Geopolitical tensions among the US, China, and Taiwan are forcing a notable change to server manufacturing, according to Asian market research firm TrendForce, which predicts that core parts of the server supply chain will eventually shift to southeast Asia and the Americas. 

According to TrendForce’s research, Taiwan-based original design manufacturers (ODM) currently account for about 90% of global server motherboard production. A notable exception is Supermicro, which has a 1.5 million square-foot factory in Fremont, California. It also has an 800,000 square-foot facility in Taiwan.

Ever since the start of the trade dispute between the US and China beginning in 2018, server ODMs began looking at moving their production lines from mainland China to Taiwan. Then, due to the explosion in construction of data centers across the Asia-Pacific region, motherboard makers began looking at southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand for capacity expansion.

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VPNs date back to the 1990s when the public internet lacked almost any form of security, and the technology was developed to provide secure and cost-effective connections across this insecure landscape.

VPNs have become widely deployed across enterprise networks and experienced a surge during the pandemic, when companies had to scramble to provide secure remote access to employees who were suddenly working from home.

VPNs remain popular today, but they are also slowly but surely being supplanted by more flexible, more secure, more granular alternatives, such as SD-WAN, Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA), and SASE, a cloud-based service that includes SD-WAN, ZTNA and other security features.

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What’s the single most important thing that enterprises should know about networking in 2023? Forget all that speeds-and-feeds crap you hear from vendors. The answer is that networking is now, and forever, linked to business applications, and those applications are linked now to the way that we use the Internet and the cloud. We’re changing how we distribute and deliver business value via networking, and so network technology will inevitably change too, and this is a good time to look at what to expect.

Growth in Internet dependence

First, the Internet is going to get a lot better because it’s going to get a lot more important. It’s not just that the top-end capacities offered will be raised, in many cases above 2 Gbps. Every day, literally, people do more online, and get more interactive, dynamic, interesting, websites to visit and content to consume. Internet availability has been quietly increasing, and in 2023 there will be a significant forward leap there, in large part because people who rely on something get really upset when it’s not working.

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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions offer a reliable and flexible method for providing your hybrid, work-from-anywhere (WFA) employees with safe, authenticated access to critical applications and resources.

The best SASE solutions combine secure remote access, advanced per-session and per-application authentication, and enterprise-grade security in a single cloud-based solution. They extend the same protections and performance to remote workers that they experience when working from traditional on-premises locations.

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Nvidia is playing some serious games.

When Jensen Huang and his two partners established Nvidia in 1993, the graphics chip market had many more competitors than the CPU market, which had just two. Nvidia’s competitors in the gaming market included ATI Technologies, Matrox, S3, Chips & Technology, and 3DFX.

A decade later, Nvidia had laid waste to every one of them except for ATI, which was purchased by AMD in 2006. For most of this century, Nvidia has shifted its focus to bring the same technology it uses to render videogames in 4k pixel resolution to power supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) in the enterprise, and artificial intelligence.

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Intel announced plans to split its AXG graphics group and move the resources into two existing business units to better serve their respective markets.

The consumer/gaming end of the GPU business will move to Intel’s Client Compute Group (CCG), which develops consumer computing platforms based on the company’s CPU products. The teams responsible for data center and supercomputing products such as the Ponte Vecchio and Rialto Bridge will move to the Data Center and AI (DCAI) business unit.

The GPU SoC and IP design teams will also fall under the DCAI umbrella, but they will continue to support the client graphics team. Jeff McVeigh, currently the vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group, will serve as the interim leader of this team until a permanent leader is found.

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Zero Trust is a term coined by John Kindervag while he was an analyst at Forrester Research to describe a strategic framework in which nothing on the network is trusted by default – not devices, not end users, not processes. Everything must be authenticated, authorized, verified and continuously monitored.

The traditional approach to security was based on the concept of “trust, but verify.” The weakness of this approach is that once someone was authenticated, they were considered trusted and could move laterally to access sensitive data and systems that should have been off-limits.

Zero Trust principles change this to “never trust, always verify.” A Zero Trust architecture doesn’t aim to make a system trusted or secure, but rather to eliminate the concept of trust altogether. Zero Trust security models assume that an attacker is present in the environment at all times. Trust is never granted unconditionally or permanently, but must be continually evaluated.

