The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority Monday approved the proposed $61 billion megamerger between Broadcom and VMware, saying that the deal would not substantially affect innovation or harm the ability of rivals to compete against the merged company.

While Broadcom said that it expects to receive all regulatory approvals necessary to close the deal VMware deal by the end of October, it acknowledged that it is still working with some authorities to obtain consent, and said in a filing with the US Securities Exchange Commission on Monday that it has agreed with VMware to extend the "Outside Date" for the deadline to conclude the deal. The new date was not immediately specified by Broadcom.

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Bugs emerged earlier this month in Intel and AMD processors that affect both client and server processors over multiple generations. Fortunately, the bugs were found some time ago and researchers kept it quiet while fixes were developed.

Google researchers found the Intel bug known as Downfall (CVE-2022-40982) and reported it to Intel more than a year ago, so both parties had plenty of time to work things out. The Downfall bug exploits a flaw in the "Gather" instruction that affected Intel CPUs use to grab information from multiple places in a system's memory. A Google researcher created a proof-of-concept exploit that could steal encryption keys and other kinds of data from other users on a given server.

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One of the first things Linux users need to learn is how to move around the Linux file system and, eventually, how to make it even easier to move around the file system. This post describes both the basic commands you need and some smart moves to make navigating easier.

Absolute and relative paths

Before we get moving, it’s important to understand the difference between absolute paths (like /home/jdoe) and relative paths (like images/photos and ..). Absolute paths always begin with a / that, of course, represents the base of the file system. If the specified path doesn’t start with a /, it’s relative. Here are some examples of both relative and absolute paths:

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You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities:

• Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time
• Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time)
• Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time)
• Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time)

Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.

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If you’re looking to add more certifications to your resume, don’t forget about wireless. Whether you’re just starting your IT career, have been in IT before Wi-Fi was a thing, or even if you have a non-IT position, there are certifications to help prove your wireless knowledge and skills.

For starters, there are vendor-neutral certifications from Certified Wireless Network Professionals (CWNP), one of the most popular programs in the wireless world. These are great if you aren’t already loyal to a networking brand. And even if you already have a favorite brand, these go deeper into the 802.11 standards and radio frequency (RF) technology without all the proprietary details and brand specifics.

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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (such as unified communications-as-a-service) is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of interesting events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update. Additional details available here.

Internet report for August 7-13

ThousandEyes reported 171 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of August 7-13. That’s the same as the week prior. Specific to the U.S., outages decreased from 63 to 59, down 5%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

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The Linux more command is a fairly obvious command to use when you want to scan through a text file a screen at a time, but there still might be quite a few things you don’t know about this command. For one thing, you don’t have to start at the top of the file if you don’t want to. Add an argument like +20 and you will start with the 20th line in the file with a command like that shown below.

$ man +20 myfile 

Note that the more command automatically adjusts itself to the number of lines in your terminal window. In addition, the last line displayed will not be a line from the file by default, but an indication of what percentage of the text has been displayed thus far – at least if there’s more text to follow. It will look like this:

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Micron has introduced memory expansion modules that support the 2.0 generation of Compute Express Link (CXL) and come with up to 256GB of DRAM running over a PCIe x8 interface.

CXL is an open interconnect standard with wide industry support that is meant to be a connection between machines allowing for the direct sharing of contents of memory. It is built on top of PCI Express for coherent memory access between a CPU and a device, such as a hardware accelerator, or a CPU and memory.

PCIe is normally used in point-to-point communications, such as SSD to memory, while CXL will eventually support one-to-many communication. So far, CXL is capable of simple point-to-point communication only.

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Networking giant Cisco’s final quarter of fiscal 2023 was a surprising success, as an easing of the supply chain crisis enabled the company to fulfill back orders and increase quarterly revenue by 16% year over year, reaching a total of $15.2 billion.

Cisco’s said that total software-related revenue was up 17% year on year, and revenue from software subscription services rose 20%. That’s part of what the company refers to as its business model transformation, as slack overall demand for collaboration technology resulting from the easing of the pandemic creates the need for Cisco to target new types of business.

Net income for the quarter jumped 41% year over year to $4 billion.

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By: Gayle Levin, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Wireless at HPE Aruba Networking.

Whether we work from home every day or just occasionally, we’ve grown accustomed to blaming the network for poor performance. There’s an ethos of “we just have to deal with it because it’s part of working remotely.” But dealing with it day after day gets old. That’s why I’m so excited about the new HPE Aruba Networking Access Points, designed to make working from home more efficient. They’re designed to conveniently fit on the desktop and can be managed using HPE Aruba Networking Central’s capabilities. Central includes dashboards that provide WAN health insights, enabling IT to troubleshoot issues whether they are due to the corporate network, applications, or even public ISPs.

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Data replication has stood the test of time, providing organizations with a reliable means of safeguarding critical information for decades. Replication creates redundant copies of vital data, ensuring its availability and resiliency in case of disasters or system failures. In this article, I will explore the intricacies of data replication, examining its fundamental components, types, and potential limitations.

Data replication starts with the selection of a source volume or filesystem that needs protection. This source volume might be a virtual disk, often referred to as a LUN (logical unit number), sourced from a storage array or volume manager. It may also take the form of a filesystem. Replication can occur either at the block level, a common practice due to its efficiency, or at the filesystem level, although the latter tends to be less favored for its relatively inferior performance.

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Kneron has rolled out a new type of neural processing unit, the KL730, which integrates image signal processing and high energy efficiency for use in edge, security and automotive applications.

The San Diego-based chip designer, in an announcement Tuesday, said that the KL730 is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A55 CPU, along with its own-brand, fourth- generation neural processing unit, as well as a host of connectivity options, including SD, USB 2 and 3, and Ethernet. Its image processing technology also packs in the ability to read high-definition inputs at up to 8MP at 90 frames per second, hardware dewarping for full panoramic views, and several other image signal processing features.

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As enterprise networks get more complex, so do the firewall deployments.

There are on-premises firewalls to manage, along with firewalls that are deployed in virtual machines and firewalls deployed in containers. There are firewalls for clouds and firewalls for data centers, firewalls for network perimeters, and firewalls for distributed offices. According to Gartner, by 2026, more than 60% of organizations will have more than one type of firewall deployment.

"A firewall used to be a box or a chasse with multiple cards," says Omdia analyst Fernando Montenegro. "Then we had a firewall in a virtual machine. And now we have a container form factor for a firewall because customers are deploying containers. And, oh, we need firewalls-as-a-service to support SASE."

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The pandemic forced businesses to send employees home to work, but even in recovery, the workforce trend is going strong. Some remote work measures were considered a temporary fix, and now the hybrid work reality demands IT organizations reassess how they can deliver consistent support, service, and technology to employees wherever they decide to work.

“There have been a lot of conversations about return to work, but it’s not really happening,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, during a recent webinar.

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Linux shells like bash have a convenient way of remembering commands that you type, making it easy to run them again without having to retype them. Just use the history command (which is a bash built-in) and then use an exclamation point followed by the number shown in front of the command in the history command output that you want to rerun. Alternatively, you can back up to that command by pressing the up arrow key as many times as needed to reach that command and then press return. Don’t forget, though, that you can also set up commands you are likely to use often as aliases by adding a line like this to your ~/.bashrc file so that you don’t need to search for them in your command history. Here’s an example:

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The latest quarterly report from Backblaze on hard drive reliability reveals a rise in failures among certain drives.

Backblaze is a pure storage provider; cloud storage is all they do, and they dig deep into the statistics of hard drive failure and share their data with the industry. The company currently has a massive inventory of 241,297 hard disk drives of varying capacities and from various brands. (In recent quarters, Backblaze has added SSD performance to its measurements, but SSDs are still early in their deployment lifecycle, so patterns over time have yet to fully emerge.)

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ECL has announced what it says will be the world’s first modular, sustainable, off-grid data center that uses hydrogen as its primary power source, promising carbon neutral performance and 99.9999% uptime.

Modular data centers are designed to go together like building blocks, allowing companies to start small and grow as their capacity needs increase. The ECL data centers will come in 1 megawatt blocks.

ECL's data-center-as-a-service offering is geared primarily to mid-sized data center operators, as well as large companies with a mix of cloud and on-premises IT environments. It claims its data centers will have a total cost of ownership that's two-thirds of what a traditional colocation data center environment would cost when measured over five years.

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Three of Red Hat’s chief enterprise Linux competitors are banding together to create an alternative to Red Hat-based software, after the company made changes to its terms of use earlier this summer, making it more difficult to access its source code.

Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ, in a joint statement issued Thursday, said that the new Open Enterprise Linux Association will “encourage the development” of Linux distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by providing free access to source code.

“With OpenELA, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE join forces with the open source community to ensure a stable and resilient future for both upstream and downstream communities to leverage Enterprise Linux,” said CIQ CEO Gregory Kurtzer, in the statement.

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As it previewed in March, IBM is set to deliver an AI-infused, hybrid-cloud oriented version of its z/OS mainframe operating system.

Set for delivery on Sept. 29, z/OS 3.1, the operating system grows IBM’s AI portfolio to let customers securely deploy AI applications co-located with z/OS applications and data, as well as a variety of new features such as container extensions for Red Hat and Linux applications that better support hybrid cloud applications on the Big Iron.

In this release of the mainframe’s OS, AI support is implemented in a feature package called AI System Services for IBM z/OS version 1.1. that lets customers build an AI Framework that IBM says is designed to support initial and future intelligent z/OS management capabilities.

