AWS Strikes Back Against JEDI, ARM News galore, and one less Chef making Progress in the kitchen in this week’s episode of the Rundown!
Progress, a developer tool company, announced this week it is buying automation darling Chef for $220 million. Chef has been one of the go-to tools for technology pros when it comes to starting their automation journey. Chef has been a 100% open source compnay since last year and had made $70 million in recurring revenue. The release from Progress makes it seem like Chef will be absorbed and had its distinctiveness added to their fold.
Last week, Marvell announced that it will be canceling the upcoming ThunderX3 ARM Server processor. This processor was designed for general-purpose use in the growing ARM server market. Instead, Marvell has deicded to start designing chips specificaly for hyperscalers, as mentioned in their most recent earnings call. Marvell admits this is a gamble if the big hyperscalers go the way of Amazon and make their own chips.
Cisco decided to patch a few bugs in enterprise communications tool Jabber last week. Why? Turns out that a single text message could kickstart a cross-site scripting attack that took advantage of holes in the Chromium framework that is the foundation of Jabber. The CVE in question got a 9.9/10 on the severity scale, which is basically doomsday for software.
Fibre Channel isn’t dead yet! Broadcom announced this week that they are shipping Fibre Channel Generation 7, the newest release of the standard. These switches run at 64Gbit/s, a doubling of the speed of Gen6 Fibre Channel. The technology is built on the acquisiton of the IP from Brocade several years ago. In fact, the switches that have been released still carry the Brocade branding!
The US JEDI contract is the news gift that keeps on giving. The US Department of Defense has conducted a review and found that the award of the contract to Microsoft was totally valid and absolutley not politically motivated in any way whatsoever thank you very much. Amazon begs to differ and has announced that it plans on contesting the decsion as long as possible. Amazon cites political interference from on high, irregular reviews of the initial contract award to Amazon, and good old fashioned stonewalling of the investigation. Amazon may be upset because the 10-year, $10 billion contract will contain 80% of the DoD’s data and be a huge feather in the cap of the company that gets the award.
ARM Cortex-R Designed for Compute-on-Storage
ARM is keeping the hot technology rolling off the assembly line with the newest Cortex-R82 process. What makes this one unique is that it is specfically designed for running compute-on-storage devices. The buzz comes from putting compute resources directly on the storage device, which is more secure and easier to access important information. ARM has increased the capabilities of the processor over the other members of the Cortex family, adding a memory management unit to the mix to help the device start using virtual memory.
Patrick Kennedy at Serve the Home has a great article out about the latest AMD EPYC CPUs. Of special note here is how those CPUS have been locked ot a specific server maker. Manufacturers like Dell and HPE are doing this to increase security for their platforms according to reports. Resellers and labs have discovered that, unlike Intel’s Xeon architecutre, you can’t just pop out one EPYC and put it in a differnet server. Patrick has narrowed the culprit down to AMD’s Platform Secure Boot (PSB) feature. Ironically enough, this is a Cortex-A5 ARM processor that verifies the chip during boot.
Hackers Brute Forcing $690m Bitcoin Wallet
Security researchers have noticed this week that a Bitcoin wallet is being brute forced in the underground hacking community. The wallet, which reportedly contains almost 70,000 bitcoins, is the seventh-largest on record. The value of the wallet at current prices would be in the neighborhood of $690 million. The wallet has reportedly been in circulation for a while and no one has been successfully able to breach the encryption on it.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
