A significant change to Intel's high performance computing roadmap gives competitors AMD and Nvidia plenty of time to grab market share.

Intel has a pair of processors called CPU Max and GPU Max. Both feature high bandwidth memory (HBM) on the die which greatly increases performance. The successor to the GPU Max, known as Rialto Bridge, was due later this year or early next year.

Instead, Intel cancelled Rialto Bridge, and its successor – Falcon Shores – isn't coming until 2025. Longer term, Intel plans to have one processor, called an XPU, that will combine CPU and GPU cores on one die, but that will come after Falcon Shores.

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In a move that highlights how the ongoing US-China chip war is disrupting the global semiconductor supply chain, the US is taking measures to address a gap in restrictions imposed on Chinese server maker Inspur Group that leaves US companies free to continue supplying Inspur’s affiliates, of which there are dozens, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Inspur sells servers targeted at AI and big data workloads, and does business worldwide, including in the US, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific.

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Power over Ethernet (or PoE) is the delivery of electrical power to networked devices over the same Ethernet cabling that connects them to the LAN. This simplifies the devices themselves by eliminating the need for an electric plug and power converter, and makes it unnecessary to have separate AC electric wiring and sockets installed near each device.

Many enterprises have come to rely on PoE to bring electricity over existing data cables to Wi-Fi access points, firewalls, IP phones, and other infrastructure throughout their networks.

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One very interesting trick that you may not know is that you can type a line of text (presumably a command) on the Linux command line and immediately save it to a file by pressing just three keys. The editor that will open up will depend on your $EDITOR setting that you can view using the command shown below:

$ echo $EDITOR nano 

If you prefer to use a different editor, use a command like this before typing or moving back to the command that you want to save:

$ export EDITOR=vi 

And don't forget to save this change to your .bashrc (or other start-up file) if you want to make this change permanent. For example:

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Aruba Networks plans to prioritize development of a short list of key networking technologies – including data-center switching, private 5G, and secure access service edge (SASE) – that it finds are top of mind for enterprise customers.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s network subsidiary is fresh off a successful first quarter that saw revenue climb 31% year over year. Aruba general manager Phil Mottram attributes the record revenue in large part to the company’s Intelligent Edge strategy, which includes technologies to help customers adopt and manage network and application resources.

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Following similar moves by the US, the Netherlands government is moving forward with plans for new restrictions on exports of advanced chip-making technology to China, which are expected to affect the manufacture of advanced logic and DRAM modules.

The Netherlands export restrictions have been in the works for some time, and on Wednesday the Dutch government posted more information on its plans.

 "These new export controls focus on advanced chip manufacturing technology, including the most advanced deposition and immersion lithography tools," according to an announcement by Netherlands-based ASML, a leading global manufacturer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

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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.

VMware has revamped its Workspace One mobile and virtual desktop platform by boosting performance, making it more service-oriented and easy to manage.

Workspace One is VMware’s endpoint-management package for delivering, managing and securing application access to any device across the a cloud or distributed on-premises enterprise. The highly-integrated suite includes device management, single sign-on, remote access control, endpoint security, analytics, automation and virtualization.

The changing way workers are using and accessing applications from multiple devices prompted the over-arching need to change Workspace One and how its services are delivered.

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Juniper Networks is looking to ease complicated campus networking by automatically configuring and helping manage Ethernet VPN-Virtual Extensible XLAN (EVPN/VXLAN) deployments.

Juniper also expanded its EX family of switches aimed at campus distribution deployments and low-density data-center top-of-rack environments, according to Jeff Aaron, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper.

Juniper has rolled out a process called campus fabric workflow, under its subscription-based Wired Assurance program. Campus fabric workflow can help customers deploy common standards-based campus fabrics, such as EVPN multihoming, EVPN core/distribution and IP Clos for VLAN extensions with an easy process that lets them pick their desired topology, assign devices/roles and push configurations, Aaron said.

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UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL TUESDAY, MARCH 7 AT 9AM ET

Fortinet has added features that broaden the range of management and security tools for its secure access service edge (SASE) package.

The company has exanded its Secure Private Access offering that ties SASE resources together with SD-WAN-based applications through a Fortinet SD-WAN hub located in a nearby point-of-presence (PoP). The idea is to support larger hybrid environments and simplify anywhere access to corporate applications, said Nirav Shah, vice president of products with Fortinet.

