VeloCloud’s SD-WAN solution facilitates quick expansion for The Bay Club Company

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  The Bay Club Company is an operator of private clubs that blend fitness, swimming and tennis. Today the company has 24 clubs across California, but it's growth path could potentially double that by the end of 2017. The Bay Club's expansion strategy includes acquiring smaller clubs and bringing them into the portfolio.IT director Mark Street is charged with bringing the acquired clubs into the Bay Club network as quickly as possible. That connection is essential in order for the club, from a technology point of view, to begin operating and feeling like a Bay Club. Street says it would take 60 to 90 days to bring a new club onto the traditional corporate backbone, but his goal is to be able to fully integrate a new club within a week to help The Bay Club and its members benefit from the new acquisition faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Belgian hospitals turn to robots to receive patients

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions.The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months.Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia.Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Monitoring VMware NSX SpoofGuard with REST API and Perl

In some prior blogs, we demonstrated leveraging NSX REST API with Python. See prior blogs, Automating Security Group and Policy Creation with NSX REST API and Automating VMware NSX Security Rules Creation using Splunk and Some Code. In this blog, we demonstrate how NSX REST API can be used with the popular Perl programming language.

One of Perl’s key strengths is the vast amount of Perl modules/libraries available via the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). There is also a CPAN module included with Perl which is used to automatically download and install additional Perl modules from the CPAN repository. The example Perl code in this post demonstrates a simple program that uses a Perl REST client module/library with NSX REST API to retrieve NSX SpoofGuard information.  Continue reading

Microsoft buys Wand to improve chat capabilities

Satya Nadella wasn't kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision. The Wand team will be joining Bing's engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company's team members will be working primarily on Microsoft's push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China claims exascale by 2020, three years before U.S.

China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China claims exascale by 2020, three years before U.S.

China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 major headaches Apple fixed

Improving every Apple platformImage by AppleIt was a jam-packed WWDC, and thankfully Apple gave us much-needed fixes to some of the most frustrating problems in all its major platforms.What were some of your personal headaches that Apple cured with the annnouncement of iOS 10, macOS, watchOS 3, and tvOS?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How behavior online will identify you

Just half an hour of web browsing is enough time for machine learning mechanisms to uncover a person’s personality and produce identifying digital signatures, researchers say.Those traits can include conscientiousness and neuroticism, among other characteristics, the scientists from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia say in their media release published by AAAS, the science society.And it might identify the individual, too."Our research suggests a person's personality traits can be deduced by their general internet usage,” says Dr. Ikusan R. Adeyemi, a research scholar at the university.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How behavior online will identify you

Just half an hour of web browsing is enough time for machine learning mechanisms to uncover a person’s personality and produce identifying digital signatures, researchers say.Those traits can include conscientiousness and neuroticism, among other characteristics, the scientists from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia say in their media release published by AAAS, the science society.And it might identify the individual, too."Our research suggests a person's personality traits can be deduced by their general internet usage,” says Dr. Ikusan R. Adeyemi, a research scholar at the university.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Chain Deep Dive on Software Gone Wild

A while ago Big Switch Networks engineers realized there’s a cool use case for their tap aggregation application (Big Tap Monitoring Fabric) – an intelligent patch panel traffic steering solution used as security tool chaining infrastructure in DMZ… and thus the Big Chain was born.

Curious how their solution works? Listen to Episode 58 of Software Gone Wild with Andy Shaw and Sandip Shah.

