OK, you used to worry about nuclear war, then pandemics, then maybe an asteroid hitting earth or the sun going nova. Now, some want you to add AI to the list of things to worry about, and yes, you should probably do that. I’d hold off on worrying that AI will end life on earth, but users themselves tell me that AI does pose some risks, particularly the current ultra-hot “generative AI” that ChatGPT popularized. That’s particularly true for those who want to apply it to network operations.

I got input from 197 senior IT and network professionals over the last month, and none of them believed that AI could lead to the mass extinction of humanity. Well over half said that they hadn’t seen any crippling long-term downsides to AI use, and all of them said that their company used AI “somewhere.” Thirty-four offered real insight into the use of AI in network operations, and I think this group offers us the best look at AI in network missions.

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Despite the economic slowdown and many organizations easing back on their hiring plans in an effort to reduce costs, high-quality talent is still incredibly difficult to find and retain. Take the IT industry, where as many as 86% of CIOs are reporting more competition for qualified candidates and 73% are concerned about IT talent attrition. Demand for IT talent is far outstripping supply across all regions, a result of rapid digitization within the economy and long-standing educational and policy issues.

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Nitel’s newest service offering takes the company’s existing network-as-a-service out of North America and into the international market, as the company announces the availability of its SASE capabilities and NaaS to 34 global regions.

Nitel’s key offering is a full as-a-service network, leveraging relationships with data carriers — wired or wireless — at the local level to deliver basic connectivity, and then fold that into a robust enterprise networking suite, complete with SASE and private networking. The idea is to provide a more or less out-of-the-box network product that allows small and medium-size companies to hand the vast majority of their connectivity issues off to Nitel, which manages configuration and provisioning. In addition, Nitel provides SASE-standard security features like antimalware sandboxing, zero trust network access, data loss prevention and content filtering.

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Reducing energy use and keeping qualified staff are top of mind for data center operators, according to Uptime Institute’s latest annual global data center survey.

“Digital infrastructure managers are now most concerned with improving energy performance and dealing with staffing shortfalls, while government regulations aimed at improving data center sustainability and visibility are beginning to require attention, investment, and action,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director, Uptime Intelligence.

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AI is nothing without lots of data, so high-speed, high-capacity storage is a must. Lenovo is the latest vendor to come out with new storage systems that are optimized for read-intensive enterprise AI workloads and large dataset workloads.

Lenovo’s ThinkSystem DG enterprise storage arrays use all-flash storage and quad-level cell (QLC) architecture, the densest flash storage available. They’re capable of up to six times faster performance and up to 50% less cost compared to HDD arrays, Lenovo asserts. 

Its ThinkSystem DM3010H array is aimed at SMB customers and designed to offer better scalability and flexibility for a wide range of workloads, including file services, virtualization, backup and archive and other I/O applications, according to Lenovo.

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AI workloads are expected to put unprecedented performance and capacity demands on networks, and a handful of networking vendors have teamed up to enhance today’s Ethernet technology in order to handle the scale and speed required by AI.

AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft announced the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), a group hosted by the Linux Foundation that’s working to develop physical, link, transport and software layer Ethernet advances.

The industry celebrated Ethernet’s 50th anniversary this year. The hallmark of Ethernet has been its flexibility and adaptability, and the venerable technology will undoubtedly play a critical role when it comes to supporting AI infrastructures. But there are concerns that today’s traditional network interconnects cannot provide the required performance, scale and bandwidth to keep up with AI demands, and the consortium aims to address those concerns.

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Enterprise networking hardware vendor EnGenuis will release one of the first Wi-Fi 7-enabled access points for business use, the company announced this week.

The ECW536 uses the Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 chipset, and features a 4x4x4 antenna configuration. It’s got two 10Gb ethernet ports, and boasts several security enhancements, including business-class encryption protocols, RADIUS and isolated guest access.

The main draw, however, is Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be, is the latest and greatest Wi-Fi specification, although official certification from the IEEE isn’t expected to start until the second half of 2024. The key upgrades in Wi-Fi 7 include wider channels (up to 320MHz), 4K quadrature amplitude modulation rather than 1K, and muiltilink operation, which uses multiple radio bands at the same time to serve one connection. All that adds up to a substantially increased theoretical throughput peak, at 46Gbps.

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The sudo command is a very important command on Linux systems. You might say that it allows users to run privileged commands without logging in as root, and that is true. However, the more important point is that it allows individuals to manage Linux systems – adding accounts, running updates, installing applications and backing up the system – without requiring these things be done using the root account. This is consistent with the policy that says root privilege should only be used as needed and that no one should simply log in as root and run all of their commands. Doing routine work using the root account is considered dangerous because any typos or commands run in the wrong location can have very serious consequences.

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The UK’s Competition Market Authority (CMA) has provisionally cleared Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMWare, paving the way for the $61 billion deal to go ahead.

