Data centers may soon recycle heat into electricity

Waste heat is the scurge of computing. In fact, much of the cost of powering a computer is from creating unwanted heat. That’s because the inefficiencies in electronic circuits, caused by resistance in the materials, generates that heat. The processors, without computing anything, are essentially converting expensively produced electrical energy into waste energy.   It’s a fundamental problem, and one that hasn’t been going away. But what if you could convert the unwanted heat back into electricity—recycle the heat back into its original energy form? The data center heat, instead of simply disgorging into the atmosphere to be gotten rid of with dubious eco-effects, could actually run more machines. Plus, your cooling costs would be taken care of—there’s nothing to cool because you’ve already grabbed the hot air.To read this article in full, please click here

When it comes to the IoT, Wi-Fi has the best security

When it comes to connecting internet of things (IoT) devices, there is a wide variety of networks to choose from, each with its own set of capabilities, advantages and disadvantages, and ideal use cases. Good ol’ Wi-Fi is often seen as a default networking choice, available in many places, but of limited range and not particularly suited for IoT implementations.According to Aerohive Networks, however, Wi-Fi is “evolving to help IT address security complexities and challenges associated with IoT devices.” Aerohive sells cloud-managed networking solutions and was acquired recently by software-defined networking company Extreme Networks for some $272 million. And Aerohive's director of product marketing, Mathew Edwards, told me via email that Wi-Fi brings a number of security advantages compared to other IoT networking choices.To read this article in full, please click here

When it comes to the IoT, Wi-Fi has the best security

When it comes to connecting internet of things (IoT) devices, there is a wide variety of networks to choose from, each with its own set of capabilities, advantages and disadvantages, and ideal use cases. Good ol’ Wi-Fi is often seen as a default networking choice, available in many places, but of limited range and not particularly suited for IoT implementations.According to Aerohive Networks, however, Wi-Fi is “evolving to help IT address security complexities and challenges associated with IoT devices.” Aerohive sells cloud-managed networking solutions and was acquired recently by software-defined networking company Extreme Networks for some $272 million. And Aerohive's director of product marketing, Mathew Edwards, told me via email that Wi-Fi brings a number of security advantages compared to other IoT networking choices.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Part 2: Before Making WAN Changes, Consider Your Bandwidth and Application Requirements

In part 1 of this 3-part series on how to conduct a wide-area network assessment and prepare for WAN updates, we looked at foundational issues such as current challenges and objectives. In this installment, we’ll examine considerations around applications and bandwidth.As with part 1, my source for information was Mike Lawson, Manager of SD-WAN/NFV Solutions Architecture for CenturyLink. Lawson is in the trenches with network architects and customers every day; as such, he understands the issues that lead companies to upgrade WAN services to newer technologies such as software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).To read this article in full, please click here

Thoughts on Restructuring the Ansible Project

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Ansible became popular largely because we adopted some key principles early, and stuck to them.

The first key principle was simplicity: simple to install, simple to use, simple to find documentation and examples, simple to write playbooks, and simple to make contributions.

The second key principle was modularity: Ansible functionality could be easily extended by writing modules, and anyone could write a module and contribute it back to Ansible.

The third key principle was “batteries included”: all of the modules for Ansible would be built-in, so you wouldn’t have to figure out where to get them. They’d just be there.

We’ve come a long way by following these principles, and we intend to stick to them.

Recently though, we’ve been reevaluating how we might better structure Ansible to support these principles. We now find ourselves dealing with problems of scale that are becoming more challenging to solve. Jan-Piet Mens, who has continued to be a close friend to Ansible since our very earliest days, recently described those problems quite succinctly from his perspective as a long-time contributor -- and I think his analysis of the problems we face is quite accurate. Simply, we’ve become victims of our own success.

Success Continue reading

The Future of Ansible Content Delivery

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Everyday, I’m in awe of what Ansible has grown to be. The incredible growth of the community and viral adoption of the technology has resulted in a content management challenge for the project.

I don’t want to echo a lot of what’s been said by our dear friend Jan-Piet Mens or our incredible Community team, but give me a moment to take a shot at it.

Our main challenge is rooted in the ability to scale. The volume of pull requests and issues we see day to day severely outweigh the ability of the Ansible community to keep up with that rate of change.

As a result, we are embarking on a journey. This journey is one that we know that the community, both our content creators and content consumers, will be interested in hearing about.

This New World Order (tongue in cheek), as we’ve been calling it, is a model that will allow for us to empower the community of contributors of Ansible content (read: modules, plugins, and roles) to provide their content at their own pace.

To do this, we have made some changes to how Ansible leverages content that is not “shipped” with it. In short, Continue reading

There’s finally a communication app tailormade for on-the-go teams. Try it free.

