Female execs front and center at Google Cloud conference

On International Women’s Day, during the opening keynote of Google Cloud’s NEXT user conference, former VMware CEO Diane Greene gave the primary keynote.When Google showcased its machine learning technology, renowned Stanford University computer scientist Fei Fei Li addressed the audience of 10,000 attendees and thousands more on the live-stream.And during a press conference after the keynote, eight of Google Cloud’s top executives sat on a stage to answer questions from press and analysts. Four of the eight are women, and three of which are listed on Google’s About Us Leadership page.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Four ways Google Cloud will bring Machine Learning & AI to the enterprise +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure

The rumors have been running around for years, and they turned out to be true. Microsoft, the world’s largest operating system supplier and still the dominant seller of systems software for the datacenter, has indeed been working for years on a port of its Windows Server 2016 operating system to the ARM server chip architecture.

The rumors about Windows Server on ARM started in earnest back in October 2014, which just before Qualcomm threw its hat into the ARM server ring and when Cavium and Applied Micro were in the market and starting to plan the generation of chips …

Windows Server Comes To ARM Chips, But Only For Azure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker and Cisco Launch Cisco Validated Designs for Cisco UCS and Flexpod Infrastructures on Docker Enterprise Edition

Last week, Cisco and Docker jointly announced a strategic alliance between our organizations. Based on customer feedback, one of the initial joint initiatives is the validation of Docker Enterprise Edition (which includes Docker Datacenter) against Cisco UCS and the Nexus infrastructures. We are excited to announce that Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for Cisco UCS and Flexpod on Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) are immediately available.

CVDs represent the gold standard reference architecture methodology for enterprise customers looking to deploy an end-to-end solution. The CVDs follow defined processes and covers not only provisioning and configuration of the solution, but also test and document the solutions against performance, scale and availability/failure – something that requires a lab setup with a significant amount of hardware that reflects actual production deployments. This enables our customers achieve faster, more reliable and predictable implementations.

The two new CVDs published for container management offers enterprises a well designed and an end-to-end lab tested configuration for Docker EE on Cisco UCS and Flexpod Datacenter. The collaborative engineering effort between Cisco, NetApp and Docker provides enterprises best of breed solutions for Docker Datacenter on Cisco Infrastructure and NetApp Enterprise Storage to run stateless or stateful containers.

The first CVD includes 2 configurations:

1. 4-node rack servers Bare Metal deployment, Continue reading

Docker Partners with Girl Develop It and Launches Pilot Class

Yesterday marked International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the social, cultural, economic and political achievements of women. In that spirit, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re partnering with Girl Develop It, a national 501(c)3 nonprofit that provides affordable and judgment-free opportunities for adult women interested in learning web and software development through accessible in-person programs. Through welcoming, low-cost classes, GDI helps women of diverse backgrounds achieve their technology goals and build confidence in their careers and their everyday lives.

Girl Develop It deeply values community and supportive learning for women regardless of race, education levels, income and upbringing, and those are values we share. The Docker team is committed to ensuring that we create welcoming spaces for all members of the tech community. To proactively work towards this goal, we have launched several initiatives to strengthen the Docker community and promote diversity in the larger tech community including our DockerCon Diversity Scholarship Program, which provides mentorship and a financial scholarship to attend DockerCon. PS — Are you a women in tech and want to attend DockerCon in Austin April 17th-20th? Use code womenintech for 50% off your ticket! 

Launching Pilot Class

In collaboration with the Continue reading

4 ways Google Cloud will bring AI, machine learning to the enterprise

Last November, when Google announced that machine learning research luminary Fei-Fei Li, Ph.D. would join Google’s Cloud Group Platform group, a lot was known about her academic work. But Google revealed little about why she was joining the company except she would lead machine learning for the Google Cloud business.After five months of suspense, yesterday Li revealed the focus of her new role during her keynote address at Google’s cloud developer conference, Cloud Next 2017. She will apply her experience to democratize machine learning to the enterprise. Her task: Study the problems that machine learning could solve in a wide variety of industries and enable enterprises to adopt machine learning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s Jasper deal – one year, 18 million new IoT devices later, challenges remain

You’d be hard-pressed to write a better opening script than the one playing out for Cisco and its now year-old acquisition of Jasper. The $1.4 billion deal was to make Jasper technology the centerpiece of Cisco’s Internet of Things strategy and it has largely done that. Of course, challenges remain – improving security and product family integration among them but the companies are off to a good start.Cisco closed the deal on Jasper last March and since then Cisco says the number of companies using Jasper’s Control Center has grown to over 9,000 from 3,500 and the company continues to add 1.5 million devices a month. In addition, the number of service providers offering Control Center services has grown to 50 from 35. Control Center is the central component of Jasper that lets users automate connectivity as well as launch and manage all aspects of IoT services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pi Day is coming and I’m probably going to take a pie in the face

In terms of made up holidays, Pi Day is the one that irritates me the least (compared with Talk Like a Pirate Day or Star Wars Day). Maybe it’s because there’s the opportunity of eating some pie (baked pie or pizza), or maybe it’s because I’m a semi-math geek.Maybe it’s because the founder of Pi Day, Larry Shaw, shares my last name (but we’re not directly related). See the video at the top of the page for more information on the origins of the holiday.Whatever the reason, I’m OK with Pi Day. Which is why I agreed to participate in the Network World Pi Day Challenge, set to stream live on Network World’s Facebook and YouTube channel (2 p.m. EDT on March 14).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A site Stack Overflow has answer to nagging question … about Stack Overflow

A systems administrator was showering the other day (maybe not literally) when he had this thought: “I’ve never actually seen Stack Overflow’s front page. I wonder what percentage of their traffic requests are to simply http://stackoverflow.com.”As with any knowledge market – and news sites such as this one – most of the traffic to Stack Overflow would be assumed to arrive at addresses other than its homepage. The wondering here was about details. And no one need wonder any longer, as stepping up to the plate is Nick Craver, Stack Overflow Architecture Lead: Someone poked me for an answer here so here's some data:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Applied Micro Renews ARM Assault On Intel Servers

The lineup of ARM server chip makers has been a somewhat fluid one over the years.

