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…
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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

Dan Kaminsky Will Be Taking Your Questions At Our DNS Meetup Next Week In San Francisco

Our last DNS meetup was a packed house with Paul Mockapetris, the original inventor of DNS. We learned why DNS answers have a question count but always only one question, why underscores aren’t allowed in domain names, and the history of how DNS came to be.

Our next meetup is with the infamous Dan Kaminsky –– there’s even a DNS attack named after him, the Kaminsky attack. Dan is known for his work finding a core flaw in the Internet, and then leading the charge to repair it. He is an invited expert to the W3C, the guiding organization for the Web, and co-founded the cybersecurity firm White Ops. He is even one of the seven "key shareholders" able to restore the Internet's Domain Name System if necessary.

We’ll cover how Dan discovered the Kaminsky attack, the future of DNS and privacy, how to secure email with DNS, and what are the policy implications of governments allowing DNS blocking. It’s going to be a really great event - we can’t wait to see you there. The meetup is at Gandi’s headquarters: 121 2nd Street, San Francisco at 6PM PST on Tuesday, May 10th, 2016. To claim your spot, Continue reading

How to use advanced analytics to mitigate EHR data risks

Over the past seven years, the federal government has established a set of incentives and fines — carrots and sticks — to promote and expand the use of healthcare information technology, particularly the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems.In a recent report, PwC's Advanced Risk & Compliance Analytics practice found that due to the government's carrot and stick, EHR implementation initiatives usually concentrated on the core challenge of meeting tight timelines while managing costs. After all, these initiatives are often the largest projects these organizations undertake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to use advanced analytics to mitigate EHR data risks

Over the past seven years, the federal government has established a set of incentives and fines — carrots and sticks — to promote and expand the use of healthcare information technology, particularly the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems.In a recent report, PwC's Advanced Risk & Compliance Analytics practice found that due to the government's carrot and stick, EHR implementation initiatives usually concentrated on the core challenge of meeting tight timelines while managing costs. After all, these initiatives are often the largest projects these organizations undertake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s John Chambers shares Top 7 Mistakes Enterprises Make While Talking Drones

It looks as though Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers is really getting into this commercial drone stuff. We wrote in late March that the former longtime Cisco CEO had invested an undisclosed amount in a hot startup called Airware that promotes itself as providing "the operating system for commercial drones." Chambers, who also joined Airware's board, was quoted at the time saying: "The commercial drone industry is poised to throw many markets into transition." Now we see that Chambers was among the speakers kicking off this week's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's big Xponential 2016 conference in New Orleans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA, FAA showoff wireless aircraft communication technology

NASA said that for the first time it has demonstrated that a wireless  system can communicate – sending route options and weather information for example -- with a jet on the ground.NASA said it tested a demonstration system known as Aircraft Access to System Wide Information Management (SWIM), to wirelessly send aviation information to an FAA Bombardier Global 5000 test aircraft taxiing 60 to 70 miles per hour on the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport runway. They sent the information over a prototype wireless system called Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System, or AeroMACS, developed by Hitachi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA, FAA showoff wireless aircraft communication technology

NASA said that for the first time it has demonstrated that a wireless  system can communicate – sending route options and weather information for example -- with a jet on the ground.NASA said it tested a demonstration system known as Aircraft Access to System Wide Information Management (SWIM), to wirelessly send aviation information to an FAA Bombardier Global 5000 test aircraft taxiing 60 to 70 miles per hour on the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport runway. They sent the information over a prototype wireless system called Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System, or AeroMACS, developed by Hitachi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day

May the Fourth be with youImage by Flickr/Josh HallettMay 4 is International Star Wars Day, the unofficial holiday where we celebrate the Force, X-wings, Ewoks and women wearing their hair in the shape of their favorite breakfast pastries.  But how do you give your week that particular galaxy-far-far-away flavor? Some suggestions follow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Interop Dead?

