Tech Field Day News Rundown

Two of the biggest players in the networking space are about to become one. Rumors started swirling on Monday evening that HPE was looking to acquire Juniper Networks and those rumors were confirmed yesterday. HPE will be paying $40/share or approximately $14 billion for all of the company. Juniper started off as a huge player in the service provider space before making strategic acquisitions of c...

It has been a big year in the enterprise IT industry for many reasons. Pat Gelsinger and Intel continue to refocus its business, the SEC gets serious with SolarWinds, Broadcom's deal to acquire VMware, HPE Aruba Ascendant, the incredible rise of generative AI, the battle of open source licenses, and of course, the Futurum Group acquiring Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. Let's discuss on this...

It has been a big year in the enterprise IT industry for many reasons. Pat Gelsinger and Intel continue to refocus its business, the SEC gets serious with SolarWinds, Broadcom's deal to acquire VMware, HPE Aruba Ascendant, the incredible rise of generative AI, the battle of open source licenses, and of course, the Futurum Group acquiring Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. The Rundown will return i...

Change is in the air and it's licensed. The biggest news this week came from VMware (by Broadcom) as they announced a simplification of their licensing model. The first change is that VMware Cloud Foundation has had the subscription cost cut in half and additional support levels added to help with activation and lifecycle management. VMware vSphere Foundation is also available as a subscriptio...

IBM and Facebook parent company Meta have decided to advocate for a more open approach to AI. They've announced a joint AI Alliance group. The companies are part of a growing trend that sees advocates arguing that AI shouldn't be proprietary and closed. Also signing on to the alliance are Dell, Sony, AMD, Intel, and several other AI startups. The group seems to stand in opposition to compa...

Amazon announced that they will be using Nvidia's NVSwitch to create new rackscale AI platforms. This allows customers to use Nvidia technology like Grace Hopper or build something using AWS Nitro DPUs and Elastic Fabric Adapaters. That last combination doesn't use InfiniBand and moves to Ethernet. Two new chips are coming out from the Amazon labs. The first is Graviton4, the latest genera...

It's been a wild week for OpenAI. On Friday, the board notified CEO Sam Altman that he was being removed. Then President and Chairman Greg Brockman quit. OpenAI then went through three interim CEOs in a weekend. Meanwhile, Altman and Brockman were hired by Microsoft but rumors swirled they would be reinstated at OpenAI, which eventually happened late Tuesday night. The condition for the reinst...

As Supercomputing 2023 is held in Denver this week, we're on the lookout for all the latest news. We have a new list of Top-500 supercomputers, more Nvidia announcements, and lots of AI. Perhaps the biggest topic of discussion, though, are the many questions about HPC itself: Will we be able to live in an exascale world? And what does that even mean when AI is the main application? Time Stamps...

Okta hasn't had a very good run of security headlines lately, and the latest is a breach that resulted in the theft of session tokens of several customers from Okta's customer support system. Though the number of customers was relatively low, the unauthorized access went undetected for over two weeks. The root cause seems to have come from an employee logging into their personal Google acc...

President Joe Biden has signed a comprehensive executive order addressing the safety and governance of artificial intelligence in the United States. The order, running to nearly 20,000 words, signifies a significant shift towards enhanced AI governance, covering areas such as transparency, safety data sharing, federal standards, and tests, and ethical considerations across various sectors. It requ...

We are at the 21st annual Information Security Summit in Cleveland today, and it's been an interesting event for us. Not only is this close to home in Northeast Ohio, the long-running ISS event attracts a wide range of attendees and presenters across the information security space. Ransomware and AI are high on the agenda of course, but we're also hearing about budgets and employment in th...

Big news this week from the boardroom as Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, has announced her departure from the Cisco Board of Directors. The move comes as a surprise in a recent SEC filing and was announced without fanfare. Su had served on the Cisco board since 2019. She is also stepping down from the board of Analog Devices, a position she has held since 2016. There is speculation that this depature could s...