One of the hardest things for employers to do is keep up with the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce. More than ever, teams are using multiple devices to do their work on the go — and for workforces that are dispersed, it can be difficult to get on the same page for key objectives and initiatives. That’s where Eko comes in: this performance-boosting platform is built for mobile workforces, combining communications, process management, task management, e-learning and HR functionalities into one easy-to-use app. Ideal for remote teams, retail and hospitality, this app streamlines everything frontline staff needs to be successful into one helpful tool. To read this article in full, please click here

Service Mesh: The Next Step in Networking for Modern Applications

By Bruce Davie, CTO, Asia Pacific & Japan

What’s New in the World of Networking

As I’m currently preparing my breakout session for VMworld 2019, I’ve been spending plenty of time looking into what’s new in the world of networking. A lot of what’s currently happening in networking is driven by the requirements of modern applications, and in that context it’s hard to miss the rise of service mesh. I see service mesh as a novel approach to meeting the networking needs of applications, although there is rather more to it than just networking.

There are about a dozen talks at VMworld this year that either focus on service mesh or at least touch on it – including mine – so I thought it would be timely to comment on why I think this technology has appeared and what it means for networking.

To be clear, there are a lot of different ways to implement a service mesh today, of which Istio – an open-source project started at Google – is probably the most well-known. Indeed some people use Istio as a synonym for service mesh, but the broader use of the term rather than a particular implementation is my Continue reading

Getting help for Linux shell built-ins

Linux built-ins are commands that are built into the shell, much like shelves that are built into a wall. You won’t find them as stand-alone files the way standard Linux commands are stored in /usr/bin and you probably use quite a few of them without ever questioning how they’re different from commands such as ls and pwd.Built-ins are used just like other Linux commands. They are likely to run a bit faster than similar commands that are not part of your shell. Bash built-ins include commands such as alias, export and bg. [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ] As you might suspect, because built-ins are shell-specific, they won't be supplied with man pages. Ask man to help with bg and you'll see something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Digital Transformation: Can SD-WAN Help Strengthen Application Security in a Cloud-First World?

The majority of enterprise CIOs are of in the midst of a digital transformation journey, migrating more of their business applications and infrastructure from their own data centers to the cloud. These applications include real-time voice calling, video conferencing, email, storage, CRM, and many other software applications now delivered as a service – “SaaS.” To support digital transformation initiatives and shifting traffic patterns as more applications move to the cloud, 94 percent1 of enterprises are considering, evaluating or have already deployed1 SD-WAN solutions to address evolving WAN requirements. Enterprises are rethinking their WAN approach to better support multi-cloud infrastructures and to actively leverage higher bandwidth (and often lower cost) broadband services to augment existing MPLS transport networks.To read this article in full, please click here

3 Tools for Getting VMs From Your Datacenter to the AWS Cloud

Here’s a simple scenario: you have some Virtual Machines (VMs) in your on-premises environment, likely in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. You want to either fully migrate some or all of those VMs to the AWS Cloud or you want to copy a gold image to the AWS Cloud so you can launch compute instances from that image. Simple enough.

Now, how do you do it?

Can you just export an OVA of the VM, copy it up, and then boot it? Can you somehow import the VMDK files that hold the VM’s virtual drive contents? Regardless the eventual method, how do you do it at scale for dozens or hundreds of VMs? And lastly, how do you orchestrate the process so that VMs belonging to an application stack are brought over together, as a unit?

This post will answer these questions and more by providing an introduction to the services available on the AWS Cloud to discover, plan, migrate, and track VMs from on-prem to AWS.

This post assumes good working knowledge of technologies such as VMware vCenter and only basic knowledge of AWS.

Let’s just clarify some things first…

Remembering that this post is tailored for those that Continue reading

VMworld 2019 Prayer Time

For the last several years, I’ve organized a brief morning prayer time at VMworld. I didn’t attend the conference last year, but organized a prayer time nevertheless (and was able to join one morning for prayer). This year, now that I’m back at VMware (via the Heptio acquisition) and speaking at the conference, I’d once again like to coordinate a time for believers to meet. So, if you’re a Christian interested in gathering together with other Christians for a brief time of prayer, here are the details.

What: A brief time of prayer

Where: Yerba Buena Gardens behind Moscone North (near the waterfall)

When: Monday 8/26 through Thursday 8/29 at 7:45am (this should give everyone enough time to grab breakfast before keynotes/sessions start at 9am)

Who: All courteous attendees are welcome, but please note this will be a distinctly Christian-focused and Christ-centric activity (note that I encourage believers of other faiths/religions to organize equivalent activities)

Why: To spend a few minutes in prayer over the day, the conference, the attendees, and each other

As in previous years, you don’t need to RSVP or anything like that, although you’re welcome to if you’d like (just hit me up on Twitter).

Continue reading

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