Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

This is important, he claims, because the majority of Cisco's datacenter customers – both large and small – are finding themselves deploying workloads across multiple on-prem, collocation, and cloud environments.

The idea behind Nexus Cloud is to extend the same kind of centralized, cloud-delivered network management that Cisco has offered its Meraki wireless and LAN switching customers for years to the datacenter.

However, the product isn't quite ready for prime time, Scheibe admitted. "Customers are telling us that it will take them some time to feel comfortable [enough] to run the whole management of the infrastructure cloud-based. But what they want to do is start monitoring, and troubleshooting, and doing capacity planning, and compliance checks."

At launch, Nexus Cloud will offer centralized monitoring and visibility capabilities, while management will continue to be handled by Nexus Dashboard running on-premises.

Additional functionality, including machine-learning-powered analytics, will come later, Scheibe said. "Over time, we will give customers the option to shift the complete management of the infrastructure into Nexus Cloud."

The platform itself is actually built on top of the Cisco's Intersight platform used by its HyperFlex HCI and USC-X servers.

Intersight got a SaaS revamp of its own last year, and earlier this year Cisco added support for managing Kubernetes clusters and virtual machine instances running in Amazon Web Services EC2.

Thanks to tight integration between Nexus Cloud and Intersight, customers with smaller IT teams can deploy and network workloads running on and off premises from a single dashboard, Scheibe said.

For example, if a customer has a workload running in AWS that needs to connect to a database running on-prem, the combined offering will enable customers to deploy and configure the application and networking all in one go.

Alongside Nexus Cloud, Cisco also detailed its next generation of Nexus datacenter switches, which it says are capable of supporting 400-800Gbps connectivity.

The company's existing Nexus datacenter family was introduced nearly a decade ago, and has been updated over several generations of line cards to support up to 400Gbps networking.

Cisco's 9800-series chassis switches are meant as a sort of reset around a baseline of 400Gbps connectivity, Scheibe explained. He added that just like previous generation Nexus switches, as faster silicon and optics become available, Cisco will offer higher bandwidth line cards to support larger data flows.

Meanwhile, the company plans to launch a smaller modular chassis later this year called the Nexus 9400, which will offer either 64x 400Gbps ports or 128x 200Gbps ports.

Alongside its big modular chassis, Cisco also updated its Nexus 9300 fixed-form-factor switches – bumping up the number of 400Gbps ports from 16 to 48 or 64.

All of the new switches announced at Cisco Live are based on a combination of Cisco's in-house Silicon One and Cloud Scale ASICs.

The update comes as analysts predict strong adoption of 400Gbps networking by major cloud and hyperscale customers.

According to Dell'Oro Group, shipments of 400Gbps switches exceeded 800,000 ports in the first quarter of 2022, and the firm expects that number to continue to ramp up over the next year.

The switches arrive as the first round of 400Gbps NICs are slated to hit the market – though Scheibe expects that most datacenters will top out at 100Gbps connectivity to the client and retain their 400Gbps ports for aggregation.

Cisco's Nexus 9300 and 9800 switches will begin shipping later this quarter, while its 9400s are slated for release this fall. ®

Concern is growing that a World Trade Organization (WTO) moratorium on cross-border tariffs covering data may not be extended, which would hit e-commerce if countries decide to introduce such tariffs.

Representatives of the WTO's 164 members are meeting in Geneva as part of a multi-day ministerial conference. June 15 was to be the final day but the trade organization today confirmed it is being extended until June 16, to facilitate outcomes on the main issues under discussion.

The current moratorium covering e-commerce tariffs was introduced in 1998, and so far the WTO has extended it at such meetings, which typically take place every two years.

A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

Lenovo has officially opened its first manufacturing facility in Europe, to locally build servers, storage systems and high-end PC workstations for customers across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

Why build a cloud datacenter yourself, when you can rent one from Hewlett Packard Enterprise? It may seem unorthodox, but That’s exactly the approach Singapore-based private cloud provider Taeknizon is using to extend its private cloud offering to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Founded in 2012, Taeknizon offers a menagerie of services ranging from IoT, robotics, and AI to colocation and private cloud services, primarily in the Middle East and Asia. The company’s latest expansion in the UAE will see it lean on HPE GreenLake’s anything-as-a-service (XaaS) platform to meet growing demand from small-to-midsize enterprises for cloud services in the region.

