Rich Stroffolino

About the Author:

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.

Articles by Rich Stroffolino

The Next Step in Hyperconvergence with Maxta

February 15, 2017

Hyperconverged infrastructure has changed the way a lot of organizations view virtualization. It brings a certain kind of simplicity to how it can be managed, provisioned, and deployed. Yet, this often only applied to organization at scale. The initial wave of hyperconverged approaches still didn’t change complexity of operation, instead focusing on deployment and provisioning. We are now starting to see a wave of HCI solutions that address that gap. Maxta offers a vision of HCI that gives you flexibility on hardware, simplicity of operation, and scalability. Hyperconvergence on the hardware you want? I’m interested!

Broadband over Power with AirGig

February 14, 2017

AT&T’s Project AirGig is now in advanced talks with several power companies to start testing their service. The antennas for the high speed service would be installed directly on existing power lines. Aside from saving AT&T a ton of money by either having to upgrade existing towers or buying the land to put up new ones, I see this as a huge boon for broadening access.

Nokia: A WING and an IoT Prayer

February 14, 2017

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia is set to launch its Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING, get it). Basically, they want to make managing IoT networking into a service, allowing enterprises to just let Nokia deal with the wide world of service providers to keep all of their devices playing nice no matter where they are.

Capacity is King with Qualcomm’s 802.11ax chipsets

February 14, 2017

Qualcomm is getting ready to bring two 802.11ax SoCs to market. The IPQ8074 SoC is designed for access points and routers, with a peak theoretical throughput of 4.8Gbps across eight 5GHz streams and four 2.4GHz streams. They’ve also got a client side SoC capable of 1.775Gbps across two streams. While not the first to announced a router SoC for 801.11ax, they’re the first I’ve seen presenting a client side option.

Testing out snapshots in Apple’s next-generation APFS file system

February 13, 2017

Adam Leventhal didn’t feel like waiting for snapshots in future MacOS updates, so he decided to find a way to take advantage of the fs_snapshot system call included in the most recent betas. He basically uses DTrace to reverse engineer how a snapshot is created. He then builds an app in an attempt to create an actual snapshot.

A Hyperconverged Home Lab

February 10, 2017

I’m never going to have a home lab to test out the latest and greatest enterprise gear. If I had ever seriously considered it, it was put to bed when I saw Joshua Stenhouse’s setup. To say it’s impressive would be an understatement.

Five Bots That Let You Live in Slack

February 10, 2017

I love thinking about universal interfaces. Having a single platform that is robust enough to adapt to my needs, but with a unified design to keep everything consistent. Slack comes close to this ideal. It’s not there yet, but it gets close sometimes. Here are the bots that will keep you in the walled garden.

Nvidia Makes Moves in the Data Center

February 10, 2017

Nvidia’s data center division made $296 million in revenue for the quarter. In the exorbitant world of technology, this might not seem all that notable as a raw figure. But compared to Q4 2015, its a 205% increase. This isn’t just a one-time blip either, in Q3 they saw year-on-year growth of 193%. If anything this is accelerating.

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