Content delivery network (CDN) and cloud computing provider Akamai has opened three new internet point of presence (POP) data centers this week, and will open two more later in the quarter, as the company looks to take over a bigger portion of the public cloud market.

The three new sites open as of this week are in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Sites in Seattle and Chennai will follow in the coming months, Akamai said. The expansion is part of the company's push into the public cloud market dominated by incumbents like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, Akamai said.

The sites were chosen carefully, according to a statement from Akamai. Washington, D.C., is one of the biggest data center hubs in the world, with Northern Virginia containing upward of half of the major data center capacity in the US. Chicago is a well-situated secondary site for latency-sensitive workloads running either locally or in nearby markets, including Philadelphia and Washington, while the Paris site represents a new option for organizations facing data sovereignty challenges posed by EU regulation.

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MLCommons, a group that develops benchmarks for AI technology training algorithms, revealed the results for a new test that determines system speeds for training algorithms specifically used for the creation of chatbots like ChatGPT.

MLPerf 3.0 is meant to provide an industry-standard set of benchmarks for evaluating ML model training. Model training can be a rather lengthy process, taking weeks and even months depending on the size of a data set. That requires an awful lot of power consumption, so training can get expensive.

The MLPerf Training benchmark suite is a full series of tests that stress machine-learning models, software, and hardware for a broad range of applications. It found performance gains of up to 1.54x compared to just six months ago and between 33x and 49x compared to the first round in 2018.

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Cisco is continuing its summer buying spree with the acquisition of security startup Oort for an undisclosed amount.

Oort offers an identity threat detection and response platform for enterprise security.  Founded in 2019, Oort raised $15 million in Series A funding that included money from Cisco’s venture capital arm.

“With Oort’s API-driven, cloud-native, and agentless platform, they eliminate identity visibility gaps across disparate data sources, show misconfigurations, check for security vulnerabilities, and offer predictive identity analytics to proactively stop attacks,” wrote Raj Chopra, senior vice president and chief product officer for Cisco Security, in a blog about the acquisition. 

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Kyndryl Bridge has found early success with nearly 1,000 customers expected by the end of the year, and the integration platform has several new services on tap – including for AI, security and sustainability efforts – to help enterprises better manage their infrastructure resources.

Announced last September, Kyndryl Bridge has roughly 60 digitally enabled services to date, and the company expects to grow that to 190 Bridge services by March 2024, according to Kyndryl CTO Antoine Shagoury.

Bridge integrates all manner of management tools, intellectual property, and processes that Kyndryl has cultivated through years of delivering services – it was, after all, a division of IBM until November 2021. It then takes that centralized information and uses it to deliver as-a-service capabilities and applications that help control and manage enterprise infrastructure. It also uses AI and ML to analyze the aggregated data in real time to provide IT operations teams with the intelligence they need to keep systems running at peak performance, Kyndryl says.

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Microsoft is jumping into the competitive Secure Service Edge (SSE) arena with a software package aimed at protecting its Windows and Azure customers as well as other cloud-based enterprise resources.

The new software is part of Microsoft’s Entra identity and network access suite, and it features two new elements – Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access – that will control and secure access to cloud-based resources. Those two new pieces, coupled with Microsoft’s existing SaaS-focused cloud-access security broker (CASB), called Microsoft Defender for Cloud apps, comprise Microsoft's SSE package.

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The European Commission said that the proposed acquisition of VMware by Broadcom may go forward, thanks to an investigation that suggested that the market would not be harmed and the acquiescence to several conditions by Broadcom.

The Commission, in a statement issued Wednesday, said that its investigation centered on answering the question of whether Broadcom, if it acquired VMware, would be in a position to harm the competitive balance of the marketplace in several key technology areas, including Fibre Channel host bus adapters, network interface cards, and storage adapters.

The investigation found that Broadcom didn’t have a strong enough position in the NIC and storage adapter markets, but noted that the proposed merger would let Broadcom harm its only rival for FC HBAs, Marvell, by making sure that VMware’s virtualization software didn’t work well with Marvell’s hardware.

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Cisco unveiled a new version of its Secure Network Analytics (SNA) software aimed at making it easier to track more data flows and act faster on relevant security alerts. Enhancements in SNA release 7.4.2 include the ability to more efficiently gather, process and store data; advanced detection capabilities; improved telemetry support; and the ability to run on Cisco’s high-performance UCS M6 hardware.

Cisco’s network analytics software is designed to help organizations detect and respond to security threats by harnessing telemetry data from multiple sources and providing insights into network behavior to proactively identify risks, according to a blog post by Jay Bethea, product marketing manager with Cisco’s secure email group.

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The market for managed security services is shifting as enterprises weigh their requirements for cloud-based security capabilities and vendors refine their feature sets and product integrations.

