When cellular phones first came out, all you could do with it was make a call. Over time, as more features were added, such as cameras and internet connectivity, those capabilities became an expected part of the phone itself. Today, even the cheapest $20 retro flip phone includes a camera, texting capabilities, GPS, music, and even the ability to (still) make a phone call.

I think a similar transition is going to happen to zero trust network access (ZTNA). Right now, many ZTNA solutions are offered as an extra service, so that organizations pay per user to access applications in addition to their existing security solutions. But over time, ZTNA will become expected, much like you expect your phone to have a built-in camera. Going forward, ZTNA will simply become a standard part of cybersecurity.

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One of the biggest technology challenges organizations face is managing an increasingly complex environment that might include multiple cloud services and providers, on-site data centers, edge systems and other components.

An emerging solution is an orchestration tool that taps into cloud management data, edge systems and on-premises infrastructure to provide a full picture of the environment and come up with recommendations to improve the flow of business workloads, cut costs, and streamline processes.

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Looking to make a long-term splash in private-enterprise 5G, HPE has grabbed up Italian private cellular technology maker Athonet  for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2005, Athonet says its goal is to speed and simplify private 5G deployments. Among other packages, it offers CBRS and 5G starter kits that include Athonet mobile packet core, SIM cards, a choice of radio and other components needed to set up private cellular networks quickly. In 2022 the company formed the 5G Consortium to bring vendors together to develop a 5G ecosystem. The group includes Google Cloud, AWS, Airspan, Bearcom, and Digi.

Athonet technology will expand HPE’s 5G portfolio, which includes private 5G equipment integrated with its Aruba Wi-Fi gear to provide the option of using the technology that best meets enterprise requirements. HPE also has integrated 5G core technology it offers to service providers.

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As the speed of business increases, enterprises often require new hybrid network architectures that combine on-premises data centers with hybrid clouds to improve productivity. With users working from anywhere and applications distributed across multi-cloud/SaaS environments, traditional network design can lead to poor user experiences. Security is vitally important not just in terms of protecting resources and assets, but also to enable the network to accelerate and adapt without introducing unknown risks. To be truly successful, organizations that are expanding their digital transformation efforts need reliable, energy-efficient, and secure underlying technologies.

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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.

Dell today announced the forthcoming availability of a new line of PowerEdge servers powered by 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, as well as new partnerships with cloud networking providers and hardware makers for private 5G networks.

The new PowerEdge server models, which will be availabe in May, are the XR8000, XR7620, and XR5610. They’re designed with modularity and scalability in mind, with the idea of making it easy to deploy and maintain them, even in difficult conditions. (The systems are meant to support temperatures ranging from -5 to 55 degrees Celsius in the field.)

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Cisco issued field notices this week outlining what has apparently become a persistent issue: failed Ethernet connections due to a connected Webex device being moved around too much by pulling on its Ethernet cable.

The product involved is the Cisco Webex Room Navigator, a small touchscreen device that combines on-screen, controls, sensors and a power-over-Ethernet port used as a controller for Webex conferencing devices and scheduling conference spaces.

The problem, as the field notice describes, is that  “the Ethernet port might fail when the Cisco Room Navigator is pulled across the table by the Ethernet cable frequently over a period of several months.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced availability of its new Amazon EC2 M7g and R7g instances, the latest generation of instances for memory-intensive applications and running Amazons custom Arm processor, known as Graviton3.

This is the second offering of Graviton3-based instances from AWS. It previously announced specific instances for compute-intensive workloads last May.

Both the M7g and the R7g instances deliver up to 25% higher performance than equivalent sixth-generation instances. Part of the performance bump comes from the adoption of DDR5 memory, which offers up to 50% higher memory bandwidth than DDR4. But there’s also considerable performance gain from the new Graviton3 chip.

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The command prompt in a Linux terminal window is often just a $ unless you’ve logged in or sudo’ed your way into the root account, in which case you'd expect a #.

Sometimes, though, your prompt will be more complicated, with a format like [lucky@fedora ~]$. But it's possible to change your prompt to some friendlier character, word, or phrase, and if you’re so inclined, you can even change its color. This post shows how easy it is to make these kinds of changes.

Changing the format

To get started, one thing you need to know is that your command prompt is not just something your shell creates on the fly. Instead, it’s a variable and its name is PS1. To see how your prompt is defined, display its value like this:

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Wi-Fi HaLow, the marketing term the Wi-Fi Alliance has chosen for the IEEE 802.11ah standard, is a long- range, low-power, low-speed version of traditional Wi-Fi. It shows promise with deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, wearables, machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, smart buildings, and smart cities.

With the ability to connect low-bandwidth devices to IP networks including the internet, it supports enough bandwidth to handle HD-quality video and can even be used for rural communications and offloading cell phone tower traffic.

