Featured Archives - Gestalt IT

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a comprehensive guide to bolster operational security (OPSEC) for election officials. This guide aims to enhance the security of election infrastructure by offering detailed strategies for identifying and mitigating potential risks within the election context. This and more on The Rundown.

1:34 – Japan Bids Farewell to Floppy Disks

Japan’s government has officially ended the use of floppy disks in all its systems, marking a significant step in modernizing its bureaucratic processes. This move comes after a dedicated campaign to phase out outdated technology and update over a thousand regulations.

Read More: Japan wins 2-year “war on floppy disks,” kills regulations requiring old tech

4:15 – NetApp to Focus on AI Integration and Data Resilience

NetApp is a familiar face in the datacenter and the company has reached into the cloud in recent years. But the storage-focused company has not really been part of the AI data infrastructure conversation until now. The latest announcements show NetApp taking retrieval-augmented generation or RAG seriously, with advanced storage features directed to support modern LLM workloads.

Read More: NetApp, Perspectives on Intelligent Data Infrastructure and Strategic Direction

9:04 – Broadcom Launches Omnissa while Streamlining VMware

Broadcom has sold its End-User Computing Division to KKR for $4 billion, forming Omnissa as a standalone company focused on digital workspace solutions like Workspace ONE and Horizon. This move marks Broadcom’s strategic shift towards concentrating on the private cloud sector, shedding non-core assets. Omnissa aims to innovate and expand its market presence under KKR’s ownership, emphasizing customer-centric strategies and product development.

Read More: Broadcom Further Streamlines VMware, Omnissa is Born

12:26 – Billions upon Billions of Passwords Published on the Dark Web

In a major cybersecurity breach, a hacker has uploaded nearly 10 billion stolen passwords to a popular crime forum. Dubbed “RockYou2024,” this massive compilation of plaintext passwords spans data breaches from the last two decades, posing significant risks for credential stuffing and brute-force attacks.

Read More: Hacker Uploads 10 Billion Passwords To Crime Forum—Report

16:02 – Douglas Gourlay Takes the Reins at Qumulo

Qumulo is a quiet success in the storage world, growing to Unicorn status with a scale-out distributed storage platform that has found success in hybrid cloud and for AI workloads. Douglas Gourlay was an early Arista Networks employee, helping lead the networking upstart to become a real challenger. The storage company hopes that Gourlay can challenge that industry with new leadership and ideas.

Read More: Qumulo Board Announces Douglas Gourlay as new Chief Executive Officer

20:27 – Cloudflare Shields Users From Data-Harvesting AI Bots

Cloudflare has introduced a new tool designed to combat the increasing challenge of AI bots scraping websites for data to train AI models. This initiative aims to prevent unauthorized data harvesting while ensuring that AI companies adhere to web scraping rules.

Read More: The future is all bot vs. bot

23:59 – CISA Focuses on Election Security

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a comprehensive guide to bolster operational security (OPSEC) for election officials. This guide aims to enhance the security of election infrastructure by offering detailed strategies for identifying and mitigating potential risks within the election context

Read More: CISA Guide Aims to Bolster OPSEC for Election Officials

36:33 – The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 35 – July 10 – 11

Tech Field Day Experience at SHARE Kansas City 2024 – August 4 – 8

Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.

The Gestalt IT Rundown is your look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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The US government is worried there might not be enough trained workers to fill the needs of the CHIPS act. President Biden has announced a Workforce Partner Alliance (WFPA) to ensure the gap for skilled workers will be closed as soon as possible. WFPA is designed to reward providers with grants of between $500,000 and $2 million to provide the training for these new chip facilities. Is this something that we can count on? Or will it turn into another boondoggle like ITT Tech? This and more on this week’s Rundown.

1:19 – CIQ Offers a CentOS Bridge

Last week we talked about SuSe’s Liberty Linux Lite, which offers a lifeline for CentOS 7 users and mentioned that Rocky Linux is another alternative. This week we talked CIQ about their Rocky Linux Bridge, which does pretty much the same thing. But there’s a twist for the biggest enterprise users, in that CIQ offers a site license and will help customers migrate to a future-proof version of Enterprise Linux.

Read More: Navigating the Post-CentOS Era: A Deep Dive into the Linux Revolution

6:12 – CyberRatings Gives Cisco’s Enterprise Firewall a “Caution” Rating

The latest report from CyberRatings has Cisco firewall customers cautionary. That’s because the independent testing firm rated the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense product with a “caution” marking, the only one to receive it. According to the report it’s because the system had a low protection rate and specifically struggled with encrypted traffic analysis and evasion techniques. Cisco denies submitting a firewall to CyberRatings for testing even though CEO Vikram Phatak said he would be happy to provide the model number and software revision.

Read More: Cisco’s enterprise firewall receives ‘caution’ rating from CyberRatings

10:32 – AI Innovation in Oracle HeatWave GenAI

As if the weather wasn’t hot enough, Oracle has decided to start their own HeatWave. This GenAI-focused solution is all about databases, with automated in-database vector stores, scale-out vector processing, and the ability to create context for conversations from unstructured content. The goal is to help Oracle customers build GenAI applications without the need to move data all over the place while also increasing performance over 20x compared to competing solutions from Amazon.

Read More: Oracle HeatWave GenAI: AI Innovation Without Data Movement or Added Expense

17:35 – OpenSSH A Little TOO Open

It’s retro day here on the Rundown, so we’re bringing back an OpenSSH bug in the wild. This exploit, which was patched back in 2006 but was reintroduced in 2020, allows for attackers to exectue arbitrary code on a target system with no need to authenticate. The exploit has been named “regreSSHion” by Qualys, the research company that discovered it. Security analysts are suggesting that this definitely does need to be patched by the likelihood of it being actively exploited in the wild is low due to some technical factors.

Read More: regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH server

Read More: “RegreSSHion” vulnerability in OpenSSH gives attackers root on Linux

21:39 – AI Power Draw Dims Net Zero Promises

Although most hyperscale and consumer tech companies promised to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030, the prospects aren’t looking so hot now that AI has taken over their datacenters. Google is the latest, reporting a 48% surge in greenhouse gas emissions over the past five years, and making us wonder how they possibly reach zero. Despite vague claims that AI will help tackle climate change, the industry’s promises seem a lot like vaporware.

Read More: announcing freenginx.org

4:53 – European Data Centers Starved for Space

In a new report, experts say that data centers in Europe are in high demand. The report states that hyperscalers are grabbing space in data centers as quickly as it becomes available while rental rates have skyrocketed. Part of the reasons for the divide come from the lack of land area available to build new facilities as well as the shortage of apporpriate power to run them as well as expand the older facilities. The primary markets in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin appear to be the most popular, with secondary cities keeping up with demand so far.

Read More: Europe’s datacenter dilemma is that hyperscalers are hogging them all

8:06 – Aviz Networks GenAI

Startup Aviz Networks is in the news with the latest version of their software that includes GenAI. The new offering is called Network Copilot and it adds overlay AI capabilites to the SONiC support that Aviz was founded to provide. Network Copilot is based on the Mistral 7B LLM, with over 7 billion parameters. Data is collected from the network and normalized before the LLM is trained on historical data to allow for natural language queries as well as help with creating deployment templates.

Read More: Aviz Networks brings genAI to network ops as Networking 3.0

13:13 – Lockbit Locked Out By Feds

LockBit is a name that has popped up several times recently in malware and ransomware cases. Now, thanks to an international effort under the codename Operation Cronos, LockBit has apparently been locked out. A message on the LockBit website says that it is now under the control of the National Crime Agency of the UK along with the FBI and Europol. LockBit has not publicly commented but maintains they have offline backups not seized by the feds and that it’s only a matter of time before they make a comeback.

Read More: Prolific cybercrime gang disrupted by joint UK, US and EU operation

15:41 – Feds Let Fancy Bear Embers Die Out

The US Department of Justice is at it again with a new team for Operation Dying Ember. Sounds spooky, right? This time it was to undertake a secret court order to remove malware from Ubiquiti devices infected by Fancy Bear. The devices in question had default administration passwords as well as remote admin access on the public Internet. The DOJ reinfected the routers with the original malware used to compromise them in the first place and then used that compromise to remove remote access and clean up the secondary payload that had been installed to turn them into a potential botnet. The DOJ said it would then notify users to do a factory reset and install the latest firmware as well as changing their admin password. There’s a lot to unpack here!

Read More: DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses

24:38 – The Weeks Ahead

AI Field Day 4 – February 21 – February 23

Networking Field Day 34 – February 28 – 29

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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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 their crimes, especially when they impact so many people around the world. This and more on this week's Rundown.

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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 PowerEdge servers, equipped with the latest AMD 4th Gen EPYC™ processors, provide accessible and easy-to-deploy high-performance solutions for partners serving customers of all sizes, emphasizing optimization for maximum performance right out of the box. This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown.

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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 efficiency, and a compact form, catering to the edge computing market's demands.

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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 performance and price benefits of on-premises GPUs. VMware NSX is even more exciting now! NSX+ is the new as-a-service offering focusing specifically on application visibility, network detection and response, and HCX+ Workload Mobility. The goal of the service is provide functionality that modern enterprises at a monthly cost for OpEx budgeting purposes. The other big piece of the NSX announcements is NSX VPC, which is modeled of the virtual private cloud (VPC) networking capabilities in public clouds. This and more from an on-premises version of the Rundown live from VMware Explore!

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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 use if your project doesn't compete with HashiCorp. If it does you'll need to buy a commercial license. The move has generated a lot of discussion and speculation in the community given how prevalent projects like Terraform are. This and more on the Rundown.

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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 also providing continuity with the past.

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Live events are back, baby! It's event season, and hotels are filling up for in-person tech events. But the pandemic has changed everything, including event participation. What should we expect from returning favorites like re:Invent, in-flux standbys like VMware Explore, and smaller events like Flash Memory Summit? This and more on this week's Gestalt IT Rundown.

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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 demonstrated by the inadvertent sending of sensitive military emails to the wrong destination due to a simple typo. Moreover, the passing of hacking legend Kevin Mitnick has also captured attention, reflecting the enduring impact of his contributions to the field. Let's take a closer look at these stories.

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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 that we're entering a new world of hyperscale competition?

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The Linux world is abuzz with controversy as IBM Red Hat puts the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) behind a paywall, leaving CentOS Stream as the only accessible option. Meanwhile, Oracle emphasizes its commitment to Linux freedom, offering open access to binaries and source code for their RHEL-compatible distribution, Oracle Linux. On the other hand, SUSE takes a bold step by forking RHEL and investing millions in developing their own RHEL-compatible distribution, free from restrictions. The battle for Linux supremacy is heating up, with each company vying for dominance and championing their respective visions of openness and innovation.

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Now that half of 2023 is behind us, let's take a closer look a the state of the global economy, with a special focus on the enterprise IT industry. As we've discussed, many different factors are impacting the current slowdown in sales of enterprise and cloud tech: Over-buying and hiring coming out of the pandemic, repercussions from the supply chain shortages, the war in Ukraine, tensions between the US, Europe, and China, a global cybercrime wave, and shifting demand from datacenter to cloud. Let's take a look at some of these changes and consider the state of the industry in mid 2023. This and more on this week's Gestalt IT Rundown.

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Training 3.0 benchmark results show performance gains of up to 1.54x compared to six months ago and 33-49x improvement over the first round, driving innovation and energy efficiency in the industry. Intel's Habana Gaudi2 ML training engine competes with Nvidia's offerings, boasting better performance than A100 and lower pricing than H100. Nvidia, on the other hand, unveils their NeMo model with half a trillion parameters and expands the MLPerf Training suite to include GPT-3 and a new Recommendation engine. Their collaboration with CoreWeave showcases the superior performance of the H100, providing a 3.6x speed increase for GPT-3 compared to Intel Xeon and Gaudi2. Nvidia is also developing foundation models for their DGX cloud, collaborating with major players in the industry, and Intel is widely rumored to be developing its own Gaudi2-as-a-Service offering. Then there's the Tiny 1.1 inferencing benchmark, which saw over 150 results and performance improvements up to 1000x.

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Intel is looking to expand their chip making facilities outside of the US. The first story this week involves a huge $25 billion dollar investment in chipmaking in Israel. Intel will pay increased taxes on the factory in return for an even bigger grant on the total investment should the conditions be met upon completion. The Israeli factory is expected to open in 2027 and operate through at least 2035. The second big investment comes in Germany, where the government has agreed to provide over $10 billion in additional subsidies for a fabrication facility in Magdeburg. Both of these announcements come on the heels of a testing facility being built in Poland. Stephen, why is Intel trying to expand their non-US operations after the CHIPS Act? This and more on the Rundown.

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We're at Pure Storage's Pure Accelerate conference this week, and the buzz is focused on the company's continuing quest to push hard disk drives out of the datacenter. The new FlashArray R4 products are faster, while the new "E family" of FlashBlade and FlashArray target capacity-focused applications like data protection and logging. Another announcement focuses on ransomware recovery, with Pure offering a temporary replacement array on demand. Let's talk about these stories in more detail. This and more on this on-site Rundown at Pure Accelerate.

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At Cisco Live 2023, Cisco unveiled a range of solutions for SSE, network management, observability, and a new cloud-native application security solution called Panoptica. The event, which includes a performance by comedian Jim Gaffigan, highlighted Cisco's focus on simplifying user experiences and addressing the evolving needs of organizations. The security service edge (SSE) solution aims to streamline access and enhance hybrid work experiences, while the integration of generative AI into the Security Cloud improves security operations and efficiency. Cisco Networking Cloud offers a unified platform for network management, addressing challenges of complexity and fragmentation. The Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform brings together data from multiple domains, enabling comprehensive insights, while Panoptica provides end-to-end lifecycle protection for cloud native applications. We're getting more details on all of these products as part of Tech Field Day at Cisco Live, which included presentations from Cisco Security, ThousandEyes, and Enterprise Networking yesterday and cloud and compute, secure policy, and IoT today.

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Dell Tech World was the talk of the industry last week. In part it’s because Dell is rolling out initiatives to try and address their key areas as those technologies move closer to the cloud. Dell APEX storage for public cloud was a key piece. APEX is a software defined storage platform for AWS and Azure that integrates with existing tools to create a hybrid multicloud experience. Also of note was Dell NativeEdge, a software platform that can help manage deployment of applications and devices at the edge of the enterprise. Also announced along with NativeEdge is Project Fort Zero, Dell’s implementation of zero trust network architecture (ZTNA). The last big announcement was a partnership with Nvidia to provide the Project Helix platform to run Nvidia generative AI. Helix sees Nvidia H100 GPUs running in PowerEdge servers.

0:46 – Red Hat Summit Headlined With Ansible Announcements

Red Hat Summit was the other big event happening last week and the biggest announcements from the show happened around Ansible. The first was Ansible Lightspeed, an AI-assisted code creation platform powered by IBM Watson. Users can input natural language prompts and recieve YAML code in response for playbooks. Ansible also gains an event-driven capability in version 2.4 that rolls out in June. This increases the number of ways that users can activate Ansible scripts across hybrid cloud instances. You can now trigger scripts to run based on outage information, service ticket creation, and even configuration drift.

Read More: Red Hat Summit 2023: The Biggest Announcements

6:46 – Mirantis Introduces Centralized, Enterprise-Wide Management of Lens Pro for Simple, Secure Operations

Mirantis announced a new feature to help manage Kubernetes this week. Lens Control Center is a follow up to their successful Lens Pro release last year. Lens Control Center has enterprise SSO capabilities, centralized management of Lens Pro deployments, and accounting and billing enhancements. Lens Control Center is aimed to help companies successfully scale out their deployments of Lens and Lens Pro to keep their Kubernetes farms corralled.

Read More: Mirantis Releases Lens Control Center for Centralized Management of Lens Pro for Large Enterprises

10:53 – A Real Backdoor Did the Trick for Barracuda

The email security team at Barracuda Networks needs to come up with something quick. That’s because they announced CVE-2023-2868, which is a backdoor remote command injection that has been actively exploited since October. The exploit can ambush operations teams with specially crafted TAR files. Barrracuda suggests you burn, burn, burn the affected appliances and contact them for a replacement.

Read More: Critical Barracuda 0-day was used to backdoor networks for 8 months

14:48 – HPE Results Buoyed By Aruba

HPE released their quarterly results this week. Results were mostly in line with expectations although there was a miss of their previous guidance. The big news is that HPE Aruba Networking rose to become the second-biggest division of HPE by revenue, sliding past storage for the first time. Given the focus of the deepening of the relationship between the two during Aruba Atmosphere last month and the announcements coming during HPE DIscover in June, what do you think this means for the future of HPE?

Read More: Hewlett Packard Enterprise reports fiscal 2022 results with record Q4 performance

18:25 – Dell Tech World Looks to Appeal to All

Dell Tech World was the talk of the industry last week. In part it’s because Dell is rolling out initiatives to try and address their key areas as those technologies move closer to the cloud. Dell APEX storage for public cloud was a key piece. APEX is a software defined storage platform for AWS and Azure that integrates with existing tools to create a hybrid multicloud experience. Also of note was Dell NativeEdge, a software platform that can help manage deployment of applications and devices at the edge of the enterprise. Also announced along with NativeEdge is Project Fort Zero, Dell’s implementation of zero trust network architecture (ZTNA). The last big announcement was a partnership with Nvidia to provide the Project Helix platform to run Nvidia generative AI. Helix sees Nvidia H100 GPUs running in PowerEdge servers.

Read More: 4 top takeaways from Dell Technologies World (from AI to cloud to edge)

29:02 – The Weeks Ahead

Cloud Field Day 17 May 31 – June 1, 2023

Cisco Live US June 6-7, 2023

Security Field Day June 28-29, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a weekly look at the IT news of the week. You can catch it as a YouTube video and on your favorite podcast application every Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Ransomware attacks continue to pose a significant threat across various sectors, with recent incidents targeting critical industries and causing substantial financial and operational damages. Federal authorities have issued warnings about a surge in cyberattacks exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Veeam software that enables unauthorized access and raises the risk of data heft and ransomware deployment. With healthcare organizations heavily reliant on Veeam software for data protection, the implications of these attacks are particularly concerning. But the impact of ransomware attacks extends beyond healthcare, as demonstrated by recent incidents faced by companies like Dole, which incurred $10.5 million in direct costs following a ransomware attack, and the ongoing attack on the Dallas Municipal Court Building, disrupting legal proceedings and potentially exposing sensitive personal and case-related information. Since we have an expert in data protection joining us today, let’s take a closer look at the face of ransomware. This and more on the Rundown.

