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Category Archives for "Networking"

Google gobbles up more big-name cloud customers

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google came late to the enterprise party in the cloud, but the company is making up for lost time. Developers and the enterprises, which Google will need to attract more business away from Amazon and Microsoft, are taking notice -- as was evidenced here by big crowds and a standing-room only audience at the company’s Google Cloud Next conference.At the kickoff keynote Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, announced several new customers, including eBay, HSBC, Colgate-Palmolive and Verizon Communications.Google defines cloud in transformational termsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Female execs front and center at Google Cloud conference

On International Women’s Day, during the opening keynote of Google Cloud’s NEXT user conference, former VMware CEO Diane Greene gave the primary keynote.When Google showcased its machine learning technology, renowned Stanford University computer scientist Fei Fei Li addressed the audience of 10,000 attendees and thousands more on the live-stream.And during a press conference after the keynote, eight of Google Cloud’s top executives sat on a stage to answer questions from press and analysts. Four of the eight are women, and three of which are listed on Google’s About Us Leadership page.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Four ways Google Cloud will bring Machine Learning & AI to the enterprise +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker and Cisco Launch Cisco Validated Designs for Cisco UCS and Flexpod Infrastructures on Docker Enterprise Edition

Last week, Cisco and Docker jointly announced a strategic alliance between our organizations. Based on customer feedback, one of the initial joint initiatives is the validation of Docker Enterprise Edition (which includes Docker Datacenter) against Cisco UCS and the Nexus infrastructures. We are excited to announce that Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for Cisco UCS and Flexpod on Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) are immediately available.

CVDs represent the gold standard reference architecture methodology for enterprise customers looking to deploy an end-to-end solution. The CVDs follow defined processes and covers not only provisioning and configuration of the solution, but also test and document the solutions against performance, scale and availability/failure – something that requires a lab setup with a significant amount of hardware that reflects actual production deployments. This enables our customers achieve faster, more reliable and predictable implementations.

The two new CVDs published for container management offers enterprises a well designed and an end-to-end lab tested configuration for Docker EE on Cisco UCS and Flexpod Datacenter. The collaborative engineering effort between Cisco, NetApp and Docker provides enterprises best of breed solutions for Docker Datacenter on Cisco Infrastructure and NetApp Enterprise Storage to run stateless or stateful containers.

The first CVD includes 2 configurations:

  1. 4-node rack servers Bare Metal deployment, Continue reading

4 ways Google Cloud will bring AI, machine learning to the enterprise

Last November, when Google announced that machine learning research luminary Fei-Fei Li, Ph.D. would join Google’s Cloud Group Platform group, a lot was known about her academic work. But Google revealed little about why she was joining the company except she would lead machine learning for the Google Cloud business.After five months of suspense, yesterday Li revealed the focus of her new role during her keynote address at Google’s cloud developer conference, Cloud Next 2017. She will apply her experience to democratize machine learning to the enterprise. Her task: Study the problems that machine learning could solve in a wide variety of industries and enable enterprises to adopt machine learning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s Jasper deal – one year, 18 million new IoT devices later, challenges remain

You’d be hard-pressed to write a better opening script than the one playing out for Cisco and its now year-old acquisition of Jasper. The $1.4 billion deal was to make Jasper technology the centerpiece of Cisco’s Internet of Things strategy and it has largely done that. Of course, challenges remain – improving security and product family integration among them but the companies are off to a good start.Cisco closed the deal on Jasper last March and since then Cisco says the number of companies using Jasper’s Control Center has grown to over 9,000 from 3,500 and the company continues to add 1.5 million devices a month. In addition, the number of service providers offering Control Center services has grown to 50 from 35. Control Center is the central component of Jasper that lets users automate connectivity as well as launch and manage all aspects of IoT services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pi Day is coming and I’m probably going to take a pie in the face

In terms of made up holidays, Pi Day is the one that irritates me the least (compared with Talk Like a Pirate Day or Star Wars Day). Maybe it’s because there’s the opportunity of eating some pie (baked pie or pizza), or maybe it’s because I’m a semi-math geek.Maybe it’s because the founder of Pi Day, Larry Shaw, shares my last name (but we’re not directly related). See the video at the top of the page for more information on the origins of the holiday.Whatever the reason, I’m OK with Pi Day. Which is why I agreed to participate in the Network World Pi Day Challenge, set to stream live on Network World’s Facebook and YouTube channel (2 p.m. EDT on March 14).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An enterprise IT pro’s guide to Mixpanel analytics

