Tag Archives: Cloud Computing

Podcast – Rob Lalonde on HPC in the Cloud, Machine Learning and Autonomous Cars

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Joining us this week is Rob Lalonde, VP & General Manager, Navops at Univa.

About Univa

Univa is the leading independent provider of software-defined computing infrastructure and workload orchestration solutions.

Univa’s intelligent cluster management software increases efficiency while accelerating enterprise migration to hybrid clouds. We help hundreds of companies to manage thousands of applications and run billions of tasks every day.

 Highlights

  • 1 min 6 sec: Introduction of Guest
  • 1 min 43 sec: HPC in the Cloud?
    • Huge migration of workloads to public clouds for additional capacity
    • Specialized resources like GPUs, massive memory machines, …
  • 3 min 29 sec: Cost perspective of cloud vs local HPC hardware
    • Primarily a burst to cloud model today
  • 5 min 10 sec: Good for machine learning or analytics?
  • 5 min 40 sec: What does Univa and Navops do?
    • Cloud cluster automation
  • 7 min 35 sec: Role of Scheduling
    • Job layer & infrastructure layer
    • Diversity of jobs across organizations
  • 9 min 30 sec: Machine learning impact on HPC
    • Survey of Users ~ Results
      • Machine learning not yet in production ~ still research
      • HPC very much linked to machine learning
      • Cloud and Hybrid cloud usage is very high
      • GPUs usage for machine language
    • 15 min 09 sec: GPU discussion
      • Similar to early cloud stories
    • 16 min 00 sec: Concurrency in operations in HPC & machine learning
      • Workload dependency ~ weather modeling
    • 18 min 12 sec: People bring workloads in-house after running in cloud?
      • Sophistication in what workloads work best where
      • HPC is very efficient ~ 1 Million Cores on Amazon : Successful when AWS called about taking all their resources for other customers 🙂
    • 23 min 56 sec: Autonomous cars discussion
      • Processing in the car or offloaded?
      • Oil and Gas exploration example (Edge Infrastructure example)
        • Pre-process data on ship then upload via satellite to find information required
      • 29 min 12 sec: Is Kubernetes in the HPC / Machine Learning world?
        • KubeFlow project
      • 35 min 8 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest:  Rob Lalonda, VP & General Manager, Navops

Rob Lalonde brings over 25 years of executive management experience to lead Univa’s accelerating growth and entry into new markets. Rob has held executive positions in multiple, successful high tech companies and startups. He possesses a unique and multi-disciplined set of skills having held positions in Sales, Marketing, Business Development, and CEO and board positions. Rob has completed MBA studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business and holds a degree in computer science from Laurentian University.

Podcast – Ian Rae talks Cloud, Innovation, and Updates from Google Next 2018

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Joining us this week is Ian Rae, CEO and Founder CloudOps who recorded the podcast during the Google Next conference in 2018.

Highlights

  • 1 min 55 sec: Define Cloud from a CloudOps perspective
    • Business Model and an Operations Model
  • 3 min 59 sec: Update from Google Next 2018 event
    • Google is the “Engineer’s Cloud”
    • Google’s approach vs Amazon approach in feature design/release
  • 9 min 55 sec: Early Amazon ~ no easy button
    • Amazon educated the market as industry leader
  • 12 min04 sec: What is the state of Hybrid? Do we need it?
    • Complexity of systems leads to private, public as well as multiple cloud providers
    • Open source enabled workloads to run on various clouds even if the cloud was not designed to support a type of workload
    • Google’s strategy is around open source in the cloud
  • 14 min 12 sec: IBM visibility in open source and cloud market
    • Didn’t build cloud services (e.g. open a ticket to remap a VLAN)
  • 16 min 40 sec: OpenStack tied to compete on service components
    • Couldn’t compete without Product Managers to guide developers
    • Missed last mile between technology and customer
    • Didn’t want to take on the operational aspects of the customer
  • 19 min 31 sec: Is innovation driven from listening to customers vs developers doing what they think is best?
    • OpenStack is seen as legacy as customers look for Cloud Native Infrastructure
    • OpenStack vs Kubernetes install time significance
  • 22 min 44 sec: Google announcement of GKE for on-premises infrastructure
    • Not really On-premise; more like Platform9 for OpenStack
    • GKE solve end user experience and operational challenges to deliver it
  • 26 min 07 sec: Edge IT replaces what is On-Premises IT
    • Bullish on the future with Edge computing
    • 27 min 27 sec: Who delivers control plane for edge?
      • Recommends Open Source in control plan
  • 28 min 29 sec: Current tech hides the infrastructure problems
    • Someone still has to deal with the physical hardware
  • 30 min 53 sec: Commercial driver for rapid Edge adoption
  • 32 min 20 sec: CloudOps building software / next generation of BSS or OSS for telco
    • Meet the needs of the cloud provider for flexibility in generating services with the ability to change the service backend provider
    • Amazon is the new Win32
  • 38 min 07 sec: Can customers install their own software? Will people buy software anymore?
    • Compare payment models from Salesforce and Slack
    • Google allowing customers to run their technology themselves of allow Google to manage it for you
  • 40 min 43 sec: Wrap-Up

