Shortages due to supply-chain problems has faded from the headlines, but they persist and are actually getting worse in some sectors.

A report from AFCOM, an organization of data-center professionals, found that 44% of data-center operators surveyed had suffered downtime or an outage because they couldn’t get needed parts.

In the report “State of the Data Center 202,” 94% of respondents said that they have had supply-chain issues of one kind or another. The most commonly cited items in short supply (59%) are basic IT equipment such as servers and switches, followed by power systems (51%) including generators and UPSes.

But even acquiring security systems (34%) such as secure doors and cameras and building materials like concrete (35%) were an issue for many respondents.

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Co-management is a key part of many arrangements between enterprise IT teams and their managed service providers (MSP), but it’s not always clear where the management boundaries and overlaps exist and how they should be handled.

Oftentimes, enterprises land on a co-management approach because they don’t want to give up total control, and the MSP may be promising productive cooperation with prospective customers to provide reassurance and close the deal. In practice, co-managed technology services can vary widely depending on the type of services being offered and the parties involved.

For the sake of this article, let’s assume that enterprises are already committed to outsourcing some elements of their IT and communications services to an MSP partner. The benefits of outsourcing – such as expense or headcount reduction, increased expertise, improved productivity, core business focus and enhanced capability – are well established, and the potential risks and concerns – including loss of control, reduced flexibility, dwindling internal expertise and fears about data protection and ownership – are also well known.

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Lenovo is planning a major push into AI with a $1 billion investment in new hardware and software over the next three years. Its AI focus is not only on the data center, where a lot of the action is, but also on the edge. To that end, it announced two new edge servers specifically designed for AI processing.

First up is the new ThinkEdge SE360 V2, an edge server designed to provide advanced computing performance for AI applications such as computer vision, voice AI, and generative AI. The ThinkEdge SE360 V2 is built on Intel and Nvidia processors with support for Nvidia's AI Enterprise software platform and Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 platform for processing intense workloads at the data source. It features a compact size and ruggedized form factor designed to withstand remote and rugged environments.

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Error mitigation for quantum computers could ultimately lead to more reliable and useful systems, according to IBM, which recently demonstrated how its error-handling technology enabled a quantum computer to outperform a classical supercomputing approach.

Quantum computing excels at solving large, data-heavy problems, and future applications are expected to significantly advance areas such as AI and machine-learning in industries including automotive, finance, and healthcare. But among the challenges developers face are the noisiness of today's quantum systems and the errors they generate.

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AMD is coming for Nvidia’s AI crown in a big way with the launch of its new Instinct processor, which it claims can do the work of multiple GPUs.

CEO Lisa Su called the Instinct MI300X “the most complex thing we’ve ever built.” She held up the chip, which is about the size of a drink coaster, at an event on Tuesday in San Francisco.

Weighing in at 146 billion transistors, the MI300X comes with up to 192GB of high-bandwidth HBM3 memory shared by both the CPU and GPU. It has a total of 13 chiplets on the die. The chip also has a memory bandwidth of 5.2 TB/s, which is 60% faster than Nvidia’s H100.

The chip consists of Zen CPU cores and AMD’s next-generation CDNA 3 GPU architecture. The enormous amount of memory is the real selling point, according to Su.

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By: Sue Gillespie, Senior Product Marketing Manager, HPE Aruba Networking.

Creating a secure, high-performance, always-on network that’s designed for operational efficiency and growth begins with a modern infrastructure—and depends on campus core switches to be the beating heart of enterprise connectivity. Because of this key role, campus core switch capabilities directly impact user and device experience, network security, and IT operational efficiency.

What is a campus core switch?

These are typically Ethernet switches that manage traffic coming to and from aggregation switches, the wide area network (WAN), and the internet via router or gateway. Network architectures often deploy either 2-tier collapsed core approaches with a single switch playing the role of both core switch and aggregation (distribution) switch or a 3-tier approach with separate core and aggregation switches.  Here’s an example of a 3-tier network from our ESP Campus Design Validated Solution Guide:

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said its North Virginia (US-East-1) region faced disruption in services for nearly four hours, affecting thousands of customers.

“Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 region,” AWS wrote on its health status page, adding that at least 104 of its services were affected during the outage.

AWS services that were malfunctioning during these four hours included the likes of AWS Management Console, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Glue, Amazon Connect, AWS Fargate, and Amazon GuardDuty.

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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.

Keeping your files private from anyone but those with superuser (root) access is easy on Linux. File permissions provide everything you need. By default, you'll have a username and primary group assigned to your account, and you can use the chmod (change mode) command to control what anyone else can view or change.

