Gartner’s 10 strategic predictions for 2017….and beyond

ORLANDO -- Claiming a 78% accuracy rate based on prior years’ results, chief of research Daryl Plummer delivered Gartner’s 10 strategic predictions for the next three-to-five years at the company’s Symposium/ITExpo yesterday.The overarching theme, Plummer said, is digital disruption, which is not only happening, but is increasing in scale over time. Here are the 10 predictions:1. By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in virtual reality. Plummer says the Pokemon Go phenomenon is the precursor to deeper experience and engagement on the part of consumers. The next step is head-mounted displays, followed by augmented reality. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2017, one in five major retailers will begin deploying augmented reality on their web sites. If you’re in retail, it’s something to think about.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: GoDaddy ups the WordPress ante

Interesting news today from GoDaddy that it is aggressively moving into the WordPress space and looking to own a far bigger chunk of the market for small businesses hosting WordPress sites.WordPress is, of course, the open-source blogging platform that hosts an incredible number of different sites. Statistics show that over 25 percent of the top 10 million websites worldwide are built on WordPress. Not bad for a formerly small project with no real commercial focus. And for GoDaddy, the hosting platform, WordPress already has a big footprint. Over 50 percent of GoDaddy’s hosting customers use the platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware embraces containers with latest vSphere, Virtual SAN updates

New versions of VMware’s core management software including vSphere, Virtual SAN and the vRealize Suite expand support for application containers and make it easier for customers to manage workloads in IaaS public clouds from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.The moves announced this week the company’s VMWorld Europe conference in Barcelona are significant because there’s been fodder in the market for years about what trends like increased use of the public cloud will mean for private cloud vendors and how the rise of application containers could kill virtual machines. Instead of fighting these innovations, VMware is embracing these innovations, says Raghu Raghuram, the company’s executive vice president of Software Defined Data Center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networks help you compress time

In his book The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo makes the thought-provoking statement that networks compress time. Nowhere is this more visible than with Amazon. Amazon reportedly releases more than 20,000 new features, capabilities and services to their customers a day, making changes to production every 11 seconds. Facebook does multiple releases a day, and Google does a large package of releases every week or two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networks help you compress time

In his book The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo makes the thought-provoking statement that networks compress time. Nowhere is this more visible than with Amazon. Amazon reportedly releases more than 20,000 new features, capabilities and services to their customers a day, making changes to production every 11 seconds. Facebook does multiple releases a day, and Google does a large package of releases every week or two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible and Junos Notes

I’m working on a project to push out configs to Juniper devices and upgrade them if necessary.  In the first instance I thought about writing it all in Python, but there’s really no need because quite a lot of legwork has already been done for you in the form of ‘PyEz’ and the Junos Ansible core modules.

Juniper give you a few examples to get you started, but don’t really explain what each of the lines in the YAML file does, but I guess they expect you to figure that out.  Below are a few notes on things I discovered – perhaps obvious to some, but they might help someone else.

‘No module named jnpr.junos’ When Running Ansible

In the examples Juniper give, they don’t tell you that the Ansible module ‘Juniper.junos’ relies on a Python module called ‘jnpr.junos’.  (It is mentioned elsewhere if you look for it.)

So if you’ve done an ‘ansible-galaxy install Juniper.junos’ you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve downloaded the modules you need.  You then gaily go on to have a crack at the example given above, but get this error:

$ ansible-playbook juniper-test.yml

PLAY [Get info] *********************************************************

TASK  Continue reading

Asylum of WikiLeaks’ Assange not in question

The asylum granted to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange by the government of Ecuador is not in question, despite possible differences of opinion between the two on the release of controversial documents by the whistleblowing site.Late Monday, the Ecuadorian government said that in the wake of speculation, it reaffirmed the continuation of asylum that it had extended to Assange for the last four years. It said that the protection would continue as long  as the circumstances that had led to that decision continues.Assange was given asylum by Ecuador in 2012 after he slipped into the country’s embassy in London, where he continues to be holed for fear of arrest by U.K. police, who have said that they have to arrest Assange if he steps out of the embassy to meet an extradition request from Sweden.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Asylum of WikiLeaks’ Assange not in question

The asylum granted to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange by the government of Ecuador is not in question, despite possible differences of opinion between the two on the release of controversial documents by the whistleblowing site.Late Monday, the Ecuadorian government said that in the wake of speculation, it reaffirmed the continuation of asylum that it had extended to Assange for the last four years. It said that the protection would continue as long  as the circumstances that had led to that decision continues.Assange was given asylum by Ecuador in 2012 after he slipped into the country’s embassy in London, where he continues to be holed for fear of arrest by U.K. police, who have said that they have to arrest Assange if he steps out of the embassy to meet an extradition request from Sweden.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scripts

This article contains a list of scripts that I created and that are somehow useful for me. You are free to download and modify them according to your needs. I do not take any responsibility for improper use or any damage caused by using them.

