Gestalt IT Rundown
282 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsThe Gestalt IT Rundown is a weekly look at the IT news of the week. Hosted by Tom Hollingsworth and Stephen Foskett. Brought to you by Gestalt IT, http://GestaltIT.com
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Episodes
AI Startups Investment vs. Business Reality | The Gestalt IT Rundown: May 1, 2024
May 01, 2024 16:53 - 40 minutes - 46.4 MBYou don't need an algorithm to know that AI is the hottest invements right now outside of frozen concentrated orange juice. Investors are seeing the mountain of money that Nvdia is making and giving startups all the funding they could hope for. While massive funding for startups in Silicon Valley is old news this recent wave has seen the huge investments coming in the very early stages instead of later rounds after a product has been developed and is ready to be put on the market. 2023 saw a...
FTC Bans Non-Compete Clauses | The Gestalt IT Rundown: April 24, 2024
April 24, 2024 17:40 - 36 minutes - 41.6 MBIn a landmark ruling from the US Federal Trade Commission, non-compete clauses in employment agreements are no longer valid and all existing non-compete clauses are null and void starting in 120 days. The government argues that non-competes stifle wages and reduce the talent pool for companies to draw from. Businesses counter that argument with the need to protect intellectual property. The ruling came after nearly 26,000 public comments. After the ruling was issued, the US Chamber of Commer...
Google Cloud Next | The Gestalt IT Rundown: April 17, 2024
April 17, 2024 17:13 - 36 minutes - 42.2 MBOur eyes were on Google Cloud Next last week, as the hyperscaler announced new ARM chips, lots of partnerships, and of course wall-to-wall AI. Google's Vertex AI Agent Builder allows no-code deployment of agents, Google Vids targets video editing, and the search giant is leaning into Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:40 - BREAKING: The Futurum Group Acquires Techstrong Group 2:23 - Commvault Acquires Appranix 4:53 - IBM Invests in $150 Mil...
New Online Privacy Protection Plan Revealed | The Gestalt IT Rundown: April 10, 2024
April 10, 2024 17:06 - 28 minutes - 32.1 MBIn a historic move, key federal lawmakers, including Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers unveiled a sweeping proposal aimed at granting consumers extensive rights to manage the use of their personal data by tech giants like Google, Meta, and TikTok. The proposed legislation, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, establishes a national baseline for data collection, usage, and transfer on the internet, allowing u...
US and UK Join Forces for AI Safety | The Gestalt IT Rundown: April 3, 2024
April 03, 2024 17:20 - 40 minutes - 46.3 MBThe US and the UK have allied to make sure AI is developed safely. A new memorandum of understanding has laid out proposals for testing and information sharing to ensure that AI is being safely written and maintained to prevent harm to anyone using it. The ultimate goal, as stated by representatives from both governments, is harnessing the potential of AI while ensuring the risks are understood and mitigated. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:04 - Intel Reveals Foundry Operati...
Revisiting the Impact of NVIDIA GTC | The Gestalt IT Rundown: March 27, 2024
March 27, 2024 17:46 - 44 minutes - 51.3 MBNVIDIA GTC event was the big story last week, both on the Rundown and in the tech industry generally. NVIDIA is clearly the company to beat in AI and HPC and this has the entire industry on its toes. Every company in tech is emphasizing their partnership and joint offerings with NVIDIA. But there's a reaction from their competitors, too, with Google, Qualcomm, and Intel announcing their intent to undermine NVIDIA's dominance. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:08 - New RISC-V Dev...
NVIDIA GTC News and NVIDIA Blackwell Systems | The Gestalt IT Rundown: March 20, 2024
March 20, 2024 16:27 - 43 minutes - 49.8 MBThis week is NVIDIA GTC, or as Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman called it "the Woodstock of AI". There's been a lot of discussion about the ascendant NVIDIA and how they plan on capitalizing on a hot market. NVIDIA unveiled Blackwell, their newest architecture. The chip was named after American mathematician David Blackwell and math is most definitely the strong suit of this product line. It has 208 billion transistors to power a second-generation transformer engine for accelerating inferenc...