In the ongoing geopolitical battle between the United States and China, a new front has emerged, focusing on the open-source chip technology known as RISC-V. American lawmakers, citing national security concerns, are pressuring the Biden administration to place restrictions on U.S. companies' involvement in RISC-V, which is widely utilized in China. This technology competes with proprietary ch...

Intel is set to spin off its Programmable Solutions Group as an independent business, aiming for an IPO in 2-3 years. PSG, led by Intel's current Data Center and AI Group EVP Sandra Rivera, will operate independently as part of Intel's broader restructuring efforts. Despite PSG's past financial success, Intel believes this shift will enable more agility and growth, targeting markets be...

Well, it finally happened folks, and I guess the third time is the charm. If rumors are to be believed, Cisco had approached Splunk on two separate occasion to talk about acquisition, but their offers were rebuffed for unknown reasons. This time it appears that all the planets and comets have aligned and Splunk has entered into a definitive agreement with Cisco to be acquired for $28B. Time Stamps...

Microsoft's AI division just found out they made a mistake. Three years ago they accidentally leaked 38 terabytes of data to a public GitHub repo while contributing to AI learnign models. A security research team found the exposure recently, which came from a misconfigured Azure Blob storage URL that was overly permissive and difficult to manage. This Shared Access Signature, or SAS, token is...

In an excellent article, Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court has started to make the case that cybercriminals should be subject to international law for their escapades. The current state of the world often sees these criminals go unpunished due to nation state backing or lack of jurisdiction. Khan says that we need to get tougher by ensuring these naer-do-wells can face justice for the...

Dell Technologies and AMD are at the forefront of high-performance computing (HPC), driving innovation in various fields, such as space exploration, wildfire prevention, and neuroscience research. Their HPC solutions are in high demand, revolutionizing industries by accelerating productivity, enabling faster market entry, and offering energy-efficient infrastructure modernization. Dell's Power...

At Hot Chips 2023, Intel unveiled Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids Xeon processors targeting data centers. Sierra Forest is Intel's first E-core Xeon with 144 CPU cores, while Granite Rapids focuses on core performance. Arm introduced Neoverse Compute Subsystem, aiding Neoverse N2 core integration. AMD previewed Siena Epyc processors for edge computing with up to 64 cores, notable power effici...

VMware just can't stop talking about GenAI, which incorporates many different developments. The company is adding AI assistants to many products and is also introducing a new VMware Private AI offering with enabling generative AI processing on NVIDIA or open-source platforms for enterprise deployment. VMware is talking about security and data privacy while at the same time touting the performa...

Do you love licensing drama? Last week HashiCorp made headlines with an announcement by CTO Armon Dadgar that they're changing licensing models. HashiCorp is now adopting the Business Source License, or BSL, which was popularized by MariaDB and Couchbase. Under the BSL, HashiCorp code will remain freely available and usable for non-production use. You may be granted a license for production us...

We are at the annual Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara this week, with the event showcasing the latest advancements in the storage industry. Let's take a closer look at some of the announcements, including bigger and better SSDs, taller NAND, and a whole lot of talk about CXL. We'll also look at the moves SNIA is doing to help the storage industry branch out into data and management while...

Some of the biggest names in the HPC and hyperconvergence space are banding together to standardize Ethernet. The new Ultra Ethernet Consortium counts AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE, Intel, and others as founding members. Chairman J. Metz says the goal of the consortium is to tune Ethernet for workloads with specific performance requirements. The companies invovled are selling very high speed Ethernet...

Cybersecurity remains a critical concern, dominating headlines with its persistent threats and sophisticated attacks. Recent incidents, such as the stolen Microsoft keys and the ongoing MOVEit file transfer hack, exemplify the complexity and severity of security breaches. However, amidst the intricacies of cybersecurity, seemingly minor errors can also lead to significant consequences, as demonstr...

Nvidia accelerates its venture capital investments in cloud and AI software startups, taking an equity stake in Lambda Labs, a competitor to Amazon Web Services. The deal, worth potentially $300 million, signifies Nvidia's growing interest in supporting startups in the cloud and AI software market while maintaining its leadership in data center chips for AI applications. Does this move suggest...