IDG Contributor Network: Aligned Energy changes the data center model

Aligned Energy is about to complete construction of its Phoenix data center, a facility that it claims is leading the way in terms of data center efficiency. Aligned Energy's leaders are so sure of the efficiencies they're driving that they're introducing a new model for how data center space is bought and sold.But before we look at that, let's look at some fundamentals around data centers.+ Also on Network World: Google's DeepMind A.I. can slash data center power use 40% + It is a generally accepted fact that data centers, a massive and growing industry, is highly wasteful of both energy and water. Indeed, Greenpeace recently went out on a limb with a campaign and report questioning the environmental impact of some major data center users and calling for a move to environmentally efficient construction and operation of data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Aligned Energy changes the data center model

Aligned Energy is about to complete construction of its Phoenix data center, a facility that it claims is leading the way in terms of data center efficiency. Aligned Energy's leaders are so sure of the efficiencies they're driving that they're introducing a new model for how data center space is bought and sold.But before we look at that, let's look at some fundamentals around data centers.+ Also on Network World: Google's DeepMind A.I. can slash data center power use 40% + It is a generally accepted fact that data centers, a massive and growing industry, is highly wasteful of both energy and water. Indeed, Greenpeace recently went out on a limb with a campaign and report questioning the environmental impact of some major data center users and calling for a move to environmentally efficient construction and operation of data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom Buys Brocade Communications for $5.9B

Broadcom strengthens its enterprise storage portfolio.

Your very own canary for the wireless coal mine: Cape’s new Wi-Fi monitor

Announced today, the Cape Sensor is a simple device that can be installed anywhere in a company’s campus, and behaves just like any other Wi-Fi client being used in that area – the idea being that any wireless issues experienced by actual clients should be seen by the Cape Sensor operating in the same place. ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Hottest Enterprise Networking & IT Startups of 2016 + Cisco says it'll make IoT safe because it owns the networkTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco seeks faster time to discovery for breaches, compromises

Cisco has announced security upgrades to cut the time compromises go unnoticed on endpoints, giving attackers less time to do damage if they get past preventive security measures.Unveiled at the Cisco Partner Summit this week, the new AMP for Endpoints comes with a lightweight agent to gather data that is analyzed in the Cisco AMP cloud. This lifts the processing burden from customers’ infrastructure.And the platform now includes an agentless feature for devices that can’t take an agent, such as visitors’ laptops.In addition to the cloud version, the analytics part of the platform can also be purchased for deployment on customer premises in their own private clouds. Detection, analysis and recommended response are handled in the cloud and pushed to the endpoints.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco seeks faster time to discovery for breaches, compromises

Cisco has announced security upgrades to cut the time compromises go unnoticed on endpoints, giving attackers less time to do damage if they get past preventive security measures.Unveiled at the Cisco Partner Summit this week, the new AMP for Endpoints comes with a lightweight agent to gather data that is analyzed in the Cisco AMP cloud. This lifts the processing burden from customers’ infrastructure.And the platform now includes an agentless feature for devices that can’t take an agent, such as visitors’ laptops.In addition to the cloud version, the analytics part of the platform can also be purchased for deployment on customer premises in their own private clouds. Detection, analysis and recommended response are handled in the cloud and pushed to the endpoints.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco goes crazy with collaboration

Remember the Prince song Let’s Go Crazy? “Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down? Oh, no let’s go! Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts.” The famed singer and poet sang about not letting others bring you down. Instead, go crazy and get yourself out that downward spiral—at least that’s my interpretation.+ Also on Network World: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline + Cisco collaboration has gone through a similar trend. A few years ago the Cisco Collaboration Business Unit was in a free fall, and people were pointing to Microsoft, Google and startups such as Slack as being Cisco killers. Since then, the company has punched back and completely turned the business around to the point where it has now seen something like 12 consecutive quarters of growth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom bids billions for Brocade in order to break it up

