What justifies network spending?  Two things, according to CIOs.

The first is the money to maintain the infrastructure that was justified by projects in the past. The other is money for new projects, and they must deliver benefits large enough to meet the CFO’s target return on investment.

The top business justification for any new tech project is productivity improvement. My data says that only about two-thirds of workers in jobs that could be empowered by network improvement have actually been given optimal access to information. In some job classifications, only 40% of workers have been empowered. Mobile workers, ones who regularly operate away from offices, are often empowered only part of the time.

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Seven years after its $16.7 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Altera, Intel is expanding the technology it gained into new areas.

While the primary use for an FPGA processor has been for smartNICs that offload tasks from server CPUs, Intel is now looking to broaden its application from the data center to remote, edge computing, and embedded systems.

It’s not as if the Altera processors languished over the last several years, however. One major change is manufacturing. When Intel purchased Altera, its chips were made by TSMC. Now they are made by Intel, so hopefully that’s one less supply-chain headache to worry about.

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Kyndryl and Microsoft have extended their existing partnership to include mainframe connectivity to cloud applications and workloads.

The extension ties together Kyndryl’s zCloud mainframe service with Microsoft’s Power Platform, a low-code application and workflow-automation package that brings access to cloud services including  Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Teams.

The aim is making it easier for organizations to access and integrate mainframe-based data with cloud-based resources and combine that data with other information to build new applications.

Available now, the service is a way to access decades of data sitting on  mainframes, said Harish Grama, Kyndryl’s global practice leader for cloud. “The idea is to unleash data sitting on the mainframe, mine it, modernize it, and write new business applications on it," he said. "That data shouldn’t be trapped in legacy backends.”

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Back in August, TrendForce Research predicted that due to an oversupply in NAND flash memory, the price of SSDs could drop by 5% to 10% in the third quarter.

Since then, the economy has only worsened and the oversupply has continued, and while TrendForce hasn't reported the Q3 actuals, it's now predicting 15% to 20% drop in NAND flash prices in the fourth quarter on top of the Q3 drop..

TrendForce says buyers of NAND flash memory—vendors that make SSDs but don’t manufacture their own memory—have reduced their NAND inventory and cut back on new purchases in the second half of the year. Meanwhile makers of memory drastically reduced prices to boost sales. Now TrendForce predicts that before the end of the year, suppliers will be selling memory at a loss and reduce production.

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Bash provides a large number of options that can be used to control the behavior of bash scripts. This post examines some of the more useful ones and explains how to display which options are in use and which are not.

Exiting when an error occurs

If you want a bash script to exit soon as it encounters an error—any error at all—in your scripts, you can add the set -o errexit option. If your script contains a syntax error, tries to read a file that doesn’t exist, attempts to append to a file when you don’t have permission to do so, or misuses a command in some way, the script will end abruptly. Here is a simple example:

#!/bin/bash set -o errexit tail NoSuchFile echo -n “Enter text to be appended> “ read txt echo $txt >> NoSuchFile 

Try to run this script, and you’ll see this:

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Cisco continues to build tighter SD-WAN integration with the leading cloud service providers to better tie together widely distributed resources.

This week Cisco and Microsoft extended their SD-WAN/Microsoft Azure integration to enable building single or multiple overlays on top of Microsoft’s backbone to interconnect enterprise sites worldwide, and to connect sites to workloads running inside Azure, similar to an arrangement Cisco has with Google Cloud.

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Modern networks are critical for any enterprise. Networks deliver business applications, multimedia messages and key data to end users around the world. A fundamental element that networks have in common is the network switch, which helps connect devices for the purpose of sharing resources within a local area network (LAN).

What is a network switch?

A network switch is a physical device that operates at the Data Link layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model -- Layer 2. It takes in packets sent by devices that are connected to its physical ports, and forwards them to the devices the packets are intended to reach. Switches can also operate at the Network Layer (Layer 3) where routing occurs.

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Long-time WAN provider Aryaka has released a version of its Zero Trust WAN product that incorporates a new Secure Web Gateway and Firewall-as-a-Service as it works toward a SASE-enabled WAN offering.

The idea is to provide a much more updated version of WAN to enterprise customers—where SD-WAN traditionally lived in a box in branch offices, the pandemic and the evolving SASE model prompted a more flexible rethink. Now, Aryaka’s latest model is an entirely cloud-based offering, routing secure traffic to branch offices or remote employees while being able to employ robust security technologies via Aryaka’s own cloud.

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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.

While it is clearly early in the game, VMware has made a bunch of moves recently to ensure that DPUs and the smartNICs they enable are an equal part of enterprise networking environments of the future.