Converged security services can offer significant benefits to enterprises when it comes to manageability, scalability, security, and price, according to research firm Gartner, which introduced the term SASE, or secure access service edge. SASE is a network architecture that combines software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security functionality into a unified cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployments, improved efficiency and security, and application-specific bandwidth policies.

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Some of the most convenient “tricks” on Linux depend on the use of a handful of special characters. This post takes a look at a number of them and shows how they work.

Using > and >>

Using the > and >> characters will have similar but different effects, and both depend on how you use them in a command. The > character can be used to direct output into a file. For example, these commands will put the specified text into a file. If the file exists, however, any former content will be overwritten. Notice how only one "hello" remains in the file.

$ echo hello > world $ echo hello > world $ cat world hello 

Using >>, on the other hand, will add the text provided to the end of a file. If the file doesn’t exist, the command will create it.

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SD-WANs (software-defined wide area networks) have been in wide-scale use for several years now, and their adoption has accelerated in recent years. According to a report by IDC, the worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure market reached $4.5 billion in 2020, representing a dramatic 45.5% increase from the previous year.

Today, SD-WAN is considered a mainstream technology, and companies like Microsoft, Vodafone, and Visa are using it to connect their branch offices, data centers, and cloud resources. As more organizations adopt cloud-based applications and services, the demand for SD-WAN is likely to continue to grow.

But within SD-WAN solutions there are critical limitations–particularly for organizations that operate globally since SD-WAN lacks a global backbone.

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By: Scott Raynovich, Founder and Chief Analyst, Futuriom

As end users adopt software-defined technology that can help them more easily deploy and manage secure networks, they are increasingly looking to the technologies known as secure access service edge (SASE) and secure service edge (SSE).

But digging deeper into these acronyms, it gets more complex. SASE and SSE products aren’t exactly product categories per se – but platforms for integrating a variety of network security functions. These wide-ranging features might include all the most popular features/acronyms, including Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS), Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System (IDS/IPS), Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking (SD-WAN), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Unified Threat Management (UTM), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). The integration of these functions is a key driving force behind the growth of the SASE market.

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Enterprises over the past several years have embraced SD-WAN for many reasons, including the flexibility of cloud architecture, enhanced security, centralized management of distributed locations, and improved application availability and performance. In turn, the popularity of SD-WAN has helped propel interest in secure access service edge (SASE), a network architecture that converges connectivity and security services.

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The mkdir command can do more than create a single directory. It can create multiple directories at once and can even create an entire directory structure with a single command. The required command will be a tad complex, but not particularly challenging.

NOTE: If you try to set up a multi-level directory structure with a command like the one shown below, it won't work if the initial directories ("this" and "that") don't already exist.

$ mkdir this/that/the_other
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘this/that/the_other’: No such file or directory

Add a -p (for "parents") and the missing directories will be created and your this/that/the_other directory structure will be set up in your current directory as intended.

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Private 5G/LTE networks for the enterprise are becoming increasingly common, but a new forecast from tech analyst firm IDC has found that several headwinds exist for the technology, which could slow its adoption over the next 18 to 24 months.

The report, authored by IDC research manager Patrick Filkins, predicted that private cellular networking infrastructure sales will grow from $2.4 billion in global revenue this year to $5.3 billion in 2027.

The use cases for private cellular networks are numerous and varied, according to IDC, encompassing everything from wide-area applications like grid networks for utility systems and transport networks to local networks for manufacturing facilities or warehouses.

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The adoption of artificial intelligence is changing the way servers are being procured while having a quick and positive impact on firms that deploy AI technologies, according to a pair of research reports from Omdia.

In its upcoming cloud and data center market report, the research firm predicts a reduction in the number of server shipments for the first time since 2007. However, the server drop in 2007 was due to a global economic crisis. The current shift in server buying has a more positive spin.

Omdia found that demand for compute resources remains high. However, it also reports that demand for more expensive servers with specialized hardware for AI model training (translation: GPUs) are being prioritized over the typical enterprise server with just a CPU.

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Network connectivity and security are key areas for IT investment as well as potential barriers to global success, according to new research.

Nearly half of CIOs claim that establishing and managing connectivity in new markets is the single most critical factor when it comes to ensuring successful global expansion, according to Expereo, which surveyed 650 large enterprise and mid-market CIOs across Asia, Europe and North America for its research. In addition, 49% of CIOs report that their board views global connectivity as “a business-critical asset to growth.”

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China’s Ministry for Industry and Information Technology has said it wants to improve the country’s manufacturing capabilities, singling out the production of advanced semiconductor materials and automotive chips as areas that are in need of improvement.

In its recently released Opinions on Manufacturing Reliability Improvement report, the department said it was putting forward a plan that would make up for the shortcomings of basic product reliability and improve the quality of core components in three industries: machinery, electronics, and automotive.

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If you’re fairly new to Linux, you might need some help getting started on the command line. But you made it here, so let’s run through a number of ways that you can get comfortable and up to speed fairly quickly.