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With the public release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s $10-billion investment into OpenAI, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly gaining mainstream acceptance. For enterprise networking professionals, this means there is a very real possibility that AI traffic will affect their networks in major ways, both positive and negative.

As AI becomes a core feature in mission-critical software, how should network teams and networking professionals adjust to stay ahead of the trend?

Andrew Coward, GM of Software Defined Networking at IBM, argues that the enterprise has already lost control of its networks. The shift to the cloud has left the traditional enterprise network stranded, and AI and automation are required if enterprises hope to regain control.

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Linux man pages can be overwhelming to people who are just learning how to work on the command line, but here we'll look at a way to quickly prepare a cheat sheet for a series of commands. These cheat sheets will tell new Linux users enough to get started and know what man page to read when they want to know more.

To get started, we’ll take a look at series of commands that any Linux newbie would need to learn:

alias cmp export less tail whereis apropos comm grep more tar who cat dd head passwd top whoami chmod df kill pwd unzip zip chown diff killall sort whatis 

Next, we use a series of commands that will provide short descriptions of these commands. These are help -d, whatis, and a man command that selects only the command description from the man pages.

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Reducing e-waste and extending the useful life of IT gear are top recycling drivers, according to an IDC survey.

The most commonly cited motivation was to reduce e-waste, with more than half those surveyed in Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific, citing it, and with US respondents falling just shy of 50%. The IDC Spotlight survey results of 540 respondents was conducted in February 2023 and written by IDC Research Vice President, Flexible Consumption and Financing Strategies for IT Infrastructure.

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The name Royal Caribbean conjures up images of luxury cruise ships, top-notch entertainment, fine dining, sandy beaches, breathtaking sunsets, tall tropical beverages.

“Our mission is to create fabulous vacations with great experiences and great memories for our crew and our guests,” says John Maya, vice president of operational excellence at Miami-based Royal Caribbean Group.

Beyond the glitz and glamour, however, Royal Caribbean has the same internal systems as any company in the travel/hospitality industry – corporate offices, sales, marketing, reservations, call centers, baggage handling, etc.

Maya describes his IT infrastructure as hybrid cloud, with some resources hosted on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, but also some core systems, such as the mission critical reservations application, running on an IBM AS-400 server in an Equinix data center in Virginia.

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An organization takes a multicloud approach when it uses cloud services from more than one provider. That might seem obvious from the name—it's multiple clouds, after all—but the reasons for choosing a multicloud approach can be as varied as the cloud platforms themselves.

Because "cloud" has become such a broad and all-encompassing category, a multicloud environment might include, say, Microsoft 365 SaaS for productivity apps, Google Drive for storage, and Amazon AWS for compute services.

On the other hand, organizations might have a reason to turn to multiple cloud providers for the same function or purpose. And public cloud services are so cheap and easy to get started with that large organizations (or organizations that don't have tight centralized control over IT) might find themselves in a multicloud situation without ever intending to.

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The ever-evolving business needs of today’s organizations and their work-from-anywhere (WFA) hybrid workforces are compelling IT leadership to redesign their networks. It is clear that network architectures must be agile to meet all traditional and new business needs. Because of this evolution, changes to the status quo are inevitable.

Physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures are converging and changing the nature of on-premises data centers. Some even believe this trend toward hybrid networks spells the end of the data center as well as traditional data center security—but they aren’t dead yet.

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Big challenges don’t usually suddenly explode on the scene. There are little symptoms, warning signs that signal developing issues. One place to look for them is a trade show, because there are a lot of buyers and sellers collected in one place. The Mobile World Congress (MWC) that just ended is a good example, because it validated some little signals that networking might be facing a big challenge.

