In a landmark ruling from the US Federal Trade Commission, non-compete clauses in employment agreements are no longer valid and all existing non-compete clauses are null and void starting in 120 days.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…

Our 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 - Welcom…

In 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 legisla…

The 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 potentia…

NVIDIA 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 Googl…

This 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 definite…

Yesterday 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 capabil…

NetApp 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 al…

In 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 clou…

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 re…

Cohesity 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 int…

Cisco 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 …

Juniper 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 assist…

According 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…

Two 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 provid…

Two 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 provid…

It 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…

It 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…

Change 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…

IBM 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 g…

Amazon 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.…

It'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 la…

As 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 mea…

Okta 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 emplo…

President 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 ethi…

We 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 …

Big 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 201…

In 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…

Intel 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 ag…

Well, 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 agreeme…

Microsoft'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. T…

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 ens…

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-effici…

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 compu…

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 priva…

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. …

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…

Some 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 compan…

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 …

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 chi…

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. …

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 chai…

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, o…

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 expe…

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 announ…

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…

Dell 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 creat…

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 ac…

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…

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…