VMware’s annual conference is taking place in San Francisco this week, and Stephen Foskett is on-site to cover the event for Gestalt IT. It’s been a tumultuous event, the first from VMware since the pandemic, and it’s returning with a new name and theme. VMware Explore is different from VMworld in many ways, not least for the focus on multi-cloud management and entierprise IT developers, but we’re also trying to see the future, since the company will soon be purchased by Broadcom. Along with vSphere 8, which integrates Project Monterey, we’re seeing a beefed-up Tanzu and a new reporting suite called Aria.

Chipmaker Qualcomm is aiming to jump back into the server CPU market. The avenue is coming from last year’s acquisition of Nuvia. We covered this deal on the Rundown last January and mentioned that the company was founded by former Apple engineers that wanted to focus on bring ARM to the datacenter. At first the acquistion seemed to refocus Nuvia on mobile device CPUs but Qualcomm appears to be looking to the future and restarting development efforts on servers. Qualcomm has a big market for System-on-a-Chip solutions for mobile devices but with the market for ARM CPUs in the cloud becoming hotter, is it time for a new player to enter and try and upset the balance? This and more on this week’s Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.

In this episode, Tom Hollingsworth and his panel discuss the pros and cons behind how EVPN Doesn’t Need VXLAN.

In this episode we will discuss the state of funding in the IT space and how it might impact future career prospects. Wonder how startups get funded? Or why interest rates are linked to investments? Tune in to learn more!

Flash Memory Summit happened last week but we didn’t want to let it go by without having our own storage expert comment on some of the announcments there.

It’s Black Hat and DEFCON week and it wouldn’t be a show without the disclosure of a few big bugs. The winner so far seems to be a new exploit found in Intel’s SGX memory encryption technology. Per pre-briefing ahead of a talk happening today, security researchers found a flaw in the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that allows them to read uninitialized memory that could contain stale data before it’s cleared by the CPU. Unlike Spectre and Meltdown, this isn’t a side channel attack. It’s a flaw in the CPU architecture. This means that attackers can recover data very quickly. Tests showed a 128-bit AES encryption key could be recovered in less than 2 seconds with 94% accuracy and a 1024-bit RSA key could be nabbed in about a minute and a half with 74% accuracy. Intel is saying the exploit is on their 10th, 11th, and 12th gen processors which includes Ice Lake but no mention of Sapphire Rapids. This and more on this week’s episode of the Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.

In this episode featuring delegates from Networking Field Day: Service Provider, we discuss how Service Providers Lead the Way in Automation.

Why is Intel doing away with Optane? Stephen and Tom discuss this and more on this week’s Gestalt IT Rundown.

It’s time again for the latest edition of Networking Field Day: Service Provider, bringing you another look at the side of the network.

Tom and Stephen have been talking about the shortage of integrated circuits and the race to build more production capacity for over a year, but maybe there’s more to this story.