SD-WANs get IPv6 support from Versa

Software Defined Networking vendor Versa this week added support for IPv6 to its SD-WAN and security packages.According to Kumar Mehta, founder and CDO of Versa Networks by supporting IPv4 and IPv6 for SD-WAN and SD-Security, customers will have the flexibility to design their WAN under IPv4 today and protect it from obsolescence as they switch over to IPv6 in the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SD-WANs get IPv6 support from Versa

Software Defined Networking vendor Versa this week added support for IPv6 to its SD-WAN and security packages.According to Kumar Mehta, founder and CDO of Versa Networks by supporting IPv4 and IPv6 for SD-WAN and SD-Security, customers will have the flexibility to design their WAN under IPv4 today and protect it from obsolescence as they switch over to IPv6 in the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SD-WANs get IPv6 support from Versa

Software Defined Networking vendor Versa this week added support for IPv6 to its SD-WAN and security packages.According to Kumar Mehta, founder and CDO of Versa Networks by supporting IPv4 and IPv6 for SD-WAN and SD-Security, customers will have the flexibility to design their WAN under IPv4 today and protect it from obsolescence as they switch over to IPv6 in the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft expands developer features for its Teams chat app

Third-party developers have new tools to play with when building integrations with Microsoft’s Teams group chat app. The company announced a pair of new developer-oriented features on Thursday, aimed at giving greater utility to services that work with Teams.Using the Microsoft Bot Framework, developers can now build bots that interact with users inside a channel, in addition to interacting with users in one-on-one private chats. In addition, developers integrating their applications directly into tabs within the Teams client can now give users a way to link their colleagues to content buried deep in the integrated app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending

As the world’s dominant supplier of switches and routers into the datacenter and one of the big providers of servers (with a hope of transforming part of that server businesses into a sizeable hyperconverged storage business), Cisco Systems provides a kind of lens into the glass houses of the world. You can see what companies are doing – and what they are not doing – and watch how Cisco reacts to try to give them what they need while trying to extract the maximum profit out of its customers.

Say what you will, but Cisco has spent the last

What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

CIO sees mobile platform as patient engagement cure

St. Luke’s Healthcare Systems is tucking several mobile applications for its patients into a platform typically used by professional sports stadiums. Picking a platform designed to help fans find their seats and order hot dogs and beer may seem odd for a hospital system tasked with delivering patient care, but CIO Deborah Gash insists on providing people the convenience they are accustomed to getting from entertainment, retail and other sectors.In other words, Gash wants to treat patients more like valued customers than like, well, patients. "Consumers demand the ability to have more convenient ways to interface with their healthcare providers," says Gash, who joined the organization 25 years ago, spending nearly 11 of those years as CIO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell EMC combines hyperconvergence and cloud in latest VxRail offering

Dell EMC is now offering a combination of its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) platform to make it easier for mid-size organizations to build private clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This DARPA-backed Machine Learning program is a quick thinker | Hot Products at RSA 2017 +VxRail, which combines compute, network and virtual storage, is based largely on VMware management software, including the vRealize Suite, which allows for self-provisioning of virtual machines, and vSAN, which is VMware’s virtual storage array. Dell EMC introduced VxRail about a year ago and Thursday said that to date it has sold 8,000 nodes to 1,000 customers, reaching over 65 Petabytes of scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell EMC combines hyperconvergence and cloud in latest VxRail offering

Dell EMC is now offering a combination of its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) platform to make it easier for mid-size organizations to build private clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This DARPA-backed Machine Learning program is a quick thinker | Hot Products at RSA 2017 +VxRail, which combines compute, network and virtual storage, is based largely on VMware management software, including the vRealize Suite, which allows for self-provisioning of virtual machines, and vSAN, which is VMware’s virtual storage array. EMC introduced VxRail about a year ago and Thursday said that to date it has sold 8,000 nodes to 1,000 customers, reaching over 65 Petabytes of scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco reserves $125 million to pay for faulty clock component in switches, routers

In its quarterly financial results announcement this week, Cisco said it had set aside $125 million to help cover the cost of replacing networking gear impacted by a fatal clock component. Cisco was the first vendor to post a notice about the clock technology problem earlier this month saying the fatal glitch includes some of the company’s most widely deployed products, such as certain models of its Series 4000 Integrated Services Routers, Nexus 9000 Series switches, ASA security devices and Meraki Cloud Managed Switches. Clock components are critical to the synchronization device functions. +More on Network World: Cisco: Faulty clock part could cause failure in some Nexus switches, ISR routers, ASA security appliances+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco reserves $125 million to pay for faulty clock component in switches, routers