Man pages

Every Linux command should have a "man page" (i.e., manual page) – an explanation of what the command does, how it works and the options that you can use to specify what you want the command to show you. For example, if you wanted to see the options for formatting the output of the date command, you should look at the man page with the command “man date”. It should among other things, show you the format of the date command like this:

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Servers can consume more than half of the energy in modern data centers, which makes server efficiency attractive to companies looking to hit carbon-neutral sustainability targets. Plus, reducing energy usage can save money.

To help reach that goal, here are five ways to boost server efficiency, according to recent research from the Uptime Institute, which is focused on improving the performance, efficiency, and reliability of business-critical infrastructure.

1. Upgrade to a newer server generation. For decades, server energy efficiency has consistently improved thanks to improved efficiency of processors that power them.
2. Pick servers with high compute capacity as measured in number of transactions per second. Those are the most energy efficient.
3. Go for high core count. In general, efficiency improves with the number of cores, although there is some tapering off at the highest end.
4. Be aware that while a server can be more energy efficient, its actual overall power consumed (Watts) can increase even as its efficiency (transactions per second per Watt) increases.
5. Embrace power-management features in two ways: by reducing core CPU voltage and frequency as utilization increases, and by moving unneeded cores to idle state.

For its analysis, Uptime focused servers that use AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon processors, and it examined server generations from 2017, 2019, and 2021 using data from The Green Grid’s SERT database (additional details on the SERT data can be found at the end of the article).

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To reduce the risk of service problems, Cisco is making it harder for organizations to use weak cryptographic algorithms when setting up authentication for OSPF packets on certain Catalyst Edge Platforms and Integrated Services Routers (ISR).

Newer versions of Cisco’s IOS XE software (Release 17.11.1 and later) no longer support those algorithms—DES, 3DES, and MD5—by default, Cisco stated in a field Notice.

Specifically, the algorithms are no longer default options for the open shortest path first v 3 (OSPFv3) protocol, which uses the IPsec secure socket API to add authentication to OSPFv3 packets that distribute routing information.

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Virtualization technology provider VMware has announced that it is partnering with AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V keystone community for the development and operations of confidential computing applications.

RISC-V is a hardware standards organization that is designing low-power processors; the Keystone Enclave is an open source project for building customizable trusted execution environments (TEEs).

The aim of the new partnership among VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V participants is to collaborate to contribute to the open-source Certifier Framework project for confidential computing. The Certifier Framework is an open-source project started by VMware in 2022 to tackle the key barriers in the development of confidential computing applications.

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The software that runs Cisco’s new Firewall 4200 Series now includes the ability to see into encrypted traffic without decrypting it, which the vendor says will allow enterprise customers to better protect hybrid and multicloud applications.

The enhanced Cisco Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) is part of the 7.4 version of the Secure Firewall operating system. Version 7.4 also includes zero-trust capabilities and improved application access control. The 4200 Series’ operating system also helps improve overall firewall performance – it’s twice as fast as previous high-end Cisco firewalls, the company says.

EVE, which has been available since version 7.2 of the software, takes things further than traditional firewalls because it now lets customers detect the client application within an encrypted tunnel, according to Rick Miles, vice president of product management, cloud and network security in Cisco’s security business group.

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As adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology accelerates, IT organizations are concerned that their existing infrastructure isn’t powerful enough to keep up.

AI hardware – especially training hardware – is becoming more and more power hungry, according to Equinix, which just released its 2023 Global Tech Trends Survey.

The power draw from traditional racks in a data center is between 5 kW and 10 kW per rack. But, increasingly, newer generations of GPU-based racks are pushing power draws north of 30 kW per rack, and in some cases as high as 72 kW per rack, according to Kaladhar Voruganti, senior technologist at Equinix. “So, definitely, it's very hard to host this type of infrastructure in private data centers,” he said.

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Snapshots are a very popular way to create virtual copies of an entire system in order to facilitate very quick (or even instant) recovery.  A properly designed snapshot-based recovery system can recover very large volumes in just minutes and can often do so to a point in time just minutes ago. In contrast, a typical restore of such size would likely take many hours and would typically lose at least a day’s worth of data.

There are two distinct approaches when it comes to creating snapshots: copy-on-write and redirect-on-write. Let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages associated with each method, as they will greatly determine the impact on system performance, and therefore your ability to keep snapshots for a long time.

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The Linux find command can locate files based on almost any criteria that you might need. This post describes the many criteria you can use to find what you’re looking for – even when you can’t remember what you named a file or when you last changed it or added content.

Basic find syntax

The basic syntax for the find command looks like this:

$ find [starting location] [criteria] [options] [action to take] 

The starting location can be a directory name (e.g., /var/log), the current directory (.), your home directory whether you’re sitting in it or not (~), or a directory relative to your current position (e.g., ./bin). You can be as specific as you want when entering the starting location.

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