Microsoft and VMware have taken their well-established relationship up a notch by tying together application and network technologies to help customers support secure WAN access to critical enterprise applications.

Specifically, the companies have combined Azure Virtual WAN Hub with VMware's SD-WAN technology so that VMware's SD-WAN customers can link resources using the networking, security, and routing services in Azure WAN Hub. They announced the news at his week's Microsoft Ignite virtual conference.

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John Deere, the $35.5 billion maker of farm equipment, is planting the seeds of company-owned 5G cellular networking in some of its manufacturing plants after investing half-a-million dollars in wireless licenses at an FCC auction last year.

The company says that having a piece of wireless spectrum more or less to itself is key to updating certain of its production facilities. Deere bought citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) licenses in five Iowa and Illinois counties at that give it virtually unfettered use of the local CBRS bandwidth for private 5G.

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Overall Internet traffic on Comcast’s network spiked substantially at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020, but normalized over the subsequent months, according to a report released today by the internet service provider.

As the largest individual home ISP in the U.S., Comcast’s data on Internet usage represents a useful snapshot into overall home connectivity during the pandemic.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans--62%--reported working from home at some point during the current crisis, double the figures for the previous March, the report found. And 93% of households with school-age children reported that those children engaged in distance learning.

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Your employees are complaining of poor performance when using Microsoft applications and services. The weakest link isn’t on the IT team; it’s your WAN!

As frequent users of business applications such as Microsoft 365 (Office, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange), we often fail to notice what peak performance feels like, but we certainly know what poor performance feels like! Our frustration builds as we wait on a frozen screen, watch a spinning wheel, or listen intently as we attempt to decipher garbled voice: “Can you repeat that? You’re breaking up.” These experiences tend to occur at the worst time: while delivering a webinar, leading a Microsoft Teams call with an important client, or while trying to access and update a file for your boss while under a tight deadline.

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By: Simon McCormack, Senior Manager of Product Management at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

By the end of next year, the majority of enterprise network infrastructure teams will have completely changed their operating models to support applications, people, and IoT devices in entirely new ways. Network orchestration is a key technology that can help achieve success for tying everything together as the rapid shift to a “centers-of-data” model accelerates.

Don’t be left on the tarmac as this jet departs.

According to Gartner, “The IT we have known is changing forever. Infrastructures of the future will not be architected based on existing topologies, rather they will be deployed on a global scale, driven by business requirements and unspecific IT vendors. The end result will be an environment that is focused on enabling the rapid deployment of business services (by the business) and deploying workloads to the right locations, for the right reasons, at the right price. The drivers of this change will not be technology in many cases, but business, markets and customer requirements.¹

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HP Enterprise has announced what it calls the Software Defined Opportunity Engine (SDOE), a cloud-based machine-learning platform that enables partners that sell HPE gear to cut the time to create custom sales proposals from weeks to just 45 seconds.

In a blog post announcing the service, HPE Storage senior vice president and general manager Tom Black said SDOE does away with an outdated IT infrastructure-buying process at a time when digital transformation has never been more critical.

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After some legal wrangling earlier this year, Cisco has closed the $4.5 billion deal for optical maker Acacia Communications, Inc. 

Cisco coveted Acacia for its high-speed, optical interconnect technologies that let data center operators, webscale companies and service providers offer ever-faster service access to widely distributed resources. It also reinforces Cisco’s commitment to optics as a critical building block for networks of the future. 

“Acacia offers a complete portfolio of long-distance data-transmission solutions that address the full range of applications in the data-center-interconnect and wide-area network segments for metro, regional, long haul, and subsea links,” wrote Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Optical Systems and Optics Group in a blog about the acquisition.

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At the monumental intersection of digital transformation, an industry-wide focus on SASE, and the continuing effects of COVID-19 on the way workforces function, we have never experienced such a seismic shift in all facets of business over such a short period of time. Today we see this transformation driving changes to corporate culture, business processes, and technology at such a rapid pace, our current security strategy cannot keep up.

