Japan will increase the financial support it's giving to semiconductor maker Rapidus — established with the aim of making cutting-edge, 2-nanometer chips — in order to further support domestic production, according to Japanese trade and industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura.

“The government is ready to continue and beef up financial support to the company,” Nishimura said in an interview with Bloomberg. He added that the plan will require the government to invest trillions of yen in the project.

The Tokyo-based manufacturer was established in 2022 with the aim of making 2nm chips in Japan by 2025. To date, it has received ￥70 billion (US$532 million) from the Japanese government, in addition to investments from Toyota, Sony, and telecom giant NT&T.

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Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify arguments when you prepare a script and want to make sure that it will do just what you intend it to do – even when someone running it makes a mistake.

Displaying the script name, etc.

To display the name of a script when it’s run, use a command like echo $0. While anyone running a script will undoubtedly know what script they just invoked, using the script name in a usage command can help remind them what command and arguments they should be providing.

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Secure access service edge (SASE) has gotten a lot of attention during the past two years from enterprises interested in improving their security posture, specifically as part of an effort to adopt Zero Trust frameworks.

That puts a lot of energy behind cybersecurity initiatives, but what about the network?

The fact is, the network is central to Zero Trust and to SASE. When coined by analysts, the concept of SASE rested on several functional pillars including SD-WAN, secure Web gateway, cloud-access security broker, next-generation firewall, and Zero Trust Network Access. SD-WAN is the most foundational, though—so fundamental that, whereas a SASE solution might legitimately omit other pillars and still be classed as SASE, omitting the SD-WAN turns it into something else: a secure service edge solution.

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A new white paper from Google details the company’s use of optical circuit switches in its machine learning training supercomputer, saying that the TPU v4 model with those switches in place offers improved performance and more energy efficiency than general-use processors.

Google’s Tensor Processing Units — the basic building blocks of the company’s AI supercomputing systems — are essentially ASICs, meaning that their functionality is built in at the hardware level, as opposed to the general use CPUs and GPUs used in many AI training systems. The white paper details how, by interconnecting more than 4,000 TPUs through optical circuit switching, Google has been able to achieve speeds 10 times faster than previous models while consuming less than half as much energy.

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UK communications regulator Ofcom has announced a provisional plan to refer Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft to the country's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over “significant concerns” that they are allegedly harming competition in online cloud services and abusing their market positions with practices that make interoperability difficult.

A market study carried out by Ofcom has provisionally identified features and practices that make it difficult for customers to switch or use multiple cloud suppliers, the regulator wrote on its website, adding that it was “particularly concerned” about the practices of Amazon and Microsoft because of their market position.

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Cisco has amped-up its support for 800G capacity networks with an eye toward helping large enterprises, cloud and service providers handle the expected demand from AI, video, and 5G services.

At the core of its recently developments is a new 28.8Tbps / 36 x 800G line card and improved control software for its top-of-the-line Cisco 8000 Series routers.

The 28.8T line card is built on Cisco’s Silicon One P100 ASIC, and brings 800G capability to the modular Cisco 8000 Series Router, which can scale to 230Tbps in a 16 RU form factor with the eight-slot Cisco 8808, and up to 518Tbps in the 18-slot chassis, according to Cisco.

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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.

ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.

HP Enterprise this week introduced what it calls “the future of storage,” an array of new hardware and software supported and sold through its GreenLake service that leases hardware on a consumption basis.

HPE's new Alletra Storage MP platforms are attached to an NVMe data fabric, delivering file or block storage using a controller that can be configured for either performance or capacity, HPE said. It breaks down into two service categories: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, which HPE promises scale-out block storage with a 100% data-availability guarantee, and HPE GreenLake for File Storage, which HPE claims will offer hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput.

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A software firm in Singapore claims it would cost more than $400 million over three years if it were to migrate from its existing colocation setup and move its workloads to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Notably, the firm runs a very compute-intensive environment, and high density computing can be very expensive to duplicate in cloud environments.

