Open source — the great equalizer.

Technology is a great equalizer and the open source movement has played a huge role in making this true and accelerating the process. Open source levels the playing field for many. Gone are the days where you had to get a job or invest to learn a technology. Open source and Linux opened up access and opportunities to learn and innovate.

We live in an era where hardware and software architectures are powered by open source technologies. Modern system architectures (distributed, cloud native and others) are built with open source technologies and many others continue to move to open technologies (open networking, open Firmware, Linux BIOS just to name a few). Open source has been the driving force in commoditizing hardware in many markets. Open communities like OCP are taking this to the next level.

Open source platforms like github and gitlab have promoted open source development and made it easier to build open source communities and ecosystems. Existing open source communities fuel new open communities. Success stories from disaggregated and open server operating systems fueled the open networking revolution leading to the birth of open network operating systems. Investing in open source and having open source development centers are Continue reading

Veeam Deepens Microsoft Teams Backup, AWS Protection

Veeam kicked off VeeamON 2020 and its "Act II” with a trove of products for Microsoft Teams, AWS,...

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Daily Roundup: Verizon Taps Cisco

Verizon tapped Cisco for a NFV services push; HPE's Neri contracted COVID-19; and Cisco updated its...

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What Does a Post-COVID World Look Like in Small Island Developing States?

This blog post was first published by DiploFoundation.

“We need to ensure we digitalize all of our business processes as to enable the effective digital transformation of our governments, businesses, and educational institutions so that the disruptive solutions brought by the global pandemic, including remote work, digital health, e-learning, and fintech, are collectively recognized as a pivot point in our history.”

There… I’ve done it… I’ve met the challenge of how many currently fashionable buzzwords and jargon I can stuff into a single sentence.

Everything we’ve been reading about dealing with the issues the global economy will face in the post-COVID-19 world tends to sound something like what I’ve written above. I can’t promise you that I will not touch upon these topics and mention these buzzwords again, but I do hope I can bring a certain degree of pragmatism to the conversation, especially given that I hail from Trinidad and Tobago, a twin-island country in the Caribbean, categorized as a small island developing state (SIDS) along with approximately 50 odd others scattered across our various oceans.

SIDS economies are generally characterized by their dependence on earning revenue from the exportation of either raw materials or partially-finished goods extracted Continue reading

Intel Goes All In On AI With Latest Xeon Scalable, FPGA

AI continues to be a core component of Intel's portfolio. The third-generation Xeon Scalable chips...

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Ambient ‘T-rays’ could help power IoT devices

Most things with a measurable temperature – human beings going about their daily routines, inert objects – generate terahertz waves, radiation that is sandwiched between infrared and microwave on the electromagnetic spectrum.So far, these waves haven’t proved very useful, but now scientists at MIT are trying to harness them with devices that use them to generate electricity that could charge the batteries of cellphones, laptops, even medical implants.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] If successful, the charging devices would passively gather the waves and generate DC current at room temperature, something that hasn’t been accomplished before. Previous devices that can turn terahertz waves – T-rays – to electricity only work in ultracold environments, according to an MIT News article about the project.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Ethernet Briefings in April 1978 by Bob Metcalfe

If you want some Ethernet history, 2 hours of instruction from 1978.

The post Video: Ethernet Briefings in April 1978 by Bob Metcalfe appeared first on EtherealMind.

AT&T Clarifies Timeline for Nationwide 5G, SDN Control

The operator’s network guru clarified that AT&T will have a nationwide 5G network running on...

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HPE CEO Neri Contracts COVID-19, Says Show Will Go On

“Yesterday I tested positive for COVID-19,” Neri tweeted. “The good news is, I feel much...

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Amazon Melts Snow Line for Edge Deployments

Snowcone is now the smallest of AWS’ Snow family of physical devices that are designed to run...

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Cloudflare and Rackspace Technology Expand Partnership with Managed Services

Last year, Cloudflare announced the planned expansion of our partner program to help managed and professional service partners efficiently engage with Cloudflare and join us in our mission to help build a better Internet. We’ve been hard at work growing and expanding our partnerships with some amazing global teams that help us support digital transformation and security needs around the world, and today we’d like to highlight one of our Elite global partners, Rackspace Technology.

