Gestalt It Rundown

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! Time Stamps: 0:00 | Welcome to the Rundown 0:31 | Chips are Migrating Outside of China 4:31 | 5G Finds Interference 6:47 | AMD Makes a Mover for the Top 9:09 | DPUs Are Shifting the Way We Do Work 10:57 | ARM is More Than Just Cheap CPUs 14:39 | Not Your Parents' Hackers 16:59 | HPC Performance Accelerates 19:28 | Quantum Computing is Almost Ready for IT 20:56 | The Rise of CXL 25:28 | VMware Negotiates an Uncertain Future Again 27:29 | Intel Dominantes the News Cycle 31:28 | The Economy Is Complicated 39:08 | Looking Ahead to 2023 42:38 | Thanks

Tech production in China is getting more concerning by the day. Between the pandemic and international technology transfer restrictions, this could become the big story of 2023. China had tried to keep the Covid genie in the bottle since the pandemic started but is now shifting gears, relaxing testing and quarantine, and seemingly hoping for the best. This follows repeated interruptions to life and business in China, including technology manufacturing, over the last two years. But the country is also the subject of tightening restrictions, including new export controls on advance semiconductor manufacturing and equipment. How will they weather these two crises in 2023? Time Stamps: 0:00 | Welcome to the Rundown 0:49 | Microsoft Picks Up Fungible 3:26 | VMware Execs Depart 6:04 | Ventana Launches RISC-V for Data Center with Veyron 9:53 | Android Signing Keys Leaked 13:03 | Microsoft Invests in Stock (Exchange) 15:44 | Will Covid and Politics Strangle Manufacturing in China? 27:12 | The Weeks Ahead 28:02 |

It's been a while since we've talked about Nutanix but they're back in the news with a big rumor. The market is abuzz with reports that HPE is looking to acquire the leader in hyperconverged infrastructure. The two companies are already partnered together for HPE Greenlake infrastructure-as-a-service which lends credence to the reports. Nutanix ousted founder and former CEO Dheeraj Pandey almost two years ago and has been coasting along ever since. A report from Seeking Alpha says that Nutanix had an operating loss in Q1 due to SG&A expenses being 65% of revenues. The same report values the potential acquisition in the neighborhood of $8 billion. Are we about to see the end of Nutanix's dominance in the HCI space they helped create? This and more on the Rundown. Time Stamps: 0:00 | Welcome to the Rundown 0:26 | Index Engines Releases Cybersense 8.0 2:54 | Lumen Lights Lots of New Fiber 5:58 | Broadcom Promises Not to Boost VMware Prices 9:15 | Not the Last Breach for LastPass 12:19 | Micron's New NVMe SSD

Graviton 3E is finally here. What does that mean? It's a CPU that is designed to accelerate floating point and vector math. That may not sound exciting to you but for high performance computing environments that's exactly what the doctor ordered. This custom unit is going to be aimed at giants that are looking to eake out the last drop of performance from those life sciences models. At the same time, Amazon introduced the Nitro version 5, the latest in their groundbreaking DPU family. Amazon has finally realized that there is a world outside of Seattle. AWS announced a new Digital Sovereignty Pledge this week. The goal? To build out controls and features in AWS that provide ways for customers to have full control over their data and how it is handled and secured. The pledge is a statement that AWS is going to provide existing tools and develop new ones to ensure companeis are in compliance with laws regulating how data is transported and utilized. The European Union especially has been very hot to get soverei

AMD got the jump on Intel in the battle for fourth-generation server CPUs, announcing the so-called Genoa line at SuperComputing 22. AMD's new CPU line is a massive upgrade, with more cores, accelerator instructions, and CXL. And it comes ahead of Intel's delayed Sapphire Rapids Xeon announcement, which is widely expected early next year. Let's take a closer look at the AMD Genoa CPU line. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:36 - VMware Purchases Ananda Networks 2:38 - NetApp's BlueXP Manages Data Anywhere 4:50 - Kalray Enters the Storage Accelerator Market 7:15 - Hammerspace Hits the Afterburner 9:18 - Alluxio 2.9 Connects Data and Applications 12:34 - AMD Releases Genoa Epyc CPUs 24:46 - The Weeks Ahead 25:49 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerd Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett  Max Mortillaro: https://www.twitter.com/MaxMortillaro Follow Gestalt IT Website: https://www.GestaltIT.com/ Twitter: https:/

