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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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.

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 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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By: Eve-Marie Lanza, Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager, HPE Aruba Networking.

An advertising campaign from the 1980s posited that peanut butter and chocolate were, “two great tastes that taste great together.” While confectionary tastes may vary, there’s no denying that some things just work better together. When it comes to IT security, network access control, and Zero Trust security are like peanut butter and chocolate—great on their own, undeniably better together.

Network access control vs. Zero Trust security

Network access control and Zero Trust security are not the same, but they are related.

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The FCC’s latest spectrum policy announcement, which preserves 500MHz of the 12GHz band for satellite use while designating another 500MHz for terrestrial radios, is a recognition that satellite internet providers like Starlink are being heard, according to experts.

The commission’s latest notice of proposed rulemaking, posted May 18, reflects a more even-handed approach than has been adopted in the past. In carving up the airwaves for C-band usage, substantial amounts of spectrum were taken away from incumbent satellite users and handed off to terrestrial operators, most notably major telecom providers.

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You’d be hard pressed to find another technology that has been as useful, successful, and ultimately influential as Ethernet, and as it celebrates its 50^th anniversary this week, it is clear that Ethernet’s journey is far from over.

Since its invention by Bob Metcalf and David Boggs back in 1973, Ethernet has continuously been expanded and adapted to become the go-to Layer 2 protocol in computer networking across industries.

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5G promises increased speed, lower latency, and support for a significantly larger number of connected devices. But the growth in devices and in new applications that will ensue also will expand the attack surface, offering new opportunities for malicious actors to take advantage of security gaps.

Plus, as with any new technology, there is a great deal of potential for misconfigurations, errors, and unpatched vulnerabilities while companies are still learning how to deploy and secure 5G at scale.

About 75% of communication service providers worldwide said that they had experienced up to six security breaches of 5G networks within the past year, according to a November 2022 survey by GlobalData and Nokia. Half of the respondents said that they experienced an attack that resulted in the leakage of customer data, and nearly three quarters said that an attack had caused a service outage.

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For the third time in a row, Frontier is ranked number one among the world’s fastest supercomputers, and it remains the only whose fastest speed exceeds one exaFLOPS.

At 1.194 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), Frontier kept its ranking with more than double the top speed of its nearest competitor, according to the list compiled by TOP500, which issues the rankings twice a year. A quintillion is 10¹⁸ or one exaFLOPS (EFLOPS).

The number two machine, Fugaku, maxed out at 442.01petaFLOPS. A petaFLOPS is 10¹⁵ FLOPS.

Two competitors in the top 10 improved their speeds since the last ranking period that ended in November 2022, but not nearly enough to even draw close. Those two—LUMI and Leonardo—rank third and fourth, respectively.

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The UK government has finally unveiled its delayed 10-year strategy for supporting the country’s semiconductor industry, which includes £1 billion ($1.24 billion) in  investments to drive research and development efforts and shore up the industry’s talent pipeline.

More than two years after the strategy was first promised, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the policy Friday at a meeting of leaders of the G7 group of nations in Japan, coinciding with an agreement to launch a "semiconductors partnership" between the two countries in order to boost supply-chain resilience.

“Semiconductors underpin the devices we use every day and will be crucial to advancing the technologies of tomorrow,” Sunak said in a statement. “Our new strategy focuses our efforts on where our strengths lie, in areas like research and design, so we can build our competitive edge on the global stage.”

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Facebook parent company Meta has revealed plans for the development of its own custom chip for running artifical intelligence models, and a new data center architecture for AI workloads.

“We are executing on an ambitious plan to build the next generation of Meta’s AI infrastructure and today, we’re sharing some details on our progress. This includes our first custom silicon chip for running AI models, a new AI-optimized data center design and the second phase of our 16,000 GPU supercomputer for AI research,” Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

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Ampere has announced it has begun shipping its next-generation AmpereOne processor, a server chip with up to 192 cores and special instructions aimed at AI processing.

It is also the first generation of chips from the company using homegrown cores rather than cores licensed from Arm. Among the features of these new cores is support for bfloat16, the popular instruction set used in AI training and inferencing.

“AI is a big piece [of the processor] because you need more compute power,” said Jeff Wittich, chief products officer for Ampere. ”AI inferencing is one of the big workloads that is driving the need for more and more compute, whether it’s in your big hyperscale data centers or the need for more compute performance out at the edge.”

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When working in the Linux terminal window, you have a lot of options for moving on the Linux command line; backing up over a command you’ve just typed is only one of them.

Using the Backspace key

We likely all use the backspace key fairly often to fix typos. It can also make running a series of related commands easier. For example, you can type a command, press the up arrow key to redisplay it and then use the backspace key to back over and replace some of the characters to run a similar command. In the examples below, a single character is backed over and replaced.

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The Department of Energy has awarded $40 million to 15 vendors and university labs as part of a government program that aims to reduce the portion of data centers' power usage that's used for cooling to just 5% of their total energy consumption.

The DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is providing the funding to jumpstart a program called COOLERCHIPS, an acronym for Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems.

For chip cooling to account for just 5% of total energy consumption, that would translate to a PUE of 1.05. (Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is a metric to measure data center efficiency. It’s the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment.)

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IBM is developing a SaaS package to help enterprises securely network heterogenous environments, including edge, on-prem and multicloud resources.

The IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is a SaaS service that implements a virtualized Layer 3-7 environment to rapidly enable secure connectivity between users, applications, and data distributed across multiple locations and environments, according to Andrew Coward, general manager of IBM’s software defined networking group. 