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Often, it can be difficult to sell the C-suite on security solutions because quantifying the return on investment (ROI) of cybersecurity solutions often dives into murky waters. But because Secure SD-WAN replaces more expensive and cumbersome WAN technology, it has been easier to make the case for it. With SD-WAN, large organizations can connect their branch offices to the applications and resources they need. However, because there are so many options, deciding which solution is the right one can be challenging.

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The ss command is used to dump socket statistics on Linux systems. It serves as a replacement for the netstat command and is often used for troubleshooting network problems.

What is a socket?

To make the best use of the ss command, it’s important to understand what a socket is. A socket is a type of pseudo file (i.e., not an actual file) that represents a network connection. A socket identifies both the remote host and the port that it connects to so that data can be sent between the systems. Sockets are similar to pipes except that pipes only facilitate connections between processes on the same system where sockets work on the same or different systems. Unlike pipes, sockets also provide bidirectional communication.

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A month after the UK’s Competition Market’s Authority (CMA) announced it was investigating Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware, European antitrust regulators have launched thier own probe into the $61 billion deal.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is five months into a separate investigation of the deal.

Meanwhile, the EU Commision said in a statement published on December 20 that it  “is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software.”

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HPE has announced new features for its GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, including Kubernetes support and workload-optimized instances.

HPE launched GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise in June. It's an automated private cloud offering for enterprises looking to deploy both traditional workloads and cloud-native applications inside their data centers. The service includes virtual machines, bare metal workloads, and containers, all running on GreenLake’s on-premises consumption model.

Among the new services HPE announced is the option to deploy Kubernetes container services through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere. Customers can now run the same container runtimes on-premises that they use in the public cloud, with a consistent experience across both public and private clouds.

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If not deployed properly, today’s whiz-bang network management tools wind up making more work for network admins rather than saving them time and reducing their overload.

Wait, labor saving devices don’t save labor? Not really, at least when it comes to freeing up time for more important or rewarding activities.

It’s not unlike the "labor saving appliance" revolution in the American home, especially in the post-WW2 era.

I’m referring, of course, to Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic history of technology book, More Work for Mother, which explored in depth how various supposedly labor-saving advances in household technology did not reduce the amount of time those women who kept house spent on housekeeping. On the contrary, because they mainly mechanized or automated work previously done by servants, children, or (occasionally) men, these tech advances shifted women’s efforts from organizing such work to doing it. At the same time, with some kinds of work around food preparation and clothes washing, they also brought back “in-house” work that had been effectively outsourced to commercial laundries, bakeries, etc.

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Today it’s critical for organizations to support a work-from-anywhere workforce. Employees need consistent security whether they’re located on-premises, at home, or anywhere else. To meet this need, many organizations have already adopted a secure access service edge (SASE) solution or plan to implement one soon.

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Hybrid and multicloud initiatives will continue to shape enterprise IT in 2023, and the impact on data-center networking will be felt across key areas including security, management, and operations. Network teams are investing in technologies such as SD-WAN and SASE, expanding automation initiatives, and focusing on skills development as more workloads and applications span cloud environments.

“The most important core trend in data centers is the recognition that the hybrid cloud model – which combines current transaction processing and database activities with a cloud-hosted front-end element for the user interface – is the model that will dominate over time,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and a Network World columnist. The industry is seeing a slow modernization of data center applications to support the hybrid-cloud model, Nolle says, “and included in that is greater componentization of those applications, a larger amount of horizontal traffic, and a greater need to manage security within the hosted parts of the application.”

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The cyberthreat landscape weighs heavily on the minds of business and IT leaders — and for good reason. Statista reports that in this year’s third quarter alone, nearly 15 million data records were exposed worldwide.

The risk of data breaches places intense pressure on IT and security teams to ensure corporate networks are not only protected, but also kept up to date. That’s a tall order given the increasingly complex network architectures that mix on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In addition, hybrid workforces have created multiple paths for data and apps traffic that must be secured.

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Sixty-two percent of organizations are planning to guarantee flexible work options to remain competitive in the marketplace, according to Foundry’s 2022 Future of Work Study. That’s causing some concerns around effective collaboration, IT staff and employee burnout, and the ability to maintain secure systems and processes.

But a network driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can help address these issues. Technologies including automation, machine learning, and natural language processing are used to gather data, analyze it, and then deliver insights or proactive recommendations for a more efficient, robust, and secure network.

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For direct sales companies, success is relative. Many thrive by offering direct-to-consumer marketing strategies. Some achieve a global reach. One company falls into the latter category. Manufacturing and distributing a wide range of kitchen and home products, it operates in nearly 40 countries worldwide across 70 locations.

