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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Nvidia launched its GPU Technology Conference with a mix of hardware and software news, all of it centered around AI.

The first big hardware announcement is the BlueField-3 network data-processing unit (DPU) designed to offload network processing tasks from the CPU. BlueField comes from  Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition, and is a SmartNIC fintelligent-networking card.

BlueField-3 has double the number of Arm processor cores as the prior generation product as well as more accelerators in general and can run workloads up to eight times faster than the prior generation. BlueField-3 can accelerate network workloads across the cloud and on premises for high-performance computing and AI workloads in a hybrid setting.

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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.

“Tickled pink” is Bob Metcalfe’s reaction to his latest accolade – the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award for inventing and commercializing Ethernet. The award was announced today and will be presented at a ceremony June 10 in San Francisco.

With his trademark sense of humor, Metcalfe says, “It’s a big surprise and a delight. I’ve received other awards in the past so I’m familiar with the notion that I have a new obligation to behave myself and live up to the standard of the award and be a role model based on that.”

The award carries a $1 million prize. “My wife suggests I spend it on her,” Metcalfe quipped, before adding that he hasn’t worked out the details but will probably pour most of it into his family foundation (after he fills up his boat with diesel fuel).

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Arista Networks has taken its first direct step into WAN routing with new software, hardware and services, an enterprise-class system designed to link critical resources with core data-center and campus networks.

The package, called the Arista WAN Routing System ties together three new components—enterprise-class routing hardware, software for its CloudVision management platform called Pathfinder, and the ability to set up neutral peering points called Transit Hubs. This trio enables setting up carrier-neutral and cloud-adjacent facilities to provide self-healing and path-optimization links across core, aggregation, and cloud networking interconnects, according to Doug Gourlay, vice president and general manager of Arista’s Cloud Networking Software group in a blog about the new package.

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Oracle is partnering with Nvidia to offer a new AI supercomputing service, dubbed DGX Cloud and available immediately, using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Supercluster.

“OCI has excellent performance. They have a two-tier computing fabric and management network," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during his keynote at the company’s annual GTC conference on Tuesday.

Nvidia is working with other cloud providers to provide similar services, but Oracle is its first partner to go live with an offering.

 "Nvidia's CX7 along with Oracle’s non-blocking remote direct access memory (RDMA) forms the computing fabric," Huang said. "And Bluefield 3 will be the infrastructure processor for the management network. The combination is a state-of-the-art DGX AI supercomputer that can be offered as a multitenant cloud service.”

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Linux includes some useful commands for counting when it comes to text files. This post examines some of the options for counting lines and words and making changes that might help you see what you want.

Counting lines

Counting lines in a file is very easy with the wc command. Use a command like that shown below, and you'll get a quick response.

$ wc -l myfile 132 myfile 

What the wc command is actually counting is the number of newline characters in a file. So, if you had a single-line file with no newline character at the end, it would tell you the file has 0 lines,

The wc -l command can also count the lines in any text that is piped to it. In the example below, wc -l is counting the number of files and directories in the current directory.

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By: Dorothy Stanley, Fellow and Head, Wireless Standards Strategy, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Wi-Fi systems are so ubiquitous indoors that location-based services are a natural extension. Retail analytics, indoor navigation, and high-value asset tracking (such as medical devices in health care) are a just a few of the use cases that organizations are deploying using Wi-Fi location-based services to improve business outcomes. In this post, I’ll delve into the evolution of Wi-Fi location-based services and give you a preview of where the standards are taking us and how your organization can take advantage of them.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced its intent to acquire OpsRamp, an IT operations management (ITOM) services provider, for an undisclosed sum as it looks to boost its GreenLake capabilities.

ITOM software and services are used to manage enterprise IT — monitoring capacity, performance and availability of infrastructure as well as computing, networking, and application resources.

San Jose-headquartered OpsRamp, which was founded in 2014 by Raju Chekuri and Varma Kunaparaju, offers an AIOps platform that specializes in monitoring, automating and managing IT infrastructure, cloud resources, workloads and applications for hybrid and multicloud environments.  

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The ninth season of Formula E World Championship racing is under way, with events slated this spring everywhere from Berlin to Jakarta to Portland, Oregon. Formula E has all of the thrills and spills of IndyCar or F1 racing—sleek aerodynamic vehicles, talented drivers, spirited competition. But there’s one key difference: the cars are electric.

