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Today’s topics include Qualcomm’s preview of its 5G wireless technology and strategy; Juniper Networks’ latest switches and software for multi-cloud environments, Google’s new high-performance virtual machine options for cloud customers; and the latest Hack the Air Force campaign has awarded more than $100,000 for bug discoveries.
Qualcomm Technologies has previewed its 5G technology and strategy as service providers prepare to upgrade their networks to support this advanced wireless protocol.
The company offered insights into early-stage use cases for 5G chips, chipsets and modems, revealed an international group of 18 telecom partners who are updating their systems in anticipation of the new hardware and previewed a new set of 5G wireless services.
Use cases for 5G will include enhanced mobile broadband to smartphones, always connected PCs, head-mounted displays for virtual reality, augmented reality and extended reality hardware; and Mobile Broadband, all of which require constant and consistent cloud connectivity. However these products won’t reach the market until 2019 at the earliest, Qualcomm executives said.
Juniper Networks this week is expanding its multi-cloud strategy with an array of hardware, software and services offerings to give businesses improved throughput, automation and security.
The broad range of network offerings comes with the understanding that enterprises are rapidly embracing not only hybrid cloud environments, but also multi-cloud environments. In the data center, Juniper introduced a universal switch that can be used for the data center spine, the network edge and the data center interconnect. They also rolled out a spine switch and a top-of-rack switch.
For the campus, Juniper unveiled two new core switches, which include interfaces that support multiple Gigabit speeds. Juniper is also offering a cloud-based service called Sky Enterprise that enables users to deploy and manage campus and branch networks and security devices. It includes a web dashboard and can reduce change errors by up to 90 percent, according to officials.
Google this week announced general availability of new high-performance virtual machine configuration options for enterprises running large workloads on its cloud platform. The configurations support up to 96 virtual CPUs, 624 gigabytes of memory, and use Google’s Intel Xeon Skylake processor-equipped cloud servers.
Hanan Youssef, product manager of Compute Engine at Google, said one Google partner has demonstrated up to 1.8x performance gains using the new virtual machines.
The high-performance VMs are available in three predefined machine types designed for handling different workloads. The standard type comes with support for 96 virtual CPUs, 360GB of memory and up to 64TB of persistent disk. The high-memory option comes with 96 virtual CPUs, 624GB of memory and 64 TB of persistent disk, and the high-CPU configuration is designed for processor-intensive apps and comes with 96 virtual CPUs and 86.4 GB memory.
The U.S. Air Force engaged in its second 20-day Hack the Air Force security initiative, operated by the HackerOne bug bounty platform, which involved security researchers from 26 countries who discovered 106 valid vulnerabilities. The Air Force paid a total of $103,883 in awards to security researchers.
Alex Rice, co-founder and CTO of HackerOne, told eWEEK, “We have done the bug bounty programs remotely in the past, which is common and this was the first one to start off with a live event.”
The live event took place on Dec. 9, 2017 and kicked off the 20-day Hack the Air Force 2.0 challenge. The results of the challenge were not publicly disclosed until Feb. 15.