In November 2022, the CMA announced it was launching an in-depth investigation into the proposed deal, looking into whether the proposed merger “may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”

In particular, the CMA was concerned that the deal could harm the ability of Broadcom’s rivals to compete with VMware’s server virtualisation software, and if there would be a potential financial benefit to Broadcom and VMware if they were to make rival products work less well with VMware’s software

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While the hype around generative AI is palpable, enterprise IT spending so far has not been impacted by it.

That is one of the main takeaways from Gartner’s quarterly IT spending forecast, which finds that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.7 trillion in 2023, an increase of 4.3% from 2022.

Data center systems spending was down slightly year-over-year, but most other enterprise spending will increase, including software, IT and communications services outlay. according to the research firm.

“IT projects are shifting from a focus on external facing deliverables such as revenue and customer experience, to more inward facing efforts focused on optimization,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, in a statement.

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Fortinet has released two new high-speed, next generation firewalls designed to protect data center assets.

The 387Gbps 3200F series and 164Gbps 900G series feature support for the vendor’s AI-Powered Security Services, which blend AI and machine-learning technologies to make customers aware of cyber threats and act on protecting resources much more quickly, according to Nirav Shah, vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet.

FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services use real-time data from Fortinet’s threat researchers at FortiGuard Lab to monitor for new dangers. “We look at terabytes of data every day, and that's where we run our AI and machine learning to see different things – whether we need to enable AI-powered services with IPS, or utilize sandbox technologies to mitigate them,” Shah said. “If you look at the cybersecurity industry, and the amount of data that we see, and the patterns and other things that we need to recognize to find the threats – [it] is extremely tough if you do it manually.”

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Linux systems use a number of file system types – such as Ext, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, JFS, XFS, ZFS, XFS, ReiserFS and btrfs. Fortunately, there are a number of commands that can look at your file systems and report on the type of each of them. This post covers seven ways to display this information.

To begin, the file system types that are used on Linux systems are described below.

File system types

Ext4 is the fourth generation of the ext file system, released in 2008 and pretty much the default since 2010. It supports file systems as big as 16 terabytes. It also supports unlimited subdirectories where ext3 only supports 32,000. Yet it’s backward compatible with both ext3 and ext2, thus allowing them to be mounted with the same driver. Ext4 is also very stable, widely supported and compatible with solid state drives.

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Thanks to the mania surrounding AI as well as the impact of inflation, spending on servers and storage for cloud deployments climbed in the first quarter of this year. Looking ahead, cloud infrastructure sales are expected to grow over the next four years while on-premises spending will diminish, reports IDC.

The research firm’s quarterly enterprise infrastructure tracker finds that spending on compute and storage infrastructure products in the first quarter increased 14.9% year over year to $21.5 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outpace the non-cloud segment, which declined 0.9% in 1Q23 to $13.8 billion.

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Cisco announced a containerized firewall package for its venerable Catalyst switch family that’s designed to help enterprise customers with mixed IT and OT systems more easily segment network resources and save money by consolidating network and security deployments.

Specifically, Cisco built a Docker-based container for its Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) that can be hosted on its Catalyst 9300 access switches. Cisco Secure Firewall ASA combines firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, encryption and virtual private network (VPN) support.

The firewall supports up to 10 logical interfaces, which can be used for segmentation. This segmentation helps limit the ability of an attacker to move laterally within the network by containing any breach to a specific zone, wrote Pal Lakatos-Toth, an engineering product manager with Cisco’s security business group, in a blog about the news.

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If you've been considering a memory upgrade for your systems, now might be the time to do it. The lengthy decline of memory prices has nearly stopped, and while that doesn’t mean prices are going to go up just yet, it's likely to happen down the road.

DRAM and NAND flash memory makers have had to endure a severe downturn in average selling prices over the past six months, as part of the typical cyclical nature of memory sales. But a new report by technology industry analyst firm TrendForce says price declines for some forms of memory have slowed to almost zero.

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Cradlepoint this week shared its strategy to couple 5G wireless with its secure access service edge (SASE) platform to provide wireless WAN and hybrid WAN environments with cloud management and SIM-based security capabilities.

The platform builds off Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Exchange 5G SD-WAN and will incorporate zero trust and cloud-based security technology Cradlepoint acquired recently with its acquisition of Ericom. The company plans to roll out the updates in phases over the next 12 months, with its Cellular Intelligence component available now.

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Israeli startup UniFabriX is aiming to give multi-core CPUs the memory and memory bandwidth needed to run compute- and memory-intensive AI and machine-learning workloads.

UniFabriX is pitching its Smart Memory Node technology as an alternative to socket-connected DRAM, which restricts memory capacity and bandwidth in CPUs. UniFabriX's technology is based on CXL (Compute Express Link), an industry-supported interconnect for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators. CXL technology maintains memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices, which allows resource sharing for higher performance, reduced software stack complexity, and lower overall system cost.

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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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