Intel announced a collaboration with Inspur, Ruijie Networks, and Silicom Connectivity Solutions to design and develop new infrastructure processing units (IPU) using both a CPU and FPGA. IPU–what Intel calls a data-processing unit (DPU)–is a programmable networking device designed to offload network processing tasks such as storage virtualization, network virtualization, and security from the CPU. That reduces overhead and frees up the CPU to focus on its primary data-processing functions. They are becoming a real…

Magnetic storage tape has’t been the recommended destination for the initial backup copy of data for quite some time, and the question is whether LTO-9, the latest tape open standard, and other market dynamics will changed that. Here’s a look at modern tape drives, discussion of the degree to which ransomware changes the equation, and a closer look at LTO-9. Tape drives: Too fast for their own good? In the 80s and early 90s, there…

The ncdu command provides a useful and convenient way to view disk usage. The name stands for “NCurses disk usage”. This means that it’s based on ncurses which, like curses, is a terminal control library used on Unix/Linux systems. The curses part of each name is a pun on “cursor” or “cursor optimization” and is unrelated to the use of foul language. You can think of ncdu as a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses…

Where we came from Over the last decade we have been moving to Cloud Native deployments for most of our application and API deployment. This has mostly been an effort to break legacy monolithic application and service models into what we commonly refer to as microservices. Most of that move has been most successful under Cloud Native technologies utilizing containers and container orchestration. This move has been handled utilizing Kubernetes, Docker, and other similar technologies….

In collaboration with Kenny Jones, Mayank Jain, Earl Dimaculangan   Management of multi-cloud matures Figure 1. Multi-cloud strategy adoption For enterprise IT organizations, the public cloud has become a staple at delivering software, infrastructure, security, and other capabilities at scale. Companies primarily adopt public cloud services for greater flexibility, faster time-to-market, and to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions while avoiding vendor lock-in. While SaaS platforms are the lion’s share of services consumed (48%), IaaS and…