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Intel Earnings Slide, AMD Earnings Soar | Gestalt IT Rundown: October 27, 2021

Intel announced their earnings were down in the client arena for Q3. On the other hand, AMD is thrilled because they were up across the board big time. We discuss this story and much more on this week’s Rundown.


NetApp Previews High-End Storage | 1:05

NetApp Insight was last week and NetApp showed off a couple of key pieces of technology for consumers. The first was a preview of all-flash A900, which is touted to be the fastest array in their lineup. Interestingly, according to Chris Mellor, the A900 is theorized to be an NVMe version of the A700 with a new memory processor instead of being built on the framework of the existing king of the hill the A800. Also announced was NetApp throwing their hat into the ransomware protection ring with the release of ONTAP 9.10.1. The new release will use machine learning to automatically protect against infections and automatically recover data from snapshots if suspicious I/O activity is detected.

Read More: Block and Files: NetApp previews high-end array and adds automatic anti-ransomware weapons to ONTAP


Telco Outage in Korea Linked to Routing Issues | 5:11

South Korean telecom provider KT Corporation found itself with a bit of an issue this week. They were down for almost 40 minutes, which doesn’t sound like a lot on the surface. However, KT is the second largest provider in South Korea and this impacted over 16 million customers who were without Internet or phone service during the outage. The initial reports indicated this might be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but evidence points to a more-likely BGP configuration error. This is very similar to the issue that took down Facebook a couple of weeks ago, as we reported on the Rundown. Service was restored to most of the customers but some phone coverage issues exist in various locations.

Read More: Bleeping Computer: South Korean telco KT suffers nationwide outage after routing error


Iran Blames Cyberattack for Fuel Supply Problems | 8:38

The worldwide plague of cybercrime continues unabated. The latest target seems to be Iran, where a major outage has occurred in the fuel distribution system. The country suffered from a lack of gasoline at service stations that has been blamed on a cyberattack on the national petrol distribution system. Technicians took the system offline for a number of gas stations around the country to clean up the mess. No word yet on how this could have happened or who might be behind it.

Read More: Security Week: Iran Blames Cyberattack for Fuel Supply Problems


Biden Picks FCC Chair and Commissioner | 11:53

President Joe Biden has announced his picks to join the FCC. The FCC currently has four members, two from each political party. As mentioned in the January 27, 2021 episode of the Rundown, Jessica Rosenworcel has been acting as the FCC Chairwoman. She has been announced to become the permanent chair for the commission, however her term has expired and she needs to be confirmed again in order to avoid being forced to leave office in January 2022. The second pick for the FCC is Gigi Sohn. Sohn served as a counselor for Tom Wheeler in 2013 and is seen in the industry as a champion for consumer rights and likely to enforce very strict net neutrality rules.

Read More: ARS Technica: Biden finally makes FCC picks: Rosenworcel as chair, Gigi Sohn as commissioner


Intel Earnings Slide, AMD Earnings Soar | 16:58

If you work for a chip maker you might be in one of two moods today. If you’re an Intel fan you’re probably a bit dreary. The titan announced their earnings were down in the client arena for Q3. Client computing is the largest part of Intel so the slide has some worried, even though IoT and data center units were up. On the other hand, AMD is thrilled because they were up across the board big time. The company reported growth of 54% above the same quarter last year. A substantial portion of this growth came from Computing and Graphics, which is their client division.

Read More: AnandTech: Intel Reports Q3 Earnings: Client Down, Data Center and IoT Up


FBI Gets Medieval on REvil | 25:15

REvil committed the biggest mistake imaginable – Never go up against the FBI when death is on the line! The ransomware gang seems to have gone offline again as their web portals have gone down without any word from them or from their competing criminal cohorts. Curiously enough, the FBI isn’t saying much about the whole thing. That’s usually a big indicator they were involved somehow. According to reports the FBI partnered with organizations to compromise the crew’s backups and take them down permanently. There’s no word on what might have happened to the individual crew members and it is likely we may never know.

Read More: ARS Technica: FBI, others crush REvil using ransomware gang’s favorite tactic against it


The Week Ahead | 33:14

Intel Innovation 2021  is October 27-28 
Commvault Connections 21 is October 28
Cloud Field Day 12 is November 3-5
Open Compute Summit is November 9-10


The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on Facebook every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. To watch along, “Like” our Facebook page. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.

About the author

Tom Hollingsworth

Tom Hollingsworth is a networking professional, blogger, and speaker on advanced technology topics. He is also an organizer for networking and wireless for Tech Field Day.  His blog can be found at https://networkingnerd.net/