Cisco/Apple bolster WiFi, business apps and voice collaboration with iOS 10 release

The Cisco and Apple partnership has yielded a ton of new business features that include improved Wi-Fi connectivity, business app prioritization capabilities and the tighter integration of voice for collaboration – all via the today’s release of iOS 10 for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.Today’s announcement is a reflection of how important and integral mobile smartphones have become to businesses. For example Cisco earlier this year stated that smartphone traffic would exceed PC traffic by 2020. In 2015, PCs accounted for 53% of total IP traffic, but by 2020 PCs will account for only 29% of traffic. Smartphones will account for 30% of total IP traffic in 2020, up from 8% in 2015, Cisco wrote in its 11th annual Visual Networking Index in June.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Matures – via the Federal Government…

Based on industry research and market assessments such as the most recent from Allied Market Research, we know software-defined networking is growing crazy fast and has a huge upside. The question is…is it maturing to the point the Federal Government will make it a priority?

I think the answer is YES, based on what Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency has said publicly. And, it appears cyber-security is one of the biggest areas he sees SDN helping out. He explains how SDN can provide the ability to create networks on-demand and make them harder to attack.

In order to help Lt. General Lynn, we needed to get past an issue I like to call, “Barrier of Implementation”. The barrier is an approved DISA STIG for SDN. In order for federal agencies to implement a SDN solution it has to go through some sort of security accreditation. Most of all security accreditation rely on DISA STIGs for the checks and balances.

With our announcement yesterday, “VMware Receives STIG-Approval for VMware NSX to Operate on U.S. Department of Defense Networks from Defense Information Systems Agency,” VMware NSX network virtualization became the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: GitLab fills need for enterprise developer tools, picks up funding round

Recently I chatted with Dawie Olivier, the CIO of Westpac Bank. Olivier has a long history within the financial services industry, and we talked about helping these kinds of organizations become agile and innovative.This is no small challenge (I’ll share more about my interview with Olivier in a future post). Financial services organizations work within a highly regulated industry and are doubly confounded by often being built on top of big, heavy, monolithic, legacy IT systems. Hardly a recipe for agility.+ Also on Network World: Promise and peril in the journey to DevOps +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Dyn is rising to the cloud challenge

Trying to capture an end-to-end picture of application performance across a single enterprise is challenging enough. Providing that level of visibility for hybrid- and public-cloud-enabled applications presents a whole new level of difficulty. Enter Dyn, which is an early leader in the emerging internet performance management (IPM) market. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Canada recalls Galaxy Note7, says over 70 cases reported in the US

Canada has recalled over 21,900 Galaxy Note7 smartphones after receiving a report of the overheating of the battery of one phone.The Samsung Note7 smartphone battery has the potential to overheat and burn, posing a potential fire hazard, Health Canada, a Canadian federal government department said Monday.The problem with the lithium-ion batteries may, however, turn out to be more serious in the U.S. where already reports of over 70 cases have been received by Samsung, according to the Canadian agency. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is charged with protecting the public from the risk of injury or death linked with certain consumer products, said Friday it was working on an official recall with Samsung but there has been no formal announcement yet of the move.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs

No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day.

We spend a lot of time thinking about such things, and as Nvidia was getting ready to launch its new Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerator cards, we asked Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia just how much computing could be devoted …

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

iPhone 8 rumor rollup: Making the case for zirconia ceramics

The hardest news out of Apple during its iPhone 7/7Plus and Apple Watch 2 extravaganza last week is that the company will release a version of its Apple Watch made from ceramic, which as Apple says, is "one of the hardest materials in the world." Speculation this week is that Apple might use some of that zirconia ceramic to build its iPhone 8, too. Why deal with messy Bendgate issues involving its aluminum-body iPhones when it can build its smartphones from stronger material?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia’s new Pascal GPUs can give smart answers

Autonomous cars need a new kind of horsepower to identify objects, avoid obstacles and change lanes. There's a good chance that will come from graphics processors in data centers or even the trunks of cars.With this scenario in mind, Nvidia has built two new GPUs -- the Tesla P4 and P40 -- based on the Pascal architecture and designed for servers or computers that will help drive autonomous cars. In recent years, Tesla GPUs have been targeted at supercomputing, but they are now being tweaked for deep-learning systems that aid in correlation and classification of data."Deep learning" typically refers to a class of algorithmic techniques based on highly connected neural networks -- systems of nodes with weighted interconnections among them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stop using mobiles for conference calls

Stop using legacy mobile audio, especially for conference calls. There are better alternatives. You’re doing your customers and colleagues a disservice by using mobile audio. It’s time we moved on. PSTN is not much better either – switch to VoIP, and give your ears a break from crappy audio connections.