Ahrefs, which develops search engine optimization tools, made the $400 million claim in a March 9 blog post by one of the company’s data center operations executives, Efim Mirochnik. Mirochnik compared the cost of acquiring and running its 850 Dell servers in a colocation provider’s data center with the cost of running a similar configuration in AWS.

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Tighter integration between Fortinet's SASE and SD-WAN offerings is among the new features enabled by the latest version of the company's core operating system.

FortiOS version 7.4 also includes better automation across its Security Fabric environment, and improved management features.

FortiOS is the operating system for the FortiGate family hardware and virtual components, and it implements Fortinet Security Fabric and includes firewalling, access control, Zero Trust, and authentication in addition to managing SD-WAN, switching, and wireless services. 

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By: Sue Gillespie, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Wondering how a network switch helps an enterprise network get ready for the latest technologies like Wi-Fi 6/6E and securely connects new endpoints and applications – all while keeping stretched IT teams sane?

Network switches, often referred to as Ethernet switches, are certainly not the new kids on the block. Recent product and technology innovations have brought big operational efficiency gains, resiliency with always on performance, visibility with built-in analytics, and enhanced security capabilities. And when combined with unified cloud management, network switches create a unified infrastructure that’s simpler to manage and ready for challenges that lie ahead.

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Oracle on Tuesday said it is planning to add a second cloud region in Singapore to meet the growing demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.

“Our upcoming second cloud region in Singapore will help meet the tremendous upsurge in demand for cloud services in South East Asia,” Garrett Ilg, president, Japan & Asia Pacific at Oracle, said in a statement.

Public cloud services market across Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, is expected to reach $153.6 billion in 2026 from $53.4 billion in 2021, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23.5%, according to a report from IDC.

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Within months of adding a second region in Melbourne, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said it would invest $8.93 billion (AU$13.2 billion) to spruce up infrastructure across its cloud regions in Australia through 2027.

The majority share of the investment, about $7.45 billion, will be invested in the company’s cloud region in Sydney through the defined time period. The remaining $1.49 billion will be used to expand data center infrastructure in Melbourne, the company said.

The $8.93 billion investment includes a $495 million investment in network infrastructure to extend AWS cloud and edge infrastructure across Australia, including partnerships with telecom partners to facilitate high-speed fiber connectivity between Availability Zones, AWS said.

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IBM has significantly reduced the size of some its Big Iron z16 mainframes and given them a new operating system that emphasizes AI and edge computing.

The new configurations—which include Telum processor-based, 68-core IBM z16 Single Frame and Rack Mounted models and a new IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 and LinuxONE Rockhopper Rack Mount boxes—are expected to offer customers better data-center configuration options while reducing energy consumption. Both new Rack Mount boxes are 18U compared to the current smallest Single Frame models, which are 42U.

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The severity of data-center outages appears to be falling, while the cost of outages continues to climb. Power failures are “the biggest cause of significant site outages.” Network failures and IT system glitches also bring down data centers, and human error often contributes.

Those are some of the problems pinpointed in the most recent Uptime Institute data-center outage report, which analyzes types of outages, their frequency, and what they cost both in money and consequences.

Unreliable data is an ongoing problem

Uptime cautions that data relating to outages should be treated skeptically given the lack of transparency of some outage victims and the quality of reporting mechanisms. “Outage information is opaque and unreliable,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime, during a briefing about Uptime’s Annual Outages Analysis 2023.

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Recording the commands that you run on the Linux command line can be useful for two important reasons. For one, the recorded commands provide a way to review your command line activity, which is extremely helpful if something didn't work as expected and you need to take a closer look. In addition, capturing commands can make it easy to repeat the commands or to turn them into scripts or aliases for long-term reuse. This post examines two ways that you can easily record and reuse commands.