Securing the Wide-Area Network

For any company of this size, securing the enterprise network is a significant challenge. Over the years, the company had built a distributed wide-area network (WAN) that connected over 65 remote offices and used more than 40 internet service providers (ISPs) to link additional sales offices, manufacturing plants, and regional offices across its international operations.

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Kyndryl, formerly IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services unit, on Thursday released Cloud Native Services, which it said will aid enterprises in accelerating their cloud application modernization efforts.

The new set of services will allow enterprises to move their on-premises applications to cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP and Azure. Kyndryl will also manage these services on behalf of its customers across hybrid or multicloud environments, the company said.

Cloud Native Services, according to the company, will provide a framework that will consist of code assets, workflows with integrated services around automated backup, patching, key performance indicators (KPI) monitoring, security, alerting and incident management.

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During the pandemic, many employees transitioned to working remotely or in hybrid environments. Now, many of these same individuals want to continue doing their jobs with work-from-anywhere (WFA) flexibility.

Often organizations are happy and willing to accommodate their hybrid work team members, but they face a mounting security challenge. The problem is that many IT departments are hard-pressed to offer employees WFA flexibility because they cannot support them with consistent, high-quality security.

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Searching for the best provider for SD-WAN, SASE, MPLS, content delivery network (CDN), 5G or any other network service can be a difficult, frustrating, and tedious process.

There are so many providers, so many options, so much confusion and possibilities for future regret. What's the best way to move forward?

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Arista Networks has a new high-end data-center switch as well as several smaller ones designed to provide more configuration and upgrade choices to fit the specific needs of individual organizations.

“Different customer use cases and application deployments within a single organization have differing requirements. Each deployment needs a right-sized solution—few applications need 400G of bandwidth per server today, but many organizations need to do the groundwork for the move away from 10/25G,” wrote Martin Hull, vice president of Cloud Titans and Platform Product Management with Arista in a blog about the new systems.

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Data-center giant Equinix has found a low-tech solution to high data-center electric bills: turn up the thermostat.

Guidance from the American Society of Heat, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends a temperature range for data-center servers from 59°F (15°C) to as high as 89°F (31.6°C). Equinix is looking at setting the temperature at 80°F (26.6°C), up from the current setting of 73°F (22.7°C).

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A joint effort by immersion cooling firm Iceotope and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, found cooling hard drives with a dielectric liquid is safe and a more effective means of cooling than using fans.

Hyperscalers like Meta deploy thousands of HDDs in their data centers, and while the heat given off on an individual basis is tiny, it adds up, especially since the drives are in constant use and are close together. The drives are stored in server racks that hold nothing but dozens of hard drives and are referred to as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

A JBOD can overheat without cooling, which up to now has been done with fans, but some drives were further away from fans than others, causing uneven cooling.

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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.

Backup and recovery systems are at risk for two types of ransomware attacks: encryption and exfiltration – and most on-premises backup servers are wide open to both. This makes backup systems themselves the primary target of some ransomware groups, and warrants special attention.

Hackers understand that backup servers are often under-protected and administered by junior personnel that are less well versed in information security. And it seems no one wants to do something about it lest they become the new backup expert responsible for the server. This is an age-old problem that can allow backup systems to pass under the radar of sound processes that protect most servers.

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Whether you’re managing a network at work or just watching out for your home systems, it’s important to understand your network connections--how you communicate with public systems and those on the local network. This article covers some of the most important commands available on Linux to help you get a clear understanding of your local network and how it reaches outside.

While the links provided include important tips on using network commands, some include commands that have been deprecated in favor of newer commands. Some of the most important commands to know today include ip a, ip neigh, ping, tracepath, dig, tcpdump and whois.

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Sometimes, budget pressures mean you just have to cut costs. Sometimes, cutting costs in one area can give you some financial elbow room to fund something in another. A fifth of all CIOs tell me that they have a mandate to cut network costs in 2023, and another third say they’d be open to doing that if they could fund something else with the savings. Most admit that they don’t have a really good idea of how to accomplish their goal without creating a risk that would potentially overwhelm benefits.

Cutting CAPEX is popular in theory.  Of 87 enterprises with cost-cutting interest, 55 said they thought their capital budgets would be an attractive place to start. That’s not changed much over the last five years, but what has changed is how enterprises think they could cut CAPEX. It used to be that they believed cost reductions could be achieved with new technologies like hosted router software or white-box devices, but this year they reported concerns that integration costs and risks were too high.

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