Five companies that manufacture semiconductors for smartphones, automobiles and more have announced that they will form a company designed to advance the open source RISC-V architecture, in a move widely seen as being designed to reduce their dependence on licensed technology from Arm.

The companies — Qualcomm, Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, NXP Semiconductors and Nordic Semiconductors — have yet to name this joint venture, but said in a statement issued Friday that the company will be registered in Germany, and that its focus will be on providing reference architectures and establishing industry solutions. The initial focus, according to the statement, will be on the automotive industry, but plans are in place to expand into mobile and IoT use cases.

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CoreWeave, a specialist cloud provider offering high performance computing services to meet growing corporate demand for generative AI workloads, announced Thursday that it has received a $2.3 billion debt financing package from several asset management firms.

The key to CoreWeave’s focus on the AI market is in its hardware. The company sells primarily GPU-based virtual machines, which are particularly well-suited for AI workloads. According to Gartner vice president and analyst Arun Chandrasekaran, CoreWeave’s advertised low cost is a function of its ties to Nvidia, with which, CoreWeave has said, it has a preferred supplier arrangement, enabling it to pass on savings.

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Fortinet has added new features to its SD-WAN software and a next-generation firewall series that promise to help customers better monitor and protect distributed enterprise resources.

On the SD-WAN front, Fortinet is introducing two services – a network underlay and overlay option to let customers better manage WAN traffic to remote sites. 

The Underlay Performance Monitoring Service for SD-WAN utilizes the vendor’s core central management system FortiManager and FortiGuard’s database of hundreds of popular SaaS and cloud implementations, to offer visibility into the performance of the underlay network.  The underlay network is typically made up if the physical network infrastructure supporting traffic between distributed cloud or remote office resources.

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Modern enterprises use anywhere from 10 to 100 monitoring and observability tools according to IDC. Tool sprawl and lack of visibility are real, with solutions that do not integrate well in multi-vendor, distributed environments. So are the challenges of collecting, managing, and analyzing data-driven insights related to the application stack.

“Teams and processes that support applications are deeply siloed, and lack essential business context,” said Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, and GM of Applications at Cisco. “Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) reduces friction and unifies data, actions, and processes to enable truly flawless digital experiences at scale.”

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Schneider Electric and Compass Datacenters have announced a partnership that's aimed at expanding the two companies' production capabilities for modular data centers. They're building a 110,000 square-foot facility where they'll integrate Schneider’s power management equipment with Compass’s prefabricated data center modules in an effort to speed deployments across the US.

It’s an ideal match. Schneider makes the infrastructure that runs data centers and Compass designs and builds data centers for hyperscalers and cloud service providers worldwide. Compass builds standard-design data centers as well as the newer modular type, which is gaining in popularity.

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When working on the Linux command line, you can start a task, move it to the background, and, when you’re ready to reverse the process, bring it back to the foreground. When you run a command or script in the foreground, it occupies your time on the command line – until it’s finished. When you need to do something else while still allowing that first task to complete, you can move it to the background where it will continue processing and spend your time working on something else.

The easiest way to do this is by typing ^z (hold the Ctrl key and press “z”) after starting the process. This stops the process. Then type “bg” to move it to the background. The jobs command will show you that it is still running.

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As data, applications, and workloads continue to move to the cloud, demand for IaaS networking is surging. The market for cloud-based IaaS networking will reach $19.4 billion in total global revenues this year, according to IDC, with a compound annual growth rate of 28% projected through 2026.

Increasing cloud-native application architectures, distributed workloads, and their respective integration needs are the biggest drivers of IaaS cloud networking adoption, says IDC analyst Taranvir Singh.

"Traditional network architectures, transports and operational models are no longer able to meet the growing requirements and objectives of enterprises’ modern networking needs," he says. "Networks need to be aligned with cloud principles."

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Aiming to bolster its assessment of Internet traffic health, Cisco has acquired Code BGP, a privately held BGP monitoring startup, for an undisclosed amount.

Code BGP will slide into Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence product portfolio and bring a cloud-based platform that, among other features, maintains an inventory of IP address prefixes, peerings and outbound policies of an organization via configured sources, like BGP feeds. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) tells Internet traffic what route to take, and the BGP best-path selection algorithm determines the optimal routes to use for traffic forwarding.

Then, the system lets customers see and interact with this inventory in real-time through an open API and bring real-time detection of BGP hijacking, route leaks, and other BGP issues according to the company. Adding such capabilities will let ThousandEyes further expand its BGP monitoring and incident analysis capabilities to maintain health of the Internet as well as key applications and services, according to Joe Vaccaro vice president of products for Cisco’s ThousandEyes in a blog about the acquisition. 

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By: Stuart Strickland, Wireless CTO and Fellow, HPE Aruba Networking and Pingping Zong, Senior Distinguished Technologist, HPE Aruba Networking

As we discussed in an earlier post, over the coming years private cellular is expected to join enterprise Wi-Fi in delivering wireless mobility. Regulatory and technological factors have converged to make private cellular an attractive solution to specific enterprise networking needs.

In this post, we’ll expand upon an opportunity to leverage private 5G (and LTE) to solve a common challenge faced by the vast majority of enterprises -- gaps in public cellular coverage that inhibit business productivity, frustrate employees, and degrade visitor experiences -- by using neutral host technology.

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Cisco has added ransomware detection and recovery support to its recently unveiled Extended Detection and Response (XDR) system.

The new features target recovery from ransomware attacks and come courtesy of integration with Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataHawk offerings which offer configurable ransomware recovery and rescue support for systems assigned to a protection plan. Cohesity’s platform can preserve potentially infected virtual machines for forensic investigation and protect enterprise workloads from future attacks.

