Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

Time	Event
3:00p	ARM Gets OK to Spend Big on New Markets Under SoftBank Ownership (Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son urged the company’s recently acquired chip-designer unit ARM Holdings Plc to make long-term bets on new markets it couldn’t risk exploring when it was a stand-alone company. U.K.-based ARM, whose technology underpins almost all of the more than 1 billion smartphones shipped every year, has support to push ahead with efforts such as attempting to dent Intel Corp.’s domination of the lucrative server chip business and to bring more computing to products like automobiles, Son said Tuesday at a briefing ahead of ARM’s annual technology conference in Santa Clara, California. Son is in the U.S. explaining what ARM can expect from the ownership of the Japan-based communications giant. To get a return on the $32 billion he bet on the chip designer, SoftBank’s biggest acquisition, Son needs its offerings to become as important in a wide range of new markets as they have been in the slowing phone business. Read more: SoftBank to Buy Britain’s ARM for $32 Billion in Record Deal “Let me worry about the financial results and believe in the future direction and capability ARM has,” he said. “That’s what I really want ARM to do. Invest more for the future. That’s the key.” Son said his investment is motivated by his belief that computer processing is finally coming to rival the power of the human brain. That means industries such as transportation, health care and finance are going to be fundamentally changed, offering an opportunity for the company that provides the underlying technology. See also: PayPal Deploys ARM Servers in Data Centers Dominant Rival ARM’s technology, dominant in phones, is increasingly being used in a wide range of devices from washing machines to drones to industrial robots that are being connected to the internet and given processing power. That still hasn’t helped ARM break into in one of the biggest markets for semiconductors: computers. Intel’s products are pervasive in personal computers and server chips, where it has a market share of more than 99 percent. Showing the benefits of its market heft, Intel’s data center division turned $4.5 billion of revenue into $2.1 billion of operating profit in the third quarter. On average, Intel’s peers in the semiconductor industry had an operating margin of less than half of that, at 20 percent, in the most recent quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ARM Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars is going to invest more in areas where his company hadn’t been spending enough — such as software development — to help his customers’ customers make the switch from Intel. ARM provides designs and licenses fundamental technology to companies such as Qualcomm Inc., which uses them to design and produce semiconductors. “That’s exactly the sort of thing that Masa wants us to do — go invest heavily to grow new business and get more growth later,” Segars said in an interview, referring to Son. Improved Security To take advantage of its broadest opportunity for growth, in the Internet of Things, ARM will need component providers and device makers to put more effort into security, Segars said. ARM this week is announcing new chip designs typically used for the smallest, lowest-power devices, that contain hardwired security components previously only found in more powerful processors. The designs and software ARM is offering as a service will help customers speed up the introduction of security into chips small enough to fit into something like a medical patch or fitness monitor, he said. “If IoT gets this rap of it being a big security threat, people just aren’t going to adopt it,” said Segars. (Comment on this)
3:30p	The Era of the Smart Data Center Michael Zody is General Manager for Northeast, Level 3; and Joseph A. Mileo is Vice President of Channel Programs for vXchnge. What does it take to run a smart data center? For many businesses, the data center is the heart of software technology—the “thing” enabling businesses to do more, efficiently expand their capabilities, and maintain the information necessary to run their business properly. A smart data center is needed to support the demands and application deployment models, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and other models on the verge of becoming mainstream. As business needs evolve, companies are demanding more from their data centers. Are data centers up to the challenge? The Golden Dotcom Age Many of us remember the peak of the dotcom era – a time filled with foosball tables, IPOs and innovative technology ideas brought to life by visionaries. Among those innovations: the data center. In the 1990s, the data center was a physical structure constrained by its very walls. The amount of data a business could process and store was a reflection of how many servers it had on site. If your data center was 15 x 20 feet, you could only house as many servers as could be secured and cooled in that space: a constraint that led to the construction of bigger and bigger server rooms. But space limitations were only one hurdle. Another challenge was slow and inefficient delivery of data from the centers. From these challenges came the formation of a new idea: What if we weren’t constrained by our physical space? What if we could move beyond the physical realm and take data storage and transport to the virtual realm? The Cloud By 2020, IDC predicts that 40 percent of data in the digital universe will be “touched” by the cloud, meaning either stored, perhaps temporarily, or processed in some way. Without the space and infrastructure of a data center, companies must use multiple hubs, which can present ongoing challenges, such as a lack of redundancy or the need to frequently update or change equipment. Today, the data center has taken another step forward to provide enterprises across the country with economical points of presence. These new data centers provide access to the best services and connectivity possible from leading network service providers through an innovation known as Carrier-Neutral Edge Colocation. Carrier-Neutral Edge Colocation and Scalability According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, 86 percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers by 2019. With this rate of growth comes greater demand for high-performance data center infrastructure services with scalable, reliable, and secure IT services. Businesses are rethinking their needs and are looking for solutions that use the latest virtualization technologies in an environment they can trust. Carrier-neutral edge colocation