Command history

The history command makes it extremely easy to record commands that you enter on the command line because it happens automatically. The only thing you might want to check is the setting that determines how many commands are retained and, therefore, how long they're going to stay around for viewing and reusing. The command below will display your command history buffer size. If it's 1,000 like that shown, it will retain the last 1,000 commands that you entered.

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According to the Fortinet Work-from-Anywhere Global Study, 60% of respondents continue to accommodate employees who work from home and 55% have a hybrid work strategy.  It’s clear that most organizations will continue to operate a hybrid network that combines a traditional infrastructure with a cloud-based system well into the future. But this increase in work-from-anywhere has also introduced new risks. According to the study, over the past 2 to 3 years, 62% of companies had a breach that was at least partially attributable to vulnerabilities related to work-from-anywhere. Threat actors continue to exploit security gaps arising from remote work.

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Google is adding a second cloud availability region in the Middle East, at Doha, to cater to demand from Qatar’s government and enterprises in the region, it said on Friday.

The new cloud region will help the Qatari government achieve its Qatar National Vision 2030 plan to sustain development and provide a high standard of living for its people, according to Google Cloud’s country manager for Qatar, Ghassan Kosta.

“This new region is a strong step towards building regional capacity that meets the needs of the Qatari digital economy, from availability and data residency, to digital sovereignty and sustainability,” Kosta wrote in a blog post.

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Fire is to blame for a small but significant number of data-center outages including a March 28 fire that caused severe damage to a data center in France, and an analysis of global incidents highlights ongoing concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries and their risk of combustion.

The use of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries in data centers is growing. Now commonly used in uninterruptible power supplies, they are expected to account for 38.5% of the data-center battery market by 2025, up from 15% in 2020, according to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

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Kyndryl, the managed IT services provider that spun out of IBM, has announced layoffs that could affect its own internal IT services.

“We are eliminating some roles globally — a small percentage — to become more efficient and competitive,” said a Kyndryl spokesperson, without giving the exact number of employees affected due to the layoffs.

“These actions will enable us to focus our investments in areas that directly benefit our customers and position Kyndryl for profitable growth,” the spokesperson said, adding that the company was in the process of undergoing transformation to streamline and simplify its processes and systems.

Bloomberg first reported about the layoffs.

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Intel has announced a new processor with 144 cores designed for simple data-center tasks in a power-efficient manner.

Called Sierra Forest, the Xeon processor is part of the Intel E-Core (Efficiency Core) lineup that that forgoes advanced features such as AVX-512 that require more powerful cores. AVX-512 is Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512, “a set of new instructions that can accelerate performance for workloads and usages such as scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence (AI)/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and audio/video processing, cryptography and data compression,” according to Intel.

Sierra Forest signals a shift for Intel that splits its data-center product line into two branches, the E-Core and the P-Core (Performance Core), which is the traditional Xeon data-center design that uses high-performance cores.

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With data center servers running hotter and hotter, the interest in liquid cooling is ramping up with vendors announcing servers that feature self-contained systems and businesses with expertise in related technologies jumping in.

Liquid cooling is more efficient than traditional air cooling, and Supermicro is using it to cool the hottest processors in a new server designed as a platform to develop and run AI software.

The SYS-751GE-TNRT-NV1 server runs hot. It features four NVIDIA A100 GPUs that draw 300W each and are liquid-cooled by a self-contained system.

Some liquid cooling systems rely on water that is piped into the data center. The self-contained system doesn’t require that, so it makes the servers more widely deployable.
The system is quiet, too; its running noise level is 30dB.

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By: Michael Tennefoss, VP of IoT and Strategic Partnerships, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Moving IoT workloads to the cloud, and securely exchanging data between cloud IoT services and both legacy and new IoT devices, can entail months of custom engineering. Most IoT vendors send sensor and actuator data in non-interoperable or proprietary formats that must be reformatted to make them usable by cloud applications. Additionally, legacy IoT devices lack modern cybersecurity mechanisms and cloud-compatible software stacks. Replacing legacy devices with new ones is cost prohibitive, while the engineering work to make IoT data payloads usable can be significant. And these expenses may be recurring, e.g., when new IoT devices from different vendors are added over time, post-acquisition of a new company, or following a site refresh.

