AWS focuses on hard disks for new big data services

Amazon Web Services is going retro to help companies deal with big data workloads. The cloud provider announced Tuesday it's launching two new volume types for its Elastic Block Store service that are powered by traditional, spinning disk hard drives. The new Throughput-Optimized HDD and Cold HDD EBS volume types let companies store files cheaply in a way that's still useful for big data workloads like MapReduce and Kafka. the Throughput-Optimized service is aimed at frequent use cases, while the Cold HDD service is built for those same uses, but for applications that reference the items stored less frequently. To get all of that data into AWS, customers can now call on a new 80TB Snowball storage appliance. That joins the existing 50TB Snowball, which was already available for users to order from AWS and get delivered to their data center for data transfer. Using the Snowball, users can ship their data securely from on-premises servers to Amazon's. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDC’s guide to avoiding vendor lock-in

"All too often, the vendors have the upper hand," says research and advisory firm IDC in a recent report. High switching costs or other "vendor control points," such as proprietary technology integrations or overly customized applications, can make it too much trouble for enterprise customers to discontinue using one vendor and switch to another.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Verizon is offshoring jobs, records say

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon is offshoring jobs, records say

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

APIs abound, but challenges remain

Businesses are now widely using application programming interfaces (APIs), but despite widespread use, a recent study has found most companies are struggling with challenges ranging from getting infrastructure in place to finding suppliers to simply setting strategy and objectives."APIs can add tremendous value to a business, but simply having them is not enough," says Rahim Bhatia, general manager, Developer Products, CA Technologies. "Like products, they have to be properly created, managed, monitored and secured or bad things can happen, as we saw in recent connected car incidents or the Snapchat breach two years ago."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel axes 12,000 jobs as it looks to break away from PCs

Intel is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide as the company restructures operations to diversify from PCs into growth areas of IoT and servers.The layoffs account for about 11 percent of employees worldwide. Intel is also consolidating work locations worldwide in a move the company hopes will save it US $750 million this year.Data center equipment will be Intel's growth area growing forward, generating a large part of Intel's profits and potentially making up for the declines in the PC market.Growth drivers will include memory and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, which the company added from its recent $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, CEO Brian Krzanich said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple introduces new MacBooks with faster processors and longer battery life

Apple notebook refreshes aren't announced during special media events anymore, but Apple still knows how to pull a trick out of its sleeve when it has to. Earlier today, Apple quietly announced a compelling refresh to its 12-inch MacBook line.First and foremost, Apple's new 12-inch MacBook models now sport Intel's Skylake dual-core M processors, an addition which should make Apple's svelte notebook much more energy efficient. On top of that, Apple's MacBook line was also graced with improved graphics performance, faster flash storage and last but not least, a full additional hour of battery life.While the dimensions of the refreshed MacBook haven't changed - it's still just 13.1 millimeters thin while weighing in at just 2 pounds - the internals have been beefed up tremendously.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Next up in IoT: The Internet of shirts and shoes

Some clothes already hang out on the Internet. Pharrell Williams’s hat has its own Twitter account, as does Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie. Your clothes could be next to get online identities, though it won't make them famous.IoT startup Evrythng is teaming up with packaging company Avery Dennison to give apparel and footwear products unique identities in Evrythng’s software right when they’re manufactured.The companies have high hopes for the Janela Smart Products Platform, seeing a potential to reach 10 billion products in the next three years. The system could put a simple form of IoT into the hands of millions of consumers who weren’t even shopping for technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Clear Pricing for Network Services

I had to buy some switches recently and needed to gather a second quote from another vendor. I went to the Dell website and was pleasantly surprised to quickly find a clear price and a buy-now button for each device on their website.
Normally you’d need an account of the vendors portal to get this information, so it is refreshing to have straightforward access to clear hardware pricing. However it was the list of professional services options shown in the attached image that caught my eye.
Dell_ProServices_MenuYou can choose options for ‘rack and cable’ basic deployment or more comprehensive ProDeploy solution. The out-of-hours cut-over and other on-site planning options are a lot more expensive, but I’d imagine those tasks require more polished and experienced engineers to be engaged, and a lot more time-risk. Lastly you have the more tightly defined remote consulting options, with a 1-hour or a higher-priced 1-case options of the course of a single year.
You could quibble with some of the prices but I was really surprised to see fixed pricing for professional services, presented in an easy-to-consume and transparent manner.  I’ve always had an interest in business. Now that I’m more focused on network consulting I’m paying very close attention to how consulting effort is estimated Continue reading

9 new cloud features Amazon announced, and 1 it didn’t

The AWS Summit in Chicago this week kicks off an international tour of dozens of Summits from New York to Tokyo this year, culminating with AWS re:Invent in December. At today’s conference Amazon Web Services GM of Product Strategy Matt Wood announced new features for the cloud platform.But one thing that was not officially discussed has been a rumored product that could give Amazon partner reason for concern.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: AWS Exec on competing with Google and Microsoft; the next big thing in the cloud| 10 big announcements from Google’s cloud conference +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Developing OpenSwitch With Linux VM/OS X Host

OpenSwitch on Mac

Note: This article was originally published here.

One of the purposes when we designed the build system in OpenSwitch, was to make it possible to develop on as many environments as possible. If you have some background with developing networking firmware, the typical developer love to have this VM where everything works perfectly, but makes it impossible to work in your laptop at 30000 feet. This is not really a sin (as long as you can have the VM hosted in your machine), but the problem is that usually is some IT team on charge of the VMs setup, and the deployment is not handled by some automated/version-controlled code.

So for OpenSwitch, we aimed to at least document the requirements and steps for manual setup of your environment. You can read this page to get your Linux machine to ready it for OpenSwitch development.

So, why to write an article about my particular setup? Well, I’m a Mac user, so in this article I’m going to detail my setup using a OS X host with a Linux VM. This provides some nice tricks that makes your workflow easier if you are using a similar setup. I will also explain Continue reading

70% off Pop-Tech Magnetic Cell Phone Dashboard Mount – Deal Alert

The Pop-Tech magnetic dashboard mount is a very simple, minimalistically designed mount that uses a strong magnet instead of clips or cradles to hold your phone securely in place, even on bumpy roads. The unit works with most major cell phones, and thanks to a steel ball allows you to rotate your device 360 degrees to adapt to most surfaces and angles. It averages 5 out of 5 stars from over 90 reviewers (read reviews). With a list price of $39.99, the current 70% discount on Amazon put this unit at just $11.99. If you're looking for a simple to use and unobtrusive mount, this item may be worth considering at its current price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New AWS service helps companies to move their apps to the cloud

A new Amazon cloud service announced Tuesday could help companies with legacy applications have an easier time taking the leap to the cloud. Amazon Web Services General Manager Matt Wood announced the new Application Discovery Service, which will allow companies to easily analyze legacy applications running on their data centers. It will help companies start the migration of their application data up to the cloud, and then work with one of Amazon's partners to get their applications running in AWS.The service lets users identify their applications and the infrastructure dependencies of those applications and then measure a performance baseline of those applications operating on-premises before companies consider moving them to the cloud. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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