• Back in 2007, Australia created a National Broadband Network (NBN) as a national infrastructure project because access infrastructure was too expensive to support competition and reasonable consumer prices. At MWC, Telecom Italia said that retail pricing pressure and exploding data consumption meant it was “facing a perfect storm.”  Ericsson said that the 200 operators in Europe need to consolidate significantly in order to be financially efficient and stable.
• Last year, because consumer willingness to pay for broadband hasn’t grown and their appetite for bandwidth has exploded, European Union operators have asked the union to approve subsidies to them from big tech. Stories spread through MWC that the EU favored the subsidies, called the fair share. An EU regulator suggested that fair-share policies were essential to assure gigabit connectivity by 2030. 
• Mobile operators, long the profit stars of carrier services, are looking for a revenue boost or cost reduction. At MWC, Telefonica announced a partnership with Microsoft to support an API program called Open Gateway that the GSMA announced as a means of raising new revenues and perhaps avoid subsidies.
• Equipment vendors’ earnings from service provides have been dropping. At MWC, Nokia’s announced rebranding created a buzz, because it includes less emphasis on service provider networks and more on enterprise networks.  But over the last 20 years, the portion of enterprise network budgets that represent new spending to achieve new benefits has dipped from almost half to about 10%.

These are not the signs of a healthy industry. Remember the story of the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a hole in the dike and saved the country from a flood? Well, we’re seeing, in all these data points, the signs of a real problem in networking, a lot of leaks in the dike of its business model. Where are the fingers? 

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If you’re sitting at your Linux computer and feeling curious about some word or term, you don’t have to jump up and grab a dictionary. Instead, you can install the dict command and you’ll probably be amazed by the wealth of information that will be available to you on the command line.

You will be able to find multiple definitions for nearly any term you ask about, often with considerable depth. Just looking up the word “seven”, I was provided with four definitions. They included references to the Pleiades (a star cluster that is also known as the "Seven Sisters"), a mention of the seven wonders of the world, scriptural references to the number seven, a note about how many days are in a week, and an explanation that seven is one greater than six.

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IBM and data security and backup provider Cohesity have formed a new partnership, calling for Cohesity’s data protection functionality to be incorporated into an upcoming IBM storage product suite, dubbed Storage Defender, for better protection of end-user organizations’ critical information.

The capabilities of Cohesity's DataProtect backup and recovery product will be one of four main feature sets in the Storage Defender program, according to an announcement from IBM Thursday.

The Storage Defender suite is designed to bring together IBM and third-party products in order to unify primary, secondary replication, and backup management, said IBM. It’s an as-a-service offering that features a single-pane-of-glass interface, SLA-driven policy automation and the ability to work with a wide variety of data sources, including physical storage, cloud hypervisors, and an assortment of different database types.

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Flash-based storage vendor Pure Storage is targeting companies using disk-based mass storage market with a new model of blade server, dubbed FlashBlade//E, that provides lower price points for petabyte-scale systems thanks to a tweak to the company’s FlashBlade architecture.

Pure Storage’s existing FlashBlade//S system is designed for performance – each blade in the 5U chassis of the system has built-in compute and networking, which are interconnected and combined into a single namespace for ease of use. (Multiple chassis can be connected together and will work similarly via an external fabric module, or XFM.)

That’s great for high-performance computing (HPC) and other applications that need particularly high performance, but Pure Storage wants to bring its all-flash approach to the world of unstructured storage, where spinning discs are still widely used.

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IBM said this week it will soon roll out an AI-infused, hybrid-cloud oriented version of its z/OS mainframe operating system.

Expected in the third quarter, z/OS 3.1 will  support technologies intended to enable deployment of AI workloads co-located with z/OS applications, IBM said in a customer preview letter.

The new OS will work best with the newest version of the Big Iron, the z16, but it will support z14 models and above, IBM says.

The z16 includes an AI accelerator built onto its core Telum processor that can do 300 billion deep-learning inferences per day with one millisecond latency and includes what IBM calls a quantum-safe system to protect organizations from anticipated quantum-based security threats.

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Nvidia recently announced fourth-quarter earnings, and all things considered, they weren’t that bad. They beat expectations even though sales were down. There was no panic on the conference call, no layoffs.

But amid all the talk about earnings and projections for 2023, CEO Jensen Huang dropped a surprise bombshell onto the earnings call with the announcement of DGX Cloud. It’s a deal to make its DGX systems available through multiple cloud providers, rather than installing the the necessary hardware on premises.

Nvidia sells GPU-based compute systems called DGX Pods. The same processors, networking, and Nvidia’s comprehensive AI Enterprise software stack from the Pods will be available through your browser, rather than sinking six or seven figures into hardware for your data center.

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