Chip maker Broadcom wants to buy storage vendor Brocade Communications Systems, stripping out its Fibre Channel business and selling the rest. Broadcom has agreed to pay around US$5.5 billion for Brocade, it said Wednesday. But it doesn't want all of it: After the deal closes -- between May and October 2017, Broadcom hopes -- it plans to sell off Brocade's IP-based wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking products. The bit Broadcom wants to keep, Brocade's Fibre Channel SAN business, is in for a challenging time as enterprises turn to cloud storage and hyperconverged infrastructures. Fibre Channel doesn't play well in the virtualized SANs that hyperconvergence entails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom bids billions for Brocade in order to break it up

Chip maker Broadcom wants to buy storage vendor Brocade Communications Systems, stripping out its Fibre Channel business and selling the rest. Broadcom has agreed to pay around US$5.5 billion for Brocade, it said Wednesday. But it doesn't want all of it: After the deal closes -- between May and October 2017, Broadcom hopes -- it plans to sell off Brocade's IP-based wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking products. The bit Broadcom wants to keep, Brocade's Fibre Channel SAN business, is in for a challenging time as enterprises turn to cloud storage and hyperconverged infrastructures. Fibre Channel doesn't play well in the virtualized SANs that hyperconvergence entails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom bids billions for Brocade in order to break it up

Chip maker Broadcom wants to buy storage vendor Brocade Communications Systems, stripping out its Fibre Channel business and selling the rest. Broadcom has agreed to pay around US$5.5 billion for Brocade, it said Wednesday. But it doesn't want all of it: After the deal closes -- between May and October 2017, Broadcom hopes -- it plans to sell off Brocade's IP-based wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking products. The bit Broadcom wants to keep, Brocade's Fibre Channel SAN business, is in for a challenging time as enterprises turn to cloud storage and hyperconverged infrastructures. Fibre Channel doesn't play well in the virtualized SANs that hyperconvergence entails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: Asteroid mission starts with a marriage of rocks, styrofoam and plywood

Robotically grabbing hunks of asteroid in deep space is no trivial task so it would be nice to practice the mission beforehand.That’s the goal with a mock-up asteroid NASA and the University of West Virginia recently built from rock, styrofoam, plywood and an aluminum endoskeleton. The mock-up is in preparation for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) which will send a spacecraft to rendezvous with a target asteroid, land a robotic spacecraft on the surface, grab a 4 meter or so sized boulder and begin a six-year journey to redirect the boulder into orbit around the moon for exploration by astronauts.+More on network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction; Quick look: NASA’s ambitious asteroid grabbing mission+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: Asteroid mission starts with a marriage of rocks, styrofoam and plywood

Robotically grabbing hunks of asteroid in deep space is no trivial task so it would be nice to practice the mission beforehand.That’s the goal with a mock-up asteroid NASA and the University of West Virginia recently built from rock, styrofoam, plywood and an aluminum endoskeleton. The mock-up is in preparation for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) which will send a spacecraft to rendezvous with a target asteroid, land a robotic spacecraft on the surface, grab a 4 meter or so sized boulder and begin a six-year journey to redirect the boulder into orbit around the moon for exploration by astronauts.+More on network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction; Quick look: NASA’s ambitious asteroid grabbing mission+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Using rowhammer to root Android

Researchers have devised an attack that gains unfettered “root” access to a large number of Android phones, exploiting a relatively new type of bug that allows adversaries to manipulate data stored in memory chips. The breakthrough has the potential to make millions of Android phones vulnerable, at least until a security fix is available, to a new form of attack that seizes control of core parts of the operating system and neuters key security defenses. —ARS Technica

The post Worth Reading: Using rowhammer to root Android appeared first on 'net work.

Do smartphone trade-ins threaten corporate security?

As the holiday season approaches (OK, it may already be here), workers in your company will likely be acquiring new smartphones. In fact, a recent survey by Blancco Technology Group says a whopping 68 percent of mobile users plan to purchase a new smartphone for the holidays. That number seems high to me, but come January, you can be pretty sure there will be a lot of shiny new iPhones, Galaxies and Pixels connecting to your corporate network. But that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is about what happens to all those no-longer-shiny BYOD smartphones that used to connect to your corporate network and work with your corporate data, but have now been replaced with something new. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Do smartphone trade-ins threaten corporate security?

