Dell-EMC expands its CI platform, simplifies data center operations

Standing up a private cloud using technology from multiple vendors is a time-consuming, complex process that involves months of post-deployment tweaking and tuning.In 2009, VMware, Cisco and EMC formed a joint venture called VCE that aimed to solve that problem. (Note: Cisco and VMWare are clients of ZK Research.) They created a converged infrastructure (CI) product called “Vblock” that brought together VMware software, Cisco servers and networking with EMC storage in a preconfigured, turnkey, validated solution so customers could essentially turn the product on and start using it.Also on Network World: Azure Stack: Microsoft’s private-cloud platform and what IT pros need to know about it Vblock had 90 percent of the heavy lifting done, with the other 10 percent being unique the organization. Customers loved it, with many saying Vblock was the only way to get a private cloud up and running inside a week. To read this article in full, please click here

Dell-EMC expands its CI platform, simplifies data center operations

Standing up a private cloud using technology from multiple vendors is a time-consuming, complex process that involves months of post-deployment tweaking and tuning.In 2009, VMware, Cisco and EMC formed a joint venture called VCE that aimed to solve that problem. (Note: Cisco and VMWare are clients of ZK Research.) They created a converged infrastructure (CI) product called “Vblock” that brought together VMware software, Cisco servers and networking with EMC storage in a preconfigured, turnkey, validated solution so customers could essentially turn the product on and start using it.Also on Network World: Azure Stack: Microsoft’s private-cloud platform and what IT pros need to know about it Vblock had 90 percent of the heavy lifting done, with the other 10 percent being unique the organization. Customers loved it, with many saying Vblock was the only way to get a private cloud up and running inside a week. To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why 5G is bringing edge computing and automation front and center

The Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang are underway and all eyes are on the competitors. They are also on the digital infrastructure and technology allowing billions around the world to view world record-breaking moments in real-time. The 2018 Games represent the world’s first deployment of a broad-scale 5G network, thanks to a partnership between domestic telecom provider KT, Intel and Samsung. The new capabilities have been on the horizon for some time. We saw 5G steal the show a year ago at Mobile World Congress, and Verizon and AT&T have each announced plans to offer 5G networks before the end of 2018. So, what does the emergence of 5G networks mean for enterprises?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why 5G is bringing edge computing and automation front and center

The Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang are underway and all eyes are on the competitors. They are also on the digital infrastructure and technology allowing billions around the world to view world record-breaking moments in real-time. The 2018 Games represent the world’s first deployment of a broad-scale 5G network, thanks to a partnership between domestic telecom provider KT, Intel and Samsung. The new capabilities have been on the horizon for some time. We saw 5G steal the show a year ago at Mobile World Congress, and Verizon and AT&T have each announced plans to offer 5G networks before the end of 2018. So, what does the emergence of 5G networks mean for enterprises?To read this article in full, please click here

Qualcomm Takes its Chip Expertise to the Edge

The company’s edge software aims to secure and manage IoT devices.

Is Lift and Shift a Viable Cloud Migration Strategy?

ExpertExpress Evolved into a Team of Experts

Years ago, I decided to try out another idea: solving real-life challenges with the help of an easy-to-consume online consulting service. When I discussed the idea with my friends during one of the early Networking Field Day events the opinion was pretty unanimous: “this will never work”

Fortunately, they were wrong. Not only did ~100 customers decided to use it in the meantime, the simple idea grew to a point where I couldn’t do it all on my own.

Why I’m helping Cloudflare grow in Asia

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Cloudflare as Head of Asia. This is an important time for the company as we continue to grow our presence in the region and build on the successes we’ve already had in our Singapore office. In this new role, I’m eager to grow our brand recognition in Asia and optimize our reach to clients by building up teams and channel partners.

A little about me

I’m a Californian with more than 20 years of experience growing businesses across Asia. I initially came to Asia with the Boston Consulting Group and since then I’ve helped Google and Twitter start and grow their businesses in Singapore and Asia. In many cases throughout my career, I’ve been one of the very first employees (sometimes the first) on the ground in this part of the world. To me, the Asian market presents an often untapped opportunity for companies looking to expand, and it’s a challenge that has appealed to me throughout my career.

This year's Chinese New Year celebration

Why Cloudflare?

I’m driven by opportunities to work with global businesses that drive change and are full of ambitious and passionate people. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build Continue reading

HTTPS or bust: Chrome’s plan to label sites as “Not Secure”

Google just announced that beginning in July 2018, with the release of Chrome 68, web pages loaded without HTTPS will be marked as “not secure”.

More than half of web visitors will soon see this warning when browsing unencrypted HTTP sites, according to data from Cloudflare’s edge that shows 56.62% of desktop requests originate from Chrome. Users presented with this warning will be less likely to interact with these sites or trust their content, so it’s imperative that site operators not yet using HTTPS have a plan to do so by July.

How did we get here (and why)?

To those who have followed the Chrome team’s public statements, this announcement comes as no surprise. Google has been gearing up for this change since 2014, as Chrome boss Parisa Tabriz tweeted and Chris Palmer memorialized in a widely distributed email. While this step is an important and potentially jarring one for users, it’s by no means the last step that Google will take to influence website administrator behavior for the better.

But why are they making this change (now)? Google’s primary motivation for driving HTTPS adoption is simple: a safe browsing experience is good for business. Users that feel Continue reading

AT&T Macro-Sizes its Microservices Supplier Program

The carrier deployed more than 300 microservices last year.

We’ve added a new GIT Fundamentals course to our library!

Log into your members account, or check out ine.com to view our latest addition to the INE video course library, GIT Fundamentals.

Why Study GIT Fundamentals:
GIT Version Control Systems are popular among many organizations, you should learn the basics now so that when faced with a GIT based project you’re able to contribute to your team quickly and efficiently.

About the Course:
This course is 3 hours and 27 minutes long and taught by Eric Parker. This is an introductory course, meant to familiarize students with the core GIT system concepts.

What You’ll Learn:
At the end of the course, students will be able to modify and commit data to both local and remote GIT repositories. Upon the completion of the course, you will be ready to start contributing to GIT based projects of your choice.

About the Instructor:
Eric Parker is a native Texan and a graduate of Texas A&M University and is more than happy to tell you all about it! He has spent the last 12+ years building software solutions in the Raleigh, NC area and has architected JAVA, .NET and JavaScript based software projects in both mid-size and enterprise level companies. He Continue reading

Establishing Early Neural Network Standards

Today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform will focus on an effort to standardize key neural network features to make development and innovation easier and more productive.

While it is still too early to standardize across major frameworks for training, for instance, portability for new architectures via a common file format is a critical first step toward more interoperability between frameworks and between training and inferencing tools.

To explore this, we are joined by Neil Trevett, Vice President of the Developer Ecosystem at Nvidia and President of the Khronos Group, an industry consortium focused on creating open …

Establishing Early Neural Network Standards was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: NSX-T

VMware’s network virtualization platform, called NSX, creates network services like routing, load balancing, firewalling and more. All of it is done in software that can be implemented on any underlying infrastructure as long as it does IP transfer. @The New Stack

Indigenous Connectivity Summit Participants Share Their Stories

Madeleine Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit – the largest and only city in Nunavut, Canada – has a colorful way of describing how sparsely populated the territory is. “The seals outnumber the people.” With a population of just over 35,000 people spread out over an arctic 1,750,000 square kilometers, Internet access is a challenge. In fact, according to Redfern, her most favorited tweet was that she couldn’t tweet… because the connection was too slow.

Madeleine Redfern participated in the first ever Indigenous Connectivity Summit last November. She and other participants shared their experience and expertise to help close the connectivity gap in Indigenous communities. Many also sat down for brief interviews with the 1st-Mile Institute, a New Mexico nonprofit that has initiated a local “Broadband for All” program. The videos are now available to watch on the 1st-Mile Institute’s website.

You can also find the videos on the Internet Society’s Indigenet page, which includes resources from the Summit including the presentations, the policy brief Spectrum Approaches for Community Networks, and other ways to get involved!

The post Indigenous Connectivity Summit Participants Share Their Stories appeared first on Internet Society.

HPE Leads Data Center Server Market, IHS Says

Enterprises continue to be the biggest server buyers — for now.

The DNS Negative Cache

Considering the DNS query chain—

• A host queries a local recursive server to find out about banana.example
• The server queries the root server, then recursively the authoritative server, looking for this domain name
• banana.example does not exist

There are two possible responses in this chain of queries, actually. .example might not exist at all. In this case, the root server will return a server not found error. On the other hand, .example might exist, but banana.example might not exist; in this case, the authoritative server is going to return an NXDOMAIN record indicating the subdomain does not exist.

Assume another hosts, a few moments later, also queries for banana.example. Should the recursive server request the same information all over again for this second query? It will unless it caches the failure of the first query—this is the negative cache. This negative cache reduces load on the overall system, but it can also be considered a bug.

Take, for instance, the case where you set up a new server, assign it banana.example, jump to a host and try to connect to the new server before the new DNS information has been propagated through the system. On Continue reading

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems

The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy.

Now, IBM’s enterprise customers that use more standard iron in their clusters, and who predominantly have CPU-only setups rather than adding in GPUs or FPGAs and who need a lot more local storage, are getting more of a Power9 meal with the launch of six new machines …

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Verizon to Use KSI Blockchain Technology Developed for Estonia

Verizon is planning to offer blockchain services for enterprises.

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge

Neural networks live on data and rely on computational firepower to help them take in that data, train on it and learn from it. The challenge increasingly is ensuring there is enough computational power to keep up with the massive amounts of data that is being generated today and the rising demands from modern neural networks for speed and accuracy in consuming the data and training on datasets that continue to grow in size.

These challenges can be seen playing out in the fast-growing autonomous vehicle market, where pure-play companies like Waymo – born from Google’s self-driving car initiative – …

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

AI and Rules Drive Deepfence App-Focused Container Security

The company's approach is to diffuse an attack before it explodes.