AMD finally released it’s initial batch of server CPU’s, under the regretful name EPYC. As promised in their announcement, the chips truly offer some interesting capabilities. No matter which EPYC 7000-series chip you buy, you get some impressive features standard: 8-channel DDR4 memory support (up to 2TB supported), 64MB of L3 cache, and 128 lanes of sweet PCIe 3.0.
In response to a reader question on his look at Liqid’s composable infrastructure, Russ White frames an interesting question: is it easier to extend PCIe to support switching, and longer runs, or is it easier to design an entire protocol to (effectively) run PCIe over Ethernet? Liqid developed their solution based on former, but other composable infrastructure projects prefer an Ethernet based approach. It’s an interesting look into the benefits and drawbacks of both.
IT professionals spend years learning how to manage the complex infrastructure that organizations depend on. But they often spend far less time thinking about how to manage their careers. The roundtable takes on this topic, looking into dealing with imposter syndrome, knowing your own worth, and how to navigate these potentially problematic waters.
Wavebox offers the ability to bring in all your web apps to a single app, including email, Office 365, G Suite, and Slack. You get full notification support and a consistent interface wrapped around these apps. We tried it out for a week to replace all of our desktop clients and browser tabs.
Excelero recently came out of stealth, and wants to provide the software layer to allow businesses to build a high performance scale out storage infrastructure. It’s a software only play, running on commodity hardware. That may not sound like the new hotness, but I’m here to tell you, Excelero is exciting!
For those that want a lean Linux subsystem to provide container functionality to be part of a greater container platform, LinuxKit is for you. If you’re not sure where to get started with it, check out this piece by Docker Captain Ajeet Singh Raina.
If I had to guess what the next buzzword was going to be in enterprise IT, “intent driven” seems to be the new hotness. For one, it sounds a lot more humanistic than saying automation. But it also represents a larger shift of companies moving away from the idea of how something has to be done, and toward looking for ways to implement how they want a given IT goal to proceed.
But as much as “intent driven” products seems to be catching on, we often see companies struggling to identify what is the actual intent behind their solutions.
An old dog is learning some new tricks. QNX has been around since the 80s, and the OS is getting a big update from BlackBerry. The venerable OS now supports containers.
The public cloud certainly has profoundly changed enterprise IT. It provides limitless scale, impressive utilization, and changed capital investments. However, it often fails to provide enterprise level performance on a consistent level, and can lack the fine tune controls organizations have come to expect. Datera is building a cloud data management foundation for on-site clouds. Their goal is to make this autonomous and transparent layer to the organization to offer the agility of the public cloud, but with enterprise class performance and control.
The Cyber Security Research Center at Ben-Gurion University may not be an every day name in security. But every few years, the come up in the news for finding another theoretical way to defeat air gapped security. They’ve found ways to exfiltrate data by using the sound of a computer fan, and the whirring buzz of a mechanical hard drive. These all require some pretty serious infiltration on the machine already, but conceptually they’re all fascinating.
This time, the researchers targeted a router for their Mission Impossible-style hack.
