Coward, general manager of IBM’s software defined networking group. In a nutshell, Hybrid Cloud Mesh deploys gateways within the clouds – including on-premises, AWS or other providers’ clouds, and transit points, if needed – to support the infrastructure, and then it builds a secure Layer 3-7 mesh overlay to deliver applications, Coward said. At the application level, the exposure to developers occurs at Layer 7, and the networking teams see Layer 3 and 4 activities, Coward said.To read this article in full, please click here
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday said it is committing $12.7 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 in order to meet growing customer demand for its cloud services.“Today we’re announcing an additional planned investment of $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India. That will bring our total investment to $16.4 billion by 2030 — boosting the country’s GDP, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, and continuing to help customers innovate,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a tweet.The new investment, according to the company, is expected to add $23.3 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030, generating 131,700 jobs annually for the next seven years.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks is looking to simplify the control of enterprise networks by expanding the AI-driven conversational interface of its cloud-based Mist management system and adding a new security access control service.Juniper is integrating the ChatGPT AI-based large language model (LLM) with Mist’s virtual network assistant, Marvis. Marvis can detect and describe myriad network problems, including persistently failing wired or wireless clients, bad cables, access-point coverage holes, problematic WAN links, and insufficient radio-frequency capacity. To read this article in full, please click here
System memory is a complex problem. More memory means more performance, especially in a virtualized environment. But more memory also requires more power, and that can add up as you start to get into thousands of memory sticks.Plus, you can only put so many memory sticks in a server, depending on the number of slots available. So how do you increase memory capacity? By increasing memory density on the chips, which is easier said than done. However, a startup called NEO Semiconductor is claiming it will be able to increase memory density by up to eight times over standard memory with a breakthrough 3D design.It’s not a new concept; 3D memory stacking has been used in NAND flash to increase capacity for a decade now. Memory transistors can only be so large to fit in the confines of a DRAM chip. Rather than an increase the number of transistors laid out side by side, memory makers began stacking it on top of each other, thus increasing capacity in the same physical space. In the 10 years since 3D stacking began, NAND flash DRAM has reached the 170-layer mark, and SSDs have seen a significant increase in capacity without Continue reading
It’s important to back up your databases, but it’s even more important to be able to restore it, so once you’ve identified how you’re going to back it up, make sure you test the different recovery scenarios.Broadly speaking, there are two database types considered here, traditional and modern, and recovery is different for each. A traditional database in this context is a database that runs in a single server or virtual machine that you manage, and a modern database might run across many nodes or it might even be serverless, where you have no access to the underlying infrastructure.Recovering traditional databases
Restoring a traditional database is straightforward as long as you have practiced how to handle different things that could go wrong. You don’t want to test your backup system for the first time during an actual database outage.To read this article in full, please click here
For online auction powerhouse eBay, customer service is everything. Or, as Parantap Lahiri, vice president of network and data center engineering, puts it, “We want to make the network more like air or water, so our people don’t have to worry about network resources when creating magical services for our users.”The demands on the eBay infrastructure are staggering: 1.8 billion active listings; 133 million active buyers. It’s main landing page gets 250 million visits per day. Unlike a static storefront site like Amazon, an eBay auction can entail multiple bidders from all over the world competing against each other as the clock ticks down to the end of the auction. And the eBay platform supports direct communication between sellers and buyers, with offers and counteroffers flying back and forth.To read this article in full, please click here
Google Cloud announced a new supercomputer virtual-machine series aimed at rapidly training large AI models.Unveiled at the Google I/O conference, the new A3 supercomputer VMs are purpose-built to handle the considerable resource demands of a large language model (LLM). “A3 GPU VMs were purpose-built to deliver the highest-performance training for today’s ML workloads, complete with modern CPU, improved host memory, next-generation Nvidia GPUs and major network upgrades,” the company said in a statement.The instances are powered by eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, Nvidia’s newest GPU that just begin shipping earlier this month, as well as Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of host memory and 3.6 TBs bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via Nvidia’s NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. To read this article in full, please click here
The grep command makes it easy to find strings in text files on Linux systems, but that's just a start. It can be used to search through these files for multiple strings or regular expressions at the same time. It can also ignore case when needed, and it can count the lines in the resulting output for you. This post shows how to use grep in all these ways.Basic grep
The simplest grep command looks like the one shown below. This "find string in file" command will show all the lines in the file that contain the string, even when that string is only part of a longer one.$ grep word story
The wording suggests there was more to the story than anyone wanted to admit.
The sword had been left behind the shed. It was several days before it was
Finding multiple strings
There are a number of ways to search for a group of strings in a single command. In the command below, the '|' character serves as an "or" function. The command will display any lines in the file that contain the word "xray", the word "tape" or both.To read this article in full, Continue reading
A group of about a dozen vendors announced this week that a test program for 5G network slicing had achieved 70% gains in the time required to programmatically create a network slice, marking a major step forward in the development of private 5G for enterprise users.A network “slice,” as it’s called, is essentially a logically distinct subnetwork in a 5G deployment that can be used for a variety of purposes to maximize bandwidth use and provide on-demand 5G services to users. The basic idea is that automation in the 5G core can apply a layer of virtualization to wireless networks, letting a service provider “slice” off parts of its available spectrum and provide them to a customer as a discrete network.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme Networks has unveiled a cloud-based network management package called ExtremeCloud Edge that lets customers administer their growing edge-based resources regardless of their location.The company also expanded its portfolio of Universal switches with new core and aggregation boxes and released a new power-efficient Wi-Fi 6E access point.The ExtremeCloud Edge package unifies the company’s core ExtremeCloud applications, which include the ExtremeCloud IQ wireless and wired network-management offering, CoPilot AI-based management tool, and SD-WAN. With an integrated package, customers can deploy a variety of management and networking features, from analytics and AI support to edge networks, all via a single cloud-based console.To read this article in full, please click here