1:06 – Micron is Kicked Out of China (Again)

The recent ruling by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) to prevent Micron Technology products from being used in critical information systems marks a significant development in the ongoing trade war between China and the United States. This move, stemming from allegations of cybersecurity crimes, not only impacts Micron but also highlights the broader complexities surrounding global semiconductor supply chains and the pursuit of self-sufficiency in key technologies. What are the implications of Micron’s exclusion from Chinese markets, and what does this mean for the ongoing financial struggle between China and the west?

Read More: Micron Closed Out of Some China Markets

5:07 – Cohesity Partners with Google Cloud for Data Insights and Security

Cohesity recently announced a significant expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud. The collaboration aims to leverage large language models (LLMs) and advanced AI technologies to enhance data insights and strengthen data security. The joint effort was unveiled during Cohesity’s Catalyst virtual conference, where the companies highlighted their focus on generative AI, data analytics, and the expansion of the Data Security Alliance. Will this have real impact or is it just more AI noise?

Read More: Cohesity RAGs large language models coming through Google Cloud

8:17 – Cloud, AI, and Business Messenger Unit Spun out from Alibaba

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has announced plans to spin off its intelligence group, which includes its cloud, AI, and business messenger units, as an independent publicly listed company. Alibaba saus this will unlock value from its businesses and attract external investors, but it is surprising that Alibaba Cloud, which dominates the Chinese market, would be spun out. What’s happening here?

Read More: Alibaba to spin off its cloud, AI and business messenger unit

10:36 – Microsoft Builds In the AI

Microsoft Build 2023 was all about AI integration. Windows 11 will feature an AI Copilot for text-related tasks, while Microsoft 365 Copilot now supports plug-ins, including Teams messages extensions and Power Platform connectors. Additionally, Edge browser will integrate 365 Copilot, Windows Terminal will incorporate an AI-powered chatbot, and of course there’s Bing, which becomes the default search engine for ChatGPT, with expanded plug-in support. Microsoft is certainly leaning into AI!

Read More: The 5 biggest announcements from Microsoft Build 2023

13:10 – BlueCat Acquires Men&Mice DDI Platform

BlueCat Networks has acquired Men&Mice, a recent Tech Field Day presenter with an industry-leading DDI platform. The acquisition strengthens BlueCat’s position in the market and allows them to offer advanced network tools to organizations of all sizes. This move comes in response to the increasing demand for DDI management, and fits well with BlueCat’s portfolio for mid-market and enterprise organizations. What’s your take?

Read More: BlueCat acquires Men&Mice to boost its industry-leading DDI platform

Tech Field Day 27 Presentation: Men&Mice Presents at Tech Field Day 27

15:37 – Supreme Court Sides with Tech Platforms on Section 230

The recent rulings by the US Supreme Court in cases involving Google and Twitter have reaffirmed the legal protections for major tech platforms. The court found that these platforms cannot be held liable for the content posted by users, specifically in relation to terrorism-related content. Let’s consider the importance of Section 230, a telecommunications law that shields tech companies from liability and the implications of these rulings, the ongoing debate around Section 230, and the potential impact on the future of social media moderation. What does this mean for the future of social platforms?

Read More: Supreme Court sides with Twitter, Google over tech platform liability

18:33 – Pliops Plus Redis Equals for In-Memory Performance

Pliops introduced an efficient Redis cluster powered by XDP-Rocks, delivering in-memory performance and SSD-like cost economics. The collaboration optimizes Redis on flash performance using hardware acceleration, allowing economical scaling of application data footprints. Pliops is also expanding its partnership with phoenixNAP, offering Pliops-powered Bare Metal Cloud instances for Redis on Flash clusters, enabling faster data processing, sub-millisecond latency, and significant cost savings. When you saw Pliops at Cloud Field Day a few years ago, would you have predicted this?

Read More: New Redis Cluster from Pliops Accelerates Redis Services, Delivers In-Memory Type Performance and SSD-like Cost Economics

21:28 – Ransomware Rampage

Ransomware attacks continue to pose a significant threat across various sectors, with recent incidents targeting critical industries and causing substantial financial and operational damages. Federal authorities have issued warnings about a surge in cyberattacks exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Veeam software that enables unauthorized access and raises the risk of data heft and ransomware deployment. With healthcare organizations heavily reliant on Veeam software for data protection, the implications of these attacks are particularly concerning. But the impact of ransomware attacks extends beyond healthcare, as demonstrated by recent incidents faced by companies like Dole, which incurred $10.5 million in direct costs following a ransomware attack, and the ongoing attack on the Dallas Municipal Court Building, disrupting legal proceedings and potentially exposing sensitive personal and case-related information. Since we have an expert in data protection joining us today, let’s take a closer look at the face of ransomware.

Read More: Dallas Municipal Court Building Closed This Week Due to Ongoing Ransomware Attack

Read More: Dole incurs $10.5M in direct costs from February ransomware attack

Read More: Feds Warn of Rise in Attacks Involving Veeam Software Flaw

36:49 – The Weeks Ahead

Cloud Field Day 17 May 31 – June 1, 2023

Cisco Live US June 6-7, 2023

Security Field Day June 28-29, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

Episode TranscriptStephen Foskett: Welcome to the Gestalt IT Rundown! Each time we meet, we run down the IT news of the week with a variable degree of snarkiness. I’m your host, Stephen Foskett, and joining me today is Tom Hollingsworth. Wait, that’s not Tom! Who is that? Hey hey, it’s W Curtis Preston. Welcome to the show, Mr. Curtis!

W. Curtis Preston: Very much not Tom, but I’m glad to be here.

Stephen Foskett: It’s nice to have you here, my friend. You and I have been friends for a long, long time. I’ve always wanted to get you on the show, and I’m thrilled to have you join us. Today is National Brothers Day, and you’re like a brother to me.

W. Curtis Preston: You know, it’s also National Scavenger Hunt Day. I love a good scavenger hunt. How about you? And what about Yucatán Shrimp Day? What do you think?

Stephen Foskett: Yucatán shrimp sounds kind of yucky to me, but I don’t know. Maybe they’re delicious. I’m gonna take my brother on a scavenger hunt for Yucatán shrimp. But in the meantime, let’s turn to some of the news of the week.

W. Curtis Preston: The recent ruling by the Cyberspace Administration of China to prevent Micron technology products from being used in critical information systems marks a significant development in the ongoing trade war between China and the United States. This move, stemming from allegations of cybersecurity crimes, not only impacts Micron but also highlights the broader complexity surrounding global semiconductor supply chains and the pursuit of self-sufficiency in key technologies. What are the implications of Micron’s exclusion from the Chinese market, and what does this mean for the ongoing financial struggle between China and the West? What do you think, Stephen?

Stephen Foskett: Yeah, it’s an interesting story. When I first heard wind of this, I was really scratching my head because I’m saying, you know, what is Micron again? So Micron is one of the leading producers of DRAM and flash memory, in competition with two Korean companies, SK Hynix and Samsung. What does Micron have to do with cybersecurity, and what kind of possible cybersecurity threat could there be from Micron DRAM and flash memory products? I mean, we’re not even talking necessarily assembled components here; we’re talking literally memory chips. And then it occurred to me that this has nothing to do with Micron’s products whatsoever. In fact, as my good friend Jim Handy points out, this is really more about the trade war between China and the US than it is about anything else. Previously, China did block Micron products very verbally and vocally, and then didn’t really block them at all once it became obvious what that would do to production. Now, I don’t know what this is going to mean for Micron overall, but I will say that maybe this is more bluster than it is reality.

Stephen Foskett: So, a couple of things to know. Number one, this only blocks the use of Micron products in what the CAC is calling “critical sensitive systems.” This doesn’t block China from importing or using Micron memory or SSDs in products for export or even just general products, at least that’s my read on this for use in China. It really is focused on blocking, basically striking a blow against a US company that’s supplying a critical component to Chinese intelligence and systems. Frankly, it strikes me that Micron was picked mainly because the other choice would have been Intel. And maybe China didn’t want to block Intel products, even though many of those are restricted now from the China market. I should also mention, as I said, this is not the first time that Micron has been blocked, and the other time didn’t have much impact overall. Micron themselves stated that the most impact it would have would be about a 25% reduction in the company’s product consumption, and probably a lot less than that. And also, I should mention that the other companies that I mentioned, Samsung and SK Hynix, well, they don’t seem all that optimistic and positive about one of their big key competitors being blocked in this market. And that’s because the memory RAM and flash market, although it is competitive, I think that there’s an understanding that there needs to be competition, there needs to be multiple suppliers in this market, and no one wants to see their market hit by basically a political game. So frankly, I really don’t see this being more than another round of bluster in the international relations game and not too much impact on Micron.

Stephen Foskett: Cohesity recently announced a significant expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud. The collaboration aims to leverage large language models and advanced AI technologies to enhance data insights and strengthen data security. The joint effort was unveiled during Cohesity’s Catalyst virtual conference, where the companies emphasized their focus on generative AI, data analytics, and the expansion of the data security alliance. We’ve been hearing a lot about large language models in cybersecurity, but you know this market better than me. What does this mean? Is this really impactful, or is it just more AI noise?

W. Curtis Preston: Well, when I saw the story, my first reaction was, “Oh, more AI news.” But I do think it’s a big deal, especially since it’s encroaching on my area of expertise. Machine learning has been used in backup and recovery technology for a while, but crossing over into the AI world is significant. The difference lies in using data to train the model. AI goes beyond just finding patterns, and Cohesity is talking about ransomware anomaly detection, which is a major concern. Detecting threats in the backup system is crucial, although it’s preferable to address them before they reach that stage. Cohesity is also exploring threat intelligence, data classification, and predictive capacity planning, which are all important aspects.

W. Curtis Preston: There’s also mention of a retrieval augmented generation model, and I’m curious to see what that entails. It could potentially assist in data retrieval and restores, but I’ll reserve judgment until I have more information. It’s commendable that Cohesity is openly using AI, unlike some other vendors who claim AI but mainly refer to AI/ML.

W. Curtis Preston: Let’s take a look at the next thing here. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has announced plans to spin off its intelligence group, which includes its cloud, AI, and business messenger units, as an independent publicly listed company. Alibaba believes this move will unlock value from its businesses and attract external investors. However, it’s surprising that Alibaba Cloud, which dominates the Chinese market, would be spun out. What do you think is happening here, Stephen?

Stephen Foskett: On the surface, it may appear as though a new competitor for Google and Amazon is emerging, potentially making a big impact in China. But upon further reading, it seems that this decision says more about Alibaba and its recent success or lack thereof in the Chinese consumer market. You may be familiar with Alibaba as a website where you can get anything delivered from China, but it’s also essentially the Amazon of China, including AWS. Alibaba Cloud is a powerful and versatile cloud computing environment extensively used by various applications in the Chinese market.

Stephen Foskett: The spin-off may seem peculiar because why would a company separate such a valuable component? Well, imagine Amazon separating out AWS. Actually, yeah, they might do it for similar reasons. Essentially, what Alibaba is doing here is a financial maneuver. They are spinning off the cloud business as a separate company while retaining partial ownership. This allows them to generate additional revenue from the most valuable part of their business, which is the cloud, and protect it from the potential impacts of slowing consumer spending, shifts in consumer demand, and changes in cloud usage in the Chinese market.

Stephen Foskett: In conclusion, I wouldn’t read too much into this other than it being a strategic move to safeguard their cloud business and generate more income. It likely indicates that the economic slowdown experienced in the US is also affecting China, including Chinese cloud companies.

Stephen Foskett: Microsoft Build 2023 was all about AI integration. Windows 11 will feature an AI copilot for text-related tasks. Microsoft 365 copilot now supports plug-ins, including Teams, Messages, Extensions, and Power Platform Connectors. Moreover, the Edge browser will integrate a 365 copilot, and even Windows Terminal will incorporate an AI-powered chatbot. Additionally, Bing becomes the default search engine for ChatGPT with expanded plug-in support. Microsoft is clearly embracing AI and labeling everything as “copilot.” So what’s going on here?

W. Curtis Preston: It’s intriguing that Bing is mentioned as the default search engine for ChatGPT. This caught my attention because just recently, Bill Gates mentioned that AI would eventually replace search engines in the near future. This interesting phrase stood out to me. Microsoft is certainly leaning into AI, but the question remains: how significant is this development? Moreover, when using interactive AI like ChatGPT, users need to actively engage with it to fully benefit from its functionalities. Even if they make the functionality of ChatGPT or something similar available to the average user, the benefits will be minimal unless users specifically interact with it as they would with ChatGPT. The success of this integration will depend on how well users embrace and utilize it. It’s uncertain if the average user is ready to engage with an AI chatbot. Personally, I have interacted quite a bit with ChatGPT and find it fascinating, but I’m unsure if the average user is prepared for that level of interaction. Only time will tell.

Stephen Foskett: So let’s talk about BlueCat Networks acquiring Men&Mice, a recent tech field presenter with an industry-leading DDI platform. The acquisition strengthens BlueCat’s position in the market and allows them to offer advanced network tools to organizations of all sizes. This move comes in response to the increasing demand for DDI management and fits well with BlueCat’s portfolio for mid-market and enterprise organizations. What’s your take, Stephen?

Stephen Foskett: I was not really surprised that this happened. I could’ve predicted exactly when it would happen, and maybe even exactly who the acquiring company would be. But Men&Mice has built a really nice product, as we saw actually on my birthday at the Tech Field Day. The product is great and it addresses a big hole in the market. We actually even did a field roundtable discussion talking about the challenges of DDI, basically managing IP addresses, managing DHCP, managing DNS. If just hearing those phrases makes you shutter, then you must be an IT person because they’re terrible.

Stephen Foskett: And BlueCat has been working in the space for a long time, or at least adjacent spaces. Men&Mice was basically founded to attack this problem, and they’ve created a solution that was pretty appealing. I have to say the Tech Field Day delegates were pretty impressed by it, and frankly, it’s no wonder that one of the major companies in the space said, “We need to have that as part of our portfolio.” The whole thing makes a lot of sense.

Stephen Foskett: I would say that overall, having it be BlueCat is probably better than having it be some big multi-product company where this would get lost. And I think this will be a big and important feature, an important highlight for BlueCat. I think BlueCat’s customers are gonna benefit, and I think the exposure to greater customer environments from Men&Mice products, I think that’s going to help them as well. So overall, I’d say this is a pretty nice acquisition. I’m pretty happy with it. And also, I will say that if you’re wondering exactly what I’m talking about, just use your favorite search engine, search for Men&Mice in Tech Field, and you’ll see their recent presentation which goes over all about the product and its features and what it’s all about.

Stephen Foskett: The recent rulings by the US Supreme Court in cases involving Google and Twitter have reaffirmed the legal protections for major tech platforms. The courts found that these platforms cannot be held liable for content posted by users, specifically in relation to terrorism-related content. But I think that this goes a little bit broader than that. The decisions emphasize the importance of Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, which shields tech companies from liability, and that has become a bit of a political football lately. This discussion explores the implications of these rulings and what it means for the future of social media platforms.

W. Curtis Preston: Well, I think that this is definitely the most political of any of the things that we’re discussing today. I think this is pretty straightforward, and basically, they ruled that it didn’t violate Section 230 and that it protects these platforms. We can argue all day long that there were a lot of people who were upset about there not being any accountability for things that some of these tech platforms have allowed to happen. And there has been a lot of noise about going after the tech platforms for things that they have allowed to happen. The problem is, for those people that are saying that, is that Section 230 backs these platforms. The idea was that since they’re just aggregating other people’s content, they’re not liable for the content. The people that did it are liable. I think that this allows those companies to breathe a little bit for the moment. But I also think that they should look forward to, and when I said ‘look forward,’ are we meeting in a positive way, they should look forward to something that isn’t Section 230.

W. Curtis Preston: I think that at some point, whether or not it comes out of this current Congress or any of our Congresses, is a different discussion point. But basically, what this really said was you can’t count on Section 230 if you want to go after these companies. Or I can put that in a different order: you can’t go after these companies as long as Section 230 is the rule of the land. So if you want to do that, you need to change the laws. I think it’s a huge ruling, and I think that the social media platforms can probably breathe a sigh of relief for the moment.

W. Curtis Preston: So let’s talk about Pliops, introducing an efficient Redis cluster powered by XDP rocks, delivering in-memory performance and SSD-like cost economics. The collaboration optimizes Redis on flash performance using hardware acceleration, allowing for an economic scaling of application data footprints. Pliops is also expanding its partnership with PhoenixNAP, offering Pliops power to bare metal cloud instances for Redis on flash clusters, enabling faster data processing, sub-millisecond latency, and significant cost savings.

Stephen Foskett: I’m actually really excited to see Pliops doing this. They presented a couple of times at Tech Field Day, and I have to say that it always seems like the product was undersold as basically a RAID card or a storage controller. What Pliops is doing with their card isn’t what you would expect a RAID card to do. It really is fundamentally taking the data and creating a new storage platform for it. Now, wisely, the company decided to offer storage on the thing because that’s what applications want. But really, what’s going on under the hood is a key-value store and something that is essentially a hardware-accelerated database that’s optimized for flash. Yeah, you can put regular data on that, but that’s sort of a waste of the platform.

Stephen Foskett: I was really excited to hear about this because, frankly, it seems to me that Redis is an ideal front-end candidate for the Pliops XDP platform, and this really showcases what this product is capable of. I would love to see more and more of this. I’d love to see Pliops not be thought of as just doing RAID, data protection, and storage, but as offering in-memory performance of databases using flash as the backend, which is a lot cheaper and more accessible to more people in the market. So overall, good move, Pliops. I’m glad to see this happening. I’m also glad to see that they’ve managed to roll this out with a cloud partner. Now, you may not know too much about PhoenixNAP, and I certainly don’t, but it’s nice to see that people can explore this product, try it out, and see if it really delivers the goods without having to go out and build a whole infrastructure of their own. So overall, nice move, Pliops, and I’m glad to hear that things are moving in the right direction.

