Schneider Electric has revamped its modular datacenters, and announced an update for the EcoStruxure IT management software to cover the hybrid infrastructure scenarios that now characterise the modern world of IT.

Modular datacenters are not a new line for Schneider, but the latest range combines all power, cooling and IT equipment into a single pre-configured unit that can be delivered to customers in 12 weeks, the company claims.

The Easy Modular Data Center All-in-One is available in four standardized form factors ranging from five to 14 racks that can be pre-configured within an ISO 20ft or ISO 40ft unit – otherwise known as a shipping container – with power densities between 27kW and 94kW.

All four versions are based on Schneider's Easy Rack, Easy PDU, and Easy UPS systems, with InRow DX cooling and monitoring and management via the EcoStruxure suite. They are said to be ideal for customers looking to implement an edge deployment.

The Modular Data Center units are based on a commercial off-the-shelf design and prefabricated and tested prior to shipping, making them “site-ready” and reducing the time needed for the planning, construction and implementation phases. At least that's the sale pitch.

“By pre-engineering and testing the new easy prefab solution at the factory-level, we're able to help customers increase reliability and mitigate risk - ensuring they benefit from shorter lead times and a lower total cost of ownership,” claimed Elliott Turek, global office manager at Schneider Electric.

Schneider also announced an update of its EcoStruxure IT management software to go beyond its datacenter roots and meet the kind of hybrid infrastructure scenarios that organizations now face.

EcoStruxure IT is Schneider's Datacenter Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform, combining IT and facilities management functions.

The world has moved on since EcoStruxure was introduced, Schneider noted, with infrastructure becoming increasingly complex. Edge deployments are considered as mission-critical as datacenters, for example, while sustainability and energy consumption are growing customer concerns.

According to Schneider's SVP of EcoStruxure Solutions, Kevin Brown, there has been a great deal of change since DCIM first emerged as a software category.

"The hybrid IT environment is challenging even the most sophisticated CIO organization with maintaining the resiliency, security, and sustainability of their IT systems. We call this trend DCIM 3.0," he said.

To address this, Schneider is evolving EcoStruxure IT to provide more capability, flexibility, and deployment options for both enterprises and datacenter operators, he claimed.

The EcoStruxure IT portfolio covers monitoring and management for power and cooling systems, plus physical security and environmental monitoring; visualization, asset tracking, and change management functions for planning and modelling; tailored solutions for automated reporting, dashboards, migrations; and custom integrations with EcoStruxure IT and third-party systems or software.

As part of the move, the company said it has created a "custom solutions" engineering team that will help perform any integration needed to ensure a customer can deploy EcoStruxure IT successfully.

Organizations can evaluate EcoStruxure free for 30 days by creating an account on Schneider's EcoStruxure IT site. ®

Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?

But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.

Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.

In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence." