Facebook’s Expanding Machine Learning Infrastructure

Here at The Next Platform, we tend to keep a close eye on how the major hyperscalers evolve their infrastructure to support massive scale and evermore complex workloads.

Not so long ago the core services were relatively standard transactions and operations, but with the addition of training and inferencing against complex deep learning models—something that requires a two-handed approach to hardware—the hyperscale hardware stack has had to quicken its step to keep pace with the new performance and efficiency demands of machine learning at scale.

While not innovating on the custom hardware side quite the same way as Google, …

Facebook’s Expanding Machine Learning Infrastructure was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Wi-Fi Alliance Strengthens Security

Get a $20 Discount If You Buy 3 Echo Dots on Amazon, For A Limited Time – Deal Alert

Echo Dot is designed to work seamlessly in every room of your house, and right now you can get $20 off your order when you buy 3 Dots, or get one Dot free when you buy 6. Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses Alexa to play music, control smart home devices, provide information, read the news, set alarms, read audiobooks from Audible, and more. New Alexa "skills" are being created all the time. If you're in the market for a few Dots, jump over to Amazon and claim your discount while it lasts.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: eVPNs for Layer 2

Verizon Software-Defined Perimeter Adds Fhoosh Security Technology

The software enables secure HD video streaming from IoT devices.

“Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for SMBs” is available now

I am honored and humbled to announce my new book “Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for Small and Medium Businesses”.

This is a concise book that provides step by step information to design and deploy NSX in Small and Medium size data centers. My aim for writing this book is to give architects and engineers the necessary tools and techniques to transform their data center from legacy architecture to software defined (SDN) architecture. The SDN architecture is the foundation to build the private cloud.

The book has about 90 pages covering following topics:

• NSX and SMB data center introduction
• Important vSphere design considerations
• vSphere cluster design and NSX deployment models
• NSX individual component design and deployment considerations
• NSX Operations: monitoring and troubleshooting
• Growing NSX deployments

Many technology vendors tend to focus efforts in the large data center space, the fact remains that the small/medium business (SMB) space represents a substantial part of the IT marketplace.

The book is available to purchase from NSX Store.
Electronic version of the book can be downloaded from here.

The post “Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for SMBs” is available now appeared first on Network Virtualization.

Versa Networks Powers Zayo Group’s SD-WAN Offering  

The CLEC says SD-WAN is just a subset of its WAN business.

MEC for Beginners: Saguna Looks to Ease Adoption with Starter Kit

MEC and CORD are seen as key pillars of next-gen network architectures.

HPC Optimizes Energy Exploration for Oil and Gas Startups

In its quest to meet the world’s ever-increasing demand for energy, the oil and gas industry has become one of the largest users—and leading innovators—of high-performance computing (HPC). As natural resources deplete, and the cost of accessing them increases, highly sophisticated computational modeling becomes an essential tool in energy exploration and development.

Advanced computational techniques provide a high-fidelity model of the subsurface, which gives oil and gas companies a greater understanding of the geophysics of the region they propose to explore. A clearer picture of the earth enables targeted drilling, reduced acquisition costs, and minimal environmental impact. In an industry …

HPC Optimizes Energy Exploration for Oil and Gas Startups was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These bugs take advantage of very technical systems that modern CPUs have implemented to make computers extremely fast. Even highly technical people can find it difficult to wrap their heads around how these bugs work. But, using some analogies, it's possible to understand exactly what's going on with these bugs. If you've found yourself puzzled by exactly what's going on with these bugs, read on — this blog is for you.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra

Late one afternoon walking through a forest near your home and navigating with the GPS you come to a fork in the path which you’ve taken many times before. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason your GPS is not working and being a methodical person you like to follow it very carefully.

Cooling your heels waiting for GPS to start working again is annoying because you are losing time when you could be getting home. Instead of waiting, you decide to make an intelligent guess about which path is most likely based on past experience and set Continue reading

Ways that Network Performance Management Has Evolved

SDxCentral's recent report highlights how big data, analytics, and convergence are impacting network and application monitoring.

