IBM targets x86 server territory with new Power servers

IBM sold off its x86 server business two years ago to Lenovo, thinking it was exiting a cut-throat, low-margin business. But the cloud has only intensified x86 server chip sales, and IBM is paying attention.The company is adapting a new range of Power servers -- which typically run powerful systems -- for the cloud. The Power E870C and E880C servers, announced Monday, are flexible in handling many tasks and can scale for distributed computing and cloud integration.The new servers, which support Ubuntu Linux and Unix, sound similar to x86 servers powering internal and external clouds at companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But IBM is packing in an extra set of features to make these systems reliable and flexible for public and private clouds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare’s new WordPress plugin

Over 25% of all websites use WordPress, and over 10% of all internet traffic flows through CloudFlare; WordPress + CloudFlare has always been a winning combination, and now with CloudFlare’s new WordPress plugin, it's easier than ever to make your site 60% faster.

Install or upgrade to CloudFlare's new plugin to speed up your WordPress site.

Our new plugin adds all of CloudFlare's performance and security benefits in a simple one-click install of recommended settings specifically developed for WordPress.

What our plugin can do for you

One-click WordPress-optimized settings is the easiest way to setup CloudFlare for your WordPress site.

Web application firewall (WAF) rulesets, available on CloudFlare’s paid plans, has built-in rulesets, including rules that mitigate WordPress specific threats and vulnerabilities. These security rules are always kept up-to-date: once the WAF is enabled, you can rest easy knowing your site is protected from all the latest threats.

Automatic cache purge occurs when you change the appearance of your website. This means that you can focus on your website, while we ensure that the latest content is always available to your visitors.

You can also change CloudFlare settings such as the Security Level, Image Optimization, etc. from within Continue reading

Microsoft adds SMB support to retail outlets

Microsoft's retail outlets, creatively known as Microsoft Store, has been its answer to the wildly successful Apple Stores that helped push a lot of Apple product into the hands of consumers, especially Macs.Up to now, the more than 100 Microsoft Stores have been focused on the consumer market. However, Microsoft announced an expansion of the stores to include what it calls SMB Zones, providing small and mid-sized businesses with a chance to check out business-oriented products and technology and also get some consultations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. —Lawfare

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Presenting Technical Topics To Technical People

Fred writes, “I’ve got a conference coming up in December that I’ve been invited to speak at. This is something I’ve wanted to do for sometime. However, having never done it, I’m looking for some tips on how to get started.”

Q: What’s the best way to find a topic that is new enough to be interesting, but relevant enough to be useful?

People go to conferences hoping, among other things, to gather information that they didn’t have before. What that is will vary by audience member. Designers, architects, and C-levels who are trying to stay ahead of the curve will want to know about the future — what tech is coming and the likely impact to their business and operations. Engineers and operations — the people down in the blood and guts of IT — will be more interested in hard skills.

By “hard,” I don’t mean difficult. I mean useful tools and techniques that they can bring back to their job with them and put to use.

  • When addressing a technical audience, the most engaging talks will be technical ones that go into specifics. The catch here is that most talks are in the 30 to 60 minute range. Continue reading

17% off Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

According to Emerson, makers of this UP500W Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, their customers save up to 33% in energy costs every year using programmed heating and cooling schedules. The Sensi thermostat makes it easy to remotely control and schedule the comfort of your home using your phone, tablet or PC. You can start with a preloaded schedule that reflects common daily patterns and quickly adapt it to your unique schedule, or you can use the intuitive swipe controls to build a customized daily schedule in seconds. When your schedule changes, the app gives you continuous control to make adjustments, from across the room or across the world. And because it doesn't require a “C-wire” in most applications, Sensi works with most heating and cooling systems in the US and Canada. If you're an Alexa user (Amazon Echo, Dot, etc), you'll find it's fully compatible with your "smart home". Sensi averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 customers on Amazon (read reviews). It's typical list price of $129 has been reduced to $106.88.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The many dimensions of cloud value