is emerging as the preferred solution. Carrier-neutral edge colocation is a sleek, streamlined, flexible approach to the data center needs of the modern enterprise. It’s more than just walls with cooling capabilites and proper power capacity. These new data centers have brought businesses to the edge, where they can serve customers locally. Carrier-neutral edge colocation enables a collaborative approach – one that addresses challenges like storage, bandwidth, cost and scalability. From a scalability standpoint, according to the IDC, by 2020, the digital universe will reach 44 trillion gigabytes of data from items such as medical implants, wearable technology, smart devices (refrigerators, phones), etc. If a data center is not properly prepared to handle its share of the digital universe, customers will experience some level of downtime, which can hurt business performance. In short, these carrier-neutral edge colocation providers deliver a solution that can help customers improve their business performance. Security Years ago, all people wanted or expected from their data centers was to know that it was going to be cold and that the power would be on. Now, the conversation is quickly switching to security. As new legislation around personal, financial and health information continues to develop, data center security is growing in importance. Data center security has grown significantly more sophisticated. It’s no longer just a simple sign-in sheet, but rather multiple levels of protection. For many vendors, this means state-of-the-art, multi-stage security features, such as two-point iris recognition, archived closed circuit video, and 24x7x365 monitoring. These steps ensure that customers’ critical IT assets remain safe at all times. Certifications for physical, environmental and information security add yet another layer of protection. Conclusion: A Smart Data Center Is the Future There are still needs that are not being met by data centers. In fact, a national survey of IT decision makers recently released by vXchnge found that 93 percent of respondents believe that software will define the smart data center of the future. While there are several options out there for businesses, the smart data center is panning out to be a solid option. The easy access and flexibility a smart data center provides is unparalleled. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
4:00p	Dear Patient, the Database Will See You Now Brought to you by IT Pro There’s a general consensus being able to analyze massive amounts of data has the potential to help launch an AI revolution across a number of industries, but a lot of questions about when and where those revolutions will occur. In a new profile of Watson by the New York Times, there’s a hint of what that revolution might look like in the field of medicine. Already, Watson was roughly on par with human experts with its recommendations for how to proceed across a series of cancer diagnoses. But then it was able go further: At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Watson was tested on 1,000 cancer diagnoses made by human experts. In 99 percent of them, Watson recommended the same treatment as the oncologists.In 30 percent of the cases, Watson also found a treatment option the human doctors missed. Some treatments were based on research papers that the doctors had not read — more than 160,000 cancer research papers are published a year. Other treatment options might have surfaced in a new clinical trial the oncologists had not yet seen announced on the web. But Watson read it all. “Humans enabled by A.I. is the way to go with genomics,” said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless, head of the school’s cancer center. Those kinds of results help explain the billions IBM has spent on developing Watson as well as acquiring companies with health data. It also could be a good road map of how in the near future, AI will increasingly augment professionals in a number of fields, helping bring insights to bear that would otherwise be missed. Read the New York Times story in full here. This first ran at http://windowsitpro.com/business-intelligence/dear-patient-database-will-see-you-now (Comment on this)
7:43p	Report: Mirai Botnet DDoSed 17 Dyn Data Centers Globally All but three data centers where DNS provider Dyn hosts its global infrastructure came under attack in last week’s massive DDoS strike that disrupted some of the internet’s most popular destinations, such as Spotify, Amazon, HBO Now, Twitter, and The New York Times, among others. Dyn’s servers sit in 20 data centers spread around the world, and the attack — implemented at least in part by using a botnet created by software called Mirai, which hijacks poorly secured IoT devices, such as CCTV cameras and DVRs — was directed at 17 of those sites, according to an analysis by ThousandEyes, a provider of global network monitoring services. The three data centers that were not affected are in Warsaw, Beijing, and Shanghai. “At the height of the attack, approximately 75 percent of our global vantage points sent queries that went unanswered by Dyn’s servers,” Nick Kephart, senior director of product marketing at ThousandEyes, wrote in a blog post. “In addition, the critical nature of many of these affected services led to collateral damage, in terms of outages and performance impacts on sites that are only tangentially related to Dyn (including this blog).” See also: Chinese Firm Says Its Cameras Were Used to Take Down Internet In addition to bringing light to the fact that the explosion of the Internet of Things will require extra effort to make sure all the devices coming online are secure in order to prevent them from being high-jacked by hackers wholesale, the incident underscores the importance of a multi-vendor strategy when it comes to anything related to core internet infrastructure. As Kephart pointed out, while the attack affected all Dyn customers, the damage to companies that relied on it as their only DNS provider was a lot greater. Most of Dyn’s customers are in the latter group, according to ThousandEyes. “Because they didn’t have a backup DNS provider to fall back on during the DDoS attacks, these customers were the most vulnerable to complete service unavailability,” Kephart wrote. Users of Amazon Web Services, for example, saw some disruption when trying to access certain APIs in some of Amazon cloud’s availability zones, but that disruption was limited to relatively few end points, because the company uses multiple DNS providers, including its own DNS service. Read more: Cloud Giants Likely to Beef Up Bandwidth to Fight IoT Botnets (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2016/10/26 [Calendar]

Next Day >>