Stephen Foskett: Curtis, we’ve got you on the rundown this weekend. Everybody knows you as Mr. Backup, Mr. Data Protection, Mr. Ransomware. Frankly, that’s why I wanted to take a closer look at some ransomware stories this week because I believe your expertise in this matter surpasses mine and many others. Ransomware attacks continue to pose a significant threat across various sectors, targeting critical industries and causing substantial financial and operational damages. Federal authorities have issued warnings about the surge in cyber attacks exploiting high severity vulnerabilities, particularly in Veeam software, which enables unauthorized access and increases the risk of ransomware deployment. Healthcare organizations heavily rely on this software for data protection, which raises huge concerns regarding these attacks. Additionally, there have been other incidents, such as the ransomware attack on Dole, resulting in a direct cost impact of $10.5 million, and the ongoing attack on the Dallas municipal court building, disrupting legal proceedings and potentially exposing sensitive information. As an expert in this field, please help us understand what is happening with ransomware.

W. Curtis Preston: Well, you know, this is one of those situations where I feel like Henny Penny saying the sky is falling, but the reality is that it is getting really bad. These are some great stories, and the first one frustrates me the most. The vulnerability in Veeam software was announced back in March, and Veeam announced a fix for it shortly afterward. It bothers me that, even two months later, we are still talking about this vulnerability being actively exploited. I mean, how is it possible that anyone who values their data hasn’t addressed this vulnerability in their backup servers? I just don’t understand it.

W. Curtis Preston: Regarding the Dole story, it was interesting to see that their data protection system worked as designed, but the restore process cost them around $6 million. That’s a significant amount, not to mention the additional costs associated with continuing operations while they were down. In the case of the Dallas municipal court building, they are still down this whole week, and the impact on legal proceedings is substantial. There’s another story that wasn’t on this list, but it’s worth mentioning. In Chile, a ransomware group took out almost all of the country’s federal infrastructure, including their equivalent of the FBI, CIA, and Supreme Court. They even attacked their backup system, and to this day, a year later, they are still rebuilding their federal infrastructure from scratch. This is something people need to think about. It’s not just about paying the ransom; your entire existence as a company could be at risk.

W. Curtis Preston: If you’re not absolutely terrified about ransomware, I don’t know what to tell you. Your company could cease to exist tomorrow. It’s crucial to secure your backup infrastructure. As Mr. Backup, I emphasize that it’s your last line of defense. You need to make sure it’s secure. Implement measures to prevent and detect ransomware, but also focus on securing your infrastructure. For example, don’t allow direct access to your backup system from your active directories. The data stored for backups should be as immutable as possible. Storing at least one copy in the cloud using write-protected immutable storage is recommended. Consult your backup vendor to enhance the security of your backups; they will have answers to your questions.

W. Curtis Preston: To go back to the Veeam customers who haven’t applied the patch, it’s disheartening. I urge you to contact your backup vendor immediately and inquire about necessary security measures. I’m sure they will provide guidance. That’s my thoughts on the matter.

Stephen Foskett: But of course, those of us who have been in IT for a long time understand that the breadth of unpatched, out-of-date systems is large. The number of systems that are exposed, either through misconfiguration or, in some cases, intentional misconfiguration just to make life easier on a day-to-day basis, is large. I think it’s remarkable to consider that when it comes to ransomware, imagine if this was a physical attack instead of a cyber attack. Imagine if the government of Chile was physically invaded by a gang of criminals who blocked and destroyed all government services. What would the response be? Would it be, ‘Oh well, we better buy some new buildings and set up some new government services over there’? Imagine if Joel Corporation had a group of criminals burst into the lobby and burn the building down. Would their response be, ‘Oh well, we better build a new one’? There would be a different response. The fact that this is a cyber, virtual attack really changes the way people approach these things, and not in a positive way. I mean, think about it. If the Dallas municipal court was shut down by people with guns or bombs, there would be not just a federal, but an international response. It wouldn’t be down for 234 weeks. It would be a massive government response. Honestly, my expectation is that eventually people in governments around the world are going to say, ‘You know what? We need to treat these things like real physical attacks,’ and that is not necessarily going to be a great day because having the government, military, and intelligence agencies suddenly getting involved in these things escalates the whole situation. I don’t know what to say about it except that our audience of IT practitioners and IT pros should listen to Curtis on this one. Update your systems, apply the patches, ask your providers what you can do to mitigate this stuff because it’s going to happen, and you can’t rely on the NSA or the army to protect you from ransomware. It’s gonna happen, and you’ve got to protect yourself from it.

Stephen Foskett: The other thing that occurs to me about this stuff is that it’s important to realize that as you’re putting out the fire, the ransomware gangs are always after the ransom. And in some cases, they may not even have the ability to decrypt the data. I’ve heard that as well. I mean, there’s wiper ransomware that is actually not encryption at all. And of course, there are now disclosures happening as a result. And data protection doesn’t protect you from that. I wonder what you think about that angle, Curtis?

W. Curtis Preston: For example, in the Dallas case, if these guys exfiltrated all sorts of sensitive case files and things like that, they could theoretically be in a much different ransom position than just basically saying, ‘Add the stuff, delete it, good luck restoring that.’ This so-called double extortion has now become the most common method. They stay exfiltration some data, and then they say, ‘Well, we have the data, and we will release it if you don’t pay the ransom.’

W. Curtis Preston: I’ll just say I’m not a fan of paying the ransom because paying the ransom just encourages more ransoms, and it also encourages even more specifically the group that targets you. It will make other ransomware groups say, ‘Oh, here’s a group that paid the ransom. Maybe they’ll pay one from us.’ Not a fan. The difficulty is with the extortion or ransomware where they say they have information. In the case of the Dallas situation, they’re saying they have some data that they’re going to publish. What Dallas is saying is that there is no evidence that they actually have it. They’re just saying that there are ways for the groups to prove it privately. They’ll say, ‘This is why we have, buddy, go look,’ and then you look, and you see, and you’re like, ‘Okay, well, we need to do something.’ And it’s much harder to deal with than simply having a good backup system. The only way to fix that one is to have a time machine, right? It is to go back to when the attack happened in the first place. So that’s why you talked with, you know, we talked earlier about DDI (Data Domain Integrity). It is one of the ways that you can have a good DDI system that can actually help on the front end of looking for and hunting down and stopping data exfiltration. I think that’s what companies and organizations need to do: to add this to the things they need to look for.

W. Curtis Preston: But, you know, I know that so many companies already aren’t doing the basics. There was an attack yesterday that I forget who it was, but in the story, it said that if they had enabled MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), it would’ve stopped the attack. I just want to say, I get very frustrated. We’re talking about complicated things that we want people to go out and do, use DDI and other systems to look for data exfiltration, and they’re not even turning on MFA. You know, I don’t know, dude, do the simple things first. Do the simple things. Have a good password management system, have MFA. These things, you know, make sure you’re using a different password everywhere. All of those things. Do the basic things. Owen and patch management are crucial. Those are the top three. You do those three, and you’re gonna stop about 80% to 90% of the attacks. And then, if you’re serious, do these other things.

Stephen Foskett: Do the simple things. Control what you can control and try to prepare for the inevitable, which is that eventually these things are going to start or already are going to appear in your environment as well.

Stephen Foskett: Thanks so much for joining us for the Rundown this week. Curtis, it’s been great to have you on here. Before we go, where can people find more of your work and continue this conversation with you?

W. Curtis Preston: Well, if they want to hear me talk more, they can go to the Backup Central Restore It All podcast. We do a weekly podcast over there where Persona and I talk about things such as these. We talk about ransomware quite a bit. You may hear the term ‘321 rule’ come up once or twice. And also, if you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s @WCPreston. If you want to contact me, it’s W Curtis Preston at Gmail.

Stephen Foskett: Let’s take a look at some of the events that are going on this week and the week ahead. Next week, I will be in Boston for Cloud Field Day. I’m pretty excited about that one. Wednesday and Thursday, you’ll hear from Couchbase, HYCU, JetStream Software, Morpheus Data, RackN, and Zerto. So please do tune in on LinkedIn or the Tech Field Day website for those, or check out the recordings on YouTube after the event. We’re also headed to Cisco Live on June 6th and 7th. We have Cisco presenting, and of course, we’ve got a lot of Cisco content coming there as well as our friends from BackBox and OpenGear. And of course, we have a Security Field Event and Edge Field Event coming up as well. So stay tuned, and we’ll tell you more about those.

Stephen Foskett: Also, I would mention that this is a pretty busy week in the event schedule. Of course, you may have heard of Dell Tech World happening right now, or the Red Hat Summit, also ISC High Performance, and KubeCon. All of those things are happening this week, so check out your favorite sources for live updates from that, and we’ll bring the highlights from those events to the Rundown next week.

Stephen Foskett: Thanks for watching the Gestalt IT Rundown. You can catch new episodes every Wednesday as a YouTube video or in your favorite podcast application. We’ll be back next Wednesday to talk about all of the IT news from those events and more. But until then, for myself, for Curtis, for Tom Hollingsworth, and all of us here at the Gestalt IT family, have a great week, and we’ll see you next Wednesday.”

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Controversy over AI, from ChatGPT to Bard, have been all over the news, and the impact of Large Language Models is hitting enterprise IT. We’re seeing litigation against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI just as the US Congress heard testimony by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And of course IT pros everywhere are grappling with the various ways their jobs will be affected by AI. Let’s take a closer look at AI in the enterprise. This and more on this week’s Rundown.

0:58 – Hammerspace Acquires RozoFS

Data orchestrator Hammerspace just shared that it has acquired French startup RozoFS for its erasure coding technology, known as the Mojette transform. The technology provides a balance of price, performance, efficiency, resiliency, and availability, making it valuable for organizations with large amounts of data in multi-site and hybrid cloud environments. Hammerspace plans to integrate RozoFS’s technology into its Data Orchestration System to enhance data workflows, accelerate analytics, and improve collaboration. He’ve covered Hammerspace frequently here at Gestalt IT and they have presented at Tech Field Day many times in the past, so maybe we can provide some perspective on the acquisition.

Read More: Hammerspace buys RozoFS for erasure coding tech

3:15 – Google I/O 2023 happened

Google showed off some new devices, like the pricey Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet. It also took this moment to re-establish itself as a leader in AI. Improvements to Bard, Duet AI coming to Workspaces to do things like help compose emails in GMail or create slides in Slides, they are also pushing integrations with Google Search to give possibly provide more useful search results, you can test that out now in Labs. PaLM2 is their answer to GPT4 and is integrated with Bard. Improvements allow some portions to run locally on devices instead of hitting the cloud.

Read More: What you need to know from today’s Google IO: PaLM 2, Pixel Fold, AI everywhere

6:49 – VAST Data’s Platform Certified as Datastore for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD

VAST Data has achieved certification for its Data Platform as a certified datastore for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, providing organizations with scalable and agile performance for modern AI workloads. The solutions makes use of VAST’s shared-everything architecture with multi-tenancy and quality of service controls, and is the first network-attached storage device to be approved by NVIDIA. Since you’ve seen a lot of VAST Data and NVIDIA at Field Day events in the past, including at AI Field Day, what do you think of this announcement?

Read More: VAST Data Achieves NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD Certification, Offering Simple and Scalable Enterprise File Services to Supercharge Generative AI Infrastructure

10:04 – Microsoft and AMD are Teaming Up

Microsoft uses 10s of thousands of NVidia GPUs in its datacenter and probably pays a pretty penny for that privilege. Bloomberg reports that they are dedicated engineering resources to assist AMD in the development of their GPUs to serve as a counterweight to NVidia’s dominance. Microsoft has had similar success offering an AMD version of Azure VMs at slightly discounted prices.

Read More: Microsoft and AMD are reportedly teaming up to combat Nvidia’s AI dominance

12:42 – Solidigm’s D5-P5430 High-Density Data Center SSD

Solidigm has introduced the D5-P5430, a new QLC SSD optimized for mainstream and read-intensive workloads. The SSD offers high storage density and equivalent read performance to TLC SSDs, making it suitable for applications such as email, object storage, and video-on-demand. Solidigm claims that it reduces total cost of ownership by up to 27%, increases storage density by 1.5 times, and lowers energy costs by 18%. We expect to see the D5-P5430 across a wide range of server and storage configurations, since it is designed to address data center issues like power efficiency and infrastructure sustainability. How should we view this new SSD?

Read More: Solidigm Introduces the D5-P5430 — A Data Center SSD with Exceptional Density, Performance, and Value

Watch our Roundtable Discussion: Bringing Next-Generation SSD to Enterprise and Cloud with Solidigm and Supermicro

15:47 – AI Controversies Hit Enterprise IT

Controversy over AI, from ChatGPT to Bard, have been all over the news, and the impact of Large Language Models is hitting enterprise IT. We’re seeing litigation against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI just as the US Congress heard testimony by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And of course IT pros everywhere are grappling with the various ways their jobs will be affected by AI. Let’s take a closer look at AI in the enterprise.

Read More: GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

Read More: In Senate testimony, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees with calls for an AI regulatory agency

Read More: Wikipedia:Large language models

27:27 – The Weeks Ahead

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

Cloud Field Day 17 May 31 – June 1, 2023

Cisco Live US June 6-7, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

Full TranscriptStephen Foskett: Welcome to the rundown! Each time we meet, we run down the IT news of the week with a variable degree of snarkiness. I’m your host, Stephen Foskett. Joining me today, filling in for Tom Hollingsworth, who’s at Mobility Field Day in California, is an esteemed co-host, Mr. Ned Bellavance. Welcome to the show!

Ned Bellavance: Very excited to be here to talk about some interesting tech stuff. But first, what day is it?

Stephen Foskett: It is actually, amazingly enough, National Pack Rat Day. And if you’re aware of my personal blog, you know that it’s called “Pack Rat.” So, today is, in fact, Stephen Foskett Day.

Ned Bellavance: That should be nationally recognized, I think. Another one that’s nationally recognized is Cherry Cobbler Day, which, let’s be honest, if you’re gonna eat a cobbler, is there any other choice besides cherry? And the answer is now, so whatever you said, the answer is no. But let’s break things down in terms of tech news.

Ned Bellavance: I heard a little rumor that data orchestrator Hammerspace has acquired a French start-up called RozoFS for erasure coding. What do you know about it, Stephen?

Stephen Foskett: Well, it’s interesting, Hammerspace. It’s a company that you’re very familiar with. They’ve come to Tech Field Day many times in the past, and we’ve dived deep into their technology over the years. We have not actually talked to RozoFS in the past, but one of the things about Hammerspace is that essentially the company is designed to make data appear everywhere or anywhere it’s needed. Their whole concept is data orchestration, which is something we’ll be talking about in some other IT contexts. I will include links to that in the show notes.

Stephen Foskett: Overall, one of the things about Hammerspace, though, is that it needs to be able to intelligently distribute data, intelligently protect data, intelligently move data, and of course, the modern way to do that is through erasure coding. So, this French start-up had been working on a new erasure coding technology called “Mojette transform.” I don’t know what that is, but it sounds very cool, and now it’s part of Hammerspace. The company apparently made this move, this acquisition, last year, late last year, but didn’t talk about it. In fact, they didn’t even talk about it to me until it was announced. So, I can’t wait to see what they do with this technology.

Stephen Foskett: I have to say, Hammerspace is really surprising us all with their growth and their market success. This is a company that is basically a scrappy bunch of industry veterans, and it has attracted a great group of people, people that I’ve known for years and years. And they’re really building something cool over there. So, if you’re not aware of Hammerspace, give them a shot, and I can’t wait to see the next version with this RozoFS technology built into it.

Stephen Foskett: Ned, Google showed off some new devices like the pricey Pixel phone and the Folding Pixel tablet. It also took a moment to reestablish itself as a leader in AI. They showed improvements to Bard and Duet AI, coming to workspaces to do things like help compose emails in Gmail or create slides. What’s your take on Google I/O 2023?

Ned Bellavance: Well, the interesting thing about this year’s Google I/O is that it was a single day. They really crammed a lot of information into that keynote and that single day, and it’s a three-hour keynote. So if you want to go watch it and you have three hours to burn, that’s fine. But there are also a bunch of really good summary YouTube videos out there that kind of snippet into the main points. Maybe they could’ve used their own AI to summarize the keynote.

Ned Bellavance: Speaking of AI, they did introduce a new version of their modeling, which is called Palm 2, the successor to Palm 1, which was just called Palm. And this is really their answer to GPT-4 in terms of scope, scale, and capabilities. And now they’re working on integrating this new model with all of their products in any way that they can. For instance, they have a new product called Duet AI, which gives you the idea that when you’re working in these various office applications in their Workspace Suite, the AI is there to help you, to work with you, to compose things like you’re singing a duet.

Ned Bellavance: They showed examples of wanting to compose an email and giving the bare-bones content and tone of voice, and then it will try to generate that email for you. And then you can use follow-up prompts to have it refine the contents of that email until it’s close enough that you just want to make a few quick edits. That was pretty cool. The other thing they talked about, as you mentioned, was being able to develop slides in Slides. That’s something that I am particularly interested in because I don’t enjoy creating slide decks. I usually have a picture and an idea in my head, but I don’t want to do all the clicking around to make it happen. So, it would be lovely if an AI could take over for me.

Ned Bellavance: As for the devices they introduced, there were a few of them. The big splashy one was probably the Pixel Fold, which is a foldable phone. It’s similar to what Samsung already has on the market, and interestingly, it has a front screen and then an internal screen that folds out to the full size, but it’s not that much thicker than the current Pixel phone. So if foldables interest you, you might want to check that out. They also introduced the Pixel tablet, their first entry into the tablet market in quite some time. And this one is basically like a Google Home or the Nest Max, but the screen is detachable. It comes with a speaker base that you can magnetically attach to, but then you can just pull it off and walk around and do tablet-y things with it. So if that’s of interest to you, I believe that one’s available right now, and the Fold is available for preorder.

Ned Bellavance: Turning our gaze back to storage and storage types. There’s a fascinating story about VAST Data achieving certification for its data platform as a certified data store for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, which provides organizations with scalable and agile performance for modern AI workloads. I wasn’t familiar with this certification, so can you expand on what VAST is doing with Nvidia?

Stephen Foskett: This is actually a very exciting story. First off, let’s just say that VAST has been an incredibly impressive company. We’ve seen them at Tech Field Day many times. I want to call your attention, especially to Storage Field Day 23, where VAST presented and they also brought in Nvidia to talk about integration between the two companies. So, I wonder if that’s related to this.