VAST Data Announcements from the Tech Field Day Showcase | The Gestalt IT Rundown: March 13, 2024
March 13, 2024 16:46 - 45 minutes - 52.6 MBYesterday VAST Data announced what they are calling the AI Factory, and we got a detailed look at this during a Tech Field Day Showcase. VAST is collaborating with NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Run:ai to demonstrate their ability to operationalize AI at scale. Highlighting their rapid growth and partnerships, VAST Data's architecture supports new capabilities like VAST DataBase and VAST DataEngine. Discussions cover integrating VAST Data with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, optimizing for Supermicro hype...
NetApp Improves their Cybersecurity | The Gestalt IT Rundown: March 6, 2024
March 06, 2024 17:56 - 39 minutes - 45.7 MBNetApp is updaing their ransomware protection solutions. They've made some new additions to their Automated Ransomware Protection (ARP) platform to address new attack vectors and improve logic for attack detection, including new methods like partial file encryption. NetApp is claiming a 99% precision in detection of ransomware attacks. They have also announced the availability of their Ransomware Recovery Guarantee for Keystone, their storage-as-a-service offering. These announcements come a...
Broadcom Redefines VMware | The Gestalt IT Rundown: February 28, 2024
February 28, 2024 18:11 - 40 minutes - 46.7 MBIn a series of bold moves, Broadcom has restructured VMware shifting to subscription-only licenses across all offerings. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan wants VMware to focus on resiliency, developer efficiency, and infrastructure efficiency. Tan outlines three key strategies: radical simplification, substantial R&D investment for on-premises to private cloud solutions, and enhancing the ecosystem. The discontinuation of products, including Aria SaaS and Carbon Black, and divesture of EUC is part of a...
Feds Let Fancy Bear Embers Die Out | Gestalt IT Rundown: February 21, 2024
February 21, 2024 18:00 - 27 minutes - 31.2 MBThe 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 an...
Cohesity to Acquire Veritas Technologies | The Gestalt IT Rundown: February 14, 2024
February 14, 2024 17:18 - 35 minutes - 40.6 MBCohesity is set to acquire the data protection assets of Veritas in a huge deal. Cohesity will be picking up the NetBackup portfolio as well as SaaS offering Alta. The move is seen as a huge bolster to Cohesity both in their cloud offerings as well as traditional on-prem enterrpise back and data protection. The deal will merge the two companies into a $7 billion. The remaining parts of Veritas that aren't purchased will be rebranded as DataCo. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:...
Cisco Live EMEA Embraces New Technologies | Gestalt IT Rundown: February 7, 2024
February 07, 2024 19:03 - 26 minutes - 50 MBCisco Live EMEA is happening this week and we're here learning all the great things that Cisco is investing in and bringing to the market. We thought it would be great to give you a quick overview of the biggest announcements as well as providing some context around why they're important. This and more on this week’s Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:09 - Linux Foundation Launches Post-Quantum Cryptography Group 3:35 - DEFCON Def...
Juniper Networks Reveals First AI-Native Networking Platform | The Gestalt IT Rundown: January 31, 2024
January 31, 2024 18:04 - 28 minutes - 32.6 MBJuniper Networks is putting more Marvis in everything. In a major announcement this week they released several new products. One of those was expanding the Mist AI platform into Juniper Apstra to create more integration between the two acquisitions. WIth Apstra you get intent-based networking and with Mist you get access to a virtual network assistant that can answer questions about issues or provide help with configuration. This and more on this week's Gestalt IT Rundown. Thanks to Max Mort...
Should We Be Concerned About Growing Electricity Demand? | The Gestalt IT Rundown: January 24, 2024
January 24, 2024 17:17 - 46 minutes - 53.3 MBAccording to a recent report from the IEA, data center electricity demands are set to rise over the next three years. The report discusses the CO2 emissions and the potential mitigation that companies have committed to doing to achieve carbon neutrality. Also of note was the assertion that clean energy sources could meet this growing demand to help offset the need to rely on older power systems that are harder to optimize for efficiency. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:09 -...
Synopsys to Acquire Ansys | The Gestalt IT Rundown: January 17, 2024
January 17, 2024 18:30 - 43 minutes - 49.2 MBTwo of the biggest players in the networking space are about to become one. Rumors started swirling on Monday evening that HPE was looking to acquire Juniper Networks and those rumors were confirmed yesterday. HPE will be paying $40/share or approximately $14 billion for all of the company. Juniper started off as a huge player in the service provider space before making strategic acquisitions of companies like Mist Systems and Apstra to become a force in the wireless and data center networki...
