Brocadecom

The news is public: Broadcom is acquiring Brocade, my employer. Official announcement here, and some (unofficial) commentary here. What’s happening, and what does it mean for me? There’s limits to what I can say – either because I don’t have the answers, or because it’s not public. But here’s a little bit of info for readers wondering what will happen to me.

What’s Happening?

Broadcom has announced its intention to acquire Brocade for approximately $5.5 billion:

This morning we announced a definitive agreement under which Broadcom will acquire Brocade. Broadcom believes the SAN business is a strong complement to its portfolio of enterprise storage and networking solutions, and its intention is to continue to deliver the market-leading storage networking solutions and innovation for which Brocade is so well known.

When will this happen?

Closing of the transaction is presently expected in the second half of Broadcom’s fiscal year 2017, which ends in October 2017, and is subject to regulatory approvals in various jurisdictions, customary closing conditions as well as the approval of Brocade’s stockholders.

What about the IP business?

This is the tricky bit. Broadcom is well-known as a maker of “merchant silicon,” used by many networking Continue reading

Black Friday deals on the iPhone 7 offer up incredible savings

There's no better time to get a new iPhone than in November. Not only have all the kinks associated with iOS presumably been ironed out by then, but Black Friday promotions across a number of big name retail outlets makes finding incredible deals on Apple smartphones surprisingly easy.In what's become something of a tradition, many retailers have started publishing their Black Friday deals weeks in advance, presumably so that shoppers can take stock of what's available and plan accordingly. While Black Friday may be more closely associated with finding tremendous deals on HDTVs, it's also a great time to pick up all types of consumer electronics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GameStop touts cool blue Xbox One for Black Friday 2016, Toys R Us geeks out too

Plenty of retailers are cutting the price of Microsoft Xbox One S 500GB bundles from $300 to $250 this Black Friday and holiday shopping season, but GameStop is offering a cool blue console on an exclusive basis. GameStop, which is closed on Thanksgiving day, but will have deals on the Xbox and dozens of other gaming items available online before Black Friday formally commences on Nov. 25. The Toys R Us Black Friday 2016 ads have been revealed, too, and while the retailer is promoting lots of LEGOS, dolls and sports toys, it geeks out with tablets, robots and drones as well. Toys R Us stores open at 5pm on Thanksgiving day. Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads such as these closely and we've been watching them closely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Online Meetup #46: Introduction to InfraKit

In case you missed it, Solomon Hykes (Docker Founder and CTO) open sourced InfraKit during his keynote address at LinuxCon Europe in Berlin last month. InfraKit is a declarative management toolkit for orchestrating infrastructure built by two Docker core team engineers, David Chung and Bill Farner. Read this blog post to learn more about InfraKit origins, internals and plugins including groups, instances and flavors.

InfraKit Architecture.png
During this online meetup, David and Bill explained what InfraKit is, what problems it solves, some use cases, how you can contribute and what’s coming next.

 


 There are many ways you can participate in the development of the project and influence the roadmap:

  • Star the project on GitHub to follow issues and development
  • Help define and implement new and interesting plugins
  • Instance plugins to support different infrastructure providers
  • Flavor plugins to support a variety of systems like etcd or mysql clusters
  • Group controller plugins like metrics-driven auto scaling and more
  • Help define interfaces and implement new infrastructure resource types for things like load balancers, networks and storage volume provisioners

Check out the InfraKit repository README for more info, a quick tutorial and to start experimenting — from plain files to Terraform integration to building a Zookeeper Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 11th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Hacking recognition systems with fashion.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

  • 9 teraflops: PC GPU performance for VR rendering; 1.75 million requests per second: DDoS attack from cameras; 5GB/mo: average data consumption in the US; ~59.2GB: size of Wikipedia corpus; 50%: slower LTE within the last year; 5.4 million: entries in Microsoft Concept Graph; 20 microseconds: average round-trip latencies between 250,000 machines using direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages (Microsoft); 1.09 billion: Facebook daily active mobile users; 300 minutes: soaring time for an AI controlled glider; 82ms: latency streaming game play on Azure; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • AORTA: Apple’s service revenue is now consistently greater than iPad and Mac revenue streams making it the number two revenue stream behind the gargantuan iPhone bucket.
    • @GeertHub: Apple R&D budget: $10 billion NASA science budget: $5 billion One explored Pluto, the other made a new keyboard.
    • Steve Jobs: tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem
    • @moxie: I think these types of posts are also the inevitable result of people overestimating our organizational capacity based Continue reading

What Sort of Burst Buffer Are You?