Stephen Foskett: VAST Data makes this data platform, which is basically an incredibly scalable NVMe over Fabrics platform for enterprise that uses flash, including QLC flash, but offers unmatched scalability, reliability, and high availability. It’s a pretty great high-end storage platform. But Nvidia’s DGX SuperPOD has never supported an enterprise NVMe over Fabrics platform that I’m aware of prior to this. The DGX SuperPOD is basically a way to deploy your own AI supercomputer using Nvidia’s latest technology. But the DGX SuperPOD needs to have additional components, especially storage, to go along with it. So, all the companies in the storage industry have been jockeying to be a good partner for Nvidia for the SuperPODs because everybody wants to be able to power the latest AI supercomputers. And that’s what VAST is offering now.

Stephen Foskett: Essentially, the VAST Data platform is certified as a data store for DGX, meaning that enterprises or hyperscalers or whoever wants to have their own Nvidia SuperPOD can just go and deploy this thing in a kind of cookie-cutter, recipe-like fashion. It supports all the latest machine learning, deep learning workloads, and of course, includes all the VAST capabilities, including scalability and performance, like I mentioned earlier. Another aspect of VAST is that it provides improved multi-tenancy, which might be interesting for some cloud providers, along with encryption, authentication, and all that sort of thing. And one of the big things that the VAST platform offers is quality of service controls. In other words, you can basically specify that a workload needs a certain level of service, and it’s important to meet those throughput and latency requirements, and so on. Anyway, it’s a really impressive product on its own, and combining that with the Nvidia DGX platform is a great move for VAST. Honestly, this is just the next step in the world’s acceptance of VAST as the next great storage company.

Stephen Foskett: Ned, Microsoft uses tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs in its data center and probably pays a pretty penny for that privilege. Bloomberg is reporting that they are dedicating engineering resources to assist AMD in the development of their GPUs to provide a counterweight, maybe to Nvidia’s dominance. Microsoft has had similar success with an AMD version of Azure VMs at a slightly discounted price. What would you expect to see here?

Ned Bellavance: My expectation is that, as you said, Microsoft is currently using tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs today, probably for various tasks like we discussed in the previous article. And because of that, they’re shelling out a lot of money. When you think about how Microsoft is currently structured, the vast majority of their spending is on capital expenditures for Azure data centers. And they’re looking at those expenses and realizing that the Nvidia item on the list is getting a little out of hand. So maybe they need to prop up their biggest competitor, which is AMD. Maybe they need to give them a helping hand to get their GPU house in order so that they can buy GPUs from them or at least use it as a bargaining chip when negotiating with Nvidia. So, I think that’s certainly what we can expect to see in the next 2 to 3 years – the introduction of more AMD GPU-based offerings within Microsoft Azure.

Ned Bellavance: They’re also turning their attention to running AI workloads on-premises. When you consider the costs of on-premises deployments, especially for companies that may not want to use Nvidia and prefer an alternative hardware platform, Microsoft is interested in offering that option and tuning their software to work with either Nvidia or AMD GPUs. They saw similar success, as you mentioned, when they started offering AMD-based CPUs for their virtualization platform within Azure, charging only a slightly lower price. But if you’re an enterprise running thousands of VMs in Azure and you have the option to go with AMD, there’s probably not much of a downside that you’re seeing, and you’re saving some money on the total cost. So, I think Microsoft is using its vast resources to provide competition to Nvidia by supporting a competitor. I do feel a little bad for AMD because they always seem to be the bridesmaid, never the bride in these situations. But I guess for now, that’s their lot in life.

Ned Bellavance: The next topic we have in the docket is from Solidigm. They introduced a new SSD, the D5P5430. It’s a QLC SSD optimized for mainstream and read-intensive workloads, and it appears to offer high storage density and equivalent read performance to TLC. Stephen, I’m assuming TLC doesn’t stand for tender loving care, so can you take us through what they’ve introduced and what it’s capable of?

Stephen Foskett: Yeah, I understand it may sound like a mishmash of letters and numbers, but in the storage industry, a lot of our terminology can be confusing to those unfamiliar with it. So bear with me as I explain. The D5P5430 from Solidigm is their latest SSD. Now, SSDs have become quite popular and I assume you’re familiar with them. But why is this new one important? Well, it’s all about QLC, which stands for Quad-Level Cell. Solidigm is a leader in QLC, which means instead of storing one bit per cell in NAND flash, they can store four bits. This allows for much greater density and lower power consumption. And that’s what this SSD utilizes.

Stephen Foskett: QLC has had a reputation for being slow or unreliable in the past, but that’s no longer the case. In fact, this is Solidigm’s fourth-generation QLC SSD, and they’ve shown that the technology works exceptionally well. So, what’s special about the P5430? It’s all about the form factor. These SSDs come in various form factors. There’s the traditional 2.5-inch form factor that looks like a regular hard drive. There’s also the E1.S form factor, which is a compact successor to what was known as the “ruler” form factor. And finally, there’s the E3.S form factor, which is the next generation. These form factors allow Solidigm to pack a large number of SSDs into a chassis.

Stephen Foskett: We recently released a video where we spoke with Supermicro about how they’re using the P5430 in their solutions to deliver incredible levels of storage capacity in a compact space. These new form factors provide better cooling, power efficiency, and density. When combined with the benefits of QLC technology and the fact that these SSDs perform exceptionally well and offer high capacities—up to 15 or even 30TB in the future—it’s clear that this is a revolutionary product, even if it may seem like a mishmash of letters and numbers.

Stephen Foskett: Ned, let’s take a closer look at one of the big stories that we’ve been hearing about—AI. It seems like everyone, even your mothers, has heard about ChatGPT and how AI is coming for your job. There’s a lot of hype, but there’s also a lot of reality. The controversy around AI has been hitting the enterprise tech industry as well. ChatGPT is making its way into various corners of the world. We’ve heard about projects from BART, Google, and others bringing AI into different domains. The impact of large language models is finally coming to the forefront, and we’ve seen litigation against GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI, and even the US Congress holding hearings with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. So, what do we think about all of this? IT pros are trying to navigate this AI revolution and understand what’s going on. Let’s start with the copilot case.

Ned Bellavance: Sure. I’ve been using the copilot product since its launch. I use it to write code and scripts. It’s been helpful in that regard. Currently, there’s a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI filed by anonymous parties. The lawsuit claims that what’s produced by the copilot’s underlying model, codex, is violating software licenses associated with the repositories it scrapes code from. The allegation standing is that it violates the software licenses and the portions of the DMCA that require attribution for derivative works. This raises the question of how we categorize content created by AI—whether it’s a net new creative work, a derivative work requiring attribution, or something else entirely. The arguments are just beginning, and it will likely take a long time to work through the courts, potentially even reaching the Supreme Court.

Stephen Foskett: I want to talk about the congressional hearings for a moment because, although we try to separate ourselves from politics in IT, this is more about policy. Congress has had past missteps in regulating tech, such as encryption keys, social media regulations, and controversies over Section 230. Now, AI is the next topic to be addressed. Congress has invited Sam Altman from OpenAI to testify and is seeking input from other experts. It’s important that they learn about the technology before enacting regulations. The testimony had a surprisingly calm and friendly tone, considering the recent news stories about chat GPT’s failures and hallucinations. Altman and IBM, who also testified, agreed that regulations should be in place and that they would cooperate with them. They emphasized the goal of using AI to help people and create new services. However, it’s worth noting that these are for-profit companies competing to utilize AI for their own purposes, which can cause issues. The idea of government regulation is nice in theory, but there are challenges. At the moment, there’s a lack of understanding about the technology among lawmakers, and it moves faster than regulations can keep up. We should be cautious about regulations that heavily favor large companies and potentially stifle innovation. A light touch approach is preferable, with regulations written by those who understand the technology and its practical use cases.

Ned Bellavance: I agree with you. Realism is key. We can’t say yes or no to AI entirely. We’re seeing a wide range of applications, some useful and others not so much. Wikipedia actually has a policy that acknowledges the use of large language models for content generation. They recognize the need for responsible usage, requiring editors to fact-check, copy-edit, and take responsibility for the generated content. Enterprises should adopt similar policies to ensure responsible AI usage and prevent shadow AI from emerging within their organizations. While we can’t stop the advancement of AI, we need to be realistic and ensure that we use it appropriately and with proper oversight.

Stephen Foskett: I’m not opposed to AI in fact, Utilizing Tech, the first three seasons of our podcast was focused on AI. We know a lot about it we’ve seen a lot of what it can do and frankly it can do some amazing things. Check out for example, what we saw at Aruba Atmosphere recently in terms of network management. A lot of ways that AI is being used in security in IT as well as of course, as he mentions assisting and helping people to get things done. We can’t not use this stuff because frankly it’s there and it helps us but also we as technologist have to be very realistic about what it can and what it can’t do.

Stephen: Thank you so much, Ned, for joining us for this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Before we go, let’s take a look at what’s going on. As I mentioned, it’s Mobility Field Day 9, so I urge you to check that out. We’ve got Arista, Celona, Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, NetAlly, and Ruckus presenting today through Friday. And of course, if you missed any of that, you can find it on LinkedIn and YouTube. Just use your favorite search engine for Mobility Field Day 9. Also, we have Cloud Field Day coming up in a few weeks, so we’ll have companies like Morpheus Data, RackN, Zerto, JetStream, and somebody named Ned Bellavance, I think, is going to be there. Also, we’re going to be at Cisco Live US. We’ll hear from Cisco, BackBox, Opengear, and others. Check out Tech Field Day dot com to learn more about that. Ned, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where we can find more from you?

Ned: Sure. My name is Ned Bellavance. The easiest way to find me is to go to my website, NedInTheCloud.com, or find me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place to find me now. I’ve been using less and less Twitter, to be honest.

Stephen: Yeah, me too, actually. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. That seems to be the big site that I’m using a lot now, as well as on Mastodon. You’ll find me there too. Well, thanks so much for watching the Gestalt IT Rundown. You can catch new episodes of the Rundown every Wednesday as a YouTube video, or you can find us in your favorite podcast application as an audio podcast. We’ll be back next Wednesday to talk about the IT news of the week that was. Until then, for myself, for Ned Bellavance, for the gallivanting Tom Hollingsworth, and all of us here in the Gestalt IT family, thanks for watching. Have a great week, and we’ll see you next time.

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Aruba Atmosphere was the talk of the town and we’re here to cover the exciting announcements from the event. There was a lot of discussion about the integration of Aruba, now known as HPE Aruba Networking, into the wider HPE company portfolio. The wireless fans had lots to cheer about with a new update to Aruba Central that offers better visibility as well as integration with HPE GreenLake. Security experts loved seeing how the acquisition of Axis Security is providing new edge security capabilities. Of course, the Athonet acquisition to extend Private 5G capabilities was also on the tip of everyone’s tongue. This and more on the Rundown.

0:34 – Infoblox Uncovers Decoy Dog

Infoblox has released a threat report on a remote access trojan toolkit called “Decoy Dog” that utilized DNS command and control and went undetected for a year in various sectors across multiple regions. Infoblox’s Threat Intelligence Group discovered the toolkit and is collaborating with other security vendors and customers to disrupt its activities and secure global networks. The report emphasizes the importance of a robust DNS security strategy and highlights Infoblox’s ability to detect threats early in the threat lifecycle and provide customers with preemptive protection against emerging threats through its Suspicious domain feeds.

Read More: Infoblox Uncovers DNS Malware Toolkit & Urges Companies to Block Malicious Domains

Read More: Infoblox Leads the Industry to Unite Networking and Security Teams to Better Protect Against Cyber Attacks

3:19 – Nutanix Disaggregating Nodes?

Peanut butter and jelly. Peas and carrots. Things that just go together, like Nutanix compute and storage. Until today, that is. Nutanix is now offering dedicated nodes for storage as well as for compute. This represents a huge shift away from the progenitor of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and their assertion that having compute and storage together in the same box is the best solution. The announcement comes during Nutanix.NEXT where the company is touting additional ways to leverage their hybrid cloud solution for specific workload requirements. The company points out that the flexibility of having different instance types all managed by the same console is something competitors aren’t able to do today. Stephen, this is a pretty big move!

Read More: Nutanix de-converges by allowing dedicated nodes for compute and storage

6:30 – MSI Leaks BootGuard Key

MSI was breached a couple of weeks ago and the group held some 1.5TB for ransom. Since you’re hearing about this story now you know that MSI didn’t pay the ransom. The attackers published the data publicly in retribution and some of the contents were pretty embarrassing. The Intel Bootguard firmware keys were found in the data dump, which means that anyone with access can now sign malicious firmware files to install on MSI devices with no warnings. According to researcher Alex Matrosov of Binarly, this leak also affects all OEM signing mechanisms within the Converged Security and Management Engine. Tom, is MSI in trouble here?

Read More: MSI Breach Leaks Intel BootGuard & OEM Image Signing Keys, Compromises Security of Over 200 Devices & Major Vendors

10:09 – Pure Says Hard Drives Done after 2028

Pure Storage VP of R&D Shawn Rosemarin is boldly claiming that hard disk drives will be extinct after 2028. The flash storage proponent is making this prediction based on the power consumption of the devices when compared to the costs of NAND flash. This follows in line with some of the new ESG initiatives that Pure has been discussing. Rosemarin says that Pure estimates that data centers use approximately 3% of the world’s power and that most of that consumption comes from spinning disks, so reducing those disks would lead to significant reductions in power usage on top of better performance. Stephen, should we start writing the requium for spnning rust?

Read More: Pure: No more hard drives will be sold after 2028

Read More: Achieving Sustainability in Datacenters with Pure Storage and Cisco

14:10 – Cisco vEdge Certificate Expires

Cisco is facing some very angry customers today. The hardware certificate that controls vEdge connections to control devices expired yesterday. This means that the connections to vSmart and vManage will eventually fail, which means the device will lose connectivity and no longer forward traffic. At this time Cisco has no solution for the issues and users have reported multi-hour hold times when calling Cisco support. Tom, how can something like this happen?

Read More: Identify vEdge Certificate Expired on May 9th 2023

17:35 – Aruba Atmosphere Announcements Abound

Aruba Atmosphere was the talk of the town and we’re here to cover the exciting announcements from the event. There was a lot of discussion about the integration of Aruba, now known as HPE Aruba Networking, into the wider HPE company portfolio. The wireless fans had lots to cheer about with a new update to Aruba Central that offers better visibility as well as integration with HPE GreenLake. Security experts loved seeing how the acquisiton of Axis Security is providing new edge security capabilities. Of course, the Athonet acquisition to extend Private 5G capabilites was also on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Tom, you were at the event. What did you make of all the news?

Read More: Improved Visualization and AI Efficiency with New Aruba Central

Read More: Deploying the Next Generation Datacenter Fabric with Aruba CX 10000 Series

Read More: Improved Visualization and AI Efficiency with New Aruba Central

Read More: Zero-Downtime Software Upgrades with Aruba CX 6400

29:35 – The Weeks Ahead

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

Cloud Field Day 17 May 31 – June 1, 2023

Cisco Live US June 6-7, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Thanks to Gina Rosenthal for sharing a wonderful article from Wired about the details behind the SolarWinds Orion supply chain hack that we covered back at the end of 2020. You may recall that SolarWinds was compromised by Russian hackers and their software was infected and used to breach the US government as well as Microsoft, Mandiant, and more. In this article we’re learning even more interesting information, such as the source of the attacks from the Russian SVR which is their version of the CIA, to the fact that the US DOJ detected signs of the attack just a couple of months after the infiltration and didn’t pick up on the possibility of it being a larger issue. The whole article is a fascinating read but what strikes me is that we’re now 2.5 years past this earth shattering situation and we still don’t know for certain if we could be impacted by it again. Chris, have we learned any lessons from this?

0:31 – Meteor Lake Ramping Up

During Intel’s Q1 call last week they gave everyone an update on the status of their latest client processor. Meteor Lake is the first disaggregated CPU that will be offered on the Intel 4 process node. Intel 4 is the basis for Intel offering chiplet technology that allows them to use different chips for I/O, graphics, and more. Meteor Lake is seen as the first big test of the new tech before it moves into server CPU production. This status update comes almost one year after we’ve last heard about the product line. Chris, will Intel manage to roll out Meteor Lake on time? And will their new process node succeed?

Read More: Intel: Meteor Lake & Intel 4 Process Now Ramping for Production

3:30 – WANDisco Sales Rep Costs Company Big Time

If you don’t think you can have an impact on your company then we need to tell you about WANDisco. The company announced back in March that they could not certifiy their 2022 sales numbers and that their booked revenue was significantly lower than reported. At the time we didn’t report on it because it wasn’t a huge news item. However, this week WANDisco has confirmed that a single sales rep created $15 million worth of sales that almost doubled the amount brought in by the rest of the sales team. This false reporting caused their stock price to soar and their CEO to believe they had cornered the market. Today that CEO and the CFO at the time have departed and their replacments are trying to sort through the mess. WANDisco stock trading has been halted until the situation can be resolved. Tom, one rep caused all this?

Read More: Single sales rep inflated WANdisco numbers

7:22 – Ubuntu Pro Now Available on AWS

Ubuntu fans can rejoice today because Canonical has announced a subscription-based Ubuntu Pro offering is now available on AWS. Ubuntu Pro provides critical enterprise support out of the box such as security maintenance and hardening scripts. The idea is that you can pull down the image from the AWS marketplace and launch instances to let you purchase Ubuntu Pro Compute Service Plans as needed. Given the focus on federal standards like FIPS, is this designed to help governements and other regulated industries jump in the cloud quickly with approved solutions? And how will Canonical make people prefer the paid version?

Read More: Ubuntu Pro Upgrade – Annual Subscription

11:22 – Apple and Nuvia Drop Lawsuit

Way back in 2019 we reported that Apple had sued the CEO of Nuvia, Gerard Williams, claiming he had breached his contract by founding the Arm-based CPU company. Nuvia was snapped up by Qualcomm last year but the lawsuit still lingered as Apple wanted Williams to admit to what he was accused of doing. At least until this week, as Apple has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. There is talk that part of this reluctance stems from the lawsuit that Arm filed against Qualcomm claiming that they have no rights to use the Nuvia technology and that all designs need to be destroyed as per the licensing breach. Tom, is Apple letting Williams off the hook? Or do they see Arm succeeding in squashing the Nuvia tech?

