OSISoft: old-school process-control company on IoT cutting edge

While the eyes of the tech world are on the usual suspects like Google and IBM, as well as high-profile operational tech firms like GE and Siemens, an almost 40-year-old company called OSISoft has quietly leveraged its expertise in process monitoring and management into an impressive list of prominent clients. These include Aramco, the national oil and gas company of Saudi Arabia, which is arguably the single most valuable and profitable company in the world, Chevron, Pacific Gas and Electric, Heineken, Tyson Foods, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, among many others.OSISoft has a lot more in common with the GEs of the world than with some of the IT-based powerhouses that are making a lot of noise about IoT these days. It’s a company with a long history of experience in real-time data collection, making the transition into an IoT-enabled world a smooth one.To read this article in full, please click here

Sharing more Details, not more Data: Our new Privacy Policy and Data Protection Plans

Sharing more Details, not more Data: Our new Privacy Policy and Data Protection Plans

After an exhilarating first month as Cloudflare’s first Data Protection Officer (DPO), I’m excited to announce that today we are launching a new Privacy Policy. Our new policy explains the kind of information we collect, from whom we collect it, and how we use it in a more transparent way. We also provide clearer instructions for how you, our users, can exercise your data subject rights. Importantly, nothing in our privacy policy changes the level of privacy protection for your information.

Our new policy is a key milestone in our GDPR readiness journey, and it goes into effect on May 25 — the same day as the GDPR. (You can learn more about the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation here.) But our GDPR journey doesn’t end on May 25.

Over the coming months, we’ll be following GDPR-related developments, providing you periodic updates about what we learn, and adapting our approach as needed. And I’ll continue to focus on GDPR compliance efforts, including coordinating our responses to data subject requests for information about how their data is being handled, evaluating the privacy impact of new products and services on our users’ personal data, and working with customers who want Continue reading

Expanding Multi-User Access on dash.cloudflare.com

Expanding Multi-User Access on dash.cloudflare.com

One of the most common feature requests we get is to allow customers to share account access. This has been supported at our Enterprise level of service, but is now being extended to all customers. Starting today, users can go to the new home of Cloudflare’s Dashboard at dash.cloudflare.com. Upon login, users will see the redesigned account experience. Now users can manage all of their account level settings and features in a more streamlined UI.

Expanding Multi-User Access on dash.cloudflare.com
CC BY 2.0 image by Mike Lawrence

All customers now have the ability to invite others to manage their account as Administrators. They can do this from the ‘Members’ tab in the new Account area on the Cloudflare dashboard. Invited Administrators have full control over the account except for managing members and changing billing information.

For Customers who belong to multiple accounts (previously known as organizations), the first thing they will see is an account selector. This allows easy searching and selection between accounts. Additionally, there is a zone selector for searching through zones across all accounts. Enterprise customers still have access to the same roles as before with the addition of the Administrator and Billing Roles.

The New Dashboard @ dash. Continue reading

VMware: Cloud-centric businesses need a cloud-centric network

It’s May, and that means all the April showers we had will soon bring spring flowers. April and May are also busy conference months, as many vendors host customer, partner, or analyst events. This week, it was Dell’s turn as the company held its first-ever Dell Technologies World. Dell has obviously had other user events before, including Dell World and Dell-EMC World, but the naming of this one is indicative of how Dell is now one company and there’s better product and go-to-market integration between Dell, EMC and VMware.VMware introduces Virtual Cloud Network As expected, much of the news at the show revolved around Dell Technologies compute products. But the network got some love, as well, when VMware announced its Virtual Cloud Network, which is the coming together of many of its network assets, including NSX and VeloCloud. The Virtual Cloud Network can be thought as an agile network and security overlay that acts as a “fabric” for digital businesses that connect apps, data, and users to each other regardless of where they are located.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware: Cloud-centric businesses need a cloud-centric network

It’s May, and that means all the April showers we had will soon bring spring flowers. April and May are also busy conference months, as many vendors host customer, partner, or analyst events. This week, it was Dell’s turn as the company held its first-ever Dell Technology World. Dell has obviously had other user events before, including Dell World and Dell-EMC World, but the naming of this one is indicative of how Dell is now one company and there’s better product and go-to-market integration between Dell, EMC and VMware.VMware introduces Virtual Cloud Network As expected, much of the news at the show revolved around Dell Technologies compute products. But the network got some love, as well, when VMware announced its Virtual Cloud Network, which is the coming together of many of its network assets, including NSX and VeloCloud. The Virtual Cloud Network can be thought as an agile network and security overlay that acts as a “fabric” for digital businesses that connect apps, data, and users to each other regardless of where they are located.To read this article in full, please click here

Datanauts 132: Unit Testing For Fun And Profit

While performing a routine sensor sweep of the Gargleblaster nebula, the crew of the Datanauts starship noticed that many of the tasks are manual in nature and could, with a little effort, be automated with some scripting.

However, every time we moved on from one part of the nebula to another, a different error would crop up with the script s code. Isn t there some way that we can automatically test our code to make sure that more time is spent drinking a frothy ale instead of all this debugging?

On today’s episode with talk with Adam Bertram, a Microsoft MVP and author of The Pester Book.

He is currently a Senior Systems Automation Engineer working with PowerShell, Desired State Configuration, and various other DevOps tools to coordinate reliable software deployments for a biotech company. You can find his work at adamtheautomator.com.

We start by defining a unit test for scripts, and how unit testing differs from integration, functional, regression tests, and others.

Then we dive into why you’d want to test your scripts (testing isn’t just for developers!), and how to create these tests.

We also talk about the notion of test-driven development, and dive Continue reading

Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC

Cloud computing became an essential infrastructure strategy for nearly every business. Last year Gartner predicted that demand for infrastructure as a service would increase by 36.8 percent. A 2018 McAfee survey found that 97 percent of organizations are using cloud services from public, private or both. Similarly, Rightscale’s 2018 cloud survey showed that 95 percent of enteprises have a cloud strategy, including 51 percent with a hybrid cloud strategy.

Yet, despite the cloud’s ubiquity, and the fact that HPC in the cloud has been possible for more than a decade – Univa commissioned the very first HPC cluster in AWS …

Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The State of Broadband Connectivity in Canada’s Rural and Remote Regions

In April, the Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology presented the “Broadband Connectivity in Rural Canada: Overcoming the Digital Divide” to the House of Commons in order to make public their findings and recommendations from a study on broadband connectivity. (In May 2016, the committee adopted a motion to do a study on broadband connectivity, with the primary purpose of developing a plan to improve rural broadband and demonstrate the Internet’s effect on rural economies.) To create the report, the committee used information and conversations from seven meetings, as well as 50 oral and written submissions. Participants in this process represented businesses, small and large service providers, experts, and on-the-ground rural providers. The Internet Society applauds the committee’s use of a consultative process and its effort to provide concrete recommendations to the House of Commons to connect Canada’s rural and remote citizens.

In 2016, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) declared Internet access an essential service and set the minimum performance standard at 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. At the same time, it estimated that it will take between 10 and 15 years for the remaining 18% of Canadians to reach those Continue reading

Startup RStor promises a new type of distributed compute fabric

A startup funded by Cisco and featuring some big-name talent has come out of stealth mode with the promise of unifying data stored across multiple distributed data centers.RStor is led by Giovanni Coglitore, the former head of the hardware team at Facebook and before that CTO at Rackspace. The company also features C-level talent who were veterans of EMC’s technology venture capital arm, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, VMware, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Samsung.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Bouyed by $45 million in venture capital money from Cisco, the company has announced RStor, a “hyper-distributed multicloud platform” that enables organizations to aggregate and automate compute resources from private data centers, public cloud providers, and trusted supercomputing centers across its networking fabric.To read this article in full, please click here

Startup RStor promises a new type of distributed compute fabric

A startup funded by Cisco and featuring some big-name talent has come out of stealth mode with the promise of unifying data stored across multiple distributed data centers.RStor is led by Giovanni Coglitore, the former head of the hardware team at Facebook and before that CTO at Rackspace. The company also features C-level talent who were veterans of EMC’s technology venture capital arm, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, VMware, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Samsung.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Bouyed by $45 million in venture capital money from Cisco, the company has announced RStor, a “hyper-distributed multicloud platform” that enables organizations to aggregate and automate compute resources from private data centers, public cloud providers, and trusted supercomputing centers across its networking fabric.To read this article in full, please click here

Stretching NSX From The Datacenter To The Edge And Cloud

VMware’s $1.26 billion acquisition of network virtualization startup Nicira in 2012 sent ripples through the tech world. Through the deal, VMware, which had made its name as a pioneer of server virtualization technology, planted a flag in the burgeoning software-defined networking (SDN) space that was roiling the traditionally staid networking market.

The deal also put the company at odds with partners like Cisco Systems, which itself was developing a strategy to address SDN and which threatened to upend the business of selling networking switches and routers that had made Cisco a very rich and high-profile tech vendor. It put VMware …

Stretching NSX From The Datacenter To The Edge And Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Customizing your text colors on the Linux command line

If you spend much time on the Linux command line (and you probably wouldn't be reading this if you didn't), you've undoubtedly noticed that the ls command displays your files in a number of different colors. You've probably also come to recognize some of the distinctions — directories appearing in one color, executable files in another, etc.How that all happens and what options are available for you to change the color assignments might not be so obvious.[ Also read: Unix tip: Coloring your world with LS_COLORS | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] One way to get a big dose of data showing how these colors are assigned is to run the dircolors command. It will show you something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco loses key software exec

Cisco lost a key warrior in its battle to become a monster software player this week as Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and head of the $5 billion Application Group, said he would be leaving the company effective May 3 to become CEO of cloud startup Five9.“During Trollope’s tenure, his team reinvented Cisco’s Collaboration business, pivoting to a SaaS model and making design, simplicity and exponential improvement the guiding principles of product development,” Five9 wrote in describing its new CEO’s pedigree.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco loses key software exec

Cisco lost a key warrior in its battle to become a monster software player this week as Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and head of the $5 billion Application Group, said he would be leaving the company effective May 3 to become CEO of cloud startup Five9.“During Trollope’s tenure, his team reinvented Cisco’s Collaboration business, pivoting to a SaaS model and making design, simplicity and exponential improvement the guiding principles of product development,” Five9 wrote in describing its new CEO’s pedigree.To read this article in full, please click here

Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization

Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization Dalton et al., NSDI’18

Yesterday we took a look at the Microsoft Azure networking stack, today it’s the turn of the Google Cloud Platform. (It’s a very handy coincidence to have two such experience and system design report papers appearing side by side so that we can compare). Andromeda has similar design goals to AccelNet: performance close to hardware, serviceability, and the flexibility and velocity of a software-based architecture. The Google team solve those challenges in a very different way though, being prepared to make use of host cores (which you’ll recall the Azure team wanted to avoid).

We opted for a high-performance software-based architecture instead of a hardware-only solution like SR-IOV because software enables flexible, high-velocity feature deployment… Andromeda consumes a few percent of the CPU and memory on-host. One physical CPU core is reserved for the Andromeda dataplane… In the future, we plan to increase the dataplane CPU reservation to two physical cores on newer hosts with faster physical NICs and more CPU cores in order to improve VM network throughput.

High-level design

Both the control plane and data plane use a hierarchical structure. The control Continue reading

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