As the holiday season approaches (OK, it may already be here), workers in your company will likely be acquiring new smartphones. In fact, a recent survey by Blancco Technology Group says a whopping 68 percent of mobile users plan to purchase a new smartphone for the holidays. That number seems high to me, but come January, you can be pretty sure there will be a lot of shiny new iPhones, Galaxies and Pixels connecting to your corporate network. But that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is about what happens to all those no-longer-shiny BYOD smartphones that used to connect to your corporate network and work with your corporate data, but have now been replaced with something new. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Setting Sail on Secret Seas with Trireme

Container networking is a tough challenge to solve. The evolving needs of creating virtual networks to allow inter-container communications is difficult. But ensuring security at the same time is enough to make you pull your hair out. Lots of companies are taking a crack at it as has been demonstrated recently by microsegmentation offerings from Cisco, VMware NSX, and many others. But a new development on this front set sail today. And the captain is an old friend.

Sailing the Security Sea

Dimitri Stiladis did some great things in his time at Nuage Networks. He created a great overlay network solution that not only worked well for software defined systems but also extended into the container world as more and more people started investigating containers as the new way to provide application services. He saw many people rushing into this area with their existing solutions as well as building new solutions. However, those solutions were all based on existing technology and methods that didn’t work well in the container world. If you ever heard someone say, “Oh, containers are just lightweight VMs…” you know what kind of thinking I’m talking about.

Late last year, Dimitri got together with some of Continue reading

6 trends that will shape cloud computing in 2017

Cloud computing has helped many enterprises transform themselves over the last five years, but experts agree that the market is entering something of a second wave, both for public cloud and private cloud services built and hosted in corporate data centers. The cloud market will accelerate faster in 2017 as enterprises seek to gain efficiencies as they scale their compute resources to better serve customers, says Forrester Research in a new report.“The No. 1 trend is here come the enterprises,” says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, primary author of the research. “Enterprises with big budgets, data centers and complex applications are now looking at cloud as a viable place to run core business applications.” Forrester says the first wave of cloud computing was created by Amazon Web Services, which launched with a few simple compute and storage services in 2006. A decade later, AWS is operating at an $11 billion run rate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CEO’s message a jolt to IT workers facing layoffs

IT workers in the infrastructure team at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) were notified recently of their layoff. They expect to be training replacements from India-based contractor HCL. The layoff affects more than 500 IT workers, according to the insurance firm.This familiar IT story began a little differently. A few days before employees were notified in mid-October of their layoff, HCSC CEO Paula Steiner talked about future goals in an internal, company-wide video.Steiner's comments weren't IT-department-specific, but the takeaway quote by one IT employee was this: "As full-time retiring baby boomers move on to their next chapter, the makeup of our organization will consist more of young and non-traditional workers, such as part-time workers or contractors," said Steiner in the video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New open source project Trireme aims to secure containers

A team made of former Cisco and Nuage Networks veterans has developed an open source project it released this week named Trireme that takes an application-centric approach to securing code written in containers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Peek inside Microsoft Azure's open source rack and server designs + Aporeto Trireme was developed by a startup named Aporeto, whose co-founders include the former co-founder and CTO of software-defined networking company Nuage Networks Dimitri Stiliadis; former distinguished engineer at Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit Satyam Sinha; and Amir Sharif, who previously worked at VMware. The first launch of the company is the free release of its Trireme open source code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump and Clinton should answer these 10 cybersecurity questions

Cybersecurity getting little attentionImage by REUTERS/Jim YoungThis election has been more about style than substance, more about the candidates’ pasts than their plans, more personal attacks than policy proposals. Even the debates, where the moderators attempt to discuss issues in need of decisions and actions, have been more notable for the ferocity of attacks than the shrewdness of the strategies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here