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I’m at Interop this week talking all things networking with a great group of people. There are quite a few members of the community here presenting, listening and discussing. There’s a great exchange of ideas flowing back and forth. Yet one thing I keep hearing in quiet corners of the room is a hushed discussion of the continued viability of Interop as a conference. Is it time to write the Interop obituary?

Only Mostly Dead

Some of the arguments are as old as tech itself. People claim that getting vendors to interoperate today is an afterthought thanks to protocols like OSPF. All of the important bits in a network are standardized now. Use of APIs and other open technologies are driving vendors to play nice with each other. The need to show up in a faraway place and do the work has long passed.

There’s also the discussion around the bigger conferences out in the world. Vendor conferences like Cisco Live and VMworld draw tens of thousands. New product announcements are dropping left and right during these events. People also want to fracture into tool-specific events like OpenStack Summit or DockerCon. Or the various analyst events or company days that Continue reading

Mothers Day Miracle: How 1800Flowers uses the cloud to handle the holiday rush

For most retailers, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the holiday rush. For 1800Flowers, it’s Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.Complicating efforts in recent years has been the venerable online flower shop’s extended reach: The parent company acquired the Harry & David brand 18 months ago, which 1800Flowers CIO Arne Leap called a “watershed moment.”“We had a real need to change our order management to support omni-channel, and tie together our commerce platforms,” Leap said of the new combined companies.Through a partnership with IBM, 1800Flowers went to the cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 25 Mother's Day gifts with geek appeal +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NVLink Takes GPU Acceleration To The Next Level

One of the breakthrough moments in computing, which was compelled by necessity, was the advent of symmetric multiprocessor, or SMP, clustering to make two or more processors look and act, as far as the operating system and applications were concerned, as a single, more capacious processor. With NVLink clustering for GPUs and for lashing GPUs to CPUs, Nvidia is bringing something as transformative as SMP was for CPUs to GPU accelerators.

The NVLink interconnect has been in development for years, and is one of the “five miracles” that Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang said at the GPU Technology Conference …

NVLink Takes GPU Acceleration To The Next Level was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Silicon Photonics

Although photons of light dominate the long-distance information superhighways of the Internet, electrons remain the workhorses that move and process information at the local level. Visionaries have imagined for decades that power-efficient light-based communication would migrate to ever-shorter distances and eventually move onto silicon chips alongside transistors at the centimeter scale. -via the ACM

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Google turns on HTTPS for all blogspot blogs

All blogs hosted on Google's blogspot.com domain can now be accessed over an encrypted HTTPS connection. This puts more control into the hands of blog readers who value privacy.Google started offering users of its Blogger service the option to switch their blogspot.com sites to HTTPS in September, but now that setting was removed and all blogs received an HTTPS version that users can access.Instead of the "HTTPS Availability" option, blog owners can now use a setting called "HTTPS Redirect," which will redirect all visitors to the HTTPS version of their blogs automatically. If the setting is not used, users will still be able to access the non-encrypted HTTP version.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop: 12 killer (and free) tools for network engineers

LAS VEGAS -- Visibility is key to troubleshooting network woes, but getting such access can be expensive. To help out, a veteran networking pro shared with attendees of the Interop conference in Las Vegas his list of a dozen mostly free “killer” tools. Network Protocol Specialists owner Mike Pennacchi: Free tools can be customized to fit your needs “There are commercial tools that do most of these functions,” says Mike Pennacchi, owner and lead network analyst at Network Protocol Specialists. “If you don’t have any budget, this gives you the tools without spending a lot of money.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop: 12 killer (and free) tools for network engineers

LAS VEGAS -- Visibility is key to troubleshooting network woes, but getting such access can be expensive. To help out, a veteran networking pro shared with attendees of the Interop conference in Las Vegas his list of a dozen mostly free “killer” tools. Network Protocol Specialists owner Mike Pennacchi: Free tools can be customized to fit your needs “There are commercial tools that do most of these functions,” says Mike Pennacchi, owner and lead network analyst at Network Protocol Specialists. “If you don’t have any budget, this gives you the tools without spending a lot of money.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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