We have some breaking news to cover today as ML Commons releases the results of their training, HPC, and tiny benchmark suites. Every company in the machine learning space found something to talk about here, with Intel showing Sapphire Rapids and Habana Gaudi 2, Nvidia showing H100, and ARM's tiny inferencing results really shining. But not everyone was happy, with some players complaining that the tests are being gamed by the big players. This and more on this week’s Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes. Time Stamps: 0:00 | Welcome to the Rundown 0:46 | HPE Introduces Next-Gen Servers 6:26 | SolarWinds Settles with Investors 10:12 | Microsoft and Github Sued over Co-Pilot AI 16:08 | Patch Tuesday Tries to Prevent Six Exploits 19:24 | Intel Admits Sapphire Rapids HPC Is Late 25:19 | AI Performance is On Display with MLPerf 36:50 | The Weeks Ahead 37:38 | Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerd Stephen Foskett: https://w

While not completely enterprise tech, we felt like it was necessary to cover the Twitter saga since so many of us use social media to share information and build our communities. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk closed on Thursday after the market closed. From there the new owner of the platform fired the CEO, CFO, and chief legal counsel. He dismissed the board of directors this week to become the sole head of the company. He also brought in a number of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX to start interviewing Twitter developers and understand how the code works for the platform. The catch? Tesla and Twitter develop in two entirely different langagues. These reports come amid rumors that people are being forced to work 80 hour weeks and that there will likely be looming layoffs coming very soon. To top it all off, Elon's grand plan to make Twitter profitable now seems to be around charging more for Twitter Blue, the premium service. The initial report was that Musk wanted to charge $20/month and include v

The story that never seems to fly away has circled back once again. The FAA has as the FCC once again to delay the deployment of C-Band 5G frequencies around airports. The line of reasoning is still that flights could be disrupted becaue of the potential impact of these frequencies on plane altimeters. A new wrinkle in the discussion is that the FAA now states that even the radio filters that are being rapidly installed in airplanes may not be enough to shield them from spurrious transmissions. The other question is whether or not the FCC has the authority to impose restrictions on the spectrum after it was auctioned off. Chris, you know a bit about this space. What do you think is the end result here? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.  Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:35 - Cisco launches 10-year plan to train 25 million people in IT skills 2:51 - RAMBUS Roaring Back with CXL 5:51 - Starlink Aviation 8:21 - Charges Filed for Obstruction in Huawei

The rumors are swirling that there is interest in Nutanix being sold or taken private. A number of reports appeared at the end of the week last week noting that discussions had been taking place with private equity investors about buying up outstanding shares in the company to take it off of Wall Street. The value of Nutanix today is reported to be about $6 billion, which is down from the valuation last year of over $9 billion but also much better than the $3.1 billion that was reported as late as June of this year. Though no companies have been mentioned in the rumors specifically there is a lot of interest in the hyperconverged infrastructure pioneer should they decide to be taken over. Max, you've worked a lot with Nutanix and you know the market. What's going to happen here? Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:31 - NVIDIA Founders Donate for AI at OSU 3:18 - Infinidat Boosting Capacity and Security 5:25 - Keysight CyPerf Powering All The Testing 9:13 - Intel Reducing Staff at Habana Labs 12:16 -

Intel isn't happy that the source code for their Alder Lake BIOS has been leaked online. The UEFI code was nabbed by someone and posted to the Internet as a 6 GB file containing all kinds of secret things. One of the big finds is the private key for Intel Boot Guard, a seuciry feature designed to create a secure booting environment. No official word has been released on who leaked the data but signs point to an ODM in China that created a Github repository that was cloned and distributed rapidly. Tom, how bad is this for Intel? Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:22 - Disk Drive Market Declining 3:04 - Splunk Claims Cribl Cribbed Code 7:53 - Pavilion Data is Threadbare 11:15 - Airlines Want 5G Made Permanent 16:48 - Alder Lake Leaks BIOS Source 26:39 - The Weeks Ahead 27:50 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerd Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett  Max Mortillaro: https://www.twitter.com/MaxMortillaro Follow