Podcast Guest: Ian Rae, CEO and Founder CloudOps

Ian Rae is the founder and CEO of CloudOps, a cloud computing consulting firm that provides multi-cloud solutions for software companies, enterprises and telecommunications providers. Ian is also the founder of cloud.ca, a Canadian cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) focused on data residency, privacy and security requirements. He is a partner at Year One Labs, a lean startup incubator, and is the founder of the Centre cloud.ca in Montreal. Prior to clouds, Ian was responsible for engineering at Coradiant, a leader in application performance management.

Podcast – Rich Miller on Cloud Innovation and Edge Revolution

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Joining us this week is Rich Miller, CEO and Managing Director of Telematica, Inc.

Highlights

  • GitHub and Microsoft Discussion ~ Why is GitHub so Valuable?
  • Evolution of Open Source and its Commercial Aspects
  • Monetization of Open Source Depends on Services for Success
  • Container Management and Marketplace for Innovation
  • ISV Ecosystem ~ All About Big Money and the New Tech Investment Thesis
  • Multi-Platforms / Multi-CSP Change the Nature of Innovation from the Independents
  • Edge Computing will Disrupt the Locus of Opportunities
  • The Edge Marketplace and Cloud Platform Marketplace Must Appear Unified to Developers
  • Edge Infrastructure Multi-Tenancy and Development Challenges
  • Distributed Ledger at Edge is the Killer Edge App
  • How will Cloud, Blockchain and Edge be Driven toward Integration in the Future? Email Example

Topic                                                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                                            0.0 – 4.16
How GitHub become so important?                                  4.16 – 10.05
Open Source evolution                                                        10.05 – 14.11
Only make money via open source services not sol’n   14.11 – 21.30
Only large companies can dominate software?              21.30 – 30.05
ISVs have a strong current against them                          30.05 – 34.55
As a Service on Multiple Platforms                                    34.55 – 38.07 (Mark Thiele Podcast)
Data and IoT at Edge ~ Edge creates the new market    38.07 – 41.31
IT Infrastructure at Edge                                                      41.31 – 47.09
Return of ISV Roots at Edge                                                47.09 – 49.46
Killer app for blockchain is Edge data husbandry          49.46 – 51.27
What has to happen to merge Cloud and Edge?            51.27 – 58.44
Closing                                                                                    58.44 – END

Podcast Guest:  Rich Miller, CEO and Managing Director of Telematica, Inc.

Rich Miller is CEO of Telematica, Inc., a holding company and consultancy with a practice in product strategy and business development for distributed computing technologies and their management; data governance, integration and monetization; and, increasingly, focus on distributed ledger technologies and industrial IoT.

Until mid-2017, he served as the non-executive Chairman of Cloudsoft Corp. Ltd. (Edinburgh).

Rich is also a co-Founder and, until May 2012, CEO of StreetLight Data Inc. He served as CEO of Replicate Technologies, Inc., a provider of configuration management technology for virtualized data centers from 2007 – 2010. Prior to Replicate, he co-founded and served as COO of Univa Corporation (now Univa, Inc.), a provider of optimization and management software for conventional and cloud data centers.