Listen to the podcast

Surveillance reform measure blocked in the wake of Orlando killings

The U.S. House of Representatives voted down an anti-surveillance amendment after some of its members expressed concern about its impact on the fight against terrorism, in the wake of Sunday’s massacre at a nightclub in Orlando.The measure was proposed by Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Congresswoman Zoe Lofrgren, a Democrat from California, as as an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act.It would prevent warrantless searches by law enforcement of information on Americans from a foreign intelligence communications database and prohibit with some exceptions the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency from using any funds appropriated under the Act to require that companies weaken the security of their products or services to enable surveillance of users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Surveillance reform measure blocked in the wake of Orlando killings

The U.S. House of Representatives voted down an anti-surveillance amendment after some of its members expressed concern about its impact on the fight against terrorism, in the wake of Sunday’s massacre at a nightclub in Orlando.The measure was proposed by Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Congresswoman Zoe Lofrgren, a Democrat from California, as as an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act.It would prevent warrantless searches by law enforcement of information on Americans from a foreign intelligence communications database and prohibit with some exceptions the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency from using any funds appropriated under the Act to require that companies weaken the security of their products or services to enable surveillance of users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Tetration analytics

Cisco Tetration Analytics: the most Comprehensive Data Center Visibility and Analysis in Real Time, at Scale, June 15, 2016, announced the new Cisco Tetration Analytics platform. The platform collects telemetry from proprietary agents on servers and embedded in hardware on certain Nexus 9k switches, analyzes the data, and presents results via Web GUI, REST API, and as events.

Cisco Tetration Analytics Data Sheet describes the hardware requirements:
Platform Hardware
Quantity
Cisco Tetration Analytics computing nodes (servers)
16
Cisco Tetration Analytics base nodes (servers)
12
Cisco Tetration Analytics serving nodes (servers)
8
Cisco Nexus 9372PX Switches
3

And the power requirements:
Property
Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform
Peak power for Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform (39-RU single-rack option)
22.5 kW
Peak power for Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform (39-RU dual-rack option)
11.25 kW per rack (22.5 KW Total)

No pricing is given, but based on the hardware, data center space, power and cooling requirements, this brute force approach to analytics will be reassuringly expensive to purchase and operate.

Update June 22, 2016: See 451 Research report, Cisco Tetration: a $3m, 1,700-pound appliance for network traffic analytics is born, for pricing information.
A much less expensive alternative is to use industry Continue reading

Salesforce also bid for LinkedIn, but lost out to Microsoft

Microsoft surprised everyone Monday when it announced plans to acquire LinkedIn for more than $26 billion. But it wasn't the only suitor: Salesforce wanted in, too. The San Francisco-based software-as-a-service vendor was interested in LinkedIn primarily for its recruiting business, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Recode on Thursday. The company gave LinkedIn a "solid look" but was unable to match Microsoft's huge offer.Salesforce's interest makes sense: information from the business-focused social network could have proved useful to people working with Salesforce products. Microsoft has similar ambitions for LinkedIn, which it sees as a potential boon to its Dynamics CRM and Office offerings in particular. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung’s Joyent buy is a swipe at AWS and Microsoft Azure

The Internet of Things is as much about computing as it is about the "things" themselves, and that's why Samsung Electronics is buying Joyent.At first glance, a maker of smartphones, home appliances and wearables doesn’t seem like it would need a cloud computing company. But so-called smart objects rely on a lot of number-crunching behind the scenes. A connected security camera can't handle all its video storage and image analysis by itself, for example, and that's where cloud services come in.The real money in IoT will be in the services more than the devices themselves, research firm Gartner says. It’s not entirely up to Samsung to deliver services its devices, but the company sees an opportunity there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pro-ISIS hacker pleads guilty to stealing data on US military personnel

A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.Ferizi’s goal was to “incite terrorist attacks,” the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hacker’s Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pro-ISIS hacker pleads guilty to stealing data on US military personnel

A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.Ferizi’s goal was to “incite terrorist attacks,” the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hacker’s Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Webinar – Challenges Delivering Apps The Modern Way

I'm hosting a webinar with Citrix about application deployment in the context of a modern data center -- containers, NFV, etc. They are bringing nerds, and I am going to ask them questions. There's a live demo at the end, so they've promised me. You should register and attend via http://bit.ly/1XSHvgU. The event is soon - Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
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