1. Networking & Servers

1.1 Automatic Deployment VyOS ISO on VMware VM
A Bash script deploy vyos.sh downloads the latest VyOS ISO image and an Expect script install vyos.exp installs VyOS ISO on VMware vmdk disk.

1.2 Automatic Deployment of DRBL (Clonezilla) Server
The script deploy drbl.sh  installs and configure DRBL server on Ubuntu with a single Ethernet card. You have to provide the name of Ethernet interface as an argument. The script creates a virtual interface for you based on a physical interface. It also downloads a DRBL project public key, download and install drbl package from repository.

1.3 Secure Copy with Rsync from SSH server
The script copy.sh keeps copying files with rsync command while a return value of the rsync command is not zero. Just edit script and set server IP address and bothe remote and local directory.

1.4 Collecting MAC and IP addresses Continue reading

How Microsoft Fell Hard for FPGAs

Microsoft’s embrace of programmable chips knowns as FPGAs is well documented. But in a paper released Monday the software and cloud company provided a look into how it has fundamentally changed the economics of delivering hardware as a service thanks to these once-specialty pieces of silicon.

Field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, are chips where the logic and networking functions can be reconfigured after they’ve been manufactured. They are typically larger than similarly functioning chips and traditionally were made for small jobs where the performance advantage outweighed the higher engineering cost associated with designing them.

But thanks to the massive …

How Microsoft Fell Hard for FPGAs was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Qualcomm’s 5G preview: high frequencies, 5-gigabit speed

5G networks will be five times as fast as the quickest LTE technology by using the highest cellular frequencies ever, according to Qualcomm, which provided a glimpse of its next-generation modem plans on Tuesday.The X50 modem won’t ship until the first half of 2018, and 5G networks aren’t expected to go commercial until 2020. But Qualcomm will have a lot to say about the new technology at its 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday. At the same event, it’s announcing plans around its gigabit-speed X16 LTE modem.The X50 will offer download speeds as high as 5Gbps (bits per second), where networks support them, using millimeter-wave frequencies and futuristic techniques for beaming signals to devices, according to slides prepared for the 4G/5G Summit. Qualcomm shared the materials in advance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Connected cameras will get smarter with new Qualcomm chips

While most of IT is consolidating around the cloud, in some ways the internet of things is moving the other direction. Vendors are putting more computing power in devices near the edges of networks, like sensor modules and gateways.That's because it can be faster and less expensive to do filtering and analytics where the data is collected than to send it all the way to a distant data center. In some cases, this can reduce communications costs and help IoT respond to events more quickly.Connected cameras are among the hardest-working IoT devices, sometimes streaming high-definition video around the clock for surveillance and streaming entertainment. They’re the target of chip and software enhancements that Qualcomm is introducing on Tuesday. The company is announcing these offerings along with other advances at its 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IPv6 and the DNS

We often think of the Internet as the web, or even these days as just a set of apps. When we look at the progress with the transition to IPv6 we talk about how these apps are accessible using IPv6 and mark this as progress. But the Internet is more than just these services. There is a whole substructure of support and if we are thinking about an IPv6 Internet then everything needs to change. So here I want to look at perhaps the most critical of these hidden infrastructure elements - the Domain Name System. How are we going with using IPv6 in the DNS?

A Snapshot Of Big Blue’s Systems Business

It is the job of the chief financial officer and the rest of the top brass of every public company in the world to present the financial results of their firms in the best possible light every thirteen weeks when the numbers are compiled and presented to Wall Street for grading. Money is how we all keep score, and how we decide we will invest and therefore live in our old age, hopefully with a certain amount of peace.

Starting this year, IBM has been presenting its financial results in a new format, which helps it emphasize its cognitive computing …

A Snapshot Of Big Blue’s Systems Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Principles of Automation

Automation is an increasingly interesting topic in pretty much every technology discipline these days. There’s lots of talk about tooling, practices, skill set evolution, and more - but little conversation about fundamentals. What little is published by those actually practicing automation, usually takes the form of source code or technical whitepapers. While these are obviously valuable, they don’t usually cover some of the fundamental basics that could prove useful to the reader who wishes to perform similar things in their own organization, but may have different technical requirements.

Principles of Automation

Automation is an increasingly interesting topic in pretty much every technology discipline these days. There’s lots of talk about tooling, practices, skill set evolution, and more - but little conversation about fundamentals. What little is published by those actually practicing automation, usually takes the form of source code or technical whitepapers. While these are obviously valuable, they don’t usually cover some of the fundamental basics that could prove useful to the reader who wishes to perform similar things in their own organization, but may have different technical requirements.

I write this post to cover what I’m calling the “Principles of Automation”. I have pondered this topic for a while and I believe I have three principles that cover just about any form of automation you may consider. These principles have nothing to do with technology disciplines, tools, or programming languages - they are fundamental principles that you can adopt regardless of the implementation.

I hope you enjoy.

It’s a bit of a long post, so TL;DR - automation isn’t magic. It isn’t only for the “elite”. Follow these guidelines and you can realize the same value regardless of your scale.

Factorio

Lately I’ve been obsessed with a game called “Factorio”. Continue reading

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