Among Telematica’s business and product strategy engagements are industry leaders like PwC, GE Digital, IBM as well as enterprise and governmental organizations pursuing digital transformation.

Miller’s career as advisor, executive, and an early investor, has focused on overseeing the formation of technology companies and their offerings that provide security applications, wireless network infrastructure, and application service infrastructures.

DC2020: Mono-clouds are easier! Why do Hybrid?

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Background: This post was inspired by a mult-cloud session session at IBM Think2018 where I am attending as a guest of IBM. Providing hybrid solutions is a priority for IBM and it’s customers are clearly looking for multi-cloud options. In this way, IBM has made a choice to support competitive platforms. This post explores why they would do that.

There is considerable angst and hype over the terms multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud. While it would be much simpler if companies could silo into a single platform, innovation and economics requires a multi-party approach. The problem is NOT that we want to have choice and multiple suppliers. The problem is that we are moving so quickly that there is minimal interoperability and minimal efforts to create interoperability.

To drive interoperability, we need a strong commercial incentive to create an neutral ecosystem.

Even something with a clear ANSI standard like SQL has interoperability challenges. It also seems like the software industry has given up on standards in favor of APIs and rapid innovation. The reality on the ground is that technology is fundamentally heterogeneous and changing. For this reason, mono-anything is a myth and hybrid is really status quo.

If we accept multi-* that as a starting point, then we need to invest in portability and avoid platform assumptions when we build automation. Good design is to assume change at multiple points in your stack. Automation itself is a key requirement because it enables rapid iterative build, test and deploy cycles. It is not enough to automate for day 1, the key to working multi-* infrastructure is a continuous deployment pipeline.

Pipelines provide insurance for hybrid infrastructure by exposing issues quickly before they accumulate technical debt.

That means the utility of tools like Terraform, Ansible or Docker is limited to how often you exercise them. Ideally, we’d build abstraction automation layers above these primitives; however, this has proven very difficult in practice. The degrees of variation between environments and pace of innovation make it impossible to standardize without becoming very restrictive. This may be possible for a single company but is not practical for a vendor trying to support many customers with a single platform.

This means that hybrid, while required in the market, carries an integration tax that needs to be considered.

My objective for discussing Data Center 2020 topics is to find ways to lower that tax and improve the outcome. I’m interested in hearing your opinion about this challenge and if you’ve found ways to solve it.

Counterpoint Addendum: if you are in a position to avoid multi-* deployments (e.g. a start-up) then you should consider that option. There is measurable overhead of heterogeneous automation; however, I’ve found the tipping point away from a mono-stack can be surprising low and committing to a vertical stack does make applications less innovation resilient.

Cloud Immutability on Metal in the Data Center

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Cloud has enabled a create-destroy infrastructure process that is now seen as common, e.g.  launching and destroying virtual machines and containers. This process is referred to as immutable infrastructure and until now, has not been available to operators within a data center. RackN technology is now actively supporting customers in enabling immutability within a data center on physical infrastructure.

In this post, I will highlight the problems faced by operators in deploying services at scale and introduce the immutability solution available from RackN. In addition, I have added two videos providing background on this topic and a demonstration showing an image deployment of Linux and Windows on RackN using this methodology.

PROBLEM

Traditional data center operations provision and deploy services to a node before configuring the application. This post-deployment configuration introduces mutability into the infrastructure due to dependency issues such as operating system updates, library changes, and patches. Even worse, these changes make it incredibly difficult to rollback a change to a previous version should the update cause an issue.

Looking at patch management highlights key problems faced by operators. Applying patches across multiple nodes may lead to inconsistent services with various dependency changes impacted not just by the software but also the hardware. The ability to apply these patches require root access to the nodes which leaves a security vulnerability for an unauthorized login.

SOLUTION

Moving the configuration of a service before deployment solves the problems discussed previously by delivering a complete runnable image for execution. However, there is some initialization that is hardware dependent and should only be run once (Cloud-Init) allowing a variety of hardware to be used.

