Network managers should be checking their list twice

Make sure it is a holly jolly time of the yearAs IT Ops teams begin preparation for the upcoming holiday season, which in retail is the busiest time of the year for web traffic, the team at BigPanda along with some other vendors have prepared a checklist of the key factors IT Ops teams need to consider to ensure their IT infrastructure is ready.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.21.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BetterWorks Program AutopilotKey features: BetterWorks Program Autopilot helps enterprise customers automate goal setting and performance management program administration. Automated program reminders, timely communications and usage dashboards all ensure engagement and adoption without administrative overhead. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.21.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BetterWorks Program AutopilotKey features: BetterWorks Program Autopilot helps enterprise customers automate goal setting and performance management program administration. Automated program reminders, timely communications and usage dashboards all ensure engagement and adoption without administrative overhead. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 11.21.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BetterWorks Program AutopilotKey features: BetterWorks Program Autopilot helps enterprise customers automate goal setting and performance management program administration. Automated program reminders, timely communications and usage dashboards all ensure engagement and adoption without administrative overhead. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 reasons to divorce the cloud

For some companies, using cloud services isn’t what they hoped or expected it to be. Reason’s like these might be enough to make them leave. 1. Your costs went out of the control. This can be significant. Prices go up and go down. A new product gets introduced that might be more financially attractive—but only if you started from that point and not if you include the added cost of migration (documentation, security and other audit) not to mention re-budgeting and rate of return over the lifecycle of the data flows. 2. Security was tougher than you thought. You were probably smart and already had extensive key control, but perhaps your cloud vendor wanted it done their way. Asset control, the cost of embedding security control planes and audit infrastructure that duplicates data center standards created a duopoly of security infrastructure—perhaps both equal but not the same—adding to costs of control, training, documentation, audit and more. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Best open source management tools

Open source holds up to commercial productsOpen source software provides an attractive alternative to more costly commercial products, but can open source products deliver enterprise-grade results? To answer this question we tested four open source products: OpenNMS, Pandora FMS, NetXMS and Zabbix. All four products were surprisingly good. We liked Pandora FMS for its ease of installation and modern user interface. In general, we found configuration to be easier and more intuitive with Pandora than the other contenders. NetXMS came in a close second with a nice user interface, easy to configure rules and a solid user manual. Overall, we found all four products suitable for enterprise use, particularly in small-to-midsize environments. (Read the full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What we talk about when we talk about 5G wireless

So what is 5G, exactly, anyway? Well, if you’re asking about “exactly,” it doesn’t exist yet. Oh, that helps me a lot. Sorry. But the best answer to your question is probably that 5G is sort of a catch-all name to describe the next generation of carrier wireless technology that’s going to be slinging tweets and videos and connected home signals from the internet to your smartphone or your smartwatch or, really, any smart object you’ve got handy. So why’s it better than 4G? Haven’t we had enough Gs? Oh, not hardly. You see, 5G – like 4G, and the rest of the Gs, in fact – is entirely a marketing term, meant to give an overview of a certain generation of carrier wireless tech. Most of what we’ve got in this country that we refer to as 4G is called LTE, although regular LTE isn’t quite 4G, according to standards groups, and LTE Advanced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2016 – the year 5G wireless testing really took off

The concept of 5G wireless has been around for a long time, but only recently have meaningful moves taken place to bring the new technology to customers.5G stakeholders – which include silicon giants such as Qualcomm and Intel, infrastructure players like Ericsson and Nokia, and, of course the major wireless carriers – have been unsurprisingly bullish on the technology’s rapid advance, announcing numerous breakthroughs and field trials over the past several months. We’ve constructed a timeline of these 5G trials, embedded below, to give you a visual sense of how much action has been taking place.+ MORE: Read our 5G FAQ +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pandora FMS wins open-source management shootout

Doing more with less remains an ongoing challenge for IT execs. Making sure everything keeps humming along to meet service-level agreements can be challenging for resource-stretched IT departments. For all but the smallest shops, effective monitoring requires tools that provide a meta view of the entire infrastructure with drill-down capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

2016 – the year 5G wireless testing really took off

The concept of 5G wireless has been around for a long time, but only recently have meaningful moves taken place to bring the new technology to customers.5G stakeholders – which include silicon giants such as Qualcomm and Intel, infrastructure players like Ericsson and Nokia, and, of course the major wireless carriers – have been unsurprisingly bullish on the technology’s rapid advance, announcing numerous breakthroughs and field trials over the past several months. We’ve constructed a timeline of these 5G trials, embedded below, to give you a visual sense of how much action has been taking place.+ MORE: Read our 5G FAQ +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple offers new battery for iPhone 6s phones that suddenly shut down

