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.  

The first fruits of this effort will be directed at the Cisco Security Cloud, the overarching, integrated-security platform that includes software such as Duo access control and Umbrella security as well as firewalls and  Talos threat intelligence access all delivered via the cloud.

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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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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.

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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After initial efforts to attract semiconductor manufacturers to India stumbled, the government is trying again, keeping hopes alive that the country could emerge as a major chip maker at a time when a US-China trade war is transforming the industry and stirring worries about the technology supply chain.

This week, after several potential deals fell through, the government is re-inviting applications to a program aimed at developing semiconductor manufacturing facilities and  offering total subsidies of around $10 billion (₹76,000), according to a statement from India’s IT ministry.

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Cisco plans to buy Armorblox, a six-year-old AI vendor, to help create “an AI-first Security Cloud.”

“Leveraging Armorblox’s use of predictive and Generative AI across our portfolio, we will change the way our customers understand and interact with their security control points,” wrote Raj Chopra senior vice president and chief product officer for Cisco Security in a blog announcing the pending acquistion.

While securing email was Armorblox’s first application of its AI techniques, they might also be applied to attack prediction, rapid threat detection, and efficient policy enforcement, Chopra wrote. “Through this acquisition though, we see many exciting broad security use cases and possibilities to unlock.”

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Google Cloud has announced services for enterprises to more easily and securely connect distributed multicloud resources.

The chief service, Cross-Cloud Interconnect, provides dedicated high-speed connections between the Google network and customer networks hosted in other clouds—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or Alibaba.

“Cross-Cloud Interconnect lets organizations connect to any public cloud through a highly secure, dedicated-bandwidth network that has a much lower latency than going through an internet-based VPN solution,” said Muninder Sambi, vice president and general manager of networking for Google Cloud. “With the new service, customers can run their applications on multiple clouds, they can host SaaS applications that are multicloud, and they can also migrate workloads from one cloud to another.”

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More than a year ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was open to the possibility of having Intel manufacture Nvidia’s GPUs through Intel's foundry services program.

At the time, Huang was noncommittal beyond saying that Nvidia was looking at the possibility. Now things are getting more concrete. During a question-and-answer session at the Computex tradeshow in Taipei, Taiwan, Huang said he had recently received good results for an Intel test chip based on the company's next-generation process node.

"You know that we also manufacture with Samsung, and we're open to manufacturing with Intel. [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger] has said in the past that we're evaluating the process, and we recently received the test chip results of their next-generation process, and the results look good," Huang said.

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A software-development team caused quite a stir recently with a blog post describing how it abandoned a serverless architecture project in favor of a monolith—and slashed cloud infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.

But this wasn’t just any team; the post was written by Marcin Kolny, a senior software-development engineer at Amazon Prime Video.

Since Amazon is one of the leading advocates for serverless computing, not to mention the market leader in cloud services, the post was viewed as either a commendable act of openness or the very definition of throwing your company under the bus. Either way, it triggered a passionate back and forth on social media platforms that focused on larger questions:

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Qualcomm has announced it is shifting its focus from providing chips exclusively for communications devices and doubling down on its efforts to support AI workloads.

The company is transitioning to becoming  an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Alex Katouzian, a senior vice president at Qualcomm, said during a keynote speech at the Computex show in Taipei Tuesday.

AI workloads require a lot of compute power and in February, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X75, its latest 5G modem component that the company said will be the world’s first modem-RF system for 5G-Advanced — a set of specifications designed to improve speed, maximize coverage, and enhance mobility and power efficiency for mobile devices. The X75 is also reportedly able to process AI workloads 2.5 times faster than its predecessor, the X70.

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With Nvidia’s Arm-based Grace processor at its core, the company has introduced a supercomputer designed to perform AI processing powered by a CPU/GPU combination.

The new system, formally introduced at the Computex tech conference in Taipei the DGX GH200 supercomputer is powered by 256 Grace Hopper Superchips, technology that is a combination of Nvidia’s Grace CPU, a 72-core Arm processor designed for high-performance computing and the Hopper GPU. The two are connected by Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink-C2C high-speed interconnect.

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Nvidia has unveiled a new DGX GH200 AI supercomputer, underpinned by its new Grace Hopper superchip and targeted toward developing and supporting large language models.

“DGX GH200 AI supercomputers integrate Nvidia’s most advanced accelerated computing and networking technologies to expand the frontier of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a blog post.

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The convert command from the ImageMagick suite of tools provides ways to make all sorts of changes to image files. Among these is an option to change the resolution of images. The syntax is simple, and the command runs extremely quickly. It can also convert a image from one format to another (e.g., jpg to png) as well as blur, crop, despeckle, dither, flip and join images and more.

Although the commands and scripts in this post mostly focus on jpg files, the convert command also works with a large variety of other image files, including png, bmp, svg, tiff, gif and such.

Basic resizing

To resize an image using the convert, you would use a command like this:

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Intel has announced a shift in strategy that impacts its XPU and data-center product roadmap.