“Today, 94% of companies operating in the UAE are SMEs," Ahmad AlKhallafi, UAE managing director at HPE, said in a statement. "Taeknizon’s as-a-service model caters to the requirements of SMEs and aligns with our vision to empower youth and the local startup community.”

Judges in the UK have dismissed the majority of an appeal made by Facebook parent Meta to overturn a watchdog's decision to order the social media giant to sell Giphy for antitrust reasons.

Facebook acquired GIF-sharing biz Giphy in May 2020. But Blighty's Competition Markets Authority (CMA) wasn't happy with the $400 million deal, arguing it gave Mark Zuckerberg's empire way too much control over the distribution of a lot of GIFs. After the CMA launched an official probe investigating the acquisition last June, it ordered Meta to sell Giphy to prevent Facebook from potentially monopolizing access to the animated images. 

Meta appealed the decision to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), arguing six grounds. All but one of them – known as Ground 4 – were dismissed by the tribunal's judges this week. And even then only one part of Ground 4 was upheld: the second element.

Here:s a novel cause for an internet outage: a beaver.

This story comes from Canada, where CTV News Vancouver yesterday reported that Canadian power company BC Hydro investigated the cause of a June 7 outage that "left many residents of north-western British Columbia without internet, landline and cellular service for more than eight hours."

That investigation found tooth marks at the base of a tree that fell across BC Hydro wires. Canadian mobile network operator shares the poles BC Hydro uses, so its optical fibre came down with the electrical wires.

The cross platform email client Thunderbird is to launch an Android version, which will be based on the existing K-9 app.

A month after Thunderbird's product manager, Ryan Lee Sipes, tweeted that a mobile version of the email client was "coming soon", the project has announced how it will do it.

It has acquired the FOSS Android email client and one-time Register app of the week K-9 Mail, which will become Thunderbird for Android.

Adobe-owned cloudy video workflow outfit Frame.io has apologized and promised to do better after a series of lengthy outages to its service, which became part of Adobe's flagship Creative Cloud in 2021.

Frame.io bills itself as "The fastest, easiest, and most secure way to automatically get footage from cameras to collaborators – anywhere in the world" because its "Camera to Cloud" approach "eliminates the delay between production and post" by uploading audio and video "from the set to Frame.io between each take." In theory, that means all the creatives involved in filmed projects don't have to wait before getting to work.

In theory. Customers say that's not the current Frame.io experience. Downdetector's listing for the site records plenty of complaints about outages and tweets like the one below are not hard to find.

As Intel plans to start construction on a massive chip manufacturing site in Germany, chipmakers GlobalFoundries and STMicroelectronics are reportedly mulling a joint venture to build a fab in France.

The proposed fab in question – reported by Bloomberg – would help Europe fight future chip shortages and support the European Union's goal of producing 20 percent of the world's semiconductors by 2030.

New York-based GlobalFoundries and Geneva-based STMicroelectronics are hoping to get government subsidies for the French fab as part of the EU's proposed European Chips Act, the report suggested, citing sources familiar with the discussions. The potential focus for the France factory could be "energy efficient chips with advanced technology," it said, without offering specifics.

Lenovo has struck an agreement with Hong Kong comms conglomerate PCCW to create a jointly owned services company, advancing its strategy of growth through services.

PCCW operates a globe-spanning software-defined network, some of which uses its own submarine cables. The company also owns PCCW Solutions – an IT services provider with a big footprint in Hong Kong, mainland China, and parts of Southeast Asia.

Lenovo and PCCW Solutions will create an entity dubbed PCCW Lenovo Technology Solutions (PLTS) that will see the Chinese kit-maker and the Hong Kong services company offer "one-stop customer solutions that integrate services, devices and digital infrastructure" according to a joint Lenovo/PCCW announcement.

A Malaysia-linked hacktivist group has attacked targets in India, seemingly in reprisal for a representative of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) making remarks felt to be insulting to the prophet Muhammad.

The BJP has ties to the Hindu Nationalist movement that promotes the idea India should be an exclusively Hindu nation. During a late May debate about the status of a mosque in the Indian city of Varanasi – a holy city and pilgrimage site – BJP rep Nupur Sharma made inflammatory remarks about Islam that sparked controversy and violence in India.

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