Read More: Apple gives up legal war on iPhone CPU wizard who co-founded Nuvia

15:56 – The Legacy of the Biggest Supply Chain Hack

Thanks to Gina Rosenthal for sharing a wonderful article from Wired about the details behind the SolarWinds Orion supply chain hack that we covered back at the end of 2020. You may recall that SolarWinds was compromised by Russian hackers and their software was infected and used to breach the US government as well as Microsoft, Mandiant, and more. In this article we’re learning even more interesting information, such as the source of the attacks from the Russian SVR which is their version of the CIA, to the fact that the US DOJ detected signs of the attack just a couple of months after the infiltration and didn’t pick up on the possibility of it being a larger issue. The whole article is a fascinating read but what strikes me is that we’re now 2.5 years past this earth shattering situation and we still don’t know for certain if we could be impacted by it again. Chris, have we learned any lessons from this?

Read More: The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever

26:04 – The Weeks Ahead

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

Cloud Field Day 17 May 31 – June 1, 2023

Cisco Live US June 6-7, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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In the three years since reporting financial metrics Google’s cloud business has announced they have turned a profit. Their offerings under this umbrella include Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace. These two products now account for 10 percent of parent company Alphabet’s total revenue. Buried in an SEC filing is news that Google will extend the estimated useful life of its servers and networking equipment to 6 years. While this is phrased as financial engineering, it also reflects a change in how Google, and other hyperscalers, will purchase and buy servers. What are the ramifications of this change? Does this mean the cloud business will remain a priority for Google going forward?

1:09 – CrowdStrike’s CloudStream aims to Simplify XDR Adoption

CrowdStrike has announced CrowdStream, powered by Cribl. This offering is meant to simplify how customers get data from many different sources into the CrowdStrike ecosystem to do detection and response. How important unique data aggregated into a single platform?

Read More: CrowdStrike Introduces CrowdStream to Accelerate and Simplify XDR Adoption

2:49 – Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster released by Canonical

Canonical has released Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”, which includes a new installer that enables enterprise deployment and customization at scale, as well as native user authentication with Azure Active Directory for Ubuntu Desktops. Ubuntu 23.04 also includes improved workflows for cross-platform development, more controls for apps and snaps, and enhancements to the Ubuntu gaming experience, among other features. Is this new release more about desktop or is there much for the server and cloud to get excited about?

Read More: Canonical releases Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster

7:19 – DHS to create a task force to determine how AI can be used to protect the country

The US Department of Homeland Security has announced the creation of a new task force to determine how the federal government can leverage artificial intelligence to protect the country. With the announcement, two examples were given on how AI could be used for this purpose. One is to screen cargo for goods made by forced labor and the other is to better find and identify fentanyl in shipments into the US. In a related story, last week, U.S. Central Command announced it hired former Google AI Cloud Director Ander Moore to be its first advisor on subjects such as AI, robotics, and cloud computing. Tim, was it just a matter of time that government agencies took an official stance on AI?

Read More: DHS task force will examine how to use A.I. to protect homeland security

9:52 – BMC Expands Mainframe Business with Model9

BMC has acquired Israeli mainframe VTL and data export startup Model9 and plans to combine their Cloud Data Management for Mainframe solutions with its own mainframe and hybrid cloud software and services. This is BMC’s sixth acquisition in three years, with the previous ones being RSM Partners, Compuware, Alderstone, ComAround and StreamWeaver. What does this tell us about the mainframe software and solutions space?

Read More: BMC buys virtual tape library biz Model9

13:58 – Cisco releases cloud-based XDR offering

At RSA 2023, Cisco announced its new, cloud-first, Extended Detection and Response (XDR) offering. The goal with this offering is to simplify security operations by prioritizing and automatically remediating security incidents. The solution is now in Beta, hitting General Availability in July of this year. Along with leveraging native telemetry within Cisco’s own ecosystem, Cisco XDR can integrate third party products in the spaces of Endpoint Detection and Response, Email Threat Defense, Next-Generation Firewall, and Security Information and Event Managment. Tim, what does it mean for Cisco to enter the XDR space and how achievable is automated incident response when it comes to security events?

Read More: Cisco Unveils New Solution to Rapidly Detect Advanced Cyber Threats and Automate Response

16:39 – Rubrik Working with ZScaler to Stop Data Exfiltration

Rubrik is teaming up with Zscaler to automate sensitive data file detection and classification, aiming to prevent data leaks outside an organization’s IT boundaries. Rubrik brings their Sensitive Data Monitoring & Management technology to discover and classify sensitive data, while Zscaler provides cloud security tools to detect known file exfiltration. What should customers make of this combination?

Read More: Rubrik, Zscaler double down on data protection

19:39 – Google Cloud Turns a Profit and Extends the Life of Servers

In the three years since reporting financial metrics Google’s cloud business has announced they have turned a profit. Their offerings under this umbrella include Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace. These two products now account for 10 percent of parent company Alphabet’s total revenue. Buried in an SEC filing is news that Google will extend the estimated useful life of its servers and networking equipment to 6 years. While this is phrased as financial engineering, it also reflects a change in how Google, and other hyperscalers, will purchase and buy servers. What are the ramifications of this change? Does this mean the cloud business will remain a priority for Google going forward?

Read More: Google’s cloud business turns profitable for the first time on record

Read More: An update on certain reporting and disclosure topics in our Q1 2023 earnings

29:50 – The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Intel made a couple of big moves this week. The first was the surprise news that they are exiting the server market. No, they aren’t giving up on Xeons and they are going to get Sapphire Rapids out the door. Instead, they are selling off their server integration business. The recipient of this windfall is MiTAC, an edge-to-cloud solutions provider and ODM partner of DSG. Intel is giving MiTAC the rights to manufacture existing designs. In addition, they announced the end of their Blockscale ASIC line which was used primarily by Bitcoin miners. Intel said that they are continuing to focus on IDM 2.0 operations. Stephen, we’ve talked a lot about Intel but the transformation seems to be accelerating!

0:46 – Solo.io Gloos a New Fabric

Solo.io announced a new addition to their Gloo platform this week. Gloo Fabric builds on to the existing platform with features like a unified control plane, multi-cloud networking management, and centralized policy management. Solo.io says that these new features are designed to solve the challenges of Cloud Native 2.0, such as zero trust service mesh, modern API management, and microservice clusters. Stephen, how can people use Solo.io in their cloud deployments?

Read More: Introducing Solo.io Gloo Fabric

4:16 – Western Digital Hackers Have the Goods

We covered the Western Digital breach two weeks ago on the Rundown but of course the stakes just got higher. The hackers responsible have said they made off with 10 TB of data, including customer data. They’re willing to forget all about it provided WD pays them a ransom of a “minimum of 8 figures”. In case you think the hackers are just bluffing they were able to provide proof to TechCrunch via a file signed with an internal WD security certificate. Tom, does this new information change your perspective on the attack?

Read More: Hackers claim vast access to Western Digital systems

7:32 – Emerson Acquires NI

Emerson announced last week that they’re picking up National Instruments, now known as NI, to add to their test and measurement solutions.Emerson is paying $60 per share, which values the deal at $8.2 billion. Emerson has been looking to buy NI for a while now, having made several bids before landing on the magic number to make the shareholders happy. The ultimate goal of Emerson’s CEO Lal Karsanbhai is to use this acquisition to turn the combined company in to a pure-play automation group. Stephen, what does this mean for Emerson’s competitors and for NI customers?

Read More: Emerson to Advance Global Automation Leadership Through Acquisition of NI

10:54 – Prosimo Launches Cloud-Native Networking Suite

Prosimo announced a new suite of full stack cloud-native networking solutions today. Visual Transit Builder allows teams to drag-and-drop network connections to on-board services and applications to speed deployment. Cloud Tracer gives your troubleshooting teams a visual way of identifying issues quickly and understanding how those issues impact other areas of your cloud environment. Lastly, the Adaptive Service Insertion solution makes it easy to deploy security policies without human error. Tom, you had the chance to talk to Prosimo this week. What do you think about these new tools?

Read More: Prosimo Launches Industry’s Only Cloud-Native Networking Suite To Accelerate Multi-Cloud Adoption

15:04 – Amazon’s Edge Gateway Goes to OCP

Amazon Web Services has contributed their edge gateway base station specification to the Open Compute Project. The gateway utilizes SONiC and DENT from the Linux Foundation to bridge the gap between cloud and edge, including OCP’s Open Edge servers. Does this blur the lines between cloud and edge?

18:49 – Intel’s Transformation Continues

Intel made a couple of big moves this week. The first was the surprise news that they are exiting the server market. No, they aren’t giving up on Xeons and they are going to get Sapphire Rapids out the door. Instead, they are selling off their server integration business. The recipient of this windfall is MiTAC, an edge-to-cloud solutions provider and ODM partner of DSG. Intel is giving MiTAC the rights to manufacture existing designs. In addition, they announced the end of their Blockscale ASIC line which was used primarily by Bitcoin miners. Intel said that they are continuing to focus on IDM 2.0 operations. Stephen, we’ve talked a lot about Intel but the transformation seems to be accelerating!

Read More: BREAKING Intel Exiting the Server Business Selling to MiTAC

Read More: Intel IFS and Arm Announce SoC Manufacturing Deal

Read More: Intel Discontinues Bitcoin-Mining Blockscale Chips, No Future Gens Announced

32:37 – The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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China is reportedly blocking multiple mergers and is now investigating Micron for an unspecified cybersecurity concern. Delays include Intel’s acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, Maxlinear’s purchase of Silicon Motion, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, and Microsoft’s bid for Activision Blizzard, as well as the long-delay in Cisco’s acquisition of Acacia and the called-off purchase of NXP by Qualcomm which we reported on previously. The latest move against Micron seems designed to antagonize rather than investigate any real cybersecurity flaws at the memory provider. What’s going on here? This and more on this week’s Rundown.

1:00 – Cisco Pulls Out of Russia

Cisco withdrew from Russia back in 2022 and has now destroyed $23 million in spare parts stored in the country, according to the Russian news organization TASS. Was Cisco specifically worried about Russian espionage or is something else happening here?

Read More: Cisco due to the termination of sales destroyed spare parts for equipment in the Russian Federation for 1.9 billion rubles.

2:38 – Sony Invests in Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is receiving some new investment from a familiar name. Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation is pouring some money into everyone’s favorite single-board computer in an effort to spur adoption of their AITRIOS platform for edge AI sensors. Is this story about Sony or is it about the strength of Raspberry Pi at the edge?

Read More: Raspberry Pi Receives Strategic Investment from Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation

4:10 – Always Greener on the Google AI Side

Google released a paper last week showing that AI systems built on its custom TPU are greener than systems built on Nvidia’s last-generation A100. Given the importance of AI these days, both to hyperscalers and chipmakers, this must have felt like a shot across the bow to Nvidia. But is it really a surprise that a custom next-generation processor is more efficient than the last-generation general purpose GPU?

Read More: Google says its AI supercomputer is faster, greener than Nvidia A100 chip

6:28 – Jacob Ziv Dies at 91

Data compression pioneer Jacob Ziv passed away at the age of 91. With Abraham Lempel, he invented the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm that paved the way for GIF, PNG, and ZIP files. Was Ziv and Lempel algorithm instrumental in the technology we are using today, beyond GIFs and memes?

Read More: Remembering Data Compression Pioneer Jacob Ziv

8:03 – MinIO Fires Back at Weka

The conflict between MinIO and Weka intensified yesterday as the object storage developer fired more accusations at the storage platform vendor, claiming that they are still not properly licensing this code. Although we can’t comment on the merits of this case, it seems that the increasing use of open source software in the enterprise requires companies to be more careful about proper licensing and attribution.

Read More: Our Response to Weka’s Post and Clarifying Terminology

13:48 – China Plays Hardball with Western Companies

China is reportedly blocking multiple mergers and is now investigating Micron for an unspecified cybersecurity concern. Delays include Intel’s acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, Maxlinear’s purchase of Silicon Motion, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, and Microsoft’s bid for Activision Blizzard, as well as the long-delay in Cisco’s acquisition of Acacia and the called-off purchase of NXP by Qualcomm which we reported on previously. The latest move against Micron seems designed to antagonize rather than investigate any real cybersecurity flaws at the memory provider. What’s going on here?

Read More: Announcement on Initiating a Cybersecurity Review of Micron’s Products Selling in China

Read More: China’s New Tech Weapon: Dragging Its Feet on Global Merger Approvals

21:44 – The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 31 – April 12-13, 2023

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. Make sure you follow Gestalt IT on Twitter and use the #Rundown if you find a story you’d like read on the show. Follow us on LinkedIn as well to keep up to date on the IT coverage from across the enterprise. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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If you’re ready to start building out IoT networks and you want access to the largest one around Amazon is ready for you. Amazon Sidewalk is now open for developers to start testing. Sidewalk is Amazon’s IoT-focused solution for edge devices that utilizes both Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 900 MHz wireless networks to provide coverage. Sidewalk is generated from Amazon’s Ring cameras and Echo speakers and has 90% coverage across the US according to reports. Tom, what’s Amazon hoping to accomplish with this rollout? This and more on this week’s Rundown.

1:05 | Quantum Announces Myriad Storage

Quantum has thrown their hat into the software storage game. Their newest offering is Myriad, a flash-focused solution for file and object storage. The release includes a research paper that notes the need for software to be architected to address the increased performance provided by NVMe and RDMA. Myriad includes a 100G Ethernet fabric to interconnect the NVMe storage nodes with the system load balancers and control nodes. Stephen, what are your thoughts on Quantum Myriad?

Read More: Quantum enters storage software with Myriad

3:55 | Cisco Picks up Lightspin for Cloud Security

Cisco announced that they’re picking up Lightspin for around $200 million. The Israeli-based security company focuses on posture management for cloud and containers. Lightspin came out of stealth in 2020 and had raised around $25 million from investors. This is the second security acquisition from Cisco in as many weeks as they picked up Valtix just a month ago at the beginning of March. Tom, what do these cloud security moves mean to Cisco customers?

Read More: Cisco Announces its Intent to Acquire Cloud Security Software Company Lightspin

6:50 | VAST Data Partners with HPE for GreenLake

VAST Data is now part of the HPE GreenLake ecosystem. The company announced on Monday that it is providing the scaleable file storage technology for HPE’s on-demand storage service. Given that HPE has many other storage offerings, including a file offering based on Qumulo, why partner with VAST?

Read More: VAST Data Announces Strategic Partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Provide Software for HPE GreenLake for File Storage

10:16 | WD Breach Locks Out Users

Western Digital suffered from a big data breach over the weekend that is still causing issues for users. WD released information that attackers had accessed the WD network over a week ago and that the company was trying to ascertain the impact of the breach. Users of the MyCloud service can definitely tell the company about the impact because they’re currently unable to access any data stored on the personal cloud service, even if the hardware is located in their home. All services related to MyCloud are currently offline with no estimate on when they will be restored. Tom, what can WD do to resolve this issue?

Read More: Users fume after My Cloud network breach locks them out of their data

13:35 | SIOS Adds Multitarget Replication with LifeKeeper

SIOS released LifeKeeper 9.7 last week with an exciting new feature for SAP HANA customers. LifeKeeper now has multitarget replication that allows for more options to keep data consistent. These new features allow for more nodes to be added to the replication as well as being able to restart replication from failed nodes as well as failback and resuming replication. LifeKeeper monitors the health of the whole cluster to ensure that replication is automatic. Stephen, you talked to SIOS about these new features. What do you think stands out?

Read More: SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux v9.7 Adds SAP HANA Multitarget Feature for Most Comprehensive High Availability Protection from Local, Sitewide and Regional Disasters

16:51 | Amazon Opens Sidewalk to Developers

If you’re ready to start building out IoT networks and you want access to the largest one around Amazon is ready for you. Amazon Sidewalk is now open for developers to start testing. Sidewalk is Amazon’s IoT-focused solution for edge devices that utilizes both Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 900 MHz wireless networks to provide coverage. Sidewalk is generated from Amazon’s Ring cameras and Echo speakers and has 90% coverage across the US according to reports. Tom, what’s Amazon hoping to accomplish with this rollout?

Read More: Amazon Invites Developers to Test Sidewalk and Build the Next Billion Connected Devices

25:31 | vFunction Launches Continuous Modernization Manager

Application modernization platform vFunction has a new trick up their sleeve. The new Continuous Modernization Manager allows companies to refactor their code with vFunction and keep it up to date on an ongoing basis. Given the ongoing fight against technical debt, this seems like a worthy addition!

Read More: vFunction Launches Continuous Modernization Manager and Expands Its Industry-Leading Application Modernization Platform

28:17 | The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 31 – April 12-13, 2023

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

Mobility Field Day 9 – May 17-19, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Computing pioneer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died. His name is commonly used in reference to Moore’s Law, which stated that processors would be exponentially more complex, but he was much more than this. Moore was a visionary, who guided Intel through the DRAM market in the early years and then lead the transition of the company to lay the foundation for modern microcomputers. He quiet and polite, unlike Robert Noyce and Andy Grove, but everyone trusted Moore’s thoughtful and considered decisions. Moore learned from his mistakes, notably a foray into the digital watch market, and was able to lead while allowing others to have their own autonomy. In a way, Moore created Silicon Valley but was entirely unlike what it has become. We could surely use more leaders in the mold of Gordon Moore!

0:34 – Toshiba Takeover Talks

Toshiba has been in talks for months to find a buyer to help alleviate their current woes. Last week they accepted a buyout bid from a domestic firm, Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). The bid was for $15 billion, which is down about 22% from last year’s highest valuation of the company. Toshiba has been dealing with accounting scandals and other management issues. Previoulsy a board plan to split the company into three parts was rejected. Stephen, Toshiba has had some rough times. Does this deal reflect the value that’s still there?

Read More: Toshiba accepts $15bn buyout offer from Japanese consortium

3:10 – Biden Outlaws Feds Commercial Spyware

President Biden signed an executive order this week that forbids the US Governement from using commerical spyware. The move is seen as a way to prevent US agencies from using tools such as NSO’s Pegasus for intellgence gathering. Government personnel have been targeted by these attacks in the past few years and the US is trying to prevent them from spreading. The White House had already forbidden the export and transfer of Pegasus and a few other tools in 2021 but this move goes further in preventing the use of the tools completely by government agencies. Tom, will this be enough?