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A trend to extend the lifespan of servers beyond the typical three- to five-year range has companies such as Microsoft looking to add a few years of use to hardware that would otherwise be retired.

The latest company to adopt this strategy is Paris-based Scaleway, a cloud services provider that's sharing details about how it plans to get a decade of use out of its servers through a mix of reuse and repair.

Scaleway decided the carbon footprint of new servers is just too large – server manufacturing alone accounts for 15% to 30% of each machine’s carbon impact. Reusing existing machines, rather than buying new ones, could significantly reduce e-waste.

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With the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), predictive network technology alerts administrators to possible network issues as early as possible and offers potential solutions.

The AI and ML algorithms used in predictive network technology have become critical, says Bob Hersch, a principal with Deloitte Consulting and US lead for platforms and infrastructure. "Predictive network technology leverages artificial neural networks and utilizes models to analyze data, learn patterns, and make predictions," he says. "AI and ML significantly enhance observability, application visibility, and the ability to respond to network and other issues."

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Some organizations’ important data may be going unprotected if an application on someone’s mobile device creates it and then it sits there without being backed up. If the device is lost or stolen, the data is gone.

You might think it’s easy to solve this problem by installing a backup app on the phone and using it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

The security models of Android and iOS devices allow each application to see only the data created by that application; therefore, you cannot install a backup application and have it back up data of other applications. The only way around this is to root the phone, but that’s a problem if the employee is using their personal phone for work. Most people are uncomfortable rooting their phone, especially just to satisfy their boss’s backup needs.

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Enterprise networking and application security company F5 is rolling out two new features to help businesses simplify different management tasks for today’s complex, multicloud environments.

The core problem with multicloud is heightened complexity and its associated costs in management headaches and security weaknesses. Distributed deployments, the company said in its announcement of the new capabilities this week, decrease visibility into the workings of complex systems, making it easier for security holes to go unnoticed.

F5’s new Distributed Cloud App Connect and Distributed Cloud Network are aimed squarely at addressing those problems via APIs designed to knit various applications and services together in a single-pane-of-glass management console.

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David Heinemeier Hansson, co-owner and CTO at SaaS vendor 37signals, is quitting the cloud and wants everyone to know about it. In a series of blog posts, Hansson has challenged the cloud business model, rebutted assumptions associated with cloud computing, and argued that the consolidation of power among hyperscalers is not necessarily a good thing.

It might seem counterintuitive for a SaaS vendor to be publicly taking pot shots at the cloud and suggesting that other companies re-consider their cloud investments.  Has Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, gone off the rails?

Hansson’s argument is simple:  By pulling server workloads off the Amazon AWS infrastructure, purchasing new hardware from Dell, and running his business from a colocation facility, he will save millions of dollars.

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As commercial availability of quantum computers moves closer to reality, researchers and vendors are investing in efforts to create quantum-secured networks.

Quantum networks use entangled photons or other particles to ensure secure communications, but they are not, in and of themselves, used for general communication. Quantum networks are expensive and slow. And though nobody can listen in on the messages without breaking the entanglement of the photons, hackers can still try to attack the systems before the messages get into the quantum network, or after they leave it.

Instead, quantum networks today are largely used for quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses quantum mechanics to secure the transmission of symmetric encryption keys. According to a June report by quantum industry analyst firm IQT research, the worldwide market for quantum networks will near $1.5 billion in 2027 and grow to more than $8 billion by 2031, and QKD will be the main revenue driver, followed by a rise in networks that use emerging quantum repeaters to connect quantum computers together and quantum sensor networks.

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