HPE Acquiring Juniper Networks for $14 Billion | Gestalt IT Rundown: January 10, 2024
January 10, 2024 17:54 - 42 minutes - 49 MBTwo of the biggest players in the networking space are about to become one. Rumors started swirling on Monday evening that HPE was looking to acquire Juniper Networks and those rumors were confirmed yesterday. HPE will be paying $40/share or approximately $14 billion for all of the company. Juniper started off as a huge player in the service provider space before making strategic acquisitions of companies like Mist Systems and Apstra to become a force in the wireless and data center networki...
Intel's AI Ecosystem and AI PCs | Gestalt IT Rundown: January 3, 2024
January 03, 2024 18:39 - 45 minutes - 52.1 MBIt has been a big year in the enterprise IT industry for many reasons. Pat Gelsinger and Intel continue to refocus its business, the SEC gets serious with SolarWinds, Broadcom's deal to acquire VMware, HPE Aruba Ascendant, the incredible rise of generative AI, the battle of open source licenses, and of course, the Futurum Group acquiring Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. Let's discuss on this year-end edition of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Gestalt IT Rundown 0:...
Top Enterprise IT Stories of 2023 | The Gestalt IT Rundown: December 20, 2023
December 20, 2023 17:32 - 34 minutes - 39.4 MBIt has been a big year in the enterprise IT industry for many reasons. Pat Gelsinger and Intel continue to refocus its business, the SEC gets serious with SolarWinds, Broadcom's deal to acquire VMware, HPE Aruba Ascendant, the incredible rise of generative AI, the battle of open source licenses, and of course, the Futurum Group acquiring Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. The Rundown will return in 2024. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Gestalt IT Rundown 0:42 - Intel Continues Business Foc...
VMware Simplifies Offer Lineup through Broadcom | The Gestalt IT Rundown: December 13. 2023
December 13, 2023 22:17 - 30 minutes - 57.6 MBChange is in the air and it's licensed. The biggest news this week came from VMware (by Broadcom) as they announced a simplification of their licensing model. The first change is that VMware Cloud Foundation has had the subscription cost cut in half and additional support levels added to help with activation and lifecycle management. VMware vSphere Foundation is also available as a subscription offering with several add-ons avaialble. Notably missing is the option for perpetual licensing, wh...
IBM and Meta's AI Alliance Launched This Week | The Gestalt IT Rundown: December 6, 2023
December 06, 2023 17:42 - 38 minutes - 44.5 MBIBM and Facebook parent company Meta have decided to advocate for a more open approach to AI. They've announced a joint AI Alliance group. The companies are part of a growing trend that sees advocates arguing that AI shouldn't be proprietary and closed. Also signing on to the alliance are Dell, Sony, AMD, Intel, and several other AI startups. The group seems to stand in opposition to companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft who are focused on creating AI rules that favor outcomes that wi...
Announcements from AWS re:Invent | The Gestalt IT Rundown: November 29, 2023
November 29, 2023 18:15 - 35 minutes - 40.2 MBAmazon announced that they will be using Nvidia's NVSwitch to create new rackscale AI platforms. This allows customers to use Nvidia technology like Grace Hopper or build something using AWS Nitro DPUs and Elastic Fabric Adapaters. That last combination doesn't use InfiniBand and moves to Ethernet. Two new chips are coming out from the Amazon labs. The first is Graviton4, the latest generation of Arm processor. Graviton4 has 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth. This version of Gravi...
OpenAI Chaos Reigns Supreme | Gestalt IT Rundown: November 22, 2023
November 22, 2023 17:55 - 33 minutes - 63.1 MBIt's been a wild week for OpenAI. On Friday, the board notified CEO Sam Altman that he was being removed. Then President and Chairman Greg Brockman quit. OpenAI then went through three interim CEOs in a weekend. Meanwhile, Altman and Brockman were hired by Microsoft but rumors swirled they would be reinstated at OpenAI, which eventually happened late Tuesday night. The condition for the reinstatement was the removal and reappointment of all but one board member. That's one hell of a weekend!...
Existential Questions about HPC and AI | Gestalt IT Rundown: November 15, 2023
November 15, 2023 18:46 - 34 minutes - 39.4 MBAs Supercomputing 2023 is held in Denver this week, we're on the lookout for all the latest news. We have a new list of Top-500 supercomputers, more Nvidia announcements, and lots of AI. Perhaps the biggest topic of discussion, though, are the many questions about HPC itself: Will we be able to live in an exascale world? And what does that even mean when AI is the main application? Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:41 - US Plans More Spectrum to Commercial Providers for 5G Deman...