Cisco said that the exponential growth of ransomware and cyber extortion has made a platform approach crucial to effectively counter adversaries.  It also noted that during the second quarter of 2023, the Cisco Talos Incident Response team responded to the highest number of ransomware engagements in more than a year.

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NVIDIA DGX Cloud is an AI supercomputer in the cloud, designed for enterprise users with demanding needs and deep pockets. The offering comes as a complete software and hardware package for large-scale AI development, accessible via web browser.

DGX Cloud gives enterprises the power to train modern AI workloads such as generative AI and large language models, says Charlie Boyle, NVIDIA's vice president of DGX Platforms. It combines an AI developer suite, workflow software, a high-performance infrastructure, direct access to NVIDIA AI experts, and 24/7 support.

Market impact of generative AI

Generative AI's arrival has sparked a rapid increase in demand for AI-based products and services. As a result, companies are racing to acquire the skills and infrastructure needed to leverage AI in their product development processes and business operations.

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If you’ve seen the news lately, it’s pretty clear that cybercriminals are stepping up attacks. The increase in volume and variety was evident in our 2H 2022 FortiGuard Labs Threat Landscape report. Today, every organization regardless of size or industry is a target as bad actors devise more sophisticated ways to infiltrate networks.

Clearly, the need for cybersecurity isn’t going away, so more organizations have been adopting a zero-trust security model to reduce risk and support remote and hybrid work. Zero trust assumes that anything or anyone trying to connect to your network is a potential threat, and every user must be verified before permission is granted to access critical resources. This verification applies regardless of whether the user is trying to access those resources remotely or is already within the network perimeter.

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The chief obstruction to data center growth is not the availability of land, infrastructure, or talent. It's local power, according to commercial real estate services company CBRE 

In its 2023 global data center trends report, CBRE says the market is growing steadily and demand is constantly rising, but data center growth has been largely confined to a few select areas, and those areas are running out of power.

No region embodies this more than Northern Virginia, which is the world's largest data center market with 2,132 megawatts (MW) of total inventory. Its growth happened for a couple of reasons. First, proximity to the US federal government. Second, because there's a major undersea cable to Europe in Northern Virginia, and data centers want to be as close to it as possible to minimize latency.

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IBM debuted an AI-powered dashboard for tracking carbon emissions used by its cloud computing services, saying that the new Cloud Carbon Calculator can be used to help enterprises with compliance and reduce harmful carbon emissions.

The calculator can be accessed via IBM’s cloud dashboard, where it provides a range of graphs and charts to track total carbon emissions created by a customer’s use of IBM’s cloud, breaking it down on a per-service, per-department and per-location basis.

The ability to identify carbon emissions in a granular way should let customers identify particularly CO2-heavy workloads, areas or departments and change their cloud profile in order to minimize emissions, according to IBM. The main idea is to identify emissions “hot spots,” which the calculator does via machine learning and algorithmic functions developed in partnership with Intel.

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Dynatrace has incorporated generative AI into its Davis AI engine to let customers more quickly create dashboards, determine the root cause of incidents, and speed mean time to repair.

Davis AI features causal and predictive AI capabilities now, and with the addition of generative AI, Dynatrace says it will offer customers a third mode of AI that applies natural language capabilities to more easily create dashboards, automate workflows, and complete tasks. Davis CoPilot generative AI will work in collaboration with its causal AI technology, which analyzes real-time data, and its Davis predictive AI models that anticipate future behavior based on past data and observed patterns in the environment.

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Directly or indirectly, large numbers of enterprises rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for service delivery in some way. Whether they are your own applications or third-party applications, there is an unceasing movement of data, traffic, and compute power from data centers to the public cloud. With AWS still at the head of the pack, its role in enterprise network performance is undeniable.

Nonetheless, many enterprises are still challenged by understanding the true performance of this part of their hybrid network. In some cases, this is due to a dearth of performance metrics. In other cases, it is due to the excess of performance metrics and the challenge of filtering out the signal from the noise.

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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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Installation and configuration of high-performance computing (HPC) systems can be a considerable challenge that requires skilled IT pros to set up the software stack, for example, and optimize it for maximum performance – it isn't like building a PC with parts bought off NewEgg.

GigaIO, which specializes in infrastructure for AI and technical computing, is looking to simplify the task. The vendor recently announced a self-contained, single-node system with 32 configured GPUs in the box to offer simplified deployment of AI and supercomputing resources.

Up to now, the only way to harness 32 GPUs would require four servers with eight GPUs apiece. There would be latency to contend with, as the servers communicate over networking protocols, and all that hardware would consume floor space.

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Enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which is capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts, is in its early stages, but is expected to increase rapidly as organizations find new uses for the technology.

“The generative AI frenzy shows no signs of abating,” says Gartner analyst Frances Karamouzis.  “Organizations are scrambling to determine how much cash to pour into generative AI solutions, which products are worth the investment, when to get started and how to mitigate the risks that come with this emerging technology.”

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A group of industry stalwarts is banding together to help enterprises, services providers and telcos fight cyber foes.

The Network Resilience Coalition includes AT&T, Broadcom, BT Group, Cisco Systems, Fortinet, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lumen Technologies, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon and VMware. Its aim is to deliver open and collaborative techniques to help improve the security of network hardware and software across the industry.

The coalition was brought together under the Center for Cybersecurity Policy & Law, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the security of networks, devices and critical infrastructure. The Center has a broad security mission, but at least for now, it wants the Resilience group to focus on routers, switches and firewalls that are older, may have reached end-of-life vendor support, or have been overlooked for security patching or replacement. 

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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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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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