Read More: Biden’s executive order limits government’s use of commercial spyware

6:03 – MinIO and Weka Divided on Licensing Changes

Open source is getting yet another test this week as MinIO and Weka go to the court of public opinion to fight out a licensing issue. MinIO announced late last week that Weka was misusing their license to use MinIO’s open source software. MinIO had originally licensed their software under the Apache 2.0 license but switched to using the Affero GPL 3.0 (GNU AGPL v3) license in 2021. The AGPL restricts companies from incorporating free software in a commercial product. Weka responded to MinIO’s claims stating that they were not in violation of the original license agreement prior to 2021 and that they had forked the software before the license switch. MinIO has previously accused Nutanix of violations of their license back in 2022. Stephen, this seems pretty messy!

Read More: Weka Violates MinIO’s Open Source Licenses

Read More: WEKA Responds to Unfounded Allegations Made by MinIO Regarding Open Source Licensing

14:09 – OVHcloud Owes for Data Damages

Two years ago we reported on a fire at OVHcloud and how it affected their cloud hosting. This week a French court has ruled that the backup data that was destroyed in the fire is the responsiblity of OVHcloud and they’re going to have to pay the customers that lost it. In one case, OVHcloud tried to argue that the fire was force majure and they weren’t liable for the loss. The defendants were able to show that OVHcloud had restarted the failed server but had somehow caused it to purge the data. In the other case, Bati Courtage found out the data they had been told wasn’t stored in the same building as the production server was, in fact, stored there when the server and backups were destroyed in the fire. OVHcloud is appealing the rulings. Tom, could a provider successfully argue that these things are beyond their control?

Read More: OVHcloud must pay damages for lost backup data

18:42 – Arm Wants an Arm and a Leg for Chip Licenses

If you’ve been wondering what the fallout would be from Arm’s failed attempt to sell itself then your day has finally come. A report says that Softbank is looking to make the rumored IPO of Arm much more attractive through a change in the licensing for their chips. They want to raise prices as well as charge device manufacturers to have Arm-based chips in their phones and tablets. The licensing fees are reportedly based on the overall price of the product to be sold. Softbank is hoping this change will make Arm attractive enough to make money with that future IPO to recoup the massive losses they’ve had after the one-two punch of Arm and WeWork. Stephen, will manufacturers play ball with this new pricing model?

Read More: RISC-Y Business: Arm wants to charge dramatically more for chip licenses

24:52 – Gordon Moore Dies at 94

Computing pioneer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died. His name is commonly used in reference to Moore’s Law, which stated that processors would be exponentially more complex, but he was much more than this. Moore was a visionary, who guided Intel through the DRAM market in the early years and then lead the transition of the company to lay the foundation for modern microcomputers. He quiet and polite, unlike Robert Noyce and Andy Grove, but everyone trusted Moore’s thoughtful and considered decisions. Moore learned from his mistakes, notably a foray into the digital watch market, and was able to lead while allowing others to have thier own autonomy. In a way, Moore created Silicon Valley but was entirely unlike what it has become. We could surely use more leaders in the mold of Gordon Moore!

Read More: Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, prophet of the rise of the PC, dies at 94

Read More: Gordon Moore’s $15 Million Watch – The Story of Intel and Microma

Read More: Gordon Moore: He Stood Alone Among Tech Titans

37:35 – The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 31 – April 12-14, 2023

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Nvidia GTC is happening this week and there’s lots of new hardware coming out. From the H100 card optimized for large language models to screaming fast GPUs for laptops and workstations Nvidia has something for everyone. We’ve already referenced the announcements around Bluefield 3 but Nvidia has also announced a new supercompute cluster with DGX cloud that you can totally rent for $37,000 a month.

0:42 | SSE Revenues Growing per Dell’Oro

A new report from Dell’Oro group says that SSE revenues grew 38% in in 2022. The report mentioned the rise in remote work brought on by the pandemic as well as the shift of applications moving into the cloud for both office and remote workers. Firewall revenue continued to grow and exceeded $12 billion for the first time. Chris, is SSE going to be the new buzzword for secure connectivity? Or do traditional enterprise offerings still have a place?

Read More: Enterprises Can’t Get Enough SSE as Revenue Rockets 38 Percent in 2022, According to Dell’Oro Group

4:09 | Nutanix CIO Out Amid Operational Oddities

Nutanix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer has announced she is leaving. The news comes as Nutanix is wrapping up an internal probe around improper software use. The SEC notified the company that they were deficient in filing a new 10-Q as required by law, which is apparently being held up by this investigation. Per reports, the software being misused was only supposed to carry an evaluation license but was instead used for interoperability testing and proof-of-concept deployments. That extra incurred expense is the reason for the delayed 10-Q. Tom, what could happen here if things don’t get resolved?

Read More: Nutanix CIO Exits Amid Software Misuse Probe

8:42 | Nvidia Bring Bluefield 3 to Oracle Cloud

Oracle announced this week that they are deploying Nvidia Bluefield technology to their cloud to increase performance. Bluefield 3 is the latest generation of DPU that Nvida has developed from the Mellanox acquisition. Nvidia revealed the news during the GTC keynote where they pointed out the reduction in power costs for servers using Bluefield 3 as well as the increased performance of using DPUs or SmartNICs for workloads. This comes on the heels of news from industry analysts that the DPU and SmartNIC market is expected to grow by at least 30% this year. Chris, is this good news for Oracle Cloud customers?

Read More: Oracle predicts: BlueField-3 is coming

Read More: SmartNIC, DPU Revenue Forecast To Grow 30% In 2023

12:23 | They Don’t Make HDDs Like They Used To

If it feels like your hard disk drive doesn’t last as long as it used to, you’re not alone. According to a report from Secure Data Recovery, modern hard drives aren’t lasting nearly as long as the ones made just 8 years ago. The test covered all the failed drives they received in 2022. 80% of those drives came from Western Digital and Seagate and lasted, on average, 34 months before failure. The biggest issue according to Secure Data Recovery is the use of Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR. Tom, how can drives made in the last couple of years be less reliable?

Read More: HDD average life span misses 3-year mark in study of 2,007 defective drives

18:53 | Nvidia GTC Looms Large

Nvidia GTC is happening this week and there’s lots of new hardware coming out. From the H100 card optimized for large language models to screaming fast GPUs for laptops and workstations Nvidia has something for everyone. We’ve already referenced the announcements around Bluefield 3 but Nvidia has also announced a new supercompute cluster with DGX cloud that you can totally rent for $37,000 a month.

Read More: The NVIDIA GTC Spring 2023 Keynote Live Blog (8:00am PT/15:00 UTC)

28:02 | The Weeks Ahead

Storage Field Day 25 – March 22-23, 2023

Networking Field Day 31 – April 12-14, 2023

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you heard about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank last weekend. But what does this mean for enterprise IT? The FDIC is covering all depositors, even beyond the traditional $250,000 limit, but are they able to access their money? And what ripple effects will this failure have on venture capital, startups, the enterprise IT ecosystem, and most importantly tech workers?

0:37 | CelerData Launches StarRocks Version 3

StarRocks is an open source analytics platform which CelerData recently donated to the Linux Foundation. Version 3 brings so-called data lakehouse analytics, making data more visible and usable than traditional data lakes. How does this compare to alternatives like Databricks or Iceberg?

Read More: CelerData Brings New Level of High-Performance Analytics to the Data Lakehouse

3:19 | Rubrik Attackers Exploited File Transfer System

Rubrik released details this week about their exposure to the ongoing Fortra GoAnywhere zero day. Rubrik’s CISO, Michael Mestrovich, posted about attackers using the vulnterability to get into non-production area of Rubrik’s environment, includin internal sales info such as partner company names and some purchase order data. No personally identifiable information was breached per the third party auditors. More importantly, Rubrik said in a secondary statment that no data held on behalf of customers was violated in the breach. The breach is another in a list of heists pulled off by the Russian-linked Clop gang. Tom, should Rubrik customers be worried?

Read More: Security giant Rubrik says hackers used Fortra zero-day to steal internal data

6:50 | Microsoft Reveals Nvidia Powers Big AI Bets

We know you’re probably tired of hearing about ChatGPT at this point but an interesting story popped up this week ahead of Nvidia GTC. In a blog post, linked in the show notes, Microsoft revealed that the hardware that has been used to train the OpenAI models powering everyone’s favorite distraction are, in fact, A100 GPUs running over Infiniband. The A100, which we’ve covered several times on the show, is the flagship card that Nvidia has been touting as the way to build AI fast. With GTC coming next week and this news breaking now, can we expect to see updates on the AI GPU front Stephen?

Read More: How Microsoft’s bet on Azure unlocked an AI revolution

10:33 | Qualcomm Tries to Dodge Fine for Dodgy Behavior

Longtime subject of the show Qualcomm is once again trying to convince the EU they shouldn’t pay a fine for breaking the rules. The EU forced the chipmaker to pay around $258 million for anti-competitive behavior back in 2019. Qualcomm is fighting against the ruling by claiming the commission that levied the fine is on a crusade against them and that the technology they’re accused of manipulating isn’t even that big of a market segment anyway. Qualcomm is no stranger to having their wrist slapped for things like this, as they have been found to have made payments to Apple in the past to keep their modems exclusively in the iPhone in the past. Tom, why would Qualcomm want to avoid paying this fine aside from the obvious?

Read More: Qualcomm tries to kick holes in logic behind €242M fine

14:19 | Analyzing What SVB’s Failure Means for Enterprises

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you heard about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank last weekend. But what does this mean for enterprise IT? The FDIC is covering all depositors, even beyond the traditional $250,000 limit, but are they able to access their money? And what ripple effects will this failure have on venture capital, startups, the enterprise IT ecosystem, and most importantly tech workers?

Read More: The End of Silicon Valley (Bank)

29:22 | The Weeks Ahead

Storage Field Day 25 – March 22-23, 2023

Networking Field Day 31 – April 12-14, 2023

Networking Field Day Experience at Aruba Atmosphere 2023 – April 25-26

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Brainchip is back again with the latest generation of their Akida AI engine. This second-generation offering provides performance increases while simultaneously offering more energy efficiency. That includes a new low-power mode that can be run on edge computing devices for specific workloads. Akida v2 is focused on providing enhancements for time series data processing and vision processing. This and more on this week’s Rundown.

0:27 | Pure Storage Announces FlashBlade//E

Pure Storage is moving to add more bits to your data center with FlashBlade//E. The lastest entry in the flagship line is based around the FlashBlade//S architecture that was released last year but more focused on capacity. The E model starts at 4 pedabytes of storage and is designed to help with global sustainability initiatives that Pure Storage is championing. Tom, you had a chance to talk to Pure a couple of weeks ago. What do you think about this new model?

Read More: Pure Storage Announces FlashBlade//E

3:30 | HPE Acquires Axis Security For SASE and SSE

HPE is making more moves in the networking space. They announced the acquisition of Axis Security, a firm focused on SASE and SSE offerings. Axis offers software solutions to help increase productivity for users whether they be remote or on-prem in the enterprise. Aruba CSO Jon Green said in an interview that Aruba is very focused on augmenting their zero trust network architecture offerings as well as providing comperable solutions to industry leaders such as ZScaler. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the acquisition is expected to close quickly. Chris, what’s your take on this big news?

Read More: Hewlett Packard Enterprise fortifies network security with acquisition of Security Service Edge provider Axis Security

7:28 | Akamai Acquires Ondat

Content Delivery titan Akamai is looking to augment their storage capabilites this week. They announced their intent to acquire Ondat. Ondat offers cloud-based storage that has a Kubernetes-based platform for stateful applications. Ondat provides persistent storage to a non-persistent world of microservices. The company is expected to be integrated into Akamai Connected Cloud, which is poised to compete in the cloud hosting market with other players focused on bespoke soltuions. Tom, why would Akamai want to roll their own storage?

Read More: Akamai Technologies To Acquire Cloud Storage Technology Company Ondat

11:21 | HPE Acquires Athonet to deliver private cellular

The HPE acquisition team has sure been busy these past few weeks. They announced the acquition of Athonet, an Italy based private cellular technology provider. No surprise as private cellular continues to grow, expecting to increase to 1.6 billion by 2026.

Read More: MWC 2023: HPE boosts enterprise wireless offer with Athonet acquisition

14:43 | Brainchip Readies Generation 2 Akida AI

Brainchip is back again with the latest generation of their Akida AI engine. This second-generation offering provides performance increases while simultaneously offering more energy efficiency. That includes a new low-power mode that can be run on edge computing devices for specific workloads. Akida v2 is focused on providing enhancements for time series data processing and vision processing. Tom, what advantages does this newest AI platform offer?

Read More: Akida, 2nd Generation: From Perception to Cognition

18:46 | The Weeks Ahead

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

Storage Field Day 25 – March 22 through March 23, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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SNIA is announcing a new way for memory to be utilized in devices. The Smart Data Accelerator Interface or SDXI, is designed to help optimize memory-to-memory data movers. If this sounds like next-gen Direct Memory Access to you then you’d be right! The goal is to help SNIA members build more integrations with CXL as well as building on the disaggregated computing research that has been going on. This and more on the Rundown.

0:40 | IBM Storage to Drop Spectrum Branding

IBM is rebranding their storage offerings to be more direct. Instead of the previous Spectrum prefix the line will now be known as IBM Storage. Big Blue had been using Spectrum since 2015. The lineup has started to include more of Red Hat’s storage offerings since last year and some of those offerings, such as Ceph, were never branded with the Spectrum moniker. IBM says this is part of a realignment to address their client needs. Stephen, is this just a fresh coat of paint? Or does the integration of Red Hat signal a sea change in IBM Storage?

Read More: Spectrum no more: IBM drops brand name for storage products

3:36 | HPE Acquires Athonet for Private 5G

HPE announced last week that they’re jumping into the private 5G market with a splash. They acquired Athonet, a company that has been providing hardware for core mobile networks as well as private options for enterprises. Athonet has been in business for over 15 years and has 450 customers. The private 5G market is projected to be a billion dollar industry in just a few short years. HPE had previously been partnered with private cellular pioneer Celona and HPE announced that customers that had purchased Celona hardware through HPE Aruba would continue to be supported. Tom, why did HPE go with Athonet?

Read More: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Doubles Down on Private 5G, Extends Leadership in Wireless Connectivity with Acquisition of Athonet

7:38 | Scale Computing Introduces Zero Touch Provisioning at Edge Field Day

The very first Edge Field Day was last week and Scale Computing had a big announcement to go with it. They debuted their new Zero Touch Provisioning capability for Scale Fleet Manager. This enables IT departments to set up edge compute devices with a minimum of effort on the part of the installer. The devices can be pre-configured to phone home when cabled to the infrastructure, where Fleet Manager allows operations teams to provision the devices and get them running without being on-site. This is a massive improvement in the way that edge nodes have typically been deployed. Stephen, you got a close look at this technology. What do you think?

Read More: SC//Fleet Manager with Zero-Touch Provisioning

Watch: Scale Computing at Edge Field Day 1

10:38 | Hackers Breached T-Mobile 100 Times in 2022

Brian Krebs broke a big story yesterday when he disclosed that SIM-swapping hacker groups had successfully penetrated T-Mobile’s internal network over 100 times in 2022. The data from three Telegram channels frequented by criminals was analyzed to determine when T-Mobile employees had successfully been phished and had their internal tool access compromised to enable this form of activity. The data suggests that attackers were very active in the summer of 2022 with access beginning to trail off by the end of the year. Tom, this is a pretty big deal for T-Mobile, isn’t it?

Read More: Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022

15:02 | SNIA Gets Smart with New Smart Accelerator Interface

SNIA is announcing a new way for memory to be utilized in devices. The Smart Data Accelerator Interface or SDXI, is designed to help optimize memory-to-memory data movers. If this sounds like next-gen Direct Memory Access to you then you’d be right! The goal is to help SNIA members build more integrations with CXL as well as building on the disaggregated computing research that has been going on. Stephen, what is SNIA hoping to accomplish with this new standard?

Read More: SNIA’s New Smart Data Accelerator Interface Specification

18:32 | US Levels the CHIPS Act Funding Field

We’ve covered a lot of the news that’s come out of the US Chips act and the first monies are finally starting to be handed out to firms. Of course, that’s not to say the first round of things hasn’t had its own special drama. The government has stated that the Chips Act isn’t a handout for struggling firms and is instead focused on national security. To that end, chipmakers that agree to recieve the money must also agree not to expand capacity in China for at least the next decade. The wording of the statement doesn’t specifcally cal out China but the read of it by the industry is pretty clear. Intel also caused a bit of a kerfuffle by stating that the US should prioritize US-based companies for Chips funding such as themselves over Taiwanese companies like TSMC. The White House clapped back by saying the funds would be allocated to companies as they saw fit. Stephen, now that we’re seeing this come to fruition are we going to see more arguments over the semantics?

Read More: US Takes Security-First Focus in Doling Out $39 Billion Chip Aid

Read More: Biden’s Semiconductor Plan Flexes the Power of the Federal Government

Read More: Chipmakers receiving US federal funds can’t expand in China for 10 years

31:20 | The Weeks Ahead

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

Storage Field Day 25 – March 22 through March 23, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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The US Supreme Court took up a case this week that could have some far-reaching impacts on the future of content on the Internet. The case, Gonzalez vs. Google, covers whether or not Google is liable for content that was uploaded to YouTube that later led to deaths in a terrorist attack. The case has garnered a significant amount of media attention as it applies to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This rule is the one that allows you to post a comment on a video or blog post and not have the hosting company be held liable for the content. Section 230 has been the target of groups that say that Internet sites are both somehow silencing commenters and that they should be held responsible for the content of their non-paid contributors. Max, what do you think the impacts of this case could be on global Internet usage and content creation? This and more on the Rundown. Thanks Max Mortillaro for filling in.

0:36 | SpectraLogic Adding On-Prem Archiving

SpectraLogic has added a new on-premises archive solution for their line of backup products. StorCycle is the name for their file and object storage solution that is designed to scan cloud storage for older data and move it to either cloud archives on on-site backup solutions like near-line or tape. This is really a combination of the hardware and software that SpectraLogic is famous for providing for customers to manage the amount of data they must keep secured and safe in the event of a disaster. According to CEO Nathan Thompson StorCycle will continue to have new features added in the coming months to help offer more on-prem archival options. Max, are customers really looking to keep their backup data somewhere other than the cloud?

