The Future of SharePoint is All About You

This morning (May 4, 2016), I had the pleasure of being in San Francisco for Microsoft’s “Future of SharePoint” event, which coincided with the general availability date for SharePoint 2016. This is the second time I’ve been in San Francisco for a major SharePoint event. The last time was in 2003, for the launch of SharePoint 2003. It’s amazing how far things have come in the past 13 years! The future of SharePoint is now – and the future is all about you and me – and making it easier to connect and collaborate and get work done in a way that brings the information we need to make key decisions to the places we need it, in the format we need it in, and on the device we are currently using. The future of SharePoint is all about people – and there should be no doubt that Microsoft is continuing to invest in providing great people experiences with SharePoint. While I am super focused on user experiences in SharePoint, and Microsoft has shown users a whole lotta love in the announcements today, developers are going to be pretty happy too – along with the folks focused on security and Continue reading

Interop: NBase-T makes “low-speed” Ethernet splash

LAS VEGAS --The growing number of vendors supporting 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper cabling demonstrated the interoperability of a variety of new gear at the Interop event here.The NBase-T Alliance showed off an assortment of 2.5 and 5GBase-T products – from switches to NICs -- it says show new applications for NBase-T products, including the ability to aggregate data at 2.5G and 5G Ethernet data across 802.11ac Wave2 access points and improved speed links to network-attached storage devices. The Alliance noted that Dell’Oro Group predicted recently that there will be a doubling of ports shipped every year in the 2.5G and 5G Ethernet market over the next 3 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop: NBase-T makes “low-speed” Ethernet splash

LAS VEGAS --The growing number of vendors supporting 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper cabling demonstrated the interoperability of a variety of new gear at the Interop event here.The NBase-T Alliance showed off an assortment of 2.5 and 5GBase-T products – from switches to NICs -- it says show new applications for NBase-T products, including the ability to aggregate data at 2.5G and 5G Ethernet data across 802.11ac Wave2 access points and improved speed links to network-attached storage devices. The Alliance noted that Dell’Oro Group predicted recently that there will be a doubling of ports shipped every year in the 2.5G and 5G Ethernet market over the next 3 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop: NBase-T makes “low-speed” Ethernet splash

LAS VEGAS --The growing number of vendors supporting 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper cabling demonstrated the interoperability of a variety of new gear at the Interop event here.The NBase-T Alliance showed off an assortment of 2.5 and 5GBase-T products – from switches to NICs -- it says show new applications for NBase-T products, including the ability to aggregate data at 2.5G and 5G Ethernet data across 802.11ac Wave2 access points and improved speed links to network-attached storage devices. The Alliance noted that Dell’Oro Group predicted recently that there will be a doubling of ports shipped every year in the 2.5G and 5G Ethernet market over the next 3 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Lets You Try Quantum Computing in the Cloud

What can five qubits do? You tell us, IBM says.

Storage Performance Models Highlight Burst Buffers at Scale

For storage at scale, particularly for large scientific computing centers, burst buffers have become a hot topic for both checkpoint and application performance reasons. Major vendors in high performance computing have climbed on board and we will be seeing a new crop of big machines featuring burst buffers this year to complement the few that have already emerged.

The what, why, and how of burst buffers can be found in our interview with the inventor of the concept, Gary Grider at Los Alamos National Lab. But for centers that have already captured the message and are looking for the …

Storage Performance Models Highlight Burst Buffers at Scale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Bank ATMs Might Benefit From SD-WAN

Viptela offers an SD-WAN device for ATMs.

The Top IT Products of 2016: Best Of Interop Award Winners Announced

The Rise Of The Infrastructure Developer

Worth Reading: Container Orchestration and Scheduling

Forgive the analogy, but we are increasingly being asked to think of our infrastructure and applications as cattle. We care about cattle, but perhaps a little less than we would in comparison to our pets. We try not to be reckless with our cattle, and we want them to be grazing on the best land, we want to move them periodically away from crowded or dangerous pasture, and if they do get ill, we want someone to tend them back to full health. -via the New Stack

The post Worth Reading: Container Orchestration and Scheduling appeared first on 'net work.

iPhone the most influential gadget of all time

When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone in 2007, he boldly exclaimed that it was a leapfrog product that was five years ahead of anything else on the market. And though Jobs was sometimes prone to hyperbole, his remarks about the iPhone were spot-on.Looking back, it's fair to say that Android didn't come close to reaching parity with the iPhone until about 2011 or 2012. Suffice it to say, the iPhone was a revolutionary device that completely changed the way the world interacts with technology.Not only did it quite literally put the internet in the pockets of millions of consumers, but it also ushered in the era of mobile apps—yet again changing the way consumers interact with technology. Today, I can use my iPhone to play games, listen to music, write reports, email with friends, pay for items at any number of stores, order food, track my exercise and much, much more. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star Wars Day special: “Jedi” jumps in job descriptions since Force Awakens released

The Star Wars Day (May the forth...) pitches this week have been mercifully few, but one that did catch my eye was job site Indeed's revelation that the word "Jedi" has increasingly been showing up in job descriptions since the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuted in December.Indeed, which published a blog post today about the history of weird job titles/descriptions, claims to have seen a 328% growth in appearances of "Jedi" either in job titles or descriptions since the movie came out. Indeed MORE: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day | 4 of the best and 4 of the worst Star Wars video gamesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zombie servers will kill you

You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zombie servers will kill you

You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zombie servers will kill you

You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

May the Fourth be with you: 4 of the best & 4 of the worst Star Wars video games

Star Wars video gamesStar Wars, as an enormous building block of nerd culture, and one that got popular right when home computing was really taking off, has an unsurprisingly huge number of video games set in its universe. Some of them are very good, and some are the opposite of very good. Here’s a look at four of the former, and four of the latter.RELATED: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars DayTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

May the Fourth be with you: 4 of the best & 4 of the worst Star Wars video games

Star Wars video gamesStar Wars, as an enormous building block of nerd culture, and one that got popular right when home computing was really taking off, has an unsurprisingly huge number of video games set in its universe. Some of them are very good, and some are the opposite of very good. Here’s a look at four of the former, and four of the latter.RELATED: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars DayTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Slides makes it easier to talk back to presenters

Google is trying to save presentation audiences from having to sit through long rambling questions with a new feature it added to its Slides software on Wednesday. Slides Q&A will let audiences send text questions through the Web when listening to a presentation using Google's software. As a presenter is talking, she can see the questions and respond to them, without waiting for someone to speak into a microphone. Google Google Slides Q&A's presenter view lets presenters see what people in their audience want to know. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An inside look at Microsoft’s booming cloud business

As Director of Program Management for Azure at Microsoft, Corey Sanders heads the compute team which is responsible for the VM-based offerings on Windows and Linux, the new microservices platform, and container services, among other things. Sanders joined the Azure team about six years ago, before which he was a developer in the Windows Serviceability team.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently visited Sanders in his Redmond, WA, office to get a better sense of how Microsoft’s cloud business is taking shape. Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management for Azure, Microsoft To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Basic Skills: Half Split Troubleshooting

Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps, it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.

If this sounds familiar, I’ve told this story before in a different context, but bear with me…

So how did we miss the problem that actually caused the blown fuse, and hence the loss of our site’s weather RADAR system for more than a day? The reason is that it was, in fact, two in the morning, and we’d run out of ideas. If you want a sense of the complexity of the system we were working on, here is the troubleshooting guide, and here is Continue reading