The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra

At the end of July, Oak Ridge National Laboratories started receiving the first racks of servers that will eventually be expanded to become the “Summit” supercomputer, the long-awaited replacement to the “Titan” hybrid CPU-GPU system that was built by Cray and installed back in the fall of 2012. So, technically speaking, IBM has begun shipping its Power9-based “Witherspoon” system, the kicker to the Power8-based “Minksy” machine that Big Blue unveiled in September 2016 as a precursor and a testbed for the Power9 iron.

Given that IBM is shipping Summit nodes to Oak Ridge and has also started shipping similar (but …

The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Data is at its greatest risk of being compromised when it is being used, when moving from a secure database around the servers or apps in memory. So, Microsoft is launching a new technology for Windows Server and Azure that protects the data while it’s being processed. Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Data is at its greatest risk of being compromised when it is being used, when moving from a secure database around the servers or apps in memory. So, Microsoft is launching a new technology for Windows Server and Azure that protects the data while it’s being processed. Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Finally: Easy, Remote IT For SMBs

Setting up and managing an IT infrastructure isn’t what most small and mid-sized business owners signed up for when they opened their doors. At least not voluntarily. After all, IT is an intimidating field filled with fragmented components, esoteric expertise, and expensive hardware. That may be why the most powerful network solutions have felt out of reach for small businesses, only approachable by larger enterprises with deeper pockets.Whether they have the resources or not, though, every business is a digital business in today’s economy. They all rely on a functional IT framework on some scale. And for the 83% of small businesses that don’t have any dedicated IT staff, the ultimate responsibility of running the company network often falls to the person with the most at stake: the business owner. So too do the related concerns of cybersecurity, network reliability, malfunctioning equipment, employee access, and so on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finally: Easy, Remote IT For SMBs

Setting up and managing an IT infrastructure isn’t what most small and mid-sized business owners signed up for when they opened their doors. At least not voluntarily. After all, IT is an intimidating field filled with fragmented components, esoteric expertise, and expensive hardware. That may be why the most powerful network solutions have felt out of reach for small businesses, only approachable by larger enterprises with deeper pockets.Whether they have the resources or not, though, every business is a digital business in today’s economy. They all rely on a functional IT framework on some scale. And for the 83% of small businesses that don’t have any dedicated IT staff, the ultimate responsibility of running the company network often falls to the person with the most at stake: the business owner. So too do the related concerns of cybersecurity, network reliability, malfunctioning equipment, employee access, and so on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Hyperconvergence and silos

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises benefits in several dimensions: streamlining deployments across compute, storage and networking; scaling linearly as needs grow; and unifying and simplifying management. When examining prospective HCI solutions, it’s important to ensure this set of promises is fulfilled, but more importantly that checking those boxes with HCI doesn’t create new IT silos. A careful examination of what causes these silos makes it much easier to identify a solution that blends seamlessly into your architecture and chips away at IT silos, while at the same time ushering in the simplicity and ease that HCI promises. —Kaustubh Das @ The Data Center Journal

The post Worth Reading: Hyperconvergence and silos appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Always test remote app performance with a WAN emulator

Many organizations deploy new applications for their remote site users without testing it on a WAN. Not testing these applications across a simulated WAN increases the possibility of performance issues during the early stages of usage because you have no idea how the application will perform once latency or jitter come in between the communication path of the client and server. If the application uses large amounts of bandwidth that causes congestion, then it can negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the bandwidth. A WAN emulator can enable you to measure the average bandwidth that an application may use before you deploy it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Always test remote app performance with a WAN emulator

Many organizations deploy new applications for their remote site users without testing it on a WAN. Not testing these applications across a simulated WAN increases the possibility of performance issues during the early stages of usage because you have no idea how the application will perform once latency or jitter come in between the communication path of the client and server. If the application uses large amounts of bandwidth that causes congestion, then it can negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the bandwidth. A WAN emulator can enable you to measure the average bandwidth that an application may use before you deploy it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location, location, location… it matters to the cloud

In real estate, there’s a mantra that most agents use of “location, location, location,” meaning houses that may be equal in many ways will cost more the closer you get to something of value. For example, the San Jose Mercury News recently published a story about a house in Sunnyvale, California, that sold for $782,000 over asking price. Why such a ridiculous amount? Because it’s near Apple’s new campus — location matters.Does location matter with the cloud? Given how fast data travels, one might not think so, but location does indeed matter. A recent report from EdgeConneX and Cedexis, Cloud, Content, Connectivity and the Evolving Internet Edge, shows just how much it actually does. The study conducted uses Cedexis’ RUM-based internet performance measurement tools to test how cloud applications perform in different locations and with various optimization techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location, location, location… it matters to the cloud

In real estate, there’s a mantra that most agents use of “location, location, location,” meaning houses that may be equal in many ways will cost more the closer you get to something of value. For example, the San Jose Mercury News recently published a story about a house in Sunnyvale, California, that sold for $782,000 over asking price. Why such a ridiculous amount? Because it’s near Apple’s new campus — location matters.Does location matter with the cloud? Given how fast data travels, one might not think so, but location does indeed matter. A recent report from EdgeConneX and Cedexis, Cloud, Content, Connectivity and the Evolving Internet Edge, shows just how much it actually does. The study conducted uses Cedexis’ RUM-based internet performance measurement tools to test how cloud applications perform in different locations and with various optimization techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented

Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed “throttling” under a “neutral” regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular “over the top” service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches a rival content service of its own. You then complain to the regulator, who investigates. She finds that your ISP did indeed change their traffic management settings right at the point that the “throttling” began. A swathe of routes, including the one to your preferred “over the top” application, have been given a different packet scheduling and routing treatment. It seems like an open-and-shut case of “throttling” resulting in a disallowed “neutrality violation”. Or is it? —Martin Geddes @ CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Docker Official Images are now Multi-platform

This past week, Docker rolled out a big update to our Official Images to make them multi-platform aware. Now, when you run docker run hello-world, Docker CE and EE will pull and run the correct hello-world image whether that’s for x86-64 Linux, Windows, ARM, IBM Z mainframes or any other system where Docker runs. With Docker rapidly adding support for additional operating systems (like Windows) and CPU architectures (like IBM Z) this is an important UX improvement.

Docker Official Images are a curated set of container images that include:

The official images have always been available for x86-64 Linux. Images for non x86 Linux architectures have also been available, but to be fetched either from a different namespace (docker pull s390x/golang on IBM Z mainframe) or using a different tag (docker pull golang:nanoserver on Windows). This was not the seamless and portable experience Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What is a data fabric and why should you care?

What is a data fabric? The concept of a "data fabric" is emerging as an approach to help organizations better deal with fast growing data, ever changing application requirements and distributed processing needs.The term references technology that creates a converged platform that supports the storage, processing, analysis and management of disparate data. Data that is currently maintained in files, database tables, data streams, objects, images, sensor data and even container-based applications can all be accessed using a number of different standard interfaces.A data fabric makes it possible for applications and tools designed to access data using many interfaces such as NFS (Network File System), POSIX (portable operating system interface), a REST API (representative state transfer), HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system), ODBC (open database connectivity), and Apache KAFKA for real-time streaming data. A data fabric must also be capable of being enhanced to support other standards as they emerge in importance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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