CIOs question value of Microsoft’s LinkedIn buy

CIOs' views of Microsoft’s blockbuster bid to buy LinkedIn runs the gamut from dismay to cautious optimism. Some IT leaders fret that the $26.2 billion deal won't generate demonstrable value for customers while others are applauding what they see as a smart big data play. "My immediate response was, 'What the hell are they doing?,' says Brian Long, CIO of aerospace parts supplier Pattonair. Long, who views Microsoft's role in the enterprise as an enabler of Office productivity, is concerned that Microsoft suddenly wants a social network that drives sales and marketing endeavors. Long doesn’t think much of Microsoft trying to anticipate where it can tap in professionals' day-to-day life.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Watching: Has SDN lived up to the hype?

This is a recent round table discussion I participated in over at LightReading. My friends over at ECI put this together.

The post Worth Watching: Has SDN lived up to the hype? appeared first on 'net work.

Dell patches critical flaws in SonicWALL Global Management System

Dell has patched several critical flaws in its central management system for SonicWALL enterprise security appliances, such as firewalls and VPN gateways.If left unfixed, the vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to gain full control of SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS) deployments and the devices managed through those systems.The SonicWALL GMS virtual appliance software has six vulnerabilities, four of which are rated critical, according to researchers from security firm Digital Defense.First, unauthenticated attackers could inject arbitrary commands through the system's web interface that would be executed with root privileges. This is possible through two vulnerable methods: set_time_config and set_dns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell patches critical flaws in SonicWALL Global Management System

Dell has patched several critical flaws in its central management system for SonicWALL enterprise security appliances, such as firewalls and VPN gateways.If left unfixed, the vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to gain full control of SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS) deployments and the devices managed through those systems.The SonicWALL GMS virtual appliance software has six vulnerabilities, four of which are rated critical, according to researchers from security firm Digital Defense.First, unauthenticated attackers could inject arbitrary commands through the system's web interface that would be executed with root privileges. This is possible through two vulnerable methods: set_time_config and set_dns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell patches critical flaws in SonicWALL Global Management System

Dell has patched several critical flaws in its central management system for SonicWALL enterprise security appliances, such as firewalls and VPN gateways.If left unfixed, the vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to gain full control of SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS) deployments and the devices managed through those systems.The SonicWALL GMS virtual appliance software has six vulnerabilities, four of which are rated critical, according to researchers from security firm Digital Defense.First, unauthenticated attackers could inject arbitrary commands through the system's web interface that would be executed with root privileges. This is possible through two vulnerable methods: set_time_config and set_dns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chromebook shipments are exploding, but not replacing Windows PCs

Chromebook shipment growth will be in the double digits this year, but the devices are not being used as Windows PC replacements, which is what Google had hoped for.Chromebook shipments will jump by about 18 percent this year compared to 2015, according to Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner. It will be one of the few areas of growth in an otherwise slumping PC market.In 2015, Chromebook shipments totaled 6.5 million units, so shipments this year could be in the 7.5 million to 8 million range. About 1.65 million Chromebooks shipped in the first quarter of 2016; second quarter numbers weren't yet available.The devices, though, are still a small fragment of the overall PC market, in which unit shipments are expected to reach 290 million units this year. Outside of Chromebooks, the Windows-based 2-in-1 and gaming PC segments are also growing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

On the ‘net: What does a control plane do?

To really understand Software Defined Networks (SDNs), we need to start from a place far different than the top of the current hype cycle. Instead, where we need to start is thinking about what a control plane actually does in a packet switched network. There seem to be just a few specific things involved in what a control plane does… —ECI

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F5 CEO to Retire (Again) as New ADCs Emerge

The Shuttle series points to the future as John McAdam points toward the exit.

IDG Contributor Network: 911 call misrouted by 2,500 miles

An urgent call to 911 from the front desk of an Anchorage, Alaska, hotel was routed to Ontario. Local police authorities blamed it on VoIP telephony services.While VoIP does play a role in the issue, the core problem stems from improper provisioning of the phone service and is something that has happened before, when calls to 911 were routed to Northern 911, an Ontario company.This specialized, privately operated 911 center functions as a "PSAP of last resort," taking calls meant for 911 that otherwise cannot be routed correctly, intercepting them manually. After determining the location of the incident, calls are then extended over trunks to administrative lines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 911 call misrouted by 2,500 miles

An urgent call to 911 from the front desk of an Anchorage, Alaska, hotel was routed to Ontario. Local police authorities blamed it on VoIP telephony services.While VoIP does play a role in the issue, the core problem stems from improper provisioning of the phone service and is something that has happened before, when calls to 911 were routed to Northern 911, an Ontario company.This specialized, privately operated 911 center functions as a "PSAP of last resort," taking calls meant for 911 that otherwise cannot be routed correctly, intercepting them manually. After determining the location of the incident, calls are then extended over trunks to administrative lines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Navigating EU safe harbor

If you’re an organization with trans-Atlantic presence that transmits and stores European citizen data (e.g. employee payroll & HR data, client & prospect data) in the U.S. you will want to pay attention. What we will discuss was administered under the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and a previous EU-U.S. agreement called Safe Harbor. We will cover what happened, what’s next, new rules (and penalties) that are set to go into effect and our recommendations. —Cloud Security Alliance

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HPE’s Itanium server refresh should come in mid-2017

Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to refresh its Itanium server range around the middle of next year, employing Intel's long-promised "Kittson" successor to the current Itanium 9500 series ("Poulson") chips.News of the server update plans comes from Ken Surplice, category manager for mission-critical solutions at HPE's EMEA server division.Surplice told Dutch website Computable that the company is on schedule to refresh its Integrity servers for HP-UX and OpenVMS with Intel's upcoming Kittson Itanium processors in 2017, and that the servers should be with customers mid-year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE’s Itanium server refresh should come in mid-2017

Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to refresh its Itanium server range around the middle of next year, employing Intel's long-promised "Kittson" successor to the current Itanium 9500 series ("Poulson") chips.News of the server update plans comes from Ken Surplice, category manager for mission-critical solutions at HPE's EMEA server division.Surplice told Dutch website Computable that the company is on schedule to refresh its Integrity servers for HP-UX and OpenVMS with Intel's upcoming Kittson Itanium processors in 2017, and that the servers should be with customers mid-year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stacking Up Oracle S7 Against Intel Xeon

Even though the Xeon processor has become the default engine for most kinds of compute in the datacenter, it is by no means to only option that is available to large enterprises that can afford to indulge in different kinds of systems because they do not have to homogenize their systems as hyperscalers must if they are to keep their IT costs in check.

Sometimes, there are benefits to being smaller, and the ability to pick point solutions that are good for a specific job is one of them. This has been the hallmark of the high-end of computing since …

Stacking Up Oracle S7 Against Intel Xeon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It all started with Dockerizing an old version of Confluence with Docker Datacenter

This is a guest post by Shawn Bower

In my role as Cloud Architect I often hear, “Docker sounds great but it won’t work for my application.”  In my experience Docker can improve the state of many applications including legacy and vendor solutions.  The first production workload at Cornell on Docker was the University’s wiki which is run on Atlassian’s Confluence in April 2015.

Our installation of Confluence is an interesting intersection of legacy and vendor solution.  We have customized the code, to work with our single sign on solution, as well as a custom synchronization with LDAP for group management.  When we started the project to move Confluence to the cloud the infrastructure, the software was old, compiled from the source and was being hand maintained.  
Our installation of Confluence is an interesting intersection of legacy and vendor solution.  We have customized the code, to work with our single sign on solution, as well as a custom synchronization with LDAP for group management.  When we started the project to move Confluence to the cloud the infrastructure, the software was old, compiled from the source and was being hand maintained.  

The stack looked like this:

• Apache 2. Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How bandwidth thieves will be nabbed in the future

Experts say spectrum pilfering is going to become a major industrial problem as software-defined radio becomes more prevalent. Software-defined radio allows frequencies and bands to be simply altered in a device through coding rather than via expensive hardware changes.Locating and detecting thieves who are looting bandwidth on radio spectrum could become easier, however, once a crowdsourcing project gets going.+ Also on Network World: Auto thieves adopting cybercrime-like tactics +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How bandwidth thieves will be nabbed in the future

Experts say spectrum pilfering is going to become a major industrial problem as software-defined radio becomes more prevalent. Software-defined radio allows frequencies and bands to be simply altered in a device through coding rather than via expensive hardware changes.Locating and detecting thieves who are looting bandwidth on radio spectrum could become easier, however, once a crowdsourcing project gets going.+ Also on Network World: Auto thieves adopting cybercrime-like tactics +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How bandwidth thieves will be nabbed in the future

Experts say spectrum pilfering is going to become a major industrial problem as software-defined radio becomes more prevalent. Software-defined radio allows frequencies and bands to be simply altered in a device through coding rather than via expensive hardware changes.Locating and detecting thieves who are looting bandwidth on radio spectrum could become easier, however, once a crowdsourcing project gets going.+ Also on Network World: Auto thieves adopting cybercrime-like tactics +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Still searching for a killer app in Windows 10 Anniversary Update

A couple of days ago, as I was finishing the InfoWorld review of Windows 10 Anniversary Update, a good friend (and astute editor) asked me a very simple question: Where is the killer app in Windows 10? After all, if folks are going to go through the pain and bother of upgrading from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Win10 -- and of climbing the learning curve once again -- there has to be a good reason for the effort, right?[ Your one-stop shop for Microsoft knowledge: Everything you need to know about Windows 10, in a handy PDF. Download it today! | Survive and thrive with the new OS: The ultimate Windows 10 survivor kit. | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with the Windows newsletter. ] I racked my brain. It's a very pertinent question, especially now that the days of free upgrades are drawing to a close.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to ensure your A.I. gets good nutrition

Like children, artificial intelligence needs proper parenting to achieve its full potential, and proper parenting starts with a healthy diet — of good data. Businesses increasingly acknowledge the potential of A.I. to accelerate decision making, but many have serious concerns about what is happening inside the black box. The quality of any A.I. can only be as good as the data it processes. Of course, “garbage in, garbage out” has long been an analytics refrain, but it’s even more important for A.I. Why? Consider the difference between the two. An analytics solution typically provides a graph prioritizing the results. Ask an analytics program why sales are down in the Northeast region, and you’ll essentially get a list of possible factors: supply chain hiccups, demographic changes, social media trends, etc. A human then has to evaluate the results to determine which factors to base the ultimate decision on. A cognitive A.I. approach is less transparent. Ask an A.I. why sales are down in the Northeast region and you get a single, definitive answer. That’s it. Done deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here