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Cisco continued filling its shopping bag with various technology firms – this time saying it intended to acquire cloud native mobile core developer Working Group Two (WG2) for an undisclosed amount.

The WG2 buy is Cisco’s fifth since June and its nineth this year.  WG2 is known for its mobile technology that helps public and private service providers and enterprise customers build secure and scalable mobile backbones.

The technology will become part of Cisco’s Mobility Services platform which offers a full-stack cloud-native converged core network and distributed edge support.

Introduced in February, the Mobility Service is designed to simplify how service providers build, manage, and deliver new mobile services globally at scale and supports a variety of technologies to bring 5G, edge, and cloud technologies, Cisco says.

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Looking to solidify its position as the dominant global supplier of chips that support generative AI workoads, Nvidia announced new GPUs and servers as well as a range of new software offerings at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles this week.

On the hardware side, Nvidia announced a new line of servers, the OVX series. The server line is designed to use up to eight of the company’s L40S GPUs. The GPUs are based on the company's Ada Lovelace architecture, which succeeded Ampere as the microarchitecture in use in its main line graphics cards. Each L40S packs 48GB of memory and is designed with complex AI workloads in mind, boasting 1.45 petaflops of tensor processing power.

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Cybercriminals aren’t slowing down, and their campaigns are becoming more complex and harder to detect. Between advanced persistent attacks, attempts to infiltrate nontraditional devices, and the increase in multifaceted attack strategies, networks are under constant siege. At the same time, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), hybrid-cloud computing, and remote work demands, as well as the continued shortage of skilled security professionals, all make it more challenging than ever to secure and manage enterprise environments. 

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IT cloud services provider PhoenixNAP is expanding its bare metal cloud offerings by deploying HPE ProLiant servers with Ampere’s Arm-based server processors rather than x86 chips.

Ampere, the chip startup founded by former Intel executive Renee James, makes Arm-based server processors specifically for cloud use. It doesn't use multithreading in its chips, unlike Intel and AMD, because it feels performance is not consistent across threads. Rather, it goes for core count, delivering chips that have 80 to 128 cores.

The new server, the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11, is a cloud-native server designed for service providers and enterprises. HPE says it offers improved compute performance and energy savings over x86 systems.

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Most people who spend time on the Linux command line move quickly into using pipes. In fact, pipes were one of the things that really got me excited when I first used the command line on a Unix system. My appreciation of their power and convenience continues even after decades of using Linux. Using pipes, I discovered how much I could get done by sending the output of one command to another command, and sometimes a command after that, to further tailor the output that I was looking for. Commands incorporating pipes – like the one shown below – allowed me to extract just the information that I needed without having to compile a program or prepare a script.

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Kyndryl said it would tap into Microsoft’s enterprise-grade generative AI technology to develop business applications with Microsoft Cloud.

The IT infrastructure provider announced the joint project with Microsoft on the heels of announcing significant 1Q 2024 earnings where Kyndryl executives said the company will return to profitability in the next year, at least a year ahead of what financial analysts predicted after the company spun out of IBM in November 2021.

In addition, Kyndryl chairman and chief executive officer Martin Schroeter told analysts on the company’s first quarter financial call that he expects the company to return to revenue growth in calendar year 2025 and that the company will reach its medium-term profit goals – in what he called significant progress for a company that has been independent for only 6 quarters.

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TSMC, Robert Bosch, Infineon and NXP will partner to form a new firm, the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and open a nearly $11 billion chipmaking facility in Germany.

ESMC, as the company will be known, will be aimed at providing necessary silicon for the automotive and industrial sectors, according to a statement issued Tuesday. The planned facility, which will be located in Dresden, will be able to produce 40,000 300mm silicon wafers per month, with each wafer able to produce hundreds of chips, depending on their specific design.

The facility will use TSMC’s 28/22nm planar CMOS technology for larger semiconductor nodes, as well as 16/12 FinFET process for smaller ones. CMOS stands for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, and is an older and more established fabrication technique, whereas FinFET, or fin field-effect transistor, enables the production of faster and more advanced processors.

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Aruba Networks is showing off some enhancements to its security platform – including new zero trust and sandboxing features – that promise to help customers advance fortification of their hybrid cloud and enterprise network environments.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s network subsidiary is also detailing the progress it has made in integrating the security technology from its March purchase of Axis Security into Aruba’s security service edge (SSE) platform with Aruba's SD-WAN and Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) offerings.

Some of the new features and directions will be demoed and discussed as part of Aruba’s presence at this week’s Black Hat 2023 event which will focus on everything security including AI, automation and threat intelligence issues.

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By: Eve-Marie Lanza, Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager at HPE Aruba Networking.