Burst buffer technology is closely associated with HPC applications and supercomputer sites as a means of ensuring that persistent storage, typically a parallel file system, does not become a bottleneck to overall performance, specifically where checkpoints and restarts are concerned. But attention is now turning to how burst buffers might find broader use cases beyond this niche, and how they could be used for accelerating performance in other areas where the ability to handle a substantial volume of data with high speed and low latency is key.

The term burst buffer is applied to this storage technology simply because this

What Sort of Burst Buffer Are You? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Election data models provide a lesson for cybersecurity

If you are like me, you were pretty convinced that Secretary Clinton was poised to be the President elect. Confidence in this opinion was based on reviewing numerous big data analytics models from the fivethirtyeight.com, The New York Times, Princeton, etc. The lowest percentage gave Mrs. Clinton roughly a 65 percent chance of winning on November 8. So, what happened? Every database jockey recognizes the old maxim of garbage in/garbage out. In other words, killer algorithms and all the processing power in the world are rather useless if your model is built on the back of crappy data. Obviously, all the brainiacs building these models made a critical mistake in not gathering data from disenfranchised white voters in rural areas. The result? A stunning election result and lots of eggs on Ivy League elitist faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Election Data Models Lesson for Cybersecurity

If you are like me, you were pretty convinced that Secretary Clinton was poised to be the President elect.  Confidence in this opinion was based on reviewing numerous big data analytics models from the fivethirtyeight.com, the New York Times, Princeton, etc.  The lowest percentage gave Mrs. Clinton roughly a 65% chance of winning on November 8. So, what happened?  Every database jockey recognizes the old maxim of garbage in/garbage out.  In other words, killer algorithms and all the processing power in the world are rather useless if your model is built on the back of crappy data.  Obviously, all the brainiacs building these models made a critical mistake in not gathering data from disenfranchised white voters in rural areas.  The result?  A stunning election result and lots of eggs on ivy league elitist faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Election Data Models Lesson for Cybersecurity

If you are like me, you were pretty convinced that Secretary Clinton was poised to be the President elect.  Confidence in this opinion was based on reviewing numerous big data analytics models from the fivethirtyeight.com, the New York Times, Princeton, etc.  The lowest percentage gave Mrs. Clinton roughly a 65% chance of winning on November 8. So, what happened?  Every database jockey recognizes the old maxim of garbage in/garbage out.  In other words, killer algorithms and all the processing power in the world are rather useless if your model is built on the back of crappy data.  Obviously, all the brainiacs building these models made a critical mistake in not gathering data from disenfranchised white voters in rural areas.  The result?  A stunning election result and lots of eggs on ivy league elitist faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker at Tech Field Day 12

Docker will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12, and you can sit in on the sessions – at least virtually.

Tech Field Day is an opportunity for IT practitioners to hear from some of the leading technology companies, and Docker is excited to be participating again. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth for cultivating a vibrant community of technical leaders and evangelists and inviting us to participate. Looking forward to meeting more of the delegates.

Our session will be Wednesday, November 16th, from 4:30 to 6:30pm Pacific. We have a full slate of topics including:

  • Docker Datacenter: What is Docker Datacenter and how can it help organizations implement their own Container as a Service platform.
  • Docker for Windows Server: An overview of the integration of Docker containers and Windows Server 2016.
  • Docker for AWS and Docker for Azure: Learn about the easiest way to deploy and manage clusters of Docker hosts on both Azure and AWS.
  • Docker Security: We’ll discuss how to implement a secure software supply chain with Docker.
  • Docker Networking: A conversation on how Docker allows developers to define container centric networks that run on top of your existing infrastructure.

Continue reading