Read More: SpectraLogic targets on-prem archive market

4:41 | Avaya Asks to Avoid Adding to Arrears Again

Avaya is once again filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The announcment came as Avaya has secured around $780 million in financing to take the company private as the pile of debt is expected to shrink from $3.4 billion down to something more manageable. The communications company has focused primarily on unified communications solutions since their previous restructuring, which saw their assets being picked up by a number of networking companies in the industry. The move means that Avaya will soon be delisted on the stock exchange which means shareholders are going to take a bath, including major partner RingCentral, which will lose their entire investment but continue the partnership. Tom, are you shocked by this news?

Read More: Avaya files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

9:02 | GoDaddy Source Code Nabbed In Multiyear Invasion

GoDaddy is facing some hard questions this week after it revealed that attackers not only breached their servers but have been there for years. GoDaddy found the intrusion back in December after a redirection attack and later disclosed to the SEC that they believe the attackers had been in the system for the past three years, going back to March 2020. The previous intrusions leaked customer passwords, email addresses, and most credentials. This could explain how attackers were able to access GoDaddy customer cPanel installations. GoDaddy says they’re working with investigators to find out who was involved. Max, does this increase the heat on GoDaddy?

Read More: GoDaddy: Hackers stole source code, installed malware in multi-year breach

12:52 | Airbus Eyeing Evidian?

Airbus is reportedly interested in purchasing a 30% stake in Evidian, the half of Atos that contains their big data and security assets. Atos has stated they will split the company in half after a failed acquistion in 2022 led to the CEO resigning. Evidian has seen lots of interest from investors and partners but Airbus reportedly wants to solve any lingering data soverignty issues by purchasing a stake in the company. Atos isn’t quite ready to let Airbus buy the whole thing however, with 30% representing the most that they’re willing to part with at this time. Atos would prefer to offer stock publicly later this year should plans work out with Airbus and other investors. Tom, what’s Airbus looking to accomplish here?

Read More: Airbus in talks to buy 30% chunk of Atos’s breakaway cybersecurity biz

16:46 | US Supreme Court Takes on Section 230

The US Supreme Court took up a case this week that could have some far-reaching impacts on the future of content on the Internet. The case, Gonzalez vs. Google, covers whether or not Google is liable for content that was uploaded to YouTube that later led to deaths in a terrorist attack. The case has garnered a significant amount of media attention as it applies to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This rule is the one that allows you to post a comment on a video or blog post and not have the hosting compnay be held liable for the content. Section 230 has been the target of groups that say that Internet sites are both somehow siliencing commentors and that they should be held responsible for the content of their non-paid contributors. Max, what do you think the impacts of this case could be on global Internet usage and content creation?

Read More: Supreme Court justices in Google case express hesitation about upending Section 230

32:19 | The Weeks Ahead

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

Storage Field Day 25 – March 22 through March 23, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Looks like it’s time to update your iPhones, Macs, and iPads again. Apple has released security fixes for all affected devices and they’ve acknowledged that it maybe have been actively exploited. Jon, is this a huge concern and should we be updating our devices immediately? Why is this happening more and more? This and more on the Rundown.

0:36 | AWS Modular Data Center for U.S. Department of Defense

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) relies on modern military applications that are data-heavy and depend on low latency to enable critical communications and coordination in the field. Accessing, processing, and sharing data at the tactical edge has become increasingly essential. Jon, Is the AWS Cloud becoming more and more mobile?

Read More: AWS announces AWS Modular Data Center for U.S. Department of Defense Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability

3:19 | EDB Adds Encryption for PostgreSQL

If you’re looking to move off of Oracle’s database offerings and you’re worried that you won’t have encryption then this new story should be of interest to you. EDB announced this week that they have relased transparent data encryption for PostgreSQL. This block-level encryption offering allows databases to be encrypted before they’re written to disk to ensure the data is secure at all times. Integration with public cloud key management systems ensures only authorized users and applications can see the database files. Tom, what’s the ultimate goal for offering encryption for Postgres?

Read More: EnterpriseDB Raises the Bar for Postgres Security and Compliance with Transparent Data Encryption

7:21 | Breaking Up with Internet Explorer on Valentines Day

The end is, or shall I say the EDGE is here for the venerable I.E. 11. The source of an antitrust lawsuit in the 90s and once popular web browser has seen it’s last update or support. The future of the web according to Redmond lies in the Chromium-based Edge. Microsoft breaks up with I.E. on Valentines Day. Jon, without I.E. how are we going to browse the so called “Web”?

Read More: RIP Internet Explorer: Microsoft Kills Off Legacy Browser

10:30 | SuSE Launches ATIP for Modernizing Comms Networks

SuSE announced this week that they’re adding support for building future-proof telecom infrastructure built around open frameworks like Open RAN. The Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform, or AITP, leverages technology from Rancher Labs to create a modular platform that can adapt to the changing needs of telecom providers. This modular system is built specifically to address provider needs with Kubernetes pods built serve those requirements. ATIP can be rolled out quickly and managed from a central location to ensure that everything is up-to-date and operational. Tom, is this solution going to ease some of the adoption issues we’ve seen with smaller providers?

Read More: Future-Proof Telecom Modernization with SUSE ATIP

15:04 | MinIO and Veeam Team Up for Backup

Backup giant and frequent Field Day presenter Veeam is touting the ability of their new version 12 software to back up to a variety of targets. One of those that has the industry excited is MinIO’s object store. Instead of backing up your data to Amazon S3 you can now point things to go to an on-premesis MinIO solution as a direct target. Initial numbers for performance look great with an observed 12 GB/s throughput. Jon, what’s the value of having an on-prem object store as your backup target for a platform like Veeam?

Read More: MinIO Veeam Backup and Replication v12 Beta 2 Throughput Benchmark

18:53 | Apple Says Zero Day Vulnerability for iPhones and Macs May have been Exploited

Looks like it’s time to update your iPhones, Macs, and iPads again. Apple has released security fixes for allaffected devices and they’ve acknowledged that it maybe have been actively exploited. Jon, is this a huge concern and should we be updating our devices immediately? Why is this happening more and more?

Read More: Apple Says Zero Day Vulnerability For iPhones And Macs May Have Been Exploited

28:00 | The Weeks Ahead

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Cisco is looking to embrace the growing field of IoT with some new announcements around rugged switches and access points as well as a new dashboard designed to address the needs of operations teams. The new Cisco IoT dashboard allows existing IT teams to manage Cisco IoT offerings, such as the IE3100 Rugged Series Switch and the IW9165 Series Access Point. The goal is to provide more integration between these teams to help create synergy as well as provide enhanced security monitoring through the new Cyber Vision IoT security platform.

Cisco has also announced several new initiatives aimed at providing sustainability in enterprise IT. Leveraging platforms such as Webex to reduce the carbon footprint of in-person meetings is just the start. Partner companies like Pure Storage are working to reduce power consumption in devices as well as providing upgrade paths to reduce the amount of e-waste for end-of-life hardware. The goal is helping IT departments adopt sustainable methods and integrate those into their workflows for the future while also streamlining operations and reducing CapEx and OpEx budgets.

1:05 | ChatGPT getting a lot of usage and headlines

ChatGPT is a trained AI model that we can interact with in a conversational way. It really has seemed to take the consumer world by storm. Google has now announced a competing offering called Bard. What are the long term goals and implications of products like these?

Read More: Microsoft is holding a press event tomorrow, with ChatGPT expected to feature heavily

Read More: Google unveils Bard, its ChatGPT rival

4:30 | Amazon planning to migrate some Oregon data centers to Natural Gas

AWS is reportedly concerned about not being able to get enough power to handle its Oregon data centers and is looking to natural gas fuel cells. Are alternate power sources an outlier or will they become more common for other hyper-scalers? Could these hyper-scalers end up inadvertently driving some alternate power and fuel source discussions.

Read More: Power Grid Worries Force Amazon To Run Oregon Datacenters Using Fuel Cells

6:13 | Dell Introduces a Rugged VX-Rail for the edge

Dell continues its push to the edge with the new rugged VD-4000 line of VX-Rail servers. These compact rack and standalone servers pack a VMware and vSAN solution for the and scale all the way down to two nodes. What’s your take on this new edge solution?

Read More: Dell takes VxRail hyperconverged systems to the rugged edge

9:28 | No Crypto Super Bowl ads have been purchased.

Crypto ads were big in the “big game” last year. Yet we’re hearing that there will be none at all during the big game this year. What has changed?

Read More: No Cryptocurrency Super Bowl Ads Have Been Purchased This Year

11:14 | NetApp Introduces a QLC Line

NetApp introduced the all-flash C-Series this week, adding a new line in their ONTAP offerings. It uses QLC flash and is positioned as a less-expensive and greener alternative. Is it the real deal?

Read More: NetApp Announces A Whole New Line

Read More: NetApp adds quad-level cell arrays to AFF range

14:42 | Where do all of the Silicon Valley workers go after layoffs?

There are continued announcements of large tech companies laying off varying percentages of staff. First off, is there a good way to know how many of these are tech professionals, and where do those tech professionals go? Do they jump to other large tech firms or do they continue to embrace remote work and take their talents to smaller companies and industries, perhaps on the enterprise side?

17:26 | HYCU Backs Up All the Things with Protégé R-Cloud

Enterprise data protection firm Hycu just introduced a new cloud backup offering featuring an extensible marketplace that could support just about any SaaS in the cloud. The Protégé R-Cloud comes out of the gate with an API and developer kit as well as support for some popular SaaS data sources. What do you think of this comprehensive offering?

Read More: HYCU tackles the SaaS data protection challenge with the announcement of R-Cloud

21:08 | Cisco Leans Into 5G, IoT, and Sustainability at Cisco Live EMEA

Cisco is looking to embrace the growing field of IoT with some new announcements around rugged switches and access points as well as a new dashboard designed to address the needs of operations teams. The new Cisco IoT dashboard allows existing IT teams to manage Cisco IoT offerings, such as the IE3100 Rugged Series Switch and the IW9165 Series Access Point. The goal is to provide more integration between these teams to help create synergy as well as provide enhanced security monitoring through the new Cyber Vision IoT security platform.

Cisco has also announced several new initiatives aimed at providing sustainability in enterprise IT. Leveraging platforms such as Webex to reduce the carbon footprint of in-person meetings is just the start. Partner companies like Pure Storage are working to reduce power consumption in devices as well as providing upgrade paths to reduce the amount of e-waste for end-of-life hardware. The goal is helping IT departments adopt sustainable methods and integrate those into their workflows for the future while also streamlining operations and reducing CapEx and OpEx budgets.

Read More: Harmonizing Networking and Security to Make SASE Easy

Read More: New innovations to simplify IT for industrial networks

Read More: Cisco expands Cisco Intersight to EMEA for sovereignty and high performance

Read More: New Cisco Catalyst 9200CX Compact With HVDC, Cisco UPOE And mGig

Read More: Cisco Connects and Protects with New Cloud Tools Across Networking, Security and Operations to Provide Greater Visibility and Control Over Networks

Read More: Cisco Doubles Down on Frictionless Security to Protect Hybrid Work and Multi-Cloud Environments

Read More: New Cisco Innovation Helps Organizations Meet Sustainability Targets

35:48 | The Weeks Ahead

Cisco Live EMEA – February 7 – February 8, 2023

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Pat Gelsinger isn’t done cutting just yet. This week brought news of two big changes for Intel. The first was news that Intel will no longer be developing networking switches. You may recall that Intel picked up startup Barefoot Networks back in 2019 and was integrating the Tofino ASIC in a number of products. Intel’s offerings had been facing stiff competition from Nvidia, Broadcom, and others and the move comes as Intel is trying to restructure after a massive loss in Q4 of 2022. Intel has said that the IPUs are going to be a focus area now. Also announced was the end of the Pathfinder for RISC-V program. The announcement came as a surprise to those in the program, only having been disclosed by a notice on the project’s webpage. Intel had been extending an olive branch to the RISC-V community to try and encourage development on the platform that Intel could leverage in their own offerings, such as allowing the code to run on FPGAs. The program was started back in August of 2022 and was supported by most of the large RISC-V companies. Stephen, how do these latest cuts stack up against the moves that Intel has been making? This and more on the Rundown.

0:46 | Dell Orchestrates Acquisition of Cloudify

Dell has picked up an exciting new company to add to their growing cloud services offering. Cloudify is an Israeli startup that focuses on cloud orchestration and automation. The company, which reportedly competed with Dell’s own Enstratius solution, was quietly purchased by Dell for around $100 million. The acquistion was so hush hush, in fact, that Dell didn’t even publicly acknowledge it until SEC paperwork pertaining to stock grants was found by reporters. Stephen, does this mean Dell is solidly working to increase their offerings for customers looking for hybrid cloud solutions?

Read More: Dell has acquired cloud orchestration startup Cloudify, sources tell us for up to $100M

3:14 | Sysdig Rocks Ransomware with Falco

Sysdig is a big name in the container security space and part of the reason why is the way they’ve embraced open source tools. One of those is Falco, a container build and runtime monitor. This open source offering can feed Sysdig with information like IP addresses used by containers, connections, and other types of information. That data can be analyzed by Sysdig to find things that shouldn’t be happening in your container farm. Tom, how important is it to find these problems quickly?

Read More: Sysdig’s open-source Falco draws on AIOps, data security to fight ransomware

6:02 | WD Doubles Up on Drive Actuators

Western Digital has a fun new drive on the market. The DC HS760 data center drive is a traditional rotating disk that has some pretty impressive throughput numbers. It’s traditional in all but one sense. The HS760 is a dual actuator drive, meaning it contains two read/write heads. The drive is actually seen by the host OS as two different drives that are addressable. This allows the system to have up to 582Mbps of I/O throughput. The new drive is aimed at workloads which have a mixture of reads and writes as opposed to a heavy tilt toward one end of the scale. Stephen, what is the advantage of having dual actuators in a traditional drive?

Read More: Western Digital quietly producing dual-actuator disk drives

10:45 | Huawei Loses Out on Chip Exports For Real This Time

If it seems like the US has been banning Huawei from getting access to chips and tech from US sources you’re not crazy. Ever since 2019 the US has been trying to lock the Chinese networking giant out of the market. With every modification of the original order comes an evasion such as buying from new unaffected suppliers or limping along with limited export licenses from Qualcomm and Intel. Qualcomm even created speccial versions of their SoCs to comply with the 5G export ban in place. The US has decided enough is enough and are signaling they will outright ban export licenses for Huawei in the coming months. Tech comanies are already grumbling about the potential loss of such a huge customer. The ban would affect new licenses being granted and begin to wind down the existing licenses. Tom, is the US playing hardball here? Or is this the last act in a long play?

Read More: No more export licenses: US plans to fully cut off Huawei from chip suppliers

15:14 | Intel Punts Pathfinder and Nixes Networking Business

Pat Gelsinger isn’t done cutting just yet. This week brought news of two big changes for Intel. The first was news that Intel will no longer be developing networking switches. You may recall that Intel picked up startup Barefoot Networks back in 2019 and was integrating the Tofino ASIC in a number of products. Intel’s offerings had been facing stiff competition from Nvidia, Broadcom, and others and the move comes as Intel is trying to restructure after a massive loss in Q4 of 2022. Intel has said that the IPUs are going to be a focus area now. Also announced was the end of the Pathfinder for RISC-V program. The announcement came as a surprise to those in the program, only having been disclosed by a notice on the project’s webpage. Intel had been extending an olive branch to the RISC-V community to try and encourage development on the platform that Intel could leverage in their own offerings, such as allowing the code to run on FPGAs. The program was started back in August of 2022 and was supported by most of the large RISC-V companies. Stephen, how do these latest cuts stack up against the moves that Intel has been making?

Read More: Intel Sunsets Network Switch Biz, Kills RISC-V Pathfinder Program (Updated)

Read More: Intel is halting development of the networking chip it got from Barefoot Networks

26:58 | The Weeks Ahead

Cisco Live EMEA – February 7 – February 8, 2023

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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The US Department of Justice has joined with 8 US states to take on Google’s ad platform. In a filing this week they announced the suit claiming that Google’s dominant position in the market affords them the ability to monopolize and eliminate their competition. Per Merick Garland, US Attorney General, Google controls the tech used to display ads, the tools used to buy that ad space, and the ad exchange that matches advertisers to publishers. The government wants Google to divest their ad management business from the rest of the company. This could be an issue for the tech giant as a reported 80% of their revenue comes from digital ads. The enterprise angle here involves what Google might be forced to do if they have to sell off the cash cow and how that could affect their service offerings, especially those that are free or insanely cheap thanks to being ad-supported.

0:33 | Intel Cools on Immersion Cooling Lab

Intel has decided to put their immersion cooling lab in Hillsboro, Oregon on ice. The 200,000 sq ft facility is seen as a cost-cutting measure for Intel as revenues from the chip market continue to chill. Immersion cooling has been seen as a way to combat the rising heat levels from CPUs and GPUs backed with transisitors with Intel rushing to the lead to try and set the as yet undefined standard. Girard, is this move by Intel going to freeze the market for these solutions? Or should we all just take a chill pill?

Read More: Intel kills $700M liquid cooling lab amid chip slump

2:16 | GoTo Hack Goes from Bad to Worse

You know those storeis about hacks in the news that just keep getting worse when you read into them? Well, GoTo is in the same boat now. You may recall that we discussed this hack last year on the Rundown as part of a story about LastPass having their shared cloud storage hacked and key information stolen. Well, GoTo, formerly known as LogMeIn, was the avenue for that hack and they have it much worse. Attackers were not only able to gain access to encrypted customer backups and exfiltrate them. You may say that it’s not too bad becaue they’re encrypted, right? Well, attackers were able to get away with at least one encryption key. That could be bad news indeed. Tom, what’s the outcome here for GoTo? Will they end up gone?

Read More: GoTo hack sees attackers get encrypted customer backups, and encryption key

6:19 | vRealize Log Insight Has Unintended Features Thanks to New Flaws

If you’re managing your log files with vRealize Log Insight Manager you are going to need to schedule a patch window. Announced this week are two new CVEs, both rated 9.8 on the Scary Meter. One is a directory traversal bug and the other is an access control exploit. VMware says that updating your installation to 8.10.2 should fix these two bugs as well as two other more minor attack vectors. Girard, how soon should people get this done?