Do you hear that grating sound of value clash among cloud providers? It’s the sound of attempted differentiation, that reason you buy Starbucks instead of Dunkin Donuts, Peet’s or perhaps Tim Horton’s brew. Brand thinkers want us to choose something we like because they know once we do, we will stay. We’re creatures of habit. We dislike the qualification process of choosing new vendors for coffee, as well as IT gear and services.Much marketing focus is going towards incremental services bundles that make one cloud vendor seem, or actually be, better than the offerings of another. Determine the value of the cloud services you need The first smoke cloud that obscures actual value of cloud services is the dizzying value calculator. This device, when present (and it’s often missing), allows you to plug in what you predict (you can predict, can’t you?) your ongoing costs will be for a particular set of data processing needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enter the brave new world of Windows 10 license activation

Windows 10 brought a lot of changes to Microsoft's flagship desktop operating system when it debuted on July 29, 2015, and it has changed even more since then. With the release of the Anniversary Update in August (Build 1607 for Current Branch users, at Build 14393.105 as I write this), even license activation has changed. Here's what most users of the business-oriented Windows 10 Enterprise will see if they check their Activation screen:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd: We have the whole cloud stack

Few enterprise IT transformations can match the importance of today’s long migration from on-premises, client-server computing to cloud computing. This week at Oracle’s mammoth OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle will make it abundantly clear that it intends to become a leader in all three flavors of cloud -- not only SaaS, where the company has already demonstrated strength, but also in PaaS and IaaS, where Oracle is a new player.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Reaction: Devops and Dumpster Fires

Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as strong as the first stiff wind. It’s far too easy to cause a network to fall over because of a change in a routing table or a series of bad decisions that aren’t enough to cause chaos unless done together. —Networking Nerd

Precisely.

But what are we to do about it. Tom’s Take is that we need to push back on applications. This, also, I completely agree with. But this only brings us to another problem—how do we make the case that applications need to be rewritten to work on a simpler network? The simple answer is—let’s teach coders how networks really work, so they can figure out how to better code to the environment in which their applications live. Let me be helpful here—I’ve been working on networks since somewhere around 1986, and on computers and electronics since Continue reading

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s New in Tower 3: Installer

Ansible-Tower-3-blog-series.png

In July, we released Ansible Tower 3. This blog series is a deep dive into some of the new aspects of Tower. We've reworked Tower to make it simpler and easier to automate your environments and share your automation solutions. For a complete overview of the Tower 3 updates, check out this post by Bill Nottingham, Director of Product.

Installer configuration in Tower

Before we look at what's new, let’s remember the < 3.0 installer - referred to hereafter as the legacy installer. The legacy installer configuration was designed to be ran by users without Ansible knowledge.

This requirement led to the two step process:

Step 1:
./configure prompts the user for the needed configuration information to setup Tower. This includes things like: tower mode (i.e. single machine, remote database, HA), ssh connection information, and service passwords. The Ansible variable file, tower_setup_conf.yml, is generated to be consumed by the ./setup.sh script.

tower_setup_conf.yml
admin_password: password
database: internal
pg_password: BQgA2Z43jv86dzjDEswH7K75LAwufzSXbE7jUztq
primary_machine: localhost
redis_password: S3tab7QfWe2e92JEB9hNNFUunV4ircg3EdRdjpxP

Step 2:
./setup.sh wraps the Ansible install.yml, backup.yml, and restore.yml playbooks and passes in the appropriate run-time flag to include the previously generated configuration variable file and manage the generated logs. The . Continue reading

Oracle is also getting in on the chatbot revolution

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison ordered himself some new business cards on stage at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday, just by having a conversation. As part of his keynote address to attendees, Ellison took the time to show off a new set of tools for creating intelligent chatbots that integrate with Oracle's software. It's aimed at making it easier for businesses to build bots that let users connect with their enterprise software, and help businesses connect with consumers. Chatbots are a hot topic in the tech industry, with companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack all building tools that companies can use to create intelligent, automated conversation partners. Their growing popularity comes down to a few factors, including the proliferation of smartphones, fast internet connections and messaging apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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