Apple has said that a few iPhone 6s smartphones are unexpectedly shutting down, confirming a problem reported last week by a Chinese consumer protection group.The company said the problem is restricted to a small number of phones within a limited serial number range that were manufactured between September and October last year.Apple said it was not a safety issue, and appeared to suggest that the problem would be resolved by a replacement battery which the company offered free. It did not say how many iPhone 6s phones were affected and in which markets.The China Consumers Association asked Apple to investigate problems with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s phones that were automatically shutting off. The unexpected shutdowns were said to happen when the phone’s battery charge dropped to between 60 and 50 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Symantec will acquire identity protection firm LifeLock in $2.3B deal

Aiming to boost its consumer security business, Symantec is acquiring LifeLock, a vendor of identity protection services, for US$2.3 billion in enterprise value. The deal will create what the two companies described as the world’s largest consumer security business with over $2.3 billion in annual revenue based on last fiscal year revenue for both companies. The immediate opportunity for Symantec comes from the large number of consumers worldwide that have been victims of cybercrime, generating as a result greater user concern in digital safety. The companies estimate the market at $10 billion, and growing in the high single digits. In the U.S. alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be about 80 million people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Symantec will acquire identity protection firm LifeLock in $2.3B deal

Aiming to boost its consumer security business, Symantec is acquiring LifeLock, a vendor of identity protection services, for US$2.3 billion in enterprise value. The deal will create what the two companies described as the world’s largest consumer security business with over $2.3 billion in annual revenue based on last fiscal year revenue for both companies. The immediate opportunity for Symantec comes from the large number of consumers worldwide that have been victims of cybercrime, generating as a result greater user concern in digital safety. The companies estimate the market at $10 billion, and growing in the high single digits. In the U.S. alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be about 80 million people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel Declares War on GPUs at Disputed HPC, AI Border

In Supercomputing Conference (SC) years past, chipmaker Intel has always come forth with a strong story, either as an enabling processor or co-processor force, or more recently, as a prime contractor for a leading-class national lab supercomputer.

But outside of a few announcements at this year’s SC related to beefed-up SKUs for high performance computing and Skylake plans, the real emphasis back in Portland seemed to ring far fainter for HPC and much louder for the newest server tech darlings, deep learning and machine learning. Far from the HPC crowd last week was Intel’s AI Day, an event in

Intel Declares War on GPUs at Disputed HPC, AI Border was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer

The future “Summit” pre-exascale supercomputer that is being built out in late 2017 and early 2018 for the US Department of Energy for its Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks like a giant cluster of systems that might be used for training neural networks. And that is an extremely convenient development.

More than once during the SC16 supercomputing conference this week in Salt Lake City, the Summit system and its companion “Sierra” system that will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, were referred to as “AI supercomputers.” This is a reflection of the fact that the national labs around the

Details Emerge On “Summit” Power Tesla AI Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Networks Drive HPC Harder Than Compute

It is hard to tell which part of the HPC market is more competitive: compute, networking, or storage. From where we sit, there is an increasing level of competition on all three fronts and the pressure to perform, both financially and technically, has never been higher. This is great for customers, of course, who are being presented with lots of technology to choose from. But HPC customers tend to pick architectures for several generations, so there is also pressure on them to make the right choices – whatever that means.

In a sense, enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders, who

Networks Drive HPC Harder Than Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Using GNOME Keyring as Git Credential Helper

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use the GNOME Keyring on Ubuntu 16.04 as a credential helper for Git. This post stems from my work in transitioning to Linux as my primary OS, an effort I’ve ratcheted up significantly in the last few weeks. What I’m including here isn’t new or ground-breaking information; I’m posting it primarily to make the information easier to find for others.

On Ubuntu 16.04, the basis for integrating GNOME Keyring into Git as a credential helper is already installed into the /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring directory. However, if you try to simply run sudo make in that directory, it will fail. In order to make it work, you must first install some additional development libraries:

sudo apt install libgnome-keyring-dev

Once you’ve installed this additional package, running sudo make in that directory will quickly compile a binary named git-credential-gnome-keyring. Once you have that binary, then you can configure Git to use GNOME Keyring as a credential helper. You can do this a couple of different ways:

  1. You can use the git config command, like this:

     git config --global credential.helper /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/gnome-keyring/git-credential-gnome-keyring
    
  2. You can edit ~/.gitconfig directly, using the text editor of your Continue reading