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Semiconductor manufacturers will respond to changes in demand by producing more dynamic RAM (DRAM) for servers than for mobile devices this year, a milestone that highlights increasing enterprise use of emerging technology related to cloud computing, AI and high performance computing (HPC) applications, according to market research firm TrendForce.

To handle the emerging-tech workloads, the average DRAM content of servers will increase by 12.1% year-over-year in 2023, compared to an increase of 6.7% for DRAM content for smartphones, TrendForce forecasts. DRAM content refers to the amount of DRAM memory installed in a device.

In a related estimate, server memory is expected to make up 37.6% of what TrendForce determines to be the total bit output of DRAM semiconductors, compared to mobile DRAM’s 36.8%, the company said in its latest DRAM research report.

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Committing routine and even rarely required tasks to scripts is almost always a big win because you don’t have to reinvent the approach to getting work done each time it’s needed, and you save a lot of time on issues you handle often.

Here are some tips for writing bash scripts and ensuring that they’ll be easy to use, easy to update/ and hard to misuse.

Comments

One important thing to do when you're preparing a script on Linux is to add comments – especially for commands that might be a little complex. If you don’t run a script very often, comments can help ensure that you quickly grasp everything that it’s doing. If someone else has to use your scripts, the comments can make it a lot easier for them to know what to expect. So, always add comments. Even you might appreciate them! You don’t need to comment every line, just every significant group of commands. Here's a simple example.

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Most organizations use both on-prem data centers and cloud-based IaaS services, often employing multiple IaaS platforms.

For some, this multicloud reality has come about as part of a steady, one-way migration to the cloud, and they may have intentionally kept their cloud networks distinct as part of that goal. Others may have a business strategy for keeping them distinct, such as providing services for a stand-alone division or a particular geography.

As a consequence, they are almost certainly already tying their on-premises and cloud infrastructure networks together in some way or are about to be.

Those with limited integration among their networks are often dealing with a patchwork of solutions that evolved haphazardly as cloud systems went from being experimental and isolated to being developmental and peripheral and then to being central and in-production.

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Software and semiconductor maker Broadcom and its acquisition target VMware have agreed to give themselves another 90 days to complete the $61 billion acquisition they announced on May 26, 2022.  

A regulatory filing by enterprise cloud vendor VMware showed that both the companies had delivered a mutual notice to extend the final date of the merger to twelve months from the day the deal was announced.

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Secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN provider Aryaka is set to open 27 new points of presence in 21 countries and 15 major metropolitan areas, with the goal of delivering low-latency services to a broader potential client base.

Aryaka's AppAssure routing and application performance solution will be present in all new and current POPs, providing SaaS-based application delivery across its network, according to a company announcement. Aryaka said it will also support wireless last-mile connectivity worldwide.

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Multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) outages have hit users around the world this week, and coming after interruptions in Microsoft's cloud services last month, are a reminder of the importance of site engineering for systems administrators whose businesses rely on cloud-based mission critical applications.

The biggest OCI outage this week began on 17:30 GMT Monday and stretched till Wednesday 22:30 GMT, impacting customers across North and South America, Australia, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe and Africa.

“Oracle engineers identified a performance issue within the back-end infrastructure supporting the OCI Public DNS API, which prevented some incoming service requests from being processed as expected during the impact window,” the company said on its cloud infrastructure  website.

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Cisco is getting more products out the door, thanks to significant product redesigns and relentless efforts by its supply-chain team to address component shortages, but the situation is still challenging.

“While components for a few product areas remain highly constrained, we did see an overall improvement in the supply chain,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins during a call with financial analysts to discuss the vendor's second-quarter results. 

Cisco reduced its backlog 6% sequentially in the second quarter, however total backlog grew year over year, Robbins said, though he didn't cite an exact dollar figure. The company still expects to have a backlog that’s roughly double what it would normally be at the end of the year. (In February of last year, Cisco said its product backlog was valued at nearly $14 billion.)

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Cisco is adding compute power and streamlining edge hardware and software offerings to make SD-WAN easier to deploy and manage.

Taken together enhancements are aimed at helping to better handle growing distributed enterprises but also to help simplify environments—the hardware by allowing users to collapse multiple devices into one, and the software to ease configuration and management of SD-WANs.

On the hardware side, Cisco is adding the 3U, Catalyst 8500-20X6C edge platform to its Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms Family. It is an edge aggregation device built on the Cisco’s quantum-flow processor (QFP) ASIC and promises more than three times the performance over the existing high-end Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform, according to Archana Khetan, head of products in Cisco’s Enterprise Routing group. “With the increased power, customers can support more users and collapse the number of boxes they need to support edge applications as needed,” Khetan said.

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AMD continues to gain ground in the data center, grabbing CPU market share from leader Intel despite a significant decline in server processor shipments.

Overall, the processor market took a hit in the fourth quarter of 2022, as well as for the full year 2022, due to lower demand, ongoing inventory corrections, and a slowing economy, according to analyst firm Mercury Research.

For 2022, total unit shipments (client and server, excluding ARM) were 374 million and revenues came in at $65 billion, down 21% and 19%, respectively, compared to 2021.

Specific to server processors, sales for the year came in at 36.1 million units, down 4.2% from 37.7 million in 2021. Revenues were $24 billion in 2022, down 7.7% from $26 billion in 2021. Mercury’s principal analyst Dean McCarron attributes the sharper drop in revenue versus units because the average selling price (ASP) declined.

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The echo command (a bash built-in) is one of the very basic commands on Linux. As with ls and pwd, you can't sit on the command line very long without using it. At the same time, echo has quite a few uses that many of us never take advantage of. So, this post looks into the many ways you can use this command.

What is echo?

Basically, echo is a command that will display any text that you ask it to display. However, when you type “echo hello”, the echo command isn't only spitting out those five letters, it's actually sending out six characters – the last one being a linefeed. Let's look at a couple of commands that make this obvious.

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5G connectivity is being used in a wide range of products, but one thing they have in common is that they tend to be very high-powered devices. Up until now, there has been little emphasis on low-power devices, such as small edge/IoT devices or consumer products.

Qualcomm is addressing that with Snapdragon X35 5G Modem-RF, a 5G New Radio (NR) processor designed to serve the low-power and low-bandwidth markets.

The company claims it is the first NR-Light processor based on the 2020 3GPP Release 17 spec that was written to support low-power 5G IoT devices over any of the broadcast frequencies allocated to 5G. At the same time, it is compatible with legacy LTE (4G). The spec is also known as “reduced capacity” or RedCap.

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Cloud communications firm Twilio has announced that it plans to reduce its global workforce by about 17%, within months of laying off over 800 employees. In addition to the layoffs, the company is also undergoing an internal restructuring to create two business units, Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications, according to a company blog post.

As of September 30, 2022, Twilio had 8,992 employees, of which 816 were laid off in the fourth quarter of 2022. The company is now expected to lay off an additional 1,400 employees in the new round of layoffs.

This fresh round of layoffs is meant to help the company “spend less, streamline, and become more efficient,” Jeff Lawson, chief executive officer and co-founder of Twilio, said in the blog post. “To do that, we’re forming two business units: Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications. And today, I’m unfortunately bearing the news that we’re parting ways with approximately 17% of our team.”

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CDN (content delivery network) giant Akamai Technologies today announced that it will discount cloud egress pricing, add ISO, SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, and build out enterprise-scale cloud computing sites and distributed points of presence in over 50 cities as part of a new initiative — dubbed Connected Cloud — aimed at filling a niche between the hyperscalers and edge computing.

The idea is to fulfill what the company sees as unmet demand. In Akamai's view, modern applications are ncreasingly being broken into a range of different microservices. In many cases, those microservices need to be distributed across a geographically wide area, creating different computing needs than those addressed by most cloud vendors.

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Observability may be the latest buzzword in an industry loaded with them, but Cisco will tell you the primary goal of the technology is to help enterprises get a handle on effectively managing distributed resources in ways that have not been possible in the past.

The idea of employing observability tools and applications is a hot idea. Gartner says that by 2024, 30% of enterprises implementing distributed system architectures will have adopted observability techniques to improve digital-business service performance, up from less than 10% in 2020.

“Today’s operational teams have tools for network monitoring, application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, call monitoring, and more, but they rarely intermingle to provide a cohesive view of what’s going on across the enterprise,” according to Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group.

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Nigel Williams-Lucas, director of Information Technology at Maryland-based footwear retailer DTLR, faced a challenge that most IT execs will recognize: the business was pushing hard on digital transformation, and the IT infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.

Store managers were seeking better data analytics and business intelligence from backend systems like inventory and sales. The business wanted IT systems to support customers ordering online and picking up at a physical store within two hours.

The network needed to securely support real-time, bandwidth-intensive IP security cameras. And Williams-Lucas wanted to roll out beaconing technology, in which the network gathers information about customer in-store activity via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and can send discount offers to a customer’s phone based on where they are in the store and what they appear to be interested in.

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Today’s CEOs have three top priorities for their CIOs: improve the customer experience, strengthen IT and business collaboration, and improve the employee experience, according to the Foundry 2023 State of the CIO.

There’s certainly room for improvement: 80% of respondents to a Juniper Networks survey said poor network connectivity interrupts their work, on average, two to three times per day.

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