Okta Breach Blamed on User's Personal Google Login | The Gestalt IT Rundown: November 8, 2023
November 08, 2023 17:44 - 30 minutes - 35 MBOkta hasn't had a very good run of security headlines lately, and the latest is a breach that resulted in the theft of session tokens of several customers from Okta's customer support system. Though the number of customers was relatively low, the unauthorized access went undetected for over two weeks. The root cause seems to have come from an employee logging into their personal Google account and saving a username and password withing the Chrome browser. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the ...
Executive Order for Federal AI Standards Signed | Gestalt IT Rundown: November 1, 2023
November 01, 2023 16:24 - 34 minutes - 39 MBPresident Joe Biden has signed a comprehensive executive order addressing the safety and governance of artificial intelligence in the United States. The order, running to nearly 20,000 words, signifies a significant shift towards enhanced AI governance, covering areas such as transparency, safety data sharing, federal standards, and tests, and ethical considerations across various sectors. It requires tech companies developing large AI models to share safety data with the U.S. government bef...
ISS Cleveland and the Current Market | Gestalt IT Rundown: October 25, 2023
October 25, 2023 19:29 - 30 minutes - 35.2 MBWe are at the 21st annual Information Security Summit in Cleveland today, and it's been an interesting event for us. Not only is this close to home in Northeast Ohio, the long-running ISS event attracts a wide range of attendees and presenters across the information security space. Ransomware and AI are high on the agenda of course, but we're also hearing about budgets and employment in the industry. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:45 - Prosimo Cloud Cost 360 3:43 - StorPool...
AMD CEO Lisa Su leaves Cisco Board of Directors | Gestalt IT Rundown: October 18, 2023
October 18, 2023 17:14 - 34 minutes - 39.1 MBBig news this week from the boardroom as Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, has announced her departure from the Cisco Board of Directors. The move comes as a surprise in a recent SEC filing and was announced without fanfare. Su had served on the Cisco board since 2019. She is also stepping down from the board of Analog Devices, a position she has held since 2016. There is speculation that this depature could signal that AMD will begin moving into the networking space more with a focus on DPU technology t...
US-China Tech War now Focused on RISC-V chip Technology | Gestalt IT Rundown: October 11, 2023
October 11, 2023 17:14 - 30 minutes - 34.9 MBIn the ongoing geopolitical battle between the United States and China, a new front has emerged, focusing on the open-source chip technology known as RISC-V. American lawmakers, citing national security concerns, are pressuring the Biden administration to place restrictions on U.S. companies' involvement in RISC-V, which is widely utilized in China. This technology competes with proprietary chip architectures from Arm and Intel and has applications ranging from smartphone chips to advanced a...
Programmable Solutions Group Spun-off by Intel | Gestalt IT Rundown: October 4, 2023
October 04, 2023 17:09 - 31 minutes - 36.5 MBIntel is set to spin off its Programmable Solutions Group as an independent business, aiming for an IPO in 2-3 years. PSG, led by Intel's current Data Center and AI Group EVP Sandra Rivera, will operate independently as part of Intel's broader restructuring efforts. Despite PSG's past financial success, Intel believes this shift will enable more agility and growth, targeting markets beyond data centers. The goal is to retain majority ownership while allowing PSG to operate autonomously in th...
Cisco Set to Acquire Splunk | Gestalt IT Rundown: September 27, 2023
September 27, 2023 17:07 - 30 minutes - 34.4 MBWell, it finally happened folks, and I guess the third time is the charm. If rumors are to be believed, Cisco had approached Splunk on two separate occasion to talk about acquisition, but their offers were rebuffed for unknown reasons. This time it appears that all the planets and comets have aligned and Splunk has entered into a definitive agreement with Cisco to be acquired for $28B. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Cold Open 0:45 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:44 - Palo Alto in Advanced Talks to buy...
Microsoft's Security Leaks Get Worse | Gestalt IT Rundown: September 20, 2023
September 20, 2023 17:32 - 29 minutes - 34.1 MBMicrosoft's AI division just found out they made a mistake. Three years ago they accidentally leaked 38 terabytes of data to a public GitHub repo while contributing to AI learnign models. A security research team found the exposure recently, which came from a misconfigured Azure Blob storage URL that was overly permissive and difficult to manage. This Shared Access Signature, or SAS, token is designed to give teams full control over shared files. However, the difficulty in managing it makes ...
