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.
0:37 | Sanjay Poonen New Cohesity CEO
Cohesity made a big splash this week with the news that they have a new CEO. Sanjay Poonen, former COO of VMware, has taken the top spot for the backup giant. Per news reports, former CEO Mohit Aron personally called Poonen to ask him to take the helm of Cohesity so that Aron could step down from the day-to-day operations and focus more on engineering. The rumors of a pending IPO have been flying fast and furious recently though the state of the market lately has potential investors worried about the investment. Stephen, given the long leadership term of Mohit Aron is this a changing of the guard? Or a steady hand for the next step?
Read More: VMware veteran takes helm of pre-IPO software company Cohesity, though market debut is on hold
3:17 | Arista Picks Up Pluribus Networks
Arista has made another big acquistion in the networking space. This week they announced the purchase of Pluribus Networks for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition marries the adpative cloud fabric of Pluribus to the existing Arista Converged Cloud fabric offering. Pluribus has gone through several iterations of their offering, many of them shown at Networking Field Day over the past eight years. One of the keys to the success of Pluribus is the decentralized nature of the fabric which should integrate nicely with Arista CloudVision. Tom, what do you make of this pickup by Arista?
Read More: Pluribus Networks is now Arista Unified Cloud Fabric
6:33 | Intel Delays New Xeons (Again)
If you were hoping to pick up a nex-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor, code name Sapphire Rapids, you’re going to need to be patient. Per reports, the fourth-gen chips are going to be delayed for a while. Industry analysts had been expecting the chips to come out by the end of 2022 but a long list of issues that need to be dealt with have pushed the potential launch window back to mid-February or even March 2023. This is significantly behind when the chip was expected to launch and has called into question the relevance for the chips when they finally do hit the market. Stephen, will we ever see Sapphire Rapids?
11:07 | Oxeye Sees Golang Goof
Security startup Oxeye has announced a new vulnerability in Golang that is ripe to be exploited. According to their research department the vulnerability can occur when two different versions of Golang are passing parameters to each other via an HTTP request. The parsing error can allow arguments to be passed through protections and allow unintended access. The vulnerability is aided by the growing adoption of Golang as a programming language of choice for cloud-enabled organizations. Oxeye recommends upgrading Golang to the latest version of 1.17 or santizing the queries before they have the chance to be exploited. Tom, is this going to cause issues?
Read More: “ParseThru” – Exploiting HTTP Parameter Smuggling in Golang
14:49 | OpenCAPI to Merge with CXL
There’s news coming out of the Flash Memory Summit this week around CPU interconnects. Back In November we talked about Gen-Z joining forces with the CXL consortium, and it becoming the de facto standard for CPU and device interconnects. This week, CXL announced that OpenCAPI will be folded in to the consortium as well. OpenCAPI predates CXL and was backed by AMD and IBM as an open extension of IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface. The largest use of OpenCAPI to date has been with IBM processors. The move is seen as yet another interconnect standard ceding the field to the giant that is CXL. Stephen, does this move signal a clear win for CXL?
Read More: OpenCAPI to Fold into CXL – CXL Set to Become Dominant CPU Interconnect Standard
19:15 | Optane Train Out of Steam?
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?
Read More: Intel Optane $559M Impairment with Q2 2022 Wind-Down
Read More: Intel at 3D exit point: Alas poor Optane, I knew it well
28:00 | The Weeks Ahead
Networking Field Day Service Provider 2 – August 3 – August 4, 2022
Tech Field Day Extra at VMware Explore US 2022 – August 29 – August 31, 2022
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.