In traditional auto racing, the skills of the driver are certainly important, but so is the strategy of when to make a pit stop for fuel and tires as well as the real-time communication between driver and pit crew. Similarly, in Formula E the driver is the star of the show, but data analytics running in the background plays an important role.

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Organizations worldwide are digitizing their products, services, and operations and moving applications to the cloud as quickly as possible. This forced—though often not well-planned— acceleration to the cloud is happening for a number of reasons, both internally and externally driven.

IT leaders within organizations are pushing the “go digital” movement because they know it can lead to improvements in product innovation, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

As for external drivers of this digital push, the recent past has the COVID-19 pandemic with the hybrid workforce as the most obvious one. However, there have also been dynamic business issues such as responding to board-of-directors directives or the specter of increased competition that have compelled organizations to ratchet up the use of the cloud to better defend and acquire market share.

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Microsoft investment in ChatGPT doesn’t just involve money sunk into its maker, OpenAI, but a massive hardware investment in data centers as well which shows that for now, AI solutions are just for the very top tier companies.

The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI dates back to 2019, when Microsoft invested $1 billion in the AI developer. It upped the ante in January with the investment of an additional $10 billion.

But ChatGPT has to run on something, and that is Azure hardware in Microsoft data centers. How much has not been disclosed, but according to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft had already spent “several hundred million dollars” in hardware used to train ChatGPT.

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Palo Alto Networks has added a variety of new features to its SASE and SD-WAN packages to help enterprises streamline network operations and better secure distributed WAN resources.

The updates center around new automation capabilities in Palo Alto’s Prisma SASE, IoT support for its Prisma SD-WAN, and a new connector for its zero-trust offering. 

Coined by research firm Gartner, secure access service edge (SASE) refers to a network architecture that integrates SD-WAN and security functionality in a unified cloud service.

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For many employees, the traditional workplace has evolved over the past 20+ years into today’s work-from-anywhere (WFA) environment. And recently, this evolution—with a boost from 2020’s global pandemic shutdowns—has accelerated at breakneck speed. Currently, many organizations and their IT cybersecurity teams are struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

While IT leadership is desperately trying to provide consistent support and protection for their WFA people, there’s never been a more opportune time for cybercriminals to take advantage of the new challenges, vulnerabilities, and expansion of the attack surface. Evidence of the increase in cyberattacks can be found in a recent global survey commissioned by Fortinet for a WFA study.

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A new deal between Dell and colocation services provider Cyxtera will enable enterprises to access Dell’s PowerEdge infrastructure for bare-metal deployments in Cyxtera facilities.

“Bare metal” cloud services means you get the hardware with no software loaded. Typically, a cloud services provider offers an operating system, usually Linux, and accompanying infrastructure. With bare metal, you just get CPU cores, memory, networking and storage but no OS. You provide your own environment.

Under the deal, enterprises will be able to deploy Dell hardware through Cyxtera’s enterprise bare-metal service, an on-demand offering that connects an enterprise’s existing on-premises infrastructure with the colocation environment.

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To schedule a command or script to run at some particular time, the at command is perfect and provides many options for specifying the time you want it to run. It will set the task up to be run whenever you specify, and you can view the scheduled tasks or even change your mind and cancel one of them as you see fit.

The at command differs from cron in that it sets up a command or script to run only once, while cron allows you to set up commands or scripts to be run on a specified schedule – whether every day, once a week, a couple times a month or even just once a year.

at command syntax

Using the at command is relatively easy, though it has a lot of options, particularly on how you specify the time a task should be run. If you specify a time like shown below, the task will be set up to be run the next time you reach 15:27 (3:27 PM), whether that's today or tomorrow.

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There's a rumbling in the cloud as network professionals increasingly seek to reclaim what they believe is their rightful place in the enterprise management hierarchy.

Network knowledge is now widespread within many other IT disciplines. "This means it's now sometimes easy for other teams to assume that they know all they need to know about networking, so they don't need to bother the network team," observes Josh Stephens, CTO of multi-cloud network automation provider BackBox.

Network pros have unique perspectives.

When it comes to multicloud decision-making, IT, cloud, cybersecurity, and network professionals all bring different perspectives and talents to the table. "IT teams have a deep understanding of the organization's overall technology, while cloud teams have expertise in cloud-based technology solutions, and cybersecurity teams have a thorough understanding of [cloud] security risks," says Dan Dulac, vice president of solutions strategy at network infrastructure provider Extreme Networks. Combining the insights of these experts, along with network professionals, is the best way for organizations to make informed decisions about their multicloud strategy, he says.