This new approach moves the patching stage earlier in the process allowing operators to ensure a consistent deployment image without the possibility of drift, security issues as no root access is required, as well as simplifying the ability to instantly and quickly move backwards to a previously running image.

IMMUTABILITY OVERVIEW

In this presentation, Rob Hirschfeld makes the case of immutable infrastructure on bare metal within your data center using RackN technology. Rob delivers the complete story highlighted in this blog post.

DEMONSTRATION 

In this demonstration, Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus do a complete immutable image deployment of a Linux server and a Windows server using the RackN Portal in less than 20 minutes.

Get started with RackN today to learn more about how you can change your model to this immutability approach.

  • Join the Digital Rebar Community to learn the basics of the Digital Rebar Provision
  • Create an account on the RackN Portal to simplify DRP installation and management
  • Join the RackN Trial program to obtain access to advanced RackN features

Podcast: Kong Yang on golden age of cloud, CI/CD and DevOps, and operator opportunity

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Kong Yang, Head Geek at SolarWinds. He also hosts the Wide World of Tech podcast. Key topics discussed in the podcast:

  • State of cloud computing ~ entering its golden age
  • IT & business units coming together to deal with shadow IT responsibly
  • Building technology on services with no control over them
  • CI/CD model
  • Operators skills and time available
  • Human aspect

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                         0.0 – 1.58 (Gina Rosenthal Podcast)
Cloud is Settling In                             1.58 – 5.18 (Entering it’s Golden Age)
Is Amazon Frictionless?                    5.18 – 6.32 (Lack of Governance Issues for IT)
Multi-Technology Issues                  6.32 – 8.05 (IT must Partner with Business Units)
Moving Away from Control Infra     8.05 – 10.40
Tooling Choices                                 10.40 – 15.10 (Managing Services is Uneasy w/ no Control)
CI/CD                                                  15.10 – 22.15 (Dev’s view vs Ops view)
Time for Operators is Limited         22.15 – 25.55 (Always have to be learning)
Pipeline Specialization per Cloud  25.55 – 36.31 (People Challenges / SRE Half-Life)
Wrap Up                                             36.31 – END

Podcast Guest
Kong Yang, Head Geek at Solar Winds

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds® with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a VMware vExpert, Cisco Champion, and active contributing practice leader within the virtualization and cloud communities.

Yang’s industry expertise includes application performance management, virtualization sizing and capacity planning best practices, community engagement, and technology evangelism. Yang is passionate about understanding the behavior of the application lifecycle and ecosystem – the analytics of the interdependencies as well as qualifying and quantifying the results to empower the organization’s bottom line.

He focuses on virtualization and cloud technologies; application performance management; hybrid cloud best practices; technology stacks such as containers, microservices, serverless, and cloud native best practices; DevOps conversations; converged infrastructure technologies; and data analytics. Yang is a past speaker at BrightTALK Summits, Spiceworks SpiceWorld, Interop ITX, and VMworld events.

He is also the owner of United States Patent 8,176,497 for an intelligent method to auto-scale VMs to fulfill peak database workloads. Yang’s past roles include a Cloud Practice Leader at Gravitant and various roles at Dell Technologies.

Follow Kong at @KongYang

Podcast – Eric Wright talks DevOpsishFullStackishness and Woke IT

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Joining us this week is Eric Wright, Director Technical Marketing/Evangelist at Turbonomic and podcaster/evangelist at Discoposse.com talking open source.