Unlike past evolutions that were driven entirely by advances in technology, this change is driven by the digital transformation of businesses and the way workforces operate. The ongoing rapid deployment of cloud has given organizations a low-cost option for implementing significant processing power. Plus, workforces now demand the ability to work from anywhere; more than 90% of devices sold today are mobile, and those devices are being used to access business systems off-premises more than 50% of the time.

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IBM has introduced Red Hat Linux on its RISC-based Power Systems servers, further expanding IBM's private- and hybrid-cloud offerings on the traditionally Unix-based hardware.

IBM already has what it calls Enterprise Linux on Power, but this is bringing Red Hat, which IBM paid $34 billion to acquire, to its big iron. IBM Power Systems now feature Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift's bare metal installer, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server is a move to bring the OpenShift container platform to IBM Power Virtual Server. The IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise infrastructure-as-a-service offering built around IBM POWER9 and offering access to more than 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

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There are a number of ways that you can create PDFs on a Linux system. You can use an application like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or you can take advantage of any of a number of commands that can generate PDFs from text files or from a group of other file formats. There are also a number of ways that you can merge a group of PDFs into a single PDF file.

Why PDFs?

PDF is often the preferred format for files that you need to share with others or archive. This is because PDF is an open file format, which makes sharing these files between diverse systems and devices possible.

Using LibreOffice or OpenOffice

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can export files as PDFs. You can open an existing document or create a new document and export it as a PDF. OpenOffice's Export as PDF… and LibreOffice's Export As => Export as PDF… will do what is required to convert your file.

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Cisco has issued three security advisories rated “critical” for some of its high-end software systems—two aimed at its Application Services Engine (ASE) implementation and one at the NX-OS operating system.

The most concerning warning came for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) installed with the ASE which was rated a worse-case scenario, 10 out of a possible 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).  The ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator lets customers control application-access policies across Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller-based fabrics.

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Juniper Networks continues to integrate and expand its portfolio of cloud-based, AI-driven services that are aimed at helping customers manage and control enterprise networks. 

At the core of those services is technology Juniper gained in its acquisition of wireless and AI software maker Mist in 2019 for $405 million. Mist's technology includes an AI-based engine called Marvis that uses machine learning to automatically identify, adapt to, and fix network issues. 

Linux certification is increasingly significant for tech workers as the public cloud and software-defined networking become ever more important. A Linux cert can set IT professionals apart from the herd and potentially put a lot more money in their bank accounts.

Once these certifications were a gauge of reliability, according to CompTIA chief tech evangelist James Stanger. “Twenty years ago, Linux tended to attract people who were a little edgier,” he said. “So certification was traditionally used in the Linux side just to find people you can work with—will they show up on time?”

Now, these certifications are a demonstration not only of proficiency but also dedication to self-improvement. “You can’t go wrong with a certification,” said Joe Faletra, director of infrastructure services at Modis, a technology staffing and consulting firm. “I’ll lean towards certs over experience [in hiring], because this person has put the effort into learning and passing the exam.”

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You will have more connected devices than ever on your network in 2021, especially if you’re in healthcare, retail, or logistics, industries that are among the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll have devices on your network edge, in your headquarters, on vehicles, in machinery, in your stores, in employees’ homes, and on public property.

And there’s a good chance that some or many of these IoT devices have built-in security vulnerabilities that can endanger your network. In trying to capitalize on the voracious global appetite for connected commercial devices, many IoT manufacturers and developers are shoveling out enterprise IoT devices with, shall we say, varying levels of regard for security.

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The proliferation of IoT devices across enterprises brings new ways to monitor, report, alert, automate and optimize business processes – from manufacturing lines to automating HVAC and lighting for energy savings. IoT makes businesses more efficient through automation, however, it also increases the attack surface by adding a new dimension of complexity.

Examples of enterprise IoT devices can include point of sale (PoS) credit card processing terminals, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning (HVAC) control systems, IP cameras, flow sensors, cameras, smart air systems and more. These network-connected devices communicate over the Internet either to a control center running in a public cloud environment such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or a corporate data center where the large data sets are recorded and analyzed. Because these enterprise IoT devices connect over the Internet, they can also expose the enterprise to threats.

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The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.

ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.

Over the last decade, a number of technological trends have come together that will transform our industrial society and introduce a high level of automation to many of our processes. Robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the cloud, and digital twins technology are ushering in the era of Industry 4.0. Asset-intensive industries are moving quickly to take advantage of these technologies, including manufacturing, ports, mines, utilities, railways, airports, logistics, intelligent highways, and smart cities. The list is long and growing quickly.

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Fresh off a solid quarterly earnings report, Extreme Networks is set for an active 2021, according to Ed Meyercord, president and CEO of the networking company.

Extreme plans to roll out a range of new products to expand its universal networking family, which offers customers standardized hardware products that can be deployed across edge, aggregation, and wiring-closet environments. Also on tap are upgrades to the company's core ExtremeCloud IQ cloud management platform, which has seen six straight quarters of customer growth and currently manages about 1.5 million networking elements.

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The Linux command line allows your system to remember commands that you use—up to a limit set by your HISTSIZE variable. Since each user’s HISTSIZE is generally set to 1000, that means Linux can remember the last 1000 commands you entered and make it easy to reuse them without retyping them.

Unless you configure your history settings differently, all of your commands will be remembered. You can put some restrictions on that behavior if you like. For example, you might not want to save every command you use to read a man page or every time you type pwd to ask where you’re currently sitting in the file system. How to restrict the commands that are remembered and which are not is covered here.

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It was probably inevitable, but companies are urging federal regulators to intervene or even block Nvidia’s planned $40 billion purchase of Arm Holdings.

Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are among a number of companies concerned about whether they will continue to have equal access to Arm technology after the acquisition closes, according to both Bloomberg and CNBC. And CNBC goes so far as to ask regulators around the world to scuttle the deal altogether.

Earlier this month, UK-based AI chip start-up Graphcore asked the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to block the acquisition. Graphcore isn’t even an Arm licensee, just an Nvidia competitor in the AI-processor space.

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Ensuring that security is applied consistently across an increasingly distributed network is one of the biggest challenges facing many IT teams today. It often starts because the security in place at the local LAN and datacenter edges does not easily migrate to a private or public cloud environments, so new solutions are deployed. And those security tools may not work in new branch offices because the dynamic connections provided by SD-WAN can quickly outpace security solutions designed to protect more static environments. And now, with the recent dramatic increase in remote and hybrid workers, ensuring consistent security is more challenging than ever.

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Traditional security programs were predicated on protecting the typically internally hosted technology infrastructure and the data within that environment. This led to an ecosystem composed of numerous discrete tools and processes all intended to detect adversaries and prevent harm. It included a multitude of controls spanning network and infrastructure security, application security, access control, and process controls.

In a world now dominated by the cloud, where applications leverage public cloud providers or are subscribed to as SaaS apps, the challenges of security have dramatically changed. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security architectures, with Next-Generation Secure Web Gateways (NG-SWG) at their cores, will transform security functions to fully address the cloud. They’ll also change how CISOs think about the role of security within businesses.

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Pure Storage, the all-flash storage-array vendor, has expanded its Purity software base and is also expanding its line of storage products.

Pure has three storage lines, the FlashArray//X, the FlashBlade, and the FlashArray//C lines, all managed by its Purity software line. The updated Purity software adds Windows-application acceleration for the FlashBlade and FlashArray lines and delivers ransomware protection across file, block and native cloud-based apps, among other features.

The new version of Purity also adds granular monitoring so administrators get real-time visibility into the most active users on a network and see who is stressing the storage system.

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Bill Holmes, facilities manager at the Corona, Calif., plant that produces the iconic Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, remembers all too well walking the factory floor with a crude handheld vibration analyzer and then plugging the device into a computer to get readings on the condition of his equipment.

While all of the woodworking was done by hand when Leo Fender founded Fender Musical Instruments Corp. 75 years ago, today the guitar necks and bodies are produced with computer-controller woodworking routers, then handed off to the craftsmen who build the final product. Holmes says he is always looking for the latest technological advances to solve problems (he uses robotics to help paint the guitars), and there's no problem more vexing than equipment breakdowns.

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