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Aruba Networks, Microsoft Azure and open-source vendor reelyActive have teamed-up to make it easier to bring IoT device data to cloud applications.

The package, Aruba IoT Transport for Azure, brings together three separate components to make it work:

• Aruba Access points that incorporate both Wi-Fi and IoT radios to serve mobile connectivity, connect to IoT devices, and function as embedded IT-to-IoT gateways simultaneously and securely.
• HPE Aruba Networking IoT Transport for Azure service that encodes IoT-device data streamed through the access points into a format compatible with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, which centrally ingests, provisions, and manages device data.
• reelyActive Pareto Anywhere for Microsoft Azure a new free open-source converter that reformats IoT data and units of measurement such as temperature and power into a universal format compatible with Microsoft analytics, Power BI and other Azure applications. The tool abstracts the original data format so that the data seen by applications are intelligible, consistent streams of immediately consumable data in recognizable units of measurement. Azure applications can directly consume data from a heterogeneous mix of BLE, 800MHz and 900MHz EnOcean specialized IoT devices that plug into the USB port on HPE Aruba Networking access points without a dedicated on-premises gateway.

In a nutshell, reelyActive’s open-source data converter lets IoT device data stream securely from Aruba Wi-Fi access points to the Microsoft Azure cloud where Microsoft applications such as Power BI and third-party applications can utilize the data.  

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The need for speed in the data center has never been greater, as data sets for AI and machine learning grow exponentially. Enterprises also need bandwidth to move increasingly large data sets, and security to protect data in transit. To that end, three vendors have announced new capabilities in the high-speed networking game. So, let’s run them down.

Intel launches Agilex 7 FPGAs with F-Tile

Intel has introduced its latest FPGA-based networking processor, the Agilex 7 with F-Tile. This PAM4 and NRZ dual-mode serial interface tile can deliver up to 116 Gbps and hardened 400 GbE intellectual property. This is double the bandwidth per channel of the previous generation of Intel FPGAs with reduced power consumption.

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By Gabriel Gomane, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Recently, organizations have increasingly adopted SD-WAN to modernize their network and streamline network connections between branch offices and headquarters. The key driver has been the acceleration of digital transformation and the move of applications to the cloud. To enable this transformation, a modernized network is critical to support multi-cloud architectures, improve security and agility. A poor network infrastructure could limit digitization efforts and prevent IT departments from aligning to strategic goals.

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Flash storage vendor Vast Data has released what it claims is its biggest software release, updating and adding new features around data catalogs that will allow enterprises to tag data with user-defined information and to query datasets that meld structured, unstructured and semi-structured data.

Vast has actually announced two revisions to its software, 4.6 and 4.7. The software itself has no formal name, just a version number. Version 4.6, available now, is a major release, and 4.7, available this spring, will be a minor release, according to Steve Pruchniewski, director of product marketing at VAST. 

“Major feature releases are core to the product's evolution, where minor feature releases typically contain bug fixes and holdovers from previous feature releases,” Pruchniewski said.

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Everyone says they want the best network, but there’s not much agreement on how to achieve it. Do you go for best of breed in your equipment, or maybe for three vendors per product area, or maybe open white-box networks? A bit over three-quarters of enterprises said in 2020 that open networks and white boxes would give them best of breed options, but what’s happened since then seems like a blast from the past, vendor-wise.

Let’s start with an interesting truth. Well over 95% of established enterprises that can look back to the origins of their networks say they started off with a single-vendor network. Enterprises who launched within the last five years (which are very few) account for almost all those who didn’t start off with one vendor. If you think about it, this is logical, because starting off with networking is daunting enough without adding in the complication of network integration and the management of multiple sources of technology.

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This is an important question, with a simple answer: it depends. And the main thing it depends on is, why an organization wants an SD-WAN in the first place. Answering that goes a long way to answering the size question.

The baseline assumption is that the IT department sees a need for the organization to have a iprivate WAN, rather than every site communicating solely over the public internet.

This is not a trivial assumption any more. As little as a decade ago, it was standard to have a private WAN for even two or three locations, since they would most likely be sharing back-end services of some sort from a common data center. Today, no such assumption can be made. Many companies grow to have many sites without needing private connectivity among them because everything they do is hosted in one or another external cloud. And, as some organizations migrate services out of data centers, they find that they need private WAN links at fewer sites or only at their data centers.

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