Relax, Mixpanel’s sales people probably aren’t going to pester you if you’re an enterprise IT pro. You’re not the target customer for this San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based analytics tools. But that doesn’t mean Mixpanel shouldn’t at least be on your radar since there’s a good chance you’re supporting people within your organization who might be using Mixpanel – we’re talking engineers, designers and other product development team members who want to get a better view of how their products are actually being used and received.MORE: 15 big data and analytics companies to watchTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Assange: CIA had lost control of its cyberweapon documents

Information about purported CIA cyberattacks was "passed around" among members of the U.S. intelligence community and contractors before it was published by WikiLeaks this week, Julian Assange says.The CIA "lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," the WikiLeaks editor in chief said during a press conference Thursday. "This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, to have created such an arsenal and stored all in one place and not secured it."Assange declined to name the source who gave the information to WikiLeaks, but he seemed to suggest the 8,700-plus documents, purportedly from an isolated CIA server, came from an insider source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Assange: CIA had lost control of its cyberweapon documents

Information about purported CIA cyberattacks was "passed around" among members of the U.S. intelligence community and contractors before it was published by WikiLeaks this week, Julian Assange says.The CIA "lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," the WikiLeaks editor in chief said during a press conference Thursday. "This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, to have created such an arsenal and stored all in one place and not secured it."Assange declined to name the source who gave the information to WikiLeaks, but he seemed to suggest the 8,700-plus documents, purportedly from an isolated CIA server, came from an insider source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Texas hospital struggles to make IBM’s Watson cure cancer

If IBM is looking for a new application for its Watson machine learning tools, it might consider putting health care providers' procurement and systems integration woes ahead of curing cancer.After spending more than four years and US$62 million on its Oncology Expert Advisor project, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas still looking for answers in all those areas.The fall-out from that project has now prompted the resignation of the cancer center's president, Ronald DePinho, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building Reliability

Systems are inherently reliable. Until they aren’t. On a long enough timeline, even the most reliable system will eventually fail. How you manage that failure says a lot about the way your build your system or application. So, why is it then that we’re so focused on failing?

Ten Feet Tall And Bulletproof

No system is infallible. Networks go down. Cloud services get knocked offline. Even Facebook, which represents “the Internet” for a large number of people, has days when it’s unreachable. When we examine these outages, we often find issues at the core of the system that cause services to be unreachable. In the most recent case of Amazon’s cloud system, it was a typo in a script that executed faster than it could be stopped.

It could also be a failure of the system to anticipate increased loads when minor failures happen. If systems aren’t built to take on additional load when the worst happens, you’re going to see bigger outages. That is a particular thorn in the side of large cloud providers like Amazon and Google. It’s also something that network architects need to be aware of when building redundant pathways to handle problems.

Take, for example, Continue reading

22% off 4 Person Premium 72 Hour Survival Kit Backpack – Deal Alert

If you like to be prepared for the unexpected, consider this 4-person premium survival kit for disasters and emergency preparedness, which contains enough food, water and emergency supplies to last a family of 4 for 72 hours. Over 245 pieces that meet or exceed Red Cross guidelines for preparedness are packaged neatly in packs. The included food and water are U.S. Coast Guard certified, and the kit contains a hard-shell Lifeline First Aid kit and LifeGear LED Flashlight. Its typical list price of $179.95 has been reduced 22% to $139.95. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Astro is an AI-powered email client with big dreams

If there’s one source of technological frustration at work, it’s email. Getting a job done often still relies on sending chains of messages back and forth to the extent that it would be nice to have an assistant to help deal with it all.That’s the idea behind Astro, a new app that applies artificial intelligence to email in an attempt to make life easier for its users. Its marquee feature is Astrobot, a chatbot powered by machine learning that’s designed to keep users abreast of what’s important in their inbox.For example, Astrobot will read through users’ emails and notify them when they’ve been asked important questions. It can also be used to unsubscribe from emails, clean out a user’s inbox and more. That functionality sits on top of a solid, modern email client, which entered public beta on Mac and iOS Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here