VMware is a leading proponent of using digital processing units to free-up server CPU cycles by offloading networking, security, storage, and other processes in order to rapidly and efficiently supporting edge- and cloud-based workloads.

Competitors—and partners in some cases—including Intel, Nvidia, AWS, and AMD, also have plans to more tightly integrate DPU-based devices into in firewalls, gateways, enterprise load balancing, and storage-offload applications.

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Enterprise IT teams are always on the lookout for ways to save money or gain operational efficiencies. One approach is to purchase used data center equipment such as servers, rather than investing in brand new systems and paying top dollar.

There’s no shortage of resellers who cater to this market. Some equipment resellers specifically target gear from hyperscalers, because the hyperscalers replace their hardware at a fast pace, and the equipment they turnover can be more powerful than what most enterprises use today.

Those in the business of selling used equipment say demand for their offerings is high.

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Networking vendors have a lot on their plate. They need to innovate in areas like automation, AIOps, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), secure access service edge (SASE), visibility, and multi-cloud management.

They must respond to customer preferences for subscription models and network as-a-service (NaaS) offerings. In a recent survey, IDC reported that 61% of organizations worldwide were interested in shifting to consumption-based models for IT investments rather than capital intensive purchases.

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SambaNova Systems is now shipping the second-generation of its DataScale systems specifically built for AI and machine learning.

You may not have heard of SambaNova, a startup led by ex-Oracle/Sun hardware executives and Stanford professors, but its work is likely familiar. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was an early adopter of DataScale and used the systems in its COVID-19 antiviral compound and therapeutic research in 2020.

“Our systems were deployed in supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which were then used by various parties for the research and development of COVID-19 antiviral compound and therapeutics,” said Marshall Choy, SambaNova’s senior vice president for products. “So, yes, they were a small part of that. As bad as the pandemic was, at least we got to do something good through it.”

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Beyond the human cost, natural disasters like hurricane Ian can take a high toll on business continuity, causing enterprise-infrastructure damage that takes days or weeks to fix while downtime costs in the six figures per hour. If Ian didn’t impact your operations, now is the time to prepare for a future disaster that might hit your network.

Vulnerable areas include cloud providers’ managed services that might require customers to explicitly specify they want their apps, compute, and storage housed in redundant, geographically separate availability zones. According to Uptime Institute, roughly one third of enterprises are architecting cloud apps that are vulnerable to outages in single cloud availability zones, rather than distributing their workloads across multiple zones.

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The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), IBM and Vodaphone are teaming up to form a task force that will promote quantum-safe cryptography standards for telco networks and, ultimately, enterprise cloud service environments.

The idea behind the new group, called the GSMA Post-Quantum Telco Network Taskforce, is to define requirements and create a standards-based roadmap to implement quantum-safe networking and mitigate anticipated security risks.

“Telco networks are the underpinning of all enterprise services, regardless of what industry they are in, so it is critical that those networks [get] out in front of the security challenges quantum brings,” said Ray Harishankar, IBM Fellow, vice president, and leader of Big Blue’s Quantum Safe strategy. “The idea of the group is to start to develop a quantum-safe plan now, because the components and standards of that roadmap won’t be developed overnight.”

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“The Wi-Fi is down.”

These words are perhaps some of the most dreaded among IT professionals everywhere. Whenever users experience issues accessing the corporate network, they often assume the Wi-Fi is malfunctioning. Yet IT teams know that the problem is usually more complicated. A helpdesk ticket about a compromised user experience often sends IT analysts down the proverbial rabbit hole of their networks in search of the culprit, inspecting everything from Network Access Control (NAC) technology to wired switches and wireless access points to authentication solutions.

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Doreen Bogdan-Martin of the US today defeated Russia’s Rashid Ismailov by a convincing 139 to 25 in a vote to decide who will become the next secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, allaying Western concerns about nation-state control and interoperability of the internet 

Bogdan-Martin, who will become the first woman to head the ITU in its 157-year history, is seen by some observers as the candidate most likely to preserve the ITU’s status as a neutral arbiter of a free and open internet, in opposition to recent Russian and Chinese maneuvering in the group that would have placed much more control over the internet’s basic functionality in the hands of nation-states.

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Thanks to innovative cooling technology developed by an MIT-hatched startup, data center managers may soon be able to acquire servers and HPC (high-performance computing) devices that will significantly reduce the energy cost and footprint of the faciities they oversee.

The startup, Jetcool, sprang from research conducted at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, and this month received an R&D 100 Award from R&D World magazine, marking it as a standout innovator for its use of what it calls “microconvection” liquid cooling of electronics.