History of Networking: Segment Routing

Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time

“Culture, any culture… depends on the quality of its record of knowledge.” — Don Waters, “‘Preserving Digital Information”

Our culture and society has been enriched by the creation and proliferation of the Internet. Information has become increasingly more accessible and has enabled so many of us to become active creators rather than passive consumers of content. With that, we’re experiencing an explosive growth of digital data, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and that data needs a place to live.

Not only does our data need a place to live, but it needs a place to survive into the future. What happens if years from now, we are no longer able to access our photos, documents, music — essentially all the records of our lives? We will not only be forgotten, but we’ll be thrusting the future into a “digital dark age,” as Vint Cerf calls it.

In short: “More and more of our lives are bound to the ones and zeroes of bits residing on a cloud server, or mobile device. Those bits in turn are mediated by the software and hardware implements we use every day. The bitstreams are unintelligible, however, without Continue reading

Everyone Wants A Data Platform, Not A Database

Every IT organization wants a more scalable, programmable, and adaptable platform with real-time applications that can chew on ever-increasing amounts and types of data. And it would be nice if it could run in the cloud, too.

Because of this, companies no longer think about databases, but rather are building or buying data platforms that are based on industry-standard technologies, big data tools like NoSQL and unified in a single place. It is a trend that started gaining momentum around 2010 and will accelerate this year, according to Ravi Mayuram, senior vice president of engineering and chief technology officer at …

Everyone Wants A Data Platform, Not A Database was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

How Chuck Robbins is turning Cisco around

Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, is a busy guy. I never see him not talking to a customer, partner, employee, analyst or some other person in the company’s ecosystem. Over the holiday break, I hope he took the time to put his feet up, light a cigar and reflect on what’s happened to the company he is leading over the past two years.If we roll the clock back to Jan. 1, 2016, the stock was at $23.79, which was the lowest price point since April of 2014, and many Cisco investors were skeptical of Cisco’s future prospects.Read also: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline A hefty amount of my business comes from my interactions with Wall Street, and two years ago, very few wanted to talk about Cisco. There were far more bears than bulls, and the feeling was that the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and other trends would slowly eat away at Cisco and it would go the way of Lucent, Nortel and so many other companies that were too stubborn to change their business models.To read this article in full, please click here

How Chuck Robbins is turning Cisco around

Cisco’s CEO, Chuck Robbins, is a busy guy. I never see him not talking to a customer, partner, employee, analyst or some other person in the company’s ecosystem. Over the holiday break, I hope he took the time to put his feet up, light a cigar and reflect on what’s happened to the company he is leading over the past two years.If we roll the clock back to Jan. 1, 2016, the stock was at $23.79, which was the lowest price point since April of 2014, and many Cisco investors were skeptical of Cisco’s future prospects.Read also: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline A hefty amount of my business comes from my interactions with Wall Street, and two years ago, very few wanted to talk about Cisco. There were far more bears than bulls, and the feeling was that the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN) and other trends would slowly eat away at Cisco and it would go the way of Lucent, Nortel and so many other companies that were too stubborn to change their business models.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why wireless is the future of advanced metering infrastructure

As the new year roars into its full swing, innovators everywhere are beginning to ask themselves what technological advancements 2018 may have in store that could change the faces of our societies forever. Increasingly, tech analyst and investors eager to find and back the next big thing are looking to advancements in wireless capabilities, with many believing it to be the key to the future of our infrastructure.So how will wireless technology impact advanced metering infrastructure as we know it today, and what will the smart grids and smart cities of tomorrow look like thanks to this tech? A quick dive into recent advancements shows that a wireless world is just around the corner.To read this article in full, please click here

GHD Uses Riverbed SteelConnect to Link 100 Global Offices

Global professional services company GHD recently merged with Conestoga-Rovers and Associates (CRA), adding more than 3,000 employees in 100 offices, including 50 small sites. With this sudden growth, GHD needed a simple, cost-effective solution to add those new sites onto the company’s network. The answer was Riverbed SteelConnect, which has fueled stronger collaboration between its... Read more →

Worth Reading: 2018-2019 Data Center Technology Trends