Software-defined storage hits the bargain rack

Some small and medium-sized businesses need fast, and flexible storage gear as much as large enterprises. The need to quickly spin up new applications, even without a storage specialist on staff, can drive those demands. The gear for doing so is gradually getting more affordable.On Monday, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise extended two of its storage product lines into more affordable territory, in one case adopting an ARM processor to help cut the cost of a system.HPE says the new systems give smaller organizations a way in on two of the hottest trends in enterprise storage: software-defined storage and flash. The former helps to line up the right storage for each application, even as a company’s demands quickly change, while the latter can give a speed boost to any type of storage arrangement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX is the Networking Bridge to a Multi-Cloud Future

Across industries, the race is on to digital transformation. It’s all about business innovation and redefinition. The transformations are huge: Tesla isn’t just a car manufacturer; it’s a software business that makes cars. CITI is a software business that makes loans. GE is a software business that makes industrial equipment.

Register for this VMworld 2016 session to learn about the future of VMware NSX

Like most of the customers we talk with, your business is also going through a transformation. Lots of change. Lots of disruption. Lots of innovation. More apps, representing more services and new business models. More lines of business empowered to make decisions about the IT they’ll use to take their innovations to market. And there’s no doubt that a huge enabler of all of this has been the cloud.

Consider what some of the leading industry pundits are predicting:

• By 2019, the majority of virtual machines (VMs) will be delivered by IaaS providers.
• By 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.
• By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today
• By 2020, 50% of applications running Continue reading

TmaxSoft is using clear licensing to woo Oracle database users

It's no secret that Oracle's aggressive licensing tactics can be a source of considerable pain for its customers, and that's just where TmaxSoft is betting it has an edge. Not only does the company promise users of its Tibero database roughly half the license fees, it also uses a licensing model so transparent that it recently became the first to be verified by the Campaign for Clear Licensing.Tibero's price list is "a single page and very easy to understand," said Martin Thompson, chief agitator for CCL, when the verification was awarded late last year. "The prices and products are clearly set out, and there are no hidden extras that customers need to look out for.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Meeting Server simplifies collaboration

I recall my first conversation with Rowan Trollope, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Internet of Things (IoT) and applications, back in 2012. He joined Cisco to head up the companies Collaboration Business Unit, and it was clear from our first conversation that collaboration under Trollope would be markedly different than it had been.The calling card for Cisco Collaboration has always been great technology, but the usability of the products has been mediocre. So, this became one of the primary focus areas for Trollope. For example, when a user receives an invitation for a WebEx meeting, he or she used to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the email and look for a hyperlink to click. Now there’s a big button at the top of the invitation that says “Join WebEx,” making the product significantly more usable, particularly for mobile users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA hacked? Top cyber weapons allegedly go up for auction

An anonymous group claims to have stolen hacking tools that might belong to the National Security Agency and is auctioning them off to the highest bidder.It’s a pretty bold claim, but the hackers have offered sample files, and some security researchers say they appear to contain legitimate exploits.The files were allegedly stolen from the Equation Group, a top cyberespionage team that may have links to the NSA.The Equation Group is known to use some of the most advanced malware and probably helped develop the infamous Stuxnet computer worm, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA hacked? Top cyber weapons allegedly go up for auction

An anonymous group claims to have stolen hacking tools that might belong to the National Security Agency and is auctioning them off to the highest bidder.It’s a pretty bold claim, but the hackers have offered sample files, and some security researchers say they appear to contain legitimate exploits.The files were allegedly stolen from the Equation Group, a top cyberespionage team that may have links to the NSA.The Equation Group is known to use some of the most advanced malware and probably helped develop the infamous Stuxnet computer worm, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: IPv6 inside LinkedIn

Adding a new network stack requires that the security is at least equivalent to the previous IPv4 security. One approach could be to use a filter to deny all IPv6 traffic and work from there. However, once a device becomes IPv6 aware, you may break services if the device cannot reach the destination over IPv6 and the application either does not gracefully fallback to IPv4 or does not do so in a timely manner. Therefore, we took a different approach. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

The post Worth Reading: IPv6 inside LinkedIn appeared first on 'net work.

Why private clouds will suffer a long, slow death

A couple of weeks ago Amazon announced its quarterly numbers. As has been the case over the past year or so, the numbers looked good. Really good. Derided for years as a profitless company propped up by investor largesse, Amazon grew its revenues by 31 percent, from $23.9 billion to $30.4 billion, while profits leapt 832 percent, from $92 million to $857 million.Most of the profit came from AWS: on $2.88 billion in revenues, AWS reported $718 million in operating income. In Q216, AWS grew 58 percent year over year (YoY), down slightly from Q1’s 64 percent, but still healthy. As I wrote earlier this year, AWS’s curious failure to align with Amazon’s overall low-margin approach to pricing indicates that it is deliberately keeping prices high to avoid further increasing customer demand. Said another way, AWS’s growth is governed by capacity, not customer demand — which means we can expect it to continue its 50 percent growth rate for the next several years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Laptops most often stolen from most unlikely place

The rise of mobile in the enterprise has led many CIOs to become concerned about the potential for data loss due to a lost or stolen device — phones, laptops and the like lost in taxis, restaurants and hotel rooms. But a new study has found that CIOs also need to spend more time focusing on the office itself.In July of this year, Kensington, a supplier of desktop and mobile device accessories (including laptop locks), surveyed 300 U.S. IT professionals from a range of industries for its IT Security & Laptop Theft report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Laptops most often stolen from most unlikely place