Highlights:

  • RANT on cloud terminology w/ new terms “DevOpsishFullStackishness” & “Woke IT”
  • Open source communities, vendors, and value of users
  • Edge Computing – definition, Turbonomic Role in cloud/edge
  • Edge and Cloud are Hybrid – embrace multiple paradigms including legacy
  • Discussion of Go language and RackN usage

Topic                                                                                  Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                                   0.0 – 2.30
Questioning in Open Source                                      2.30 – 3.38 (Rob’s Skill)
RANT on Cloud Terminology                                     3.38 – 14.30 (Hybrid IT is legitimate)
Software Defined Terminology                                 14.30 – 15.55 (Trademark Tech Terms)
Open Source Community & Vendors                       15.55 – 20.30
Using Open Source as Valuable as Contribute      20.30 – 24.30
Open Source Project Scope Creep                          24.30 – 26.13
Edge Computing                                                         26.13 – 28.57
Turbonomic Role in Edge                                           28.57 – 32.53 (Workload Automation)
Dynamic Mapping of Workloads at Edge                32.53 – 34.39
Sounds like Hybrid?                                                     34.39 – 42.31 (RackN does PXE in Go)
Ruby Containers into Go on a Switch                       42.31 – 46.35 (Language Snobs)
Wrap Up                                                                        46.35 – END

 

 

Podcast Guest: Eric Wright, Director Technical Marketing/Evangelist at Turbonomic

Before joining Turbonomic, Eric Wright served as a systems architect at Raymond James in Toronto. As a result of his work, Eric was named a VMware vExpert and Cisco Champion with a background in virtualization, OpenStack, business continuity, PowerShell scripting and systems automation. He’s worked in many industries, including financial services, health services and engineering firms. As the author behind DiscoPosse.com, a technology and virtualization blog, Eric is also a regular contributor to community-driven technology groups such as the Pluralsight Author, the leading provider of online training for tech and creative professionals. Eric’s latest course is “Introduction to OpenStack” you can check it out at pluralsight.com.

Raise your Data Center above the Clouds

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As more and more companies move workloads and storage to public clouds, CIOs are forced to account for existing data center investments. Simply abandoning existing infrastructure is not an option and IT teams need to find new methodologies to fully use their available resources.   

Of course, legacy services continue to be served in these data centers; however there is ample opportunity for new technology to leverage the compute power by selecting a foundational provision and control solution from RackN. Our solution brings cloud management tooling found in public clouds to your data centers enabling IT teams the option of keeping resources in house.   

Issue :  Data Center as Clouds

  • Public Clouds – Shadow IT and leverage of public clouds have exposed the shortcomings of IT’s ability to deliver services in a timely manner for business needs
  • Data Center Sunk Costs – CIOs cannot simply leave existing data centers under-utilized with only legacy services and must enhance the operational skills of the IT team  

Impact : Data Center Investment

  • Data Center Management – Many services cannot be moved into a public cloud and IT teams must enhance their skills to maximize their available resources in-house
  • Automated Provision/Control – Standardizing your infrastructure foundation with RackN allows IT to manage all platforms including data centers and public clouds at scale and securely

RackN Solution : Data Center Efficiency

  • Operations Excellence – RackN’s foundational management ensures IT can operate services regardless of platform (e.g. data center, public cloud, etc)
  • Operational Improvement – RackN delivers a single platform for IT to leverage across deployment vehicles as well as ensure IT team efficiency across services

The RackN team is ready to start you on the path to operations excellence:

Podcast: Gina Rosenthal (Minks) on Ops Challenges, Day 2 Ops Support, and Dev Ops Communication

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware and experienced sys-admin/operator. She also hosts the Wide World of Tech podcast.

  • Cloud debate on virtualization and hypervisors as requirement
  • What makes Ops so hard?
  • Technical Communities for Day 2 Ops
  • Community Support for Vendors and Open Source
  • Is DevOps different than 5 years ago?
  • Devs and Operators Communication and Working Together

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                             0.0 – 0.55
Background and Current Work            0.55 – 2.05
Wide World of Tech Podcast                2.05 – 4.00
Sys-Admin and Operators                     4.00 – 4.50
vSphere & Hypervisors for Cloud         4.50 – 5.28 (Hypervisors are a MUST for Cloud?)
What is a Cloud? Virtualization              5.28 – 7.33 (Building Blocks are Virtual?)
OpenStack Experience                           7.33 – 8.16 (Didn’t Fix Metal Part)
What makes Ops so hard?                     8.16 – 12.25
Devs want latest and Ops has old        12.25 – 16.03 (Demos and Stories)
Demo Day 2 for Ops                                16.03 – 19.10 (Maintaining product post install issues)
Community Vendor vs Open Source    19.10 – 25.03 (Vendors not accepted in open source)
Choosing Multiple Vendors/Tech         25.03 – 27.18 (Innovations and Stability)
2 Classes of Operators                            27.18 – 30.00 (Tension b/w new and stable is good)
DevOps is Dead                                        30.00 – 37.44 (VMware covered over Ops issues)
Too Much Abstraction for Devs?            37.44 – 49.55 (Key to Ops and Devs Communication)
Wrap Up                                                     49.55 – END