Read More: Logfile management is no fun. Now it’s a nightmare thanks to critical-rated VMware flaws

8:28 | ChatGPT, Write Me A Prompt Where You Get Paid

As reported last week, Microsoft has decided to invest multiple millsions of dollars into ChatGPT, the AI system for writing term papers and performance reviews. Microsoft had already invested $1 billion into the platform and has added more cold hard cash to OpenAI, the parent company that runs ChatGPT. The investment, reportedly up to $10 billion, comes amid rumors that ChatGPT will start offering a professional tier subscription that costs around $42/month to provide faster, more stable responses and access to new features when they get added. No word yet on whether that amount is secretly the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Read More: Microsoft confirms it’s investing billions in the creator of ChatGPT

13:13 | DoJ Says Google Doesn’t Ad Up

The US Department of Justice has joined with 8 US states to take on Google’s ad platform. In a filing this week they announced the suit claiming that Google’s dominant position in the market affords them the ability to monopolize and eliminate their competition. Per Merick Garland, US Attorney General, Google controls the tech used to display ads, the tools used to buy that ad space, and the ad exchange that matches advertisers to publishers. The government wants Google to divest their ad management business from the rest of the company. This could be an issue for the tech giant as a reported 80% of their revenue comes from digital ads. The enterprise angle here invovles what Google might be forced to do if they have to sell off the cash cow and how that could affect their service offerings, especially those that are free or insanely cheap thanks to being ad-supported.

Read More: Justice department alleges Google tried to ‘eliminate’ ad market rivals in lawsuit

21:09 | The Weeks Ahead

Cloud Field Day 16 – January 25, 2023

Cisco Live EMEA – February 7 – February 8, 2023

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Supermicro, Dell, HPE, Cisco, and others have introduced the first server lines based on Intel’s recently-announced 4th generation Xeon processors. And of course Nvidia is also supporting these new processors with their H100 DGX platform. Let’s take a look under the hood and see how Sapphire Rapids brings new capabilities to these devices!

1:42 | Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Touts AWS Innovation

One week after Amazon announced 18,000 layoffs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is credited with saying how AWS innovation is helping Amazon and its customers. AWS is a separate business inside of Amazon. A separate $20.5 billion dollar side business reported in their 2022 Q3 revenue. Andy did note that AWS employees would not be affected by the layoff round at Amazon. Jon, how is AWS not laying off but Amazon is, and will it continue?

Read More: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Touts AWS Innovation

3:47 | Global IT Spending 1% Below Expectations in 2022

We’re all seeing that IT spending isn’t as strong as it could be, and this was seemingly confirmed by a recent report from Gartner. They had predicted 0.8% growth in 2022 but instead spending was down 0.2%. This doesn’t sound like much, but things aren’t looking much better in 2023. What’s your take?

Read More: Global IT Spending Decreased in 2022

5:35 | Norton LifeLock Compromised Password Manager Accounts

Attackers used login details obtained from third-party platforms. Not for a few but thousands of NortonLifelock customers received a “warning” notifying them that hackers have successfully compromised Norton Password Manager. Jon, What’s someone supposed to do about securing their passwords now that it seems most online platforms are getting breached? Put it on a sticky? Jon are we seeing the end of password management systems or software?

Read More: NortonLifeLock notifies thousands of users about compromised Password Manager accounts

7:26 | Pure Storage Introduces Energy Efficiency SLA

Pure Storage was early to the eco game with their so-called Evergreen storage concept, but now they’re backing this up with an energy efficiency SLA for Pure1 customers. Customers can get service credits if their capacity-per-watt expectations aren’t met, though this should be pretty easy for Pure to ensure. Since storage is your game, what’s your take on this news, Stephen?

Read More: With Industry-First Energy Efficiency Guarantee, Pure Storage Further Expands SLA Offerings for Evergreen//One

10:14 | ChatGPT is the hottest topic since sliced bread

Rumors that Microsoft will expand ChatGPT access due to their Open AI investment continue to swirl and CEOs are buzzing about ChatGPT-style AI at the World Economic Forum. Jon, are more companies focusing on ChatGPT and will it replace Google Search?

Read More: Microsoft to expand ChatGPT access as OpenAI investment rumors swirl

12:26 | Sapphire Rapids Servers are Launched

Supermicro, Dell, HPE, Cisco, and others have introduced the first server lines based on Intel’s recently-announced 4th generation Xeon processors. And of course Nvidia is also supporting these new processors with their H100 DGX platform. Let’s take a look under the hood and see how Sapphire Rapids brings new capabilities to these devices!

Read More: Major OEMs Roll Out Servers with Intel Sapphire Rapids

Read More: New Dell PowerEdge Servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Launched

Read More: Cisco Unveils Its Most Powerful and Energy-Efficient Computing Systems

Read More: The Greenest Generation: NVIDIA, Intel and Partners Supercharge AI Computing Efficiency

Read More: Massive Supermicro X13 Generation for 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launched

Read More: HPE ProLiant Gen11 Servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launched

23:47 | The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 30 – January 18 through January 20, 2023

Cloud Field Day 16 – January 25, 2023

Cisco Live EMEA – February 7 – February 8, 2023

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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If you were curious as to when Intel would launch their fourth generation Xeon processors you can satisfy that curiosity. Intel’s long-rumored Sapphire Rapids architecture is now official as of this week. The biggest takeaways from the official coverage are the inclusion of accelerators on the CPU die to help increase performance for specific workloads such as SSL, 5G, and networking built around DPDK. This features comes alongside Intel On Demand, a service that allows you to purchase a CPU now and unlock accelerators in the future for a fee. There’s even discussion of support for Optane and CXL! This and more on this week’s Rundown.

0:38 | WD and Kioxia Restart Merger Talks

Western Digital is restarting talks with Kioxia about a potential merger between the brands. You may recall that there were talks back in 2021 that eneded up going nowhere. WD is looking at some strategic alternatives thanks to the double whammy of a declining flash memory market and interest from noted activist investor and Tazmanian Devil Elliot Investment Management. The details of the proposal include the two providers being united into one publicly traded company but are still in a very early stage. WD and Kioxia already have a partnership together in a joint venture. Stephen, is this merger going to come through this time around?

Read More: Western Digital, Kioxia Revive Merger Talks With Flash Memory Demand Sinking

4:05 | AWS Encrypts S3 By Default

It’s a new year which means it’s time for AWS to change some default settings. Before you get upset this is actually a very good change! Amazon announced that S3 will now encrypt all new objects by default. This long-requested change ensures that all objects saved to the storage system will be encrypted without user intervention. The encryption method used, SSE-S3, has been available for quite a while but it required user intervention to enable it. Tom, what do you think about this change?

Read More: Amazon S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default

7:23 | Microsoft Officially Has A Fungible Asset

Something we covered on the Rundown late last year is finally official. Fungible has been acquired by Microsoft to integrate their DPU technology into Microsoft Azure. The Fungible team will be joining the datacenter infrastructure team and reportedly will be working on multiple DPU solutions. Stephen, with the phrasing of that statement do you think that Microsoft is going ot keep Fungible as an internal-only offering? Or could we see it being offered commercially?

Read More: Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation

10:19 | FAA Orders Airlines to Fix Altimeters for 5G

Want to know what it looks like when a government agency is finally tired of stalling and inaction? Ladies and gentlemen, the FAA. The airline oversight agency has announced a sweeping order that sets a 2024 deadline for aircraft operators to either install new altimeters or shield existing models to eliminate the supposed threat from C-band 5G radios. The new rules come amidst a flurry of back-and-forth arguing from providers like AT&T and airlines. The providers had slowed the rollout of C-band tech near airports as a show of good faith to allow airlines to fix altimeters but the lobbyists for the airlines wanted to make the ban permanent. The FAA evidently thought differently. Approximately 8,000 aircraft will need to be adjusted, with around 200 of those requiring a full replacment of equipment. Tom, did the FAA do the right thing here?

Read More: Airworthiness Directives; Transport and Commuter Category Airplanes

13:39 | Intel 4th Gen Xeon Rides the Rapids

If you were curious as to when Intel would launch their fourth generation Xeon processors you can satisfy that curiosity. Intel’s long-rumored Sapphire Rapids architecture is now official as of this week. The biggest takeways from the official coverage are the inclusion of accelerators on the CPU die to help increase performance for specific workloads such as SSL, 5G, and networking built around DPDK. This features comes alongside Intel On Demand, a service that allows you to purchase a CPU now and unlock accelerators in the future for a fee. There’s even discussion of support for Optane and CXL! Stephen, you’ve been following this release very closely for a while now. Tell us what stands out for you.

Read More: 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids Leaps Forward

33:17 | The Weeks Ahead

Networking Field Day 30 – January 18 through January 20, 2023

Cloud Field Day 16 – January 25 through January 27, 2023

Edge Field Day 1 – February 22 through February 23, 2023

Tech Field Day 27 – March 8 through March 10, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Just in time for the holidays, Okta got a lump of coal in the form of a breach of their GitHub repository for source code. The intrusion appears to have been targeted at the Workforce Identity Cloud solution and an automated tool was able to access and dump the code. GitHub declined to offer details on how the code was accessed but assured users that customer data was not impacted and Auth0 products were not affected. This attack comes on the heels of Okta being breached by Lapsus earlier in 2022. Tom, what do you think about this latest SNAFU for Okta?

0:41 | Guardian Offices Offline Thanks to Ransomware

The holiday break wasn’t the best for the IT staff at The Guardian, a UK publication often quoted in Rundown stories. Per reports the Guardian Media Group was hit with a ransomware attack shortly before Christmas and has been trying to recover but to no avail. Mandiant has sourced the attack to a Chinese ransomware crew and indicated there appears to be some effort to gain intelligence to further espionage efforts. The Guardian says they’ll be offline until at least January 23.

Read More: Guardian offices closed until 23 January due to ongoing fallout from suspected ransomware attack

3:12 | Okta Source Code Nabbed from GitHub

Just in time for the holidays, Okta got a lump of coal in the form of a breach of their GitHub repository for source code. The intrusion appears to have been targeted at the Workforce Identity Cloud solution and an automated tool was able to access and dump the code. GitHub declined to offer details on how the code was accessed but assured users that customer data was not impacted and Auth0 products were not affected. This attack comes on the heels of Okta being breached by Lapsus earlier in 2022. Tom, what do you think about this latest SNAFU for Okta?

Read More: Okta’s source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked

6:36 | HPs “Enterprise” Earbuds have a touchscreen on the case

It’s CES week, the week which brings us $7,000 front doors with a built in camera, toilets that test your pee, and Augmented Reality enabled makeup. In slightly more enterprise news from CES, HP has joined the AirPod competition with their new Poly Voyager Free 60 line.

Read More: HP’s ‘enterprise’ earbuds (yes, really) have a touchscreen on the case

9:26 | HPE Interest in Nutanix is Nil Now

In a follow up to a story we brought you last month here on the Rundown it appears that the interest that HPE was showing in Nutanix is less hot than it looked. The reports that have surfaced say HPE is no longer in talks with Nutanix and HPE confirmed that there are no ongoing discussions with the company. This comes after Nutanix stock rose 25% after the initial reports back in October that the hyperconverged giant was looking to sell to a prospective buyer. The stock price has come down a bit since mid-December after the announcement that HPE isn’t interested. Tom, what does this mean for Nutanix now?

Read More: HPE interest in Nutanix said to wane, end talks – report

14:44 | The Weeks Ahead

CES 2023 – January 5, 2023 through January 8, 2023

Networking Field Day 30 – January 18 through January 20, 2023

Cloud Field Day 16 – January 25 through January 27, 2023

The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

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Join us for the Rundown of all our 2022 Rundowns! We’re looking at the big picture and linking the various stories throughout the year. See how things like DPU and ARM drove companies like AMD and Intel to make big moves in the industry. How did technologies like 5G and Quantum Computing impact the world? Are companies looking to move away from China’s chipmaking dominance? Will hackers steal your info? Tune in for a super-sized Rundown of all these stories and more!

0:31 | Chips are Migrating Outside of China

As we mentioned last week there’s been a lot of news around China in 2022, both dealing with the tech industry in the country as well as other countries looking to reduce their dependence on Chinese industry.

Read More: Intel “mega-fab” coming to Ohio, reports say

Read More: Intel to Invest at Least $19 Billion for New Chips Plant in Germany

Read More: Chip giants threaten to scale back U.S. expansion without subsidies

Read More: SK vows $22 bn new capex in U.S., $15 bn to enhance chip R&D and packaging capacity

Read More: Micron Breaks Ground in Its $15 Billion EUV DRAM Fab in the U.S.

Read More: Exclusive: Biden to hit China with broader curbs on U.S. chip and tool exports -sources

4:31 | 5G Finds Interference

5G is a transformational technology for end users but it doesn’t come without challenges. We saw a couple of big stories this year around 5G that could impact the future of how we use it.

Read More: 5G apocalypse is here as major airlines suspend U.S. flights

Read More: Broadcom Launches Wi-Fi 7 Portfolio for Access Points and Client Devices

Read More: Airport 5G restrictions should be made permanent, says aviation body

Read More: Exclusive: FAA warns of aviation safety risks without U.S. mandate on 5G limits

6:47 | AMD Makes a Mover for the Top

AMD spent the year positioning themselves to challenge for the crown of chip makers. Acqusitions and announcements have analysts excited for what is in store.

Read More: AMD Might Have to Wait Behind Intel and Apple for TSMC’s 3nm Wafers

Read More: AMD Technology Roadmap from AMD Financial Analyst Day 2022

Read More: The Steady Hand Guiding AMD’s “Prudently Expanding” Datacenter Business

Read More: Why AMD “Genoa” Epyc Server CPUs Take the Heavyweight Title

Read More: AMD’s 96-core Epyc CPUs leapfrog Intel to put DDR5, PCIe 5.0 in the datacenter

Read More: AMD EPYC Genoa Gaps Intel Xeon in Stunning Fashion

Read More: AMD Seizes Performance Crown with 4th Gen EPYC, Genoa

9:09 | DPUs Are Shifting the Way We Do Work

2022 saw the rise of the DPU and a shift in the way that workloads will be built around the technology. Vendors scrambled to rearm their lineups around this innovation.

Read More: Update: AMD’s Acquisition of Xilinx Receives Regulatory Go, Deal Closes at $49B

Read More: China finally green lights AMD–Xilinx merger

Read More: Xilinx Presents at Tech Field Day 24

Read More: AMD Acquires Pensando for its DPU Future

Read More: Key:value SSD controller Pliops gains $100 million funding

Read More: Fungible sold to Microsoft for $190 million, say multiple sources

10:57 | ARM is More Than Just Cheap CPUs

Speaking of ARM, there was a LOT of news this year about non-x86 technology. Could 2023 be the year of ARM and RISC-V?

Read More: Nvidia Quietly Prepares to Abandon $40 Billion Arm Bid

Read More: SiFive Raises $175M To Quicken ‘Arm Intercept’ Strategy

Read More: Ampere Announces 5nm Arm Server CPU AmpereOne

Read More: HPE Unveils ProLiant Server With 128-Core Ampere Altra Max CPU

Read More: Qualcomm is jumping back into the server CPU market with Nuvia acquisition

Read More: Arm Sues Qualcomm over Nuvia IP Misappropriation and Trademark Infringement

Read More: Arm Neoverse V2 Cores Launched for NVIDIA Grace and CXL 2.0 PCIe Gen5 CPUs

Read More: Ventana Plans to Bring RISC-V Chip to HPC

14:39 | Not Your Parents’ Hackers

It wouldn’t be a Rundown without a hacking and security story. However, instead of just mentioning Yet Another Ransomware attack there were a couple of key pieces of news this year that colored the way that we look at intrusions.

Read More: Nvidia says its ‘proprietary information’ is being leaked by hackers

Read More: Teen Suspected by Cyber Researchers of Being Lapsus$ Mastermind

Read More: Department of Justice Announces New Policy for Charging Cases under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Read More: Cisco admits hack on IT network, links attacker to LAPSUS$ threat group

Read More: Uber Investigating Breach of Its Computer Systems

16:59 | HPC Performance Accelerates

If you want to make the big bucks in the compute market in modern times you need to have a solution for the customers that crave the best performance. HPC saw lots of development and some big news items, with Nvidia claiming lots of attention with a product line by the name of Grace Hopper.

Read More: NVIDIA Hopper GPU Architecture and H100 Accelerator Announced: Working on Smarter and Harder

Read More: Los Alamos supercomputer will use Nvidia’s Grace Hopper processors

Read More: Intel ISC 2022 Keynote Rialto Bridge after Ponte Vecchio and Falcon Shores

19:28 | Quantum Computing is Almost Ready for IT

The future of computing lies in the Quantum realm. That doesn’t mean that the future is here yet.

Read More: White House wants nation to prepare for cryptography-breaking quantum computers

Read More: NIST announces four quantum-resistant algorithms

Read More: HPE Is Texas Bound| Gestalt IT Rundown: December 2, 2020

Read More: Tomversations: Episode 9 – Post-Quantum Cryptography

Read More: Tomversations: Episode 10 – Quantum Computers are the Future

Read More: Post-quantum encryption contender is taken out by single-core PC and 1 hour

20:56 | The Rise of CXL

CXL is going to change the way that computers look and act. This isn’t a shift in consumption but a fundemental change in the way they are designed and constructed at scale. From PCIe to UCIe to the next-generation server platforms, CXL is emerging as the technology to watch.

Read More: PCI Express 6.0 Specification Finalized: x16 Slots to Reach 128GBps

Read More: Industry Consortium Forms to Drive UCIe Chiplet Interconnect Standard

Read More: PCIe 7.0 to quadruple the bandwidth of current-gen devices

Read More: OCP BoW or Bunch-of-Wires Specification Announced

Read More: OpenCAPI to Fold into CXL – CXL Set to Become Dominant CPU Interconnect Standard

Read More: Flash Memory Summit thematic extraction

Read More: Samsung Shows Off CXL Server Memory Expander

Read More: IntelliProp First to Market with Memory Fabric Based on CXL; Driving Most Disruptive Technology to Hit Data Centers in Decades

Read More: IntelliProp has chips to build CXL fabric

Read More: Rambus offers chip designers a drop-in PCIe 6.0 subsystem

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