The rise of mobile in the enterprise has led many CIOs to become concerned about the potential for data loss due to a lost or stolen device — phones, laptops and the like lost in taxis, restaurants and hotel rooms. But a new study has found that CIOs also need to spend more time focusing on the office itself.In July of this year, Kensington, a supplier of desktop and mobile device accessories (including laptop locks), surveyed 300 U.S. IT professionals from a range of industries for its IT Security & Laptop Theft report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Where Clinton and Trump stand on tech issues

This presidential election presents one of the clearest choices in U.S. history between two major-party candidates. But one thing has been rarely discussed: Where do the candidates stand on tech issues? Whether it’s net neutrality, investing in tech infrastructure, building an educational pipeline of tech workers, privacy or any of several other tech issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take very different approaches. It’s worth looking at their varied stances. Let’s start with net neutrality. For Clinton, it’s straightforward. She supports the FCC’s rulings in favor of net neutrality. Trump opposes the concept. His primary statement on the matter came in a tweet in which he called President Obama’s support of net neutrality an “attack on the internet.” His full tweet is: “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Where Clinton and Trump stand on tech issues

This presidential election presents one of the clearest choices in U.S. history between two major-party candidates. But one thing has been rarely discussed: Where do the candidates stand on tech issues? Whether it’s net neutrality, investing in tech infrastructure, building an educational pipeline of tech workers, privacy or any of several other tech issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take very different approaches. It’s worth looking at their varied stances. Let’s start with net neutrality. For Clinton, it’s straightforward. She supports the FCC’s rulings in favor of net neutrality. Trump opposes the concept. His primary statement on the matter came in a tweet in which he called President Obama’s support of net neutrality an “attack on the internet.” His full tweet is: “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tim Cook’s first 5 years: Apple’s CEO on failure and why he still believes in surprises

We hear from Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company’s quarterly earnings calls, but lately the leader of Apple has been opening up in ways that non-analysts can understand. First he sat down with Fast Company, and on Monday an in-depth Washington Post interview on Cook’s 5-year anniversary as CEO offered more insight into the company’s past failures and future surprises. A lot has changed in the last five years, Cook told the Post. Steve Jobs passed away just six weeks after Cook took the reins, which came as a shock, he said. Apple expanded its product lineup after Jobs’s death, and some of those devices were conceived of and developed entirely without Jobs’s input. Apple just sold its 1 billionth iPhone, even as analysts and investors fret over the smartphone’s declining revenue. There are bigger changes in store, Cook said, though he played coy as usual.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Expedia.com was built on machine learning

Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com -- but according to VP of global product David Fleischman, machine learning has always been at the heart of the company's operations.The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary 'best fare search' (BFS) has to 'learn' and adapt all the time.The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. The average Expedia.com flight search will take three seconds to deliver results. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Expedia.com was built on machine learning

Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com -- but according to VP of global product David Fleischman, machine learning has always been at the heart of the company's operations.The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary 'best fare search' (BFS) has to 'learn' and adapt all the time.The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. The average Expedia.com flight search will take three seconds to deliver results. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

End to free upgrade halts rapid Windows 10 growth

As expected, Windows 10's usage share growth sank after Microsoft ended the free upgrade it had offered customers for the past year. According to analytics vendor StatCounter, Windows 10's week-over-week gains in the first two weeks of August were 0.13 and 0.15 percentage points, respectively. The increases were the smallest of any two-week span this year, with the exception of two different times -- in April, again in July -- when Windows 10's share fell from one week to the next. If the remainder of August plays out the same as the first half, Windows 10 will post a one-month increase about a third of July's and approximately a fourth of June's.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft acknowledges Anniversary Update causes freezing

After a lot of anecdotal reports, Microsoft acknowledged there is a problem with the Anniversary Update to Windows 10 causing PCs to freeze up. However, it says the problem is isolated to a specific PC configuration.In a Windows forum post, Microsoft claims the freezing issue is experienced only on computers with SSDs where apps are installed on a different drive than the one where Windows 10 is installed. The obvious workaround is to move all apps to the drive where Windows 10 is located, and the company actually recommends this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel is leaving PCs behind to highlight VR and IoT at IDF

For decades, PCs were at the center of Intel's business, but not anymore.Self-driving cars, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are more attractive to Intel, which no longer views PCs as a priority. That's the message the company will try to deliver at Intel Developer Forum, starting on Tuesday.IDF attendees will see drones fly around and robots roaming the floor, and they will be able to try on cool wearables and VR and AR (augmented reality) headsets.Unlike past years, attendees won't be wowed with a lot of blazing laptops and desktops running upcoming PC processors. Instead, Intel will provide an insight into its internet-of-things and data-center strategies. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

36% off KDLINKS X1 Full-HD 1920×1080 Wide Angle Car Dashboard Cam with GPS – Deal Alert

The X1 car dash camera from KDLINKS currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 2,400 customers (read reviews). It records full-HD Video 1920x1080 at 30 fps, and features a super wide 165° viewing angle. It starts recording immediately after turning on the ignition, and records in a continuous loop, however there is an emergency "lock" feature that can be enabled and will prevent overwriting. It has a motion detection system as well as a night mode ensuring high quality recordings even in poor lighting conditions. A built-in GPS module records GPS data along with your video, so you can review vehicle location, route, and speed information using the KDLINKS software package. A suction-cup style mount allows the camera to rotate 360-degrees, so it can record inside the car, or even while facing the window if desired. The X1's typical list price of $270 has been reduced by 36% to $170 on Amazon. Learn more about the discounted X1 auto dash cam, or buy it now, on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT Looms Large Again as Intel Kicks Off Its Developer Forum

Question marks include Nervana and the security business.