Podcast Guest
Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware

I have a varied background: technical trainer, *nix sysadmin, technical training developer, community manager, social media marketing manager, and now product marketing manager.

Those are just my paid gigs, I also have a social justice background, and have been blogging for 12 years. All these threads weave together in interesting and powerful ways.

At my core, I’m a storyteller and educator. I’m interested in telling the story of technology in simple, clear terms.

February 9 – Weekly Review Of Digital Rebar And RackN With DevOps And Edge News

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet RackN (@rackngo)

News Items of the Week

As we develop increasingly sophisticated technologies like self-driving cars and industrial internet of things sensors, it’s going to require that we move computing to the edge. Essentially this means that instead of sending data to the cloud for processing, it needs to be done right on the device itself because even a little bit of latency is too much.

Intel announced a new chip today, called the Intel Xeon D-2100 processor, to help customers who want to move computing to the edge. It’s part of an effort by the chip giant to stay ahead of emerging technology trends like edge computing and the Internet of Things.

Someone’s been kicking up the “NoOps” ant pile again. There it was, sitting there finally rebuilt after the annual upturning, and The Lord of Cartography, Simon Wardley says: “I think you’ll find that the new legacy is going to be DevOps.” That said, it is winter, so the ants are moving a bit slower than usual.

The increased demand for cost-efficient hosted services to achieve increased performance, streamlined data operations, and data security would result in a higher adoption of bare metal cloud in various verticals within the near future. Currently, the world bare metal cloud market is driven by telecom & IT due to the growing big data and increasing demand for effective storage. However, advertising is the most money making end use segment and this trend is expected to continue over the forecast period.

Bare metal cloud offers many advantages such as increased security, easy maintenance of records, monitoring activities in commercial & residential areas, and empowering nations against terrorism & external threats at different locations. The adoption of hosted services is significantly high in the telecom & IT end use industry, owing to the enhanced demand for virtual storage facility.

Digital Rebar

Digital Rebar is a community-based solution for an open PXE provisioning solution for infrastructure including bare metal, cloud, and edge.

RackN

How secure is your infrastructure? Not just your internal data centers, but what about your networks connecting to public clouds or hosting providers? How about your corporate data which could be anywhere in the world as you certainly have Shadow IT somewhere?

RackN believes that IT security begins with a secure foundation for provisioning not only within your data center but into your cloud environments as well. Having a single tool architected with security as a key feature allows SecOps to spend more time worrying about protecting attacks at the application and data storage layer instead of allowing attacks at the metal.

A common side-effect of rapid growth for any organization is the introduction of complexity and one-off solutions to keep things moving regardless of the long-term impact. Over time, these decisions add up to create a chaotic environment for IT teams who find themselves unable to find an appropriate time to stop and reset.

IT operations teams also struggle in this environment as management knowledge for all these technologies are not often shared appropriately and it is common to have only 1 operator capable of supporting specific technologies. Obviously, enterprises are at great risk when knowledge is not shared and there is no standard process across a team.

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

In this week’s podcast, we speak with Paul Teich, Principal Analyst, Tirias Research. Paul offered his insight into several key industry trends as well as the recent Spectre and Meltdown discoveries.

* Spectre and Meltdown – Will this drive additional security focus?
* Augmented Reality and AI is the holy grail of Edge and Cloud
* Capabilities of 5G and its impact over next 10 years
* Why is Hyper Converged Infrastructure popular?

UPCOMING EVENTS

Follow the latest info on RackN and Digital Rebar events at www.rackn.com/events