Benchmarking spreadsheet systems

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint

A recent TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by hand and so everything operated at human scale. Increasingly we’re dealing with larger and larger datasets — for example, data imported via csv files — and spreadsheets are creaking. I’m certainly familiar with the sinking feeling on realising I’ve accidentally asked a spreadsheet to open up a file with 10s of thousands of rows, and that my computer is now going to be locked up for an age. Rahman et al. construct a set of benchmarks to try and understand what might be going on under the covers in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice Calc.

Spreadsheets claim to support pretty large datasets these days – e.g. five million cells for Google Sheets, and even more than that for Excel. But in practice, they struggle at sizes well below this.

With increasing data sizes… spreadsheets have started to break down to the point of being unusable, displaying a number of scalability problems. They often freeze during computation, and are unable to import datasets well below the size limits posed by Continue reading

Seagate doubles HDD performance with multi-actuator technology

Seagate has taken the wraps off its Exos 2X14 enterprise hard drive. It's the first to integrate Seagate's MACH.2 multi-actuator technology, which is a method of turning one hard disk into two and doubling performance.The technology is pretty straightforward. Say you have four platters in a disk drive. The actuator controls the drive heads and moves them all in unison over all four platters. Seagate's multi-actuator makes two independent actuators out of one, so in a six-platter drive, the two actuators cover three platters each. READ MORE: SSD vs. HDD: Choosing between solid-state and hard-disk drivesTo read this article in full, please click here

Will Kubernetes Drive Cloud Native Telcos?

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Nov. 18-21 in San Diego. Perhaps the most global use case to come for Kubernetes is in the telecommunications industry. It does have about five billion users after all. And it’s inherently a hardware-backed, well-regulated industry. The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams sat down at last month’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to talk about telco’s cloud native future with OPNFV), and Vulk Coop design and development cooperative. The different collaborative, telecom-focused Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation working groups that Kirksey and Carpenter are a part of have witnessed — and sometimes driven — telco’s move over the last five years from monolithic hardware appliances toward what’s now known as the cloud. Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn For telcos, cloud native means software solving the complex problems heavy equipment traditionally did. It all comes down to answering two questions: What are the problems Continue reading

Huawei Slams FCC With Legal Appeal

AWS Chief Minimizes Impact of Declining Growth

Sophos Tracks Kubernetes Vulnerabilities, Adds Threat Intel Platform

CenturyLink Expands Edge Services With Network Storage

Managing the TICK Stack with Docker App

Docker Application eases the packaging and the distribution of a Docker Compose application. The TICK stack – Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor – is a good candidate to illustrate how this actually works. In this blog, I’ll show you how to deploy the TICK stack as a Docker App.

About the TICK Stack

This application stack is mainly used to handle time-series data. That makes it a great choice for IoT projects, where devices send data (temperature, weather indicators, water level, etc.) on a regular basis.

Its name comes from its components:

– Telegraf

– InfluxDB

– Chronograf

– Kapacitor

The schema below illustrates the overall architecture, and outlines the role of each component.

Data are sent to Telegraph and stored in an InfluxDB database. Chronograf can query the database through a web interface. Kapacitor can process, monitor, and raise alerts based on the data.

Defining the Application in a Compose File

The tick.yml file below defines the four components of the stack and the way they communicate with each other:

version: '3.7'
services:
  telegraf:
    image: telegraf
    configs:
    - source: telegraf-conf
      target: /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf
    ports:
    - 8186:8186
  influxdb:
    image: influxdb
  chronograf:
 Continue reading

SD-WAN in 2020: 6 trends to look for

The market for SD-WAN remains white hot with distributed organizations widely deploying the technology to solve WAN bandwidth limitations, provide reliability/resiliency and improve quality of user experience for cloud-based applications.Dozens of suppliers are rapidly innovating and maturing their SD-WAN products with innovations in cloud onramps, support for leading SaaS applications, security and management/automation platforms.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Here are six top issues to evaluate as SD-WAN moves to its 2.0 phase and beyond during 2020.To read this article in full, please click here

Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products

As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?

Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products

As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?

Reviews: Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products

As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?

Reviews: Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products

As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?

Automating Scale-Out IP Fabrics with the Adaptive Cloud Fabric’s New Layer 2 Features

Enea’s Roland Steiner Discusses Mobile Vendors, UDM, and Why the SaaS Model is Just Better

Time Is Always Money, Especially With HPC On The Cloud

Systems management has always been in a race to catch up with the innovation in systems, and it is always nipping at the heels. …

Time Is Always Money, Especially With HPC On The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Researchers experiment with glass-based storage that doesn’t require electronics cooling

Hard drives aren’t going to be capacious enough for future data archiving and retrieval requirements, scientists believe, as applications such as artificial intelligence, wide-scale Internet of Things connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality take hold. Glass could be the answer.Encoding in glass would have advantages over hard drives and other mediums, experts suggest. Holding capacity is greater, and the slivers of quartz being experimented with don’t need cooling or dehumidifying environments.Microsoft Research, working in the UK along with the University of Southampton, announced that it has been able to store an entire movie on a quartz, glass-based storage medium. The team stored and retrieved a full-length Superman film on a small slab of the special material that measures about 3 inches square and less than a tenth of an inch thick.To read this article in full, please click here

Researchers experiment with glass-based storage that doesn’t require electronics cooling

Hard drives aren’t going to be capacious enough for future data archiving and retrieval requirements, scientists believe, as applications such as artificial intelligence, wide-scale Internet of Things connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality take hold. Glass could be the answer.Encoding in glass would have advantages over hard drives and other mediums, experts suggest. Holding capacity is greater, and the slivers of quartz being experimented with don’t need cooling or dehumidifying environments.Microsoft Research, working in the UK along with the University of Southampton, announced that it has been able to store an entire movie on a quartz, glass-based storage medium. The team stored and retrieved a full-length Superman film on a small slab of the special material that measures about 3 inches square and less than a tenth of an inch thick. .To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Silver Peak Named a Leader in 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure

We’re two for two! This week Gartner published its 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and I’m proud to report that once again Silver Peak has been positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.Last year Gartner published the inaugural 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, providing enterprise decision makers with a comprehensive assessment of the changing requirements for a modern WAN, Gartner listened to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewed each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzed their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The published report talks about Gartner’s view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in the rapidly changing WAN edge infrastructure market.To read this article in full, please click here

Rural Development Special Interest Group Organizes Internet Connectivity Tag 2019

In November, the Internet Society Rural Development Special Interest Group (RD SIG) organized an event called the Internet Connectivity Tag 2019 in Bangalore, India to deliberate on emerging technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) and security, and what this means for rural development in India.

RD SIG invited a number of distinguished speakers to the event, many of whom are Chapter members. Adarsh B.U., for instance, is the president of RD SIG, a member of the Bangalore Chapter, and the program chair of the Hyderabad Chapter, which is currently being established. B.U. has been recognized as one of the top eight IoT thought leaders for his contribution towards the advancement of IoT in India. At the event, he organized an interactive, hands-on session with Contiki OS and Cooja Simulator.

Leading up to the event, RD SIG issued a call for fellowship applications from which over 300 expressions of interest were received. Out of the applicants, seven fellows from different parts of India were selected to participate in the event.

Highlights from the event included a presentation by Abhijan Bhattacharyya on IPv6 in the context of 5G for digital convergence. In his talk, he looked at the Continue reading