In its quarterly financial results announcement this week, Cisco said it had set aside $125 million to help cover the cost of replacing networking gear impacted by a fatal clock component. Cisco was the first vendor to post a notice about the clock technology problem earlier this month saying the fatal glitch includes some of the company’s most widely deployed products, such as certain models of its Series 4000 Integrated Services Routers, Nexus 9000 Series switches, ASA security devices and Meraki Cloud Managed Switches. Clock components are critical to the synchronization device functions. +More on Network World: Cisco: Faulty clock part could cause failure in some Nexus switches, ISR routers, ASA security appliances+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Yahoo’s Internal Hadoop Cluster Does Double-Duty on Deep Learning

Five years ago, many bleeding edge IT shops had either implemented a Hadoop cluster for production use or at least had a cluster set aside to explore the mysteries of MapReduce and the HDFS storage system.

While it is not clear all these years later how many ultra-scale production Hadoop deployments there are in earnest (something we are analyzing for a later in-depth piece), those same shops are likely on top trying to exploit the next big thing in the datacenter—machine learning, or for the more intrepid, deep learning.

For those that were able to get large-scale Hadoop clusters into

How Yahoo’s Internal Hadoop Cluster Does Double-Duty on Deep Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

24% off Fitbit Alta Fitness Tracker – Deal Alert

Fitbit Alta is a customizable fitness tracker designed to fit your personal style and keeps you motivated by tracking all-day activity like steps, distance, calories burned and active minutes, and get credit for your workouts with Smart Track automatic exercise recognition. At night, track your sleep and set a silent alarm to wake better and get your best rest. No matter where you're headed, the easy-to-read OLED screen keeps your goals in focus with stats, time, and call or text notifications on display. Available accessory wristbands in metal, leather and sport, help you find the right style for every occasion. The Fitbit Alta currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 7,700 people (read reviews), and its typical list price of $129.95 has been reduced to $99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s monthlong delay of patches may pose risks

Microsoft has decided to bundle its February patches together with those scheduled for March, a move that at least some security experts disagree with."I was surprised to learn that Microsoft wants to postpone by a full month," said Carsten Eiram, the chief research officer at vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security, via email. "Even without knowing all the details, I find such a decision very hard to justify. They are aware of vulnerabilities in their products and have developed fixes; those should always be made available to customers in a timely fashion."Microsoft took everyone by surprise on Tuesday when it announced that this month's patches had to be delayed because of a "last minute issue" that could have had an impact on customers. The company did not initially specify for how long the patches will be postponed, which likely threw a wrench in some systems administrators' patch deployment plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s monthlong delay of patches may pose risks

Microsoft has decided to bundle its February patches together with those scheduled for March, a move that at least some security experts disagree with."I was surprised to learn that Microsoft wants to postpone by a full month," said Carsten Eiram, the chief research officer at vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security, via email. "Even without knowing all the details, I find such a decision very hard to justify. They are aware of vulnerabilities in their products and have developed fixes; those should always be made available to customers in a timely fashion."Microsoft took everyone by surprise on Tuesday when it announced that this month's patches had to be delayed because of a "last minute issue" that could have had an impact on customers. The company did not initially specify for how long the patches will be postponed, which likely threw a wrench in some systems administrators' patch deployment plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: IT needs to get great at mastering change

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.Change is constant and necessary in IT, even if it’s an uphill battle. Fortunately, you can purposefully drive change through collaboration, automation and DevOps practices. In a recent Puppet-sponsored webinar, we discussed the complexity and accelerating rate of change in IT, and how it impacts user expectations and tool evolution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s Alexa gains support for Outlook calendars

Users of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now ask it questions about the contents of their Microsoft-hosted calendars. On Wednesday, the assistant gained the ability to interact with calendars from Outlook.com and Office 365, similar to how it works with Google Calendar.Amazon didn’t make an announcement for the new feature. When asked about the change, a spokesperson for the company said that it was designed to only work with personal calendars.That said, it was possible for me to connect my Office 365 calendar, which is provided through an enterprise subscription. When asked about what’s on my schedule, Alexa answered with the contents of my work calendar. It’s unclear if Amazon plans to continue supporting that functionality, and it may break at any time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here