Cybercriminals Gain Attention from International Criminal Courts | Gestalt IT Rundown: September 13, 2023
September 13, 2023 16:35 - 32 minutes - 37.2 MBIn 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. Time Stamps: 0:00 - W...
Dell & AMD Partner for Accessible High Performance Computing | Gestalt IT Rundown: September 6, 2023
September 06, 2023 17:11 - 28 minutes - 32.9 MBDell 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-...
Intel, Arm, AMD, and More Announcements from Hot Chips 2023 | Gestalt IT Rundown: August 30, 2023
August 30, 2023 17:50 - 43 minutes - 50 MBAt 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. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Wel...
Announcements from VMware Explore | Gestalt IT Rundown: August 23, 2023
August 23, 2023 20:27 - 43 minutes - 50.1 MBVMware 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. What is this all about? VMware NSX is even more excitin...
Business Source License Adopted by HashiCorp | Gestalt IT Rundown: August 16, 2023
August 16, 2023 18:31 - 42 minutes - 48.3 MBDo 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...
Announcements from Flash Memory Summit | Gestalt IT Rundown: August 9, 2023
August 09, 2023 20:00 - 39 minutes - 45 MBWe 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. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 1:26 - Cadence ...
Ultra Ethernet Consortium Founded & Event Season is Heating Up | Gestalt IT Rundown: August 2, 2023
August 02, 2023 18:17 - 45 minutes - 52.5 MBSome of the biggest names in the HPC and hyperconvergence space are banding together to standardize Ethernet. The new Ultra Ethernet Consortium counts AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE, Intel, and others as founding members. Chairman J. Metz says the goal of the consortium is to tune Ethernet for workloads with specific performance requirements. The companies invovled are selling very high speed Ethernet focused on HPC and AI workloads. Notably absent in the list is NVIDIA. Live events are back, b...
Cybersecurity Threats, Simple Errors, and the Death of an Icon | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 26, 2023
July 26, 2023 17:34 - 31 minutes - 58.3 MBCybersecurity 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 s...
NVIDIA and Lambda Labs Team Up | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 19, 2023
July 19, 2023 17:02 - 28 minutes - 32.2 MBNvidia 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? Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rund...
The Battle Over Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 12, 2023
July 12, 2023 17:41 - 42 minutes - 79.1 MBThe 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 r...
Checking In on the State of the IT Economy Half Way Through 2023 | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 5, 2023
July 05, 2023 17:24 - 39 minutes - 44.8 MBNow 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 clou...
MLPerf 3 Upsets the AI Apple Cart | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 28, 2023
June 28, 2023 17:55 - 34 minutes - 39.2 MBTraining 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 Recomm...
Intel Expanding Chip Fabs in Foreign Locations | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 21, 2023
June 21, 2023 17:10 - 33 minutes - 37.9 MBIntel 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 ove...
05x08: The Middle Mile is the Heart of the Edge
June 19, 2023 11:00 - 34 minutes - 39 MBBetween the so-called last mile and first mile lies the middle mile, the realm of colocation and network service providers. This episode of Utilizing Tech features Roy Chua and Allyson Klein, discussing the middle mile with Stephen Foskett. This middle area includes content delivery services like Varnish and Akamai, as well as companies like Cloudflare that are delivering content and compute there. The middle network includes providers like Equinix, Digital Realty, and Megaport, which provid...
Pure Storage Takes Aim at Disk Storage | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 14, 2023
June 14, 2023 18:36 - 34 minutes - 39.8 MBWe'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. ...
Announcements from Cisco Live | Gestalt IT Rundown: June 7, 2023
June 07, 2023 18:16 - 33 minutes - 37.9 MBAt 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 t...
Dell Tech World Looks to Appeal to All | Gestalt IT Rundown: May 31, 2023
May 31, 2023 17:34 - 30 minutes - 35.3 MBDell Tech World was the talk of the industry last week. In part it's because Dell is rolling out initiatvies 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 device...
Ransomware Rampage: Cyber Threats and Costly Consequences | Gestalt IT Rundown: May 24, 2023
May 24, 2023 18:40 - 39 minutes - 44.9 MBRansomware 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 protecti...