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Cloud expertise dominates the most in-demand tech skills for enterprises today, according to Skillsoft.

The digital-learning company released its 2022 list of top-paying IT certifications, and AWS certs accounted for five of the 15 slots. Two Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certs and one Microsoft Azure cert also made the list.

The continuing value of cloud certifications isn’t surprising, but what’s noteworthy is a shift toward multi-cloud skills, said Michael Yoo, customer market leader for Skillsoft’s technology and developer portfolio. “The increase in importance of Google Cloud and multi-cloud certifications—not just AWS and Azure—speaks to the growing fraction of enterprises that now rely on more than one cloud computing platform.”

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

Originally created primarily to support WAN virtualization, SD-WAN capabilities have evolved to manage more aspects of the network—including security. Today, secure SD-WAN solutions have also enabled IT teams to eliminate branch firewalls in favor of a simplified branch WAN infrastructure.

The reasons are manifold. As network architecture continues to shift to the cloud, branch offices must now tackle new security challenges as the network grows more complex as more users connect outside the traditional security perimeter. At the same time, enterprises want additional flexibility to cope with the growing number of cloud applications, the ability to open new branches faster, or host new applications more quickly. The traditional network structure, built on MPLS, routers, and firewalls, simply cannot handle the flexibility enterprises need, due to the cost, complexity, and rigidity this hardware demands…especially as it was never designed to be part of the emerging cloud infrastructure of today. 

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Lenovo Group is marking its 30^th anniversary with its largest data-center product launch ever, with more than 50 new products covering servers, storage, and edge systems.

Specifically, the celebration is for the ThinkSystem server, and many of the announcements were about upgrades.

The next generation of ThinkSystem servers and storage, along with the ThinkEdge edge computing device lineup, as well as the ThinkAgile family of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances collectively are called Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3.

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As the Log4J crisis made clear, understanding what is in the software unpinning your applications is crucial to understanding your security posture. This is no less true of your network services.

Enterprise-network infrastructure is still very much about hardware in data center and LAN and WAN, but now it is becoming more and more about software.

In this era of software-defined networks, an ever-increasing number of network appliances are just proprietary software running on generic switching hardware or even a plain vanilla x86 server with extra network cards. That shift in emphasis from the hard to the soft has made the software stacks running the network a new source of risk and worry for cybersecurity.

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Fortinet has added support for AI operations to its Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE gateways giving customers more insights into the networks linking their distributed resources and reducing  the time it takes to fix problems.

The company has expanded its FortiAIOps platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to collect network data and analytics to help identify and automate problem resolution. The addition of Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE fills out the FortiAIOps portfolio, which already supported WAN, wireless LAN, and LAN operations on a single console to manage and secure wired and wireless connectivity.

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Supply chain problems have triggered most major networking players such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others to redesign or re-engineer some products in an attempt to overcome component shortages and deliver products to customers.

Lead times for some routers, switches and other gear is already delayed well beyond six months. Retooling to get hardware out the door can add is own delay and put additional pressure on engineers looking to reshape things like power supplies and board-level features without causing major problems themselves.

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Currently, many IT departments are being challenged to make fundamental changes to their cybersecurity strategies. The changes required are necessary to meet their organization’s demands of digital transformation and the rapid growth of their work-from-anywhere (WFA) workforce. Because users from anywhere need to access resources distributed across their networks, organizations are faced with security gaps and vulnerabilities as their legacy, siloed point products are incapable of providing consistent end-to-end protection.

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In reviewing CPU and server benchmarks, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that testing covers both single-core and multi-core performance. Here's the difference.

In terms of raw performance, both are equally important, but single- and multi-core have areas of use where they shine. So when picking a CPU, it’s important to consider your particular workloads and evaluate whether single-core or multi-core best meets your needs.

Single-core CPUs

There are still a lot of applications out there that are single-core limited, such as many databases (although some, like MySQL, are multicore).

Performance is measured in a couple of ways. Clock frequency is the big one; the higher the frequency the faster apps will run. Also important is the width of execution pipelines, and the wider the pipeline, the more work can get done per clock cycle. So even if an app is single threaded, a wider pipeline can improve its performance.

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The commands for looping in bash are extremely useful. They allow you to run a series of commands as many times as needed to process a large collection of data. The break and continue commands provide another special option. They allow you to exit a loop early or skip the remaining commands in the loop and return to the beginning.

Both the break and the continue commands are meant to be used only in for, while and until loops. In fact, if you try to invoke the break command on its own, bash will tell you just that.

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