There have been some that have come and gone (pioneer Calxeda was among the first to the party but folded in 2013 after running out of money), some that apparently have looked at the battlefield and chose not to fight (Samsung and Broadcom, after its $37 billion merger with Avago), and others that have made the move into the space only to pull back a bit (AMD a year ago released its ARM-based Opteron A1100 systems-on-a-chip, or SOCs but has since shifted most of …

Applied Micro Renews ARM Assault On Intel Servers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Bouncing back to private clouds

There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions. —The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Bouncing back to private clouds appeared first on 'net work.

An enterprise IT pro’s guide to Mixpanel analytics

Relax, Mixpanel’s sales people probably aren’t going to pester you if you’re an enterprise IT pro. You’re not the target customer for this San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based analytics tools. But that doesn’t mean Mixpanel shouldn’t at least be on your radar since there’s a good chance you’re supporting people within your organization who might be using Mixpanel – we’re talking engineers, designers and other product development team members who want to get a better view of how their products are actually being used and received.MORE: 15 big data and analytics companies to watchTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Assange: CIA had lost control of its cyberweapon documents

Information about purported CIA cyberattacks was "passed around" among members of the U.S. intelligence community and contractors before it was published by WikiLeaks this week, Julian Assange says.The CIA "lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," the WikiLeaks editor in chief said during a press conference Thursday. "This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, to have created such an arsenal and stored all in one place and not secured it."Assange declined to name the source who gave the information to WikiLeaks, but he seemed to suggest the 8,700-plus documents, purportedly from an isolated CIA server, came from an insider source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Assange: CIA had lost control of its cyberweapon documents

Information about purported CIA cyberattacks was "passed around" among members of the U.S. intelligence community and contractors before it was published by WikiLeaks this week, Julian Assange says.The CIA "lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," the WikiLeaks editor in chief said during a press conference Thursday. "This is a historic act of devastating incompetence, to have created such an arsenal and stored all in one place and not secured it."Assange declined to name the source who gave the information to WikiLeaks, but he seemed to suggest the 8,700-plus documents, purportedly from an isolated CIA server, came from an insider source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Texas hospital struggles to make IBM’s Watson cure cancer

If IBM is looking for a new application for its Watson machine learning tools, it might consider putting health care providers' procurement and systems integration woes ahead of curing cancer.After spending more than four years and US$62 million on its Oncology Expert Advisor project, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas still looking for answers in all those areas.The fall-out from that project has now prompted the resignation of the cancer center's president, Ronald DePinho, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Basic training: Cybersecurity lessons inspired by an opportunistic developer

Today, not only do we see a significant increase in the number of cyber attacks, but by design the incidents are also more fearless and larger in their scale and impact to the business. According to Cisco, the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has increased more than 2.5 times since 2013, with the current average DDoS attack large enough to take many organizations completely offline.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Most businesses have cybersecurity initiatives, but how can we be sure the policies and people are keeping pace with the threats that are becoming more dynamic as technology progresses? TechRepublic reported that an estimated 90 million cyber attacks occurred in 2016, which means 400 attacks every minute. As data travels through a virtual ecosystem, security must extend beyond the device itself. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Expands Enterprise Cloud With Machine Learning

Google’s Cloud Platform is the relative newcomer on the public cloud block, and has a way to go before before it is in the same competitive sphere as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which deliver a broader and deeper range of offerings and larger infrastructures.

Over the past year, Google has promised to rapidly grow the platform’s capabilities and datacenters and has hired a number of executives in hopes of enticing enterprises to bring more of their corporate workloads and data to the cloud.

One area Google is hoping to leverage is the decade-plus of work and …

Google Expands Enterprise Cloud With Machine Learning was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Building Reliability

Systems are inherently reliable. Until they aren’t. On a long enough timeline, even the most reliable system will eventually fail. How you manage that failure says a lot about the way your build your system or application. So, why is it then that we’re so focused on failing?

Ten Feet Tall And Bulletproof

No system is infallible. Networks go down. Cloud services get knocked offline. Even Facebook, which represents “the Internet” for a large number of people, has days when it’s unreachable. When we examine these outages, we often find issues at the core of the system that cause services to be unreachable. In the most recent case of Amazon’s cloud system, it was a typo in a script that executed faster than it could be stopped.

It could also be a failure of the system to anticipate increased loads when minor failures happen. If systems aren’t built to take on additional load when the worst happens, you’re going to see bigger outages. That is a particular thorn in the side of large cloud providers like Amazon and Google. It’s also something that network architects need to be aware of when building redundant pathways to handle problems.

Take, for example, Continue reading