AT&T has decided enough is enough. They have filed a lawsuit over the tactics they claim are putting first responders and critical government services at risk. AT&T is claiming breach of contract because of the new support policy enacted by Broadcom after the VMware acquisition. The key point comes in an amendment in their support agreement that says that AT&T can renew their current support contracts for up to two more years provided they do so before the expiration of their current contract. They are exercising that option now but VMware by Broadcom is not honoring the renewal. AT&T stated they don’t have an issue with the business model change, just that it affects them right now and is making them pay more.

AI networking is making huge strides toward standardization but Ethernet isn’t ready to displace the leading incumbent InfiniBand yet. In this episode of the Tech Field Day Podcast, Tom Hollingsworth is joined by Scott Robohn and Ray Lucchesi to discuss the state of Ethernet today and how it is continuing to improve. The guests discuss topics such as the dominance of InfiniBand, why basic Ethernet isn’t suited to latency-sensitive workloads, and how the future will improve the technology.

This week kicked off the annual Hot Chips conference and AI has once again dominated the conversation. There were a lot of stories to talk about, from wafer scale chips to silicon photonics, Cerebras’ giant leap into AI Inferencing, Microsoft Azure’s MAIA 100 AI Accelerator, IBM’s On-Chip DPU, Broadcom’s AI Compute ASIC, Intel’s Guadi 3, and more. Let’s dive in on this episode of The Rundown.

Our big story this week is from AMD. They’re opening up their wallet to the tune of nearly $5 billion to buy ZT Systems. The two companies have had a preexisting partnership, with ZT having collaborated on the EPYC processor lines. ZT’s biggest customers are AWS and Azure, as ZT specializes in hyperscale AI systems that are bought by the rack. This move follows a very recent acquisition of Silo AI, which we covered on the Rundown, as well as their last big acquisition of Xilinx. There’s a lot to unpack here and the Futurum Group has had some amazing coverage of this deal so far. Stephen, let’s start with you. What does ZT Systems have that makes them so attractive to AMD. This and more on the Rundown.

Black Hat was last week and Hacker Summer Camp never fails to disappoint. There were some big takeaways from the show, such as Moxie Marlinspike telling DevOps they’re the problem with security as well as a whole host of exploits, like the ones we’ve covered above. However, AI is king in 2024 and we knew everyone was going to be talking about it. This and more on The Rundown.

Generative AI tools and features are becoming an indispensable part of the way operations teams do their jobs. Tom Hollingsworth is joined by Keith Parsons, Kerry Kulp, and Ron Westfall for this episode discussing the rise of AI tools and how they are implemented.

It’s not a great day for Intel and some 15,000 workers. In the earning call last week the CPU giant revealed that while they hit their revenue target numbers this past quarter there are storm clouds on the horizon. Challenges from AI companies as well as issues with some of their most recent chip designs has Pat Gelsinger looking to cut costs.

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is a very popular topic in the modern enterprise. It promises a way to consume networking technologies in the same way that one would purchase cloud computing by only charging users for what they need. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, Jordan Martin, Micheline Murphy, and Robb Boyd join Tom Hollingsworth as they discuss the various ways that Network-as-a-Service can be expressed in an organization. They debate the merits of the operational model versus the financial aspects and how NaaS blends into the wider industry trends.

Microsoft has released an accountability notice after the big Crowdstrike outage. According to the release, Microsoft is going to change and innovate in the area of end-to-end resilience. This includes things like VBS enclaves, which require no kernel mode drivers, as well as Azure Attestation, which determines secure boot posture. The messaging indicates that Microsoft sees kernel access is their biggest issue and they are going to try and develop new tools that eliminate the need for it. This and more on the Rundown.

You probably felt the pain this past Friday morning from a huge outage. No, not the one on Azure. A misconfigured update to popular security platform Crowdstrike took down over 8 million Windows PCs and servers. The configuration file caused the system to halt and refuse to boot. Affected entities included mulitple airlines, healthcare systems, and even Starbucks Order Ahead. Fixes were developed and put into play but they required a reboot to safe mode or mounting an image on a new system to remove the offfending file, which ground AWS to a halt over the weekend. Crowdstrike’s CEO released a statement that was not well received, especially because he was the CTO at McAfee when a simliar issue happened back in 2017.