Since taking over AMD's enterprise chip business in 2014, Forrest Norrod has built the perennial also-ran into a CPU powerhouse. Now that AMD is truly a major player in CPUs, the company has broadened into network adapters (acquiring Xilinx and Pensando for DPUs) and is seeing traction in ML. The Next Platform sat down with Norrod for an in-depth interview covering the competition with Intel, the development of CXL, why they bought Xilinx and Pensando, and what the future holds. This is something we've been covering for years here at Gestalt IT, so what more does this interview tell us? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:38 - First half 2022 DDoS report Netscout/Arbor 2:43 - Intel's Mobileye Files for an IPO 4:48 - Proposal for CVE disclosure protocol 6:32 - Linux 6.0 is Released 9:42 - Google spin out of wireless tight beam service provider Aalyria 11:55 - Red Hat Storage Moves to IBM 14:48 - Micr

Intel Innovation 2022 is happening this week and that means lots of coverage of the things that Intel is talking about and showing off. Pat Gelsinger has been on the job for a little less than two years and he's been working tirelessly to keep Intel relevant. From the admission that Moore's Law isn't dead just yet but may involve chiplets to the end of Optane and the anticipation for Sapphire Rapids there is a lot of buzz going on. Stephen, there's a lot to discuss around the announcements but let's start with a simple appraisal - How does Intel look two years into the Pat Era? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:44 - IntelliProp Announces CXL Memory Fabric 5:25 - Feds Want BGP Bolstered 9:12 - Cloudflare To Take on AWS? 13:40 - Dell'Oro Sees SASE Growth Soar 17:40 - StormForge and Datadog Do Automatic Kubernetes Scaling 22:20 - Gelsinger's New Intel - How's It Looking? 33:32 - NVIDIA GTC 2022 43:1

Oracle released it’s fiscal 2023 Q1 results and it showed massive year-on-year cloud-revenue growth. The numbers could only mean one thing – Oracle is set to win the race against other cloud vendors. With its accelerated growth, it may very well one-up Google Cloud and become the fastest growing cloud vendor in the industry. This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes. Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Gestalt IT Rundown 1:23 - Arm Announces Neoverse V2 CPU Cores 3:03 - Etherium Merger creates the second largest blockchain 7:08 - Uber Investigating Breach of Its Computer Systems 11:42 - ASE, TSMC team up for silicon photonics 15:13 - Intel says Goodbye to Celeron and Pentium in Laptops 19:05 - Oracle on Verge of Becoming World’s Hottest Cloud Vendor 23:38 - Oracle reports 18% revenue growth after Cerner deal closes 27:05 - The Weeks Ahead 29:45 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerd Ste

MLCommons released the latest wave of machine learning training and inferencing benchmarks, and Nvidia's next-generaltion H100 really aced the results, delivering up to 4.5 times the performance of the leading Nvidia A100. But there are some other gems in the results, including a surprisingly strong showing for the Biren Technology BR104 and good enough performance from Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon to eliminate the market for low-performing inferencing hardware. What do the MLPerf results tell us? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:42 - Meta Moves PyTorch to Start AI Fire 3:05 - Cyberattack Earns Iran Albianian Ban 5:46 - VMware Charged with Misleading Investors 9:42 - HP Pays Up Over Printer Security 13:20 - Micron Is Building the Biggest RAM Fab 17:02 - Biden Looks to Curb Chinese Chips 26:25 - Nvidia Aces MLPerf with H100 32:20 - The Week Ahead 33:26 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts o

The United States turned up the heat on China last week, announcing that export or sale of advanced GPUs from Nvidia and AMD would not be allowed. This escalation of the trade war also reflects the war in Ukraine, with western governments seeking to keep most technology out of Russian hands. But this comes just as two Chinese firms have announced advanced GPU designs of their own. Will this move hold China back or will it backfire? This and more on the Gestalt IT Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to The Gestalt IT Rundown 0:36 - Folio Photonics Gives Optical Discs Another Try 3:09 - USB Naming Gets Weirder 5:40 - Pure Storage Brings the vVols Back at VMware Explore 8:17 - Arm Sues Qualcomm Over Nuvia 10:55 - Astera Labs Announces the First CXL Memory Controller 13:42 - China Blocked in the GPU and AI Market 19:39 - The Weeks Ahead   21:02 - Thanks for Watching! Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNer

VMware's annual conference is taking place in San Francisco this week, and Stephen Foskett is on-site to cover the event for Gestalt IT. It's been a tumultuous event, the first from VMware since the pandemic, and it's returning with a new name and theme. VMware Explore is different from VMworld in many ways, not least for the focus on multi-cloud management and entierprise IT developers, but we're also trying to see the future, since the company will soon be purchased by Broadcom. Along with vSphere 8, which integrates Project Monterey, we're seeing a beefed-up Tanzu and a new reporting suite called Aria. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to The Rundown 0:47 - Tintri Embraces Public Cloud 3:40 - LastPass Breached 7:12 - Memory Expansion Module for CXL 11:39 - Atlassian BitBucket a Bit Leaky 14:13 - VMware Brings NetApp to AWS for Enterprise Cloud Workloads 17:56 - VMware Explores the Future of Enterprise IT 29:53 - The Weeks Ahead 31:22 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: http

Chipmaker Qualcomm is aiming to jump back into the server CPU market. The avenue is coming from last year's acquisition of Nuvia. We covered this deal on the Rundown last January and mentioned that the company was founded by former Apple engineers that wanted to focus on bring ARM to the datacenter. At first the acquistion seemed to refocus Nuvia on mobile device CPUs but Qualcomm appears to be looking to the future and restarting development efforts on servers. Qualcomm has a big market for System-on-a-Chip solutions for mobile devices but with the market for ARM CPUs in the cloud becoming hotter, is it time for a new player to enter and try and upset the balance? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:37 - Pliops Gets $100 Million 3:27 - Lloyd's Avoids Insurance Wars 7:36 - MinIO and Intel Team Up 10:11 - Aruba SD-WAN Gains ICSA Certification 13:01 - Storpool Releases v20 16:33 - Qualcomm Taking a Nuv

Flash Memory Summit happened last week but we didn't want to let it go by without having our own storage expert comment on some of the announcements there. Lots of talk around CXL happened along with the ever-present discussion of the impending issues with Intel Optane, as covered by Stephen on the Gestalt IT Checksum. Oh, and that tiny little 128TB SSD that Samsung showed off. Stephen, what were your big takeaways from Flash Memory Summit? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to The Rundown   0:37 - Post-Quantum Algorithm SIKEd Out     3:51 - Verge.io Goes Virtual with GPUs 7:06 - Broadcom Goes Big with Tomahawk 5 10:33 - FCC Cancels Starlink Grant 15:30 - Cisco Compromised by LAPSUS$ 19:14 - Flash Memory Summit in a Flash 30:17 - The Weeks Ahead 31:58 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social Media Tom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerd Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com

It's Black Hat and DEFCON week and it wouldn't be a show without the disclosure of a few big bugs. The winner so far seems to be a new exploit found in Intel's SGX memory encryption technology. Per pre-briefing ahead of a talk happening today, security researchers found a flaw in the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that allows them to read uninitialized memory that could contain stale data before it's cleared by the CPU. Unlike Spectre and Meltdown, this isn't a side channel attack. It's a flaw in the CPU architecture. This means that attackers can recover data very quickly. Tests showed a 128-bit AES encryption key could be recovered in less than 2 seconds with 94% accuracy and a 1024-bit RSA key could be nabbed in about a minute and a half with 74% accuracy. Intel is saying the exploit is on their 10th, 11th, and 12th gen processors which includes Ice Lake but no mention of Sapphire Rapids. This and more on this week's episode of the Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   T

The name Optane is one that should be familiar to almost everyone in the IT industry. Heralded by some as a revolution in computer architecture, the promise of persistent memory seemed to always be just over the horizon. That horizon has faded away this week as Intel made mention in their Q2 earnings report of a winding down of the Optane memory business buried in a forward-looking footnote statuement. The impairment to the bottom line amounted to $559 million which was more than the total quarterly revenue loss reported. Stephen, there's a lot to unpack here. Why is Intel doing away with Optane? This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.    Time Stamps:   0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown   0:37 - Sanjay Poonen New Cohesity CEO 3:17 - Arista Picks Up Pluribus Networks 6:33 - Intel Delays New Xeons (Again) 11:07 - Oxeye Sees Golang Goof 14:49 - OpenCAPI to Merge with CXL 19:15 - Optane Train Out of Steam? 28:00 - The Weeks Ahead 29:47 - Thanks for Watchi