Refresher: Audio Quality Standards

There are many different methods of encoding speech for transmission across networks. There are trade-offs with each, balancing bandwidth, voice quality, and endpoint requirements. The interesting point is that there is not a direct relationship between bandwidth and quality. Half the bandwidth does not have to mean half the quality.

The Mean opinion score test provides a way of ‘scoring’ the quality of a call. 1 is Bad, 5 is Excellent. G.711 encoding has a score of 4.1, which is very good quality, but uses 64kbps per call. GSM has a score of 3.5, which is the minimum acceptable level…but it only uses 12.2kbps. Pretty good tradeoff if you’re in a bandwidth-constrained environment.

But we’re no longer constrained by bandwidth. We don’t need to squeeze that audio call down to only a few kbps. We can use other options such as FaceTime, Continue reading

A Follow Up on SSH Bastion Hosts

This post is a follow-up on my earlier post on using an SSH bastion host. Since that article was published, I’ve gotten some additional information that I wanted to be sure to share with my readers. It’s possible that this additional information may not affect you, but I’ll allow you to make that determination based on your use case and your specific environment.

Agent Forwarding

You may recall that my original article said that you needed to enable agent forwarding, either via the -A command-line switch or via a ForwardAgent line in your SSH configuration file. This is unnecessary. (Thank you to several readers who contacted me about this issue.) I tested this several times using AWS instances, and was able to transparently connect to private instances (instances without a public IP address) via a bastion host without enabling agent forwarding. This is odd because almost every other tutorial I’ve seen or read instructs readers to enable agent forwarding. I’ve not yet determined why this is the case, but I’m going to do some additional testing and I’ll keep readers posted as I learn more.

Note that I’ve updated the original article accordingly.

The “-W” Parameter vs. Netcat

The Continue reading

Being pushed out of your comfort zone can make your IT career

“’Come to my office. You and I have something to talk about.’”That was the message John Marcante got from Vanguard’s then-chairman, Jack Brennan. It was a few months after Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, tragedy notwithstanding, Marcante was living his professional dream.Back then, he was leading all development for Vanguard’s institutional business. It was one of those jobs that many software-development pros view as the apex of their careers. The sales teams brought him to meet prospects. The client service teams wanted him out in front of valued clients, which included corporations and retirement plans.“That was a really cool job,” says Marcante, now CIO of Vanguard, “and I was in love with it.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon buys Sensity and launches farm pilot with sensor tech

Verizon has been busy building a diverse Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio that includes sensors used on farms as well as on city streets.On Monday, the wireless carrier announced it is buying Sensity Systems for an undisclosed sum.Sensity, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has focused on using energy-efficient LED lighting to help cities build an IoT platform on city streetlights. The platform can include the use of various sensors on a streetlight pole to monitor weather and city services ranging from parking to public safety.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Jefferson County’s IT Department Improved Their Security Posture with VMware NSX

Jefferson County, Colorado (“Jeffco”) is a local jurisdiction located against the beautiful Rocky Mountains and adjacent to the state capital in Denver.  Jeffco’s IT jefferson-county-colorado-squarelogo-2organization is charged with meeting the needs not only of the various internal departments of the county, but also of serving its half million residents.

As with most IT departments, Jeffco’s IT team has some key priorities to address, including modernizing application infrastructures and bringing more efficiency to business processes — all while fundamentally enhancing security.  It was these needs that led Jeffco to VMware NSX. “We’re doing as much as we can to simplify our infrastructure, yet provide more security, higher up time, and better performance,” says Matt Alexander, Senior Systems Administrator.

Like many other organizations, Jeffco first considered VMware NSX for micro-segmentation.  Their network had followed the traditional model of data center security: perimeter firewalls, DMZ, internal security zone.  But this legacy security model wasn’t enough.  Jeffco recognized the need to treat all network traffic — regardless of whether it originated inside or outside the data center — as potentially insecure.  “From a micro-segmentation and east-west firewalling perspective, we may have had the ability [in the past] but it was exceptionally expensive with physical Continue reading

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