XPU is an effort by Intel to combine multiple pieces of silicon into one package. The plan was to combine CPU, GPU, networking, FPGA, and AI accelerator and use software to choose the best processor for the task at hand.

That’s an ambitious project, and it looks like Intel is admitting that it can’t do it, at least for now.

Jeff McVeigh, corporate vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel, provided an update to the data-center processor roadmap that involves taking a few steps back. Its proposed combination CPU and GPU, code-named Falcon Shores, will now be a GPU chip only.

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It’s been 17 years and counting since Nemertes first wrote about the logic of integrating event response in the enterprise: bringing together the security operations center (SOC) and network operations center (NOC) at the organizational, operational, and technological levels. Needless to say, this has not happened at most organizations, although there has been a promising trend toward convergence in the monitoring and data management side of things. It’s worth revisiting the issue.

Why converge?

The arguments for convergence remain pretty compelling:

• Both the NOC and SOC are focused on keeping an eye on the systems and services comprising the IT environment; spotting and understanding anomalies; and spotting and responding to events and incidents that could affect or are affecting services to the business.
• Both are focused on minimizing the effects of events and incidents on the business.
• The streams of data they watch overlap hugely.
• They often use the same systems (e.g. Splunk) in managing and exploring that data.
• Both are focused on root-cause analysis based on those data streams.
• Both adopt a tiered response approach, with first-line responders for “business as usual” operations and occurrences, and anywhere from one to three tiers of escalation to more senior engineers, architects, and analysts.
• Most crucially: When something unusual happens in or to the environment (that router is acting funny), it can be very hard to know up front whether it is fundamentally a network issue (that router is acting funny – it has been misconfigured) or a security issue (that router is acting funny – it has been compromised) or both (that router is acting funny – it has been misconfigured and is now a serious vulnerability). Having fully separate NOC and SOC can mean duplicative work as both teams pick something up and examine it. It can mean ping-ponging incidents that bounce from one to the other, or incidents that neither picks up, thinking the other has or will.

At the very least, the lower tiers of separate NOC and SOC operations should be converged, so that there is neither duplication nor a game of hot potato as staff try to figure out what a problem actually is, and whether the response will be network focused, security focused, or both. Maintaining separate or semi-separate escalation paths is supportable given that lower-level convergence.

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The US Commerce Department should put trade restrictions on Chinese memory chip maker Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT), say lawmakers on the US House of Representative’s Committee on China.

The comments come in the wake of the Chinese government's ban on the use of some Micron chips in certain sectors, citing concerns that the products pose a significant security risk to the country’s key information infrastructure supply chain.

However, these claims are “not based in fact” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, adding that the Department of Commerce was engaged directly with the PRC (People's Republic of China) to detail the administration’s views on the ban.

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Intel has launched a field-programmable gate array—Agilex 7 with R-Tile—that features PCIe 5.0 and CXL capabilities for processing networking workloads.

The Agilex FPGA is primarily used in smartNICs that offload the processing of network traffic from the CPU, thus freeing up CPU capacity for other tasks. Intel sees Agilex playing a role in data centers, telecommunications, and financial services, among other high-traffic industries.

Agilex is an evolution of the old Stratix and Arria FPGA lines, and it’s designed to reflect changes in performance and features. Agilex 7 is the second most powerful FPGA family within the Agilex portfolio.

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Microsoft is integrating Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software suite with its Azure Machine Learning service to help enterprise developers build, deploy, and manage applications based on large language models, it said Tuesday.

Developers and enterprises will have access to over 100 frameworks, pretrained large language models, and development tools as part of AI Enterprise Suite integration with Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning service, the companies said in a joint statement. For now, the integration is only available through an invitation-only preview in the Nvidia community registry.

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Dell Technologies and Nvidia are jointly launching an initiative called Project Helix that will help enterprises to build and manage generative AI models on-premises, they said Tuesday.

The companies will combine their hardware and software infrastructure in the project to support the complete generative AI lifecycle from infrastructure provisioning through modeling, training, fine-tuning, application development, and deployment, to deploying inference and streamlining results, they said in a joint statement.

Dell will contribute its PowerEdge servers, such as the PowerEdge XE9680 and PowerEdge R760xa, which are optimized to deliver performance for generative AI training and AI inferencing, while Nvidia contribution to Project Helix, will be its H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Nvidia Networking to form the infrastructure backbone for generative AI workloads.

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With Bed Bath & Beyond filing for bankruptcy last month, it’s liquidation-sale time. That doesn’t mean just  blankets and cookware; it also includes its data center in North Carolina. Not just its servers but the whole facility.

The data center in Claremont, N.C., was built in 2013 with a total of 47,500 square feet, 9,500 feet of which is raised floor space, with the ability to double the amount of raised floor space and boost the total power from 1MW to 3.5MW.

It is rated a Tier III on the data-center ranking scale of I through IV. Tier III data centers have redundant components and infrastructure for power and cooling, with a guaranteed 99.982% availability.

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