(If permissions like "750" and "rwxr-x---" don't ring any bells for you, check out these posts for insights into how file permissions work on Linux: A deeper dive into Linux permissions and Unix: beyond group and everyone else)

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Cato Networks said today that it has successfully created an encrypted tunnel capable of 5Gbps of throughput, offering reassurance to network administrators worried about traffic overhead created by Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platforms.

The company’s announcement said that increasing uptake of SASE, particularly by large enterprises, has created a need for faster encrypted connections that still support the full array of security technologies present in SASE. The speed boost, Cato said, was made possible by improved performance in the company’s Single Pass Processing Engine, which is the umbrella of services that runs in its various points of presence.

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Enterprise technology is evolving at a break-neck pace, and one of the areas seeing the greatest transformation is the next-generation firewall (NGFW) market. Gone are the days of a single enterprise data center protected by firewalls only capable of basic packet inspection. NGFWs are converging networking and security to offer cutting-edge features powered by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) that can delve deeper into network traffic than ever before.

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Using aliases on Linux systems can save you a lot of trouble and help you work faster and smarter. This post examines the ways and reasons that many Linux users take advantage of aliases, shows how to set them up and use them, and provides a number of examples of how they can help you get your tasks done with less trouble.

What are aliases?

Aliases are simply one-line commands that are assigned names and generally stored in a startup file (e.g., .bashrc) that is run when you log in using a tool like PuTTY or open a terminal window on your desktop. The syntax is easy. It follows this pattern:

$ alias NAME = 'COMMAND'

As a simple example, typing a command like that shown below enables you to clear your screen simply by typing “c”.

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OK, it’s not been a great first half for many companies, from end users to vendors and providers. The good news is that users sort of believe that many of the economic and political issues that have contributed to the problem have been at least held at bay.

There’s still uncertainty in the tech world, but it's a bit less than before. Most of the companies I’ve talked with this year have stayed guardedly optimistic that things were going to improve. Over the last month, of the nearly 200 companies I’ve emailed with, only 21 were “pessimistic” about the outlook for their tech spending in the second half.

Lack of pessimism doesn’t translate to optimism, though, and optimism is a bit non-specific for network and IT planners to build on. What are the user priorities for tech for the rest of the year? Do they think their budgets will shift, and if so from what to what? Are they looking to make major changes in their networks, change their vendors, be more or less open? I thought I knew some of the answers to these questions, but for some I was wrong.

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Colocation provider Cyxtera Technologies has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after spending the last few months trying to find a buyer or reduce its debt load. The company will now attempt to restructure through bankruptcy or perhaps a suitor will come along to buy out the company.

Meanwhile, the company says it will be business as usual for its customers, but with the reorganization that comes with Chapter 11, it’s hard to say whether that will last, according to Bill Kleyman, an independent consultant to data-center companies.

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Too many management tools that don’t integrate well and a lack of visibility into third-party systems are among the problems enterprise IT teams face when they try to manage multivendor, distributed environments.

Cisco’s Full-Stack Observably Platform is designed to collect and correlate data from application, networking, infrastructure, security, and cloud domains to provide a clear view of what’s going on across the enterprise and make it easier for enterprises to spot anomalies, preempt and address performance problems, and improve threat mitigation.

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Big changes in how enterprise networks are managed and optimized are coming.

The new paradigm is all about radical simplicity and applying scarce skills to networking improvements that make a real difference. It features the convergence of different technologies, networks, applications, and key features of the cloud operating model, in turn driving simplicity, visibility, and predictability for IT professionals.

The No. 1 Challenge to IT Innovation

Innovation in IT―doing things better, faster, and more cost-effectively―is very much on the minds of enterprise companies. In a recent global study, 91% of CIOs, other senior IT decision makers, and developers reported that they are doubling down on their investments in innovation between now and 2026. The number one challenge to innovation cited by these 18,000 respondents in 34 global markets: the limits of their current technology. Yet they also say that technology is the top enabler of innovation.

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Looking to harness a decade of AI/ML development Cisco this week previewed generative AI-based features it will soon bring to its Security Cloud service and Webex collaboration offerings.

Cisco said it was looking meld the network and security intelligence it has amassed over the years with the large language models (LLMs) of generative AI to simplify enterprise operations and address threats with practical, effective techniques.  

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A tremendous number of enterprises and service providers view Cisco as the nexus of their network, security, and cloud operations. At the company’s Cisco Live customer and partner conference in June, Cisco boldly connected the dots of a network- and cloud-based ecosystem that ties together innovative technologies to drive productivity, resiliency, and growths, while also showcasing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Cisco’s market share for ethernet switches was 43.3% for 2022, according to IDC’s tracker report, while combined service provider and enterprise router revenue accounted for 35.1% of the total market. Network World named Cisco #1 in its 2022 list of “the top 10 vendors providing corporate networks with everything from SASE and NaaS to ZTNA and network automation.”