Today, we are announcing the expansion of our worldwide reseller partnership with Rackspace Technology to include a series of managed services offerings for Cloudflare. As a result, with Cloudflare Security, Performance, and Reliability with Rackspace Managed Services, customers will not only have access to and the scalability of Cloudflare’s global network and integrated cloud platform of security, performance, and reliability solutions but also benefit from a team of certified, enabled Rackspace experts to configure, onboard, and deploy Cloudflare solutions. Because more than 1 billion unique IP addresses pass through Cloudflare's global network every day, Cloudflare, together with its solutions providers, can build real-world intelligence on the communications occurring over the Internet, and how well they perform. We’ve enjoyed enabling their teams to leverage this Continue reading

Outburst: Presentation Tips for May 2020

After six weeks of virtual events, some ideas on content for your presentation because you are all getting it wrong.

The post Outburst: Presentation Tips for May 2020 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Cisco Pushes Full Stack Visibility Vision

"We have to realize that the metric by which IT will be measured is probably going to shift toward...

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Taking A Deep Dive Into “Cooper Lake” Xeon SP Processors

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Intel, the dominant maker of processors for servers on the planet, was rejiggering its product roadmaps behind the scenes in conjunction with its largest OEM partners as well the hyperscalers and large public cloud builders that drive about a third of its revenues these days. …

Taking A Deep Dive Into “Cooper Lake” Xeon SP Processors was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making Java Play Nice With Kubernetes

Java turned 25 years old in May, marking a quarter of a century in which it has consistently been one of the most widely used programming languages. …

Making Java Play Nice With Kubernetes was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.

Getting Unstructured Data Under Control

Data growth is the one exponential we can all relate to and will continue to grow into the future. …

Getting Unstructured Data Under Control was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Verizon Taps Cisco for NFV Services Push

The partnership enables Verizon to address Cisco-specific customer needs and provide an ecosystem...

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Why is there a “V” in SIGSEGV Segmentation Fault?

Another long night. I was working on my perfect, bug-free program in C, when the predictable thing happened:

$ clang skynet.c -o skynet
$ ./skynet.out 
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Oh, well... Maybe I'll be more lucky taking over the world another night. But then it struck me. My program received a SIGSEGV signal and crashed with "Segmentation Fault" message. Where does the "V" come from?

Did I read it wrong? Was there a "Segmentation Vault?"? Or did Linux authors make a mistake? Shouldn't the signal be named SIGSEGF?

I asked my colleagues and David Wragg quickly told me that the signal name stands for "Segmentation Violation". I guess that makes sense. Long long time ago, computers used to have memory segmentation. Each memory segment had defined length - called Segment Limit. Accessing data over this limit caused a processor fault. This error code got re-used by newer systems that used paging. I think the Intel manuals call this error "Invalid Page Fault". When it's triggered it gets reported to the userspace as a SIGSEGV signal. End of story.

Or is it?

Martin Levy pointed me to an ancient Version 6th UNIX documentation on "signal". This is Continue reading

Bridging Loops in Disaster Recovery Designs

One of the readers commenting the ideas in my Disaster Recovery and Failure Domains blog post effectively said “In an active/passive DR scenario, having L3 DCI separation doesn’t protect you from STP loop/flood in your active DC, so why do you care?”

He’s absolutely right - if you have a cold disaster recovery site, it doesn’t matter if it’s bombarded by a gazillion flooded packets per second… but how often do you have a cold recovery site?

Machine learning in Palo Alto firewalls adds new protection for IoT, containers

Palo Alto Networks has released next-generation firewall (NGFW) software that integrates machine learning to help protect enterprise traffic to and from hybrid clouds, IoT devices and the growing numbers of remote workers.The machine learning is built into the latest version of Palo Alto's firewall operating system – PAN 10.0 –  to prevent real-time signatureless attacks and to quickly identify new devices – in particular  IoT products – with behavior-based identification.To read this article in full, please click here