In a nutshell, Hybrid Cloud Mesh deploys gateways within the clouds – including on-premises, AWS or other providers’ clouds, and transit points, if needed – to support the infrastructure, and then it builds a secure Layer 3-7 mesh overlay to deliver applications, Coward said. At the application level, the exposure to developers occurs at Layer 7, and the networking teams see Layer 3 and 4 activities, Coward said.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday said it is committing $12.7 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 in order to meet growing customer demand for its cloud services.

“Today we’re announcing an additional planned investment of $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India. That will bring our total investment to $16.4 billion by 2030 — boosting the country’s GDP, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, and continuing to help customers innovate,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a tweet.

The new investment, according to the company, is expected to add $23.3 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030, generating 131,700 jobs annually for the next seven years.

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Juniper Networks is looking to simplify the control of enterprise networks by expanding the AI-driven conversational interface of its cloud-based Mist management system and adding a new security access control service.

Juniper is integrating the ChatGPT AI-based large language model (LLM) with Mist’s virtual network assistant, Marvis. Marvis can detect and describe myriad network problems, including persistently failing wired or wireless clients, bad cables, access-point coverage holes, problematic WAN links, and insufficient radio-frequency capacity. 

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System memory is a complex problem. More memory means more performance, especially in a virtualized environment. But more memory also requires more power, and that can add up as you start to get into thousands of memory sticks.

Plus, you can only put so many memory sticks in a server, depending on the number of slots available. So how do you increase memory capacity? By increasing memory density on the chips, which is easier said than done. However, a startup called NEO Semiconductor is claiming it will be able to increase memory density by up to eight times over standard memory with a breakthrough 3D design.

It’s not a new concept; 3D memory stacking has been used in NAND flash to increase capacity for a decade now. Memory transistors can only be so large to fit in the confines of a DRAM chip. Rather than an increase the number of transistors laid out side by side, memory makers began stacking it on top of each other, thus increasing capacity in the same physical space. In the 10 years since 3D stacking began, NAND flash DRAM has reached the 170-layer mark, and SSDs have seen a significant increase in capacity without increasing the number of chips.

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It’s important to back up your databases, but it’s even more important to be able to restore it, so once you’ve identified how you’re going to back it up, make sure you test the different recovery scenarios.

Broadly speaking, there are two database types considered here, traditional and modern, and  recovery is different for each. A traditional database in this context is a database that runs in a single server or virtual machine that you manage, and a modern database might run across many nodes or it might even be serverless, where you have no access to the underlying infrastructure.

Recovering traditional databases

Restoring a traditional database is straightforward as long as you have practiced how to handle  different things that could go wrong. You don’t want to test your backup system for the first time during an actual database outage.

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For online auction powerhouse eBay, customer service is everything. Or, as Parantap Lahiri, vice president of network and data center engineering, puts it, “We want to make the network more like air or water, so our people don’t have to worry about network resources when creating magical services for our users.”

The demands on the eBay infrastructure are staggering: 1.8 billion active listings; 133 million active buyers. It’s main landing page gets 250 million visits per day. Unlike a static storefront site like Amazon, an eBay auction can entail multiple bidders from all over the world competing against each other as the clock ticks down to the end of the auction. And the eBay platform supports direct communication between sellers and buyers, with offers and counteroffers flying back and forth.

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By Gabriel Gomane, Senior Product Marketing Manager at HPE Aruba Networking.

Nowadays, a secure SD-WAN integrates advanced SD-WAN features with built-in next-generation firewall capabilities such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), IDS/IPS, and micro-segmentation, allowing organizations to replace legacy branch firewalls. Even though security features in secure SD-WANs are often equivalent to legacy firewalls, a secure SD-WAN offers additional benefits that a firewall cannot provide, accelerating the retirement of legacy firewalls in branches.

The benefits of replacing a branch firewall with a secure SD-WAN include:

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As more IT organizations apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and so-called AIOps technology to network management, network data is critical to success. AI/ML technology requires more and more data to learn individual networks, derive insights, and offer recommendations. Unfortunately, many organizations encounter problems when trying to feed network data to these AI tools.

In other words, network teams need to modernize their approach to network data before they embrace AI technology.

Enterprise Management Associates recently surveyed 250 IT professionals about their experience with AI/ML-driven network management solutions for a report, “AI-Driven Networks: Leveling up Network Management.” It found that data problems are the number-two technical challenge they encounter when applying AI/ML to network management. Only network complexity is a bigger technical issue.

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Google Cloud announced a new supercomputer virtual-machine series aimed at rapidly training large AI models.

Unveiled at the Google I/O conference, the new A3 supercomputer VMs are purpose-built to handle the considerable resource demands of a large language model (LLM). 

“A3 GPU VMs were purpose-built to deliver the highest-performance training for today’s ML workloads, complete with modern CPU, improved host memory, next-generation Nvidia GPUs and major network upgrades,” the company said in a statement.

The instances are powered by eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, Nvidia’s newest GPU that just begin shipping earlier this month, as well as Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of host memory and 3.6 TBs bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via Nvidia’s NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 interconnects.

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Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.

An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)

The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. 

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Branch offices play a critical role in the success of a business, contributing significantly to its bottom line. Despite that, branch offices often do not have all the pieces of the puzzle in place for robust performance and threat management in these remote locations.

This can happen due to shortfalls in branch office IT management, which can include:

• No full-time IT staff on site
• Reduced visibility into network and service performance compared to headquarters or data center locations
• Limited or no visibility into traffic that doesn’t come back to the data center
• Difficulty in understanding the remote end-user experience and quantifying the impact of service degradations

Negating these shortfalls requires a more comprehensive approach to remote management encompassing the following areas:

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