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Semiconductors, especially CPUs, are immensely complex creations all done at the microscopic level. That there aren’t more bugs, for lack of a better word, is a testament to the efforts that these chipmakers put in to delivering solid products. But occasionally, something slips by.

AMD has issued an alert that an older processor line has a minor error. The problem exists in its Epyc 7002 line, code-named Rome, which was released three years ago. The bug, first noted on a Reddit thread, says that servers running Rome-era chips will hang after 1,044 days of uptime or nearly three years.

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Cisco this week took the wraps off a security service edge (SSE) offering that aims to help enterprises securely connect growing edge resources, including cloud, private and SAAS applications.

Along with the SSE package, the vendor made two additional application security-related announcements at its Cisco Live! customer event. It unveiled Cisco Multicloud Defense, which is a new service designed to protect cloud service workloads, and it upgraded Panoptica, its cloud-native security application development software.

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Software-defined networking (SDN) is a network management technique that centralizes control of network appliances in software. SDN makes network management easier in two ways: it allows networks to be administered as a whole, rather than on a device-by-device basis, and it allows for administrative work to be automated and conducted on the fly in response to changing network needs and conditions.

The first SDN system to gain traction was the open source OpenFlow protocol, which rolled out in 2011. There are now a number of possible SDN models, each providing significant benefits when compared to traditional networking.

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Cisco is taking the wraps off an overarching architecture it expects will let enterprise customers manage and control its vast arsenal of networking hardware and software for years to come.

The Cisco Networking Cloud, unveiled at this week’s Cisco Live! customer event, will involve a broad range of software and cloud system integration and has as its ultimate, if somewhat vague, goal to converge networking platforms over time, culminating in a unified management platform that works on premises or cloud for improved visibility and enterprise automation, according to Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Networking.

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Microsoft is launching its first cloud region in Italy, the company said on Monday.

The new region, which will have three data centers, will be located in Lombardy — an administrative area in Northern Italy whose capital is Milan.

Enterprises will be able to start using the new region using Microsoft Azure or Microsoft 365 in the coming weeks, the company said, adding that other services such as Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are expected to follow soon.

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There are always things to wait for on a Linux system—upgrades to complete, processes to finish, coworkers to log in and help resolve problems, status reports to be ready.

Fortunately, you don’t have to sit twiddling your thumbs. Instead, you can get Linux to do the waiting and let you know when the work is done. You can do this with a script or you can use the wait command, a bash built-in that watches for processes running in the background to complete.

Crafting waiting within scripts

There are many ways to craft waiting within a script. Here’s a simple example of simply waiting for a period of time before moving on to the next task:

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Telecom ministers from at least 18 EU countries have rejected a proposal by network operators to have major technology companies fund the rollout of 5G and broadband.

The proposal, put forward by telecom lobbying groups GSMA and ETNO, which represent 160 operators across Europe, says that big tech companies that account for more than 5% of a provider’s peak average internet traffic should help foot the bill for rolling out the services across Europe.

The EU launched a consultation on the issue in February 2022. According to a report by Reuters, telecom ministers met with EU Commissioner Thierry Breton to raise their objections, with those who are against the proposal saying there is a lack of analysis to prove the measure would actually work, with some citing concerns that tech companies would end up passing these costs onto the consumer.

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IT organizations that apply artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technology to network management are finding that AI/ML can make mistakes, but most organizations believe that AI-driven network management will improve their network operations.

To realize these benefits, network managers must find a way to trust these AI solutions despite their foibles. Explainable AI tools could hold the key.

A survey finds network engineers are skeptical.

In an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) survey of 250 IT professionals who use AI/ML technology for network management, 96% said those solutions have produced false or mistaken insights and recommendations. Nearly 65% described these mistakes as somewhat to very rare, according to the recent EMA report “AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management.” Overall, 44% percent of respondents said they have strong trust in their AI-driven network-management tools, and another 42% slightly trust these tools.

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Data center developers are under pressure to expand their horizons when it comes to choosing sites for new construction. Land prices, availability of power and bandwidth, and pushbacks from neighbors are among the factors that are driving developers to seek new regions.

Northern Virginia, for example, is home to more data centers than any other part of the world, with 275 and more on the way. But the region is running out of space and available power, and residents are running out of patience for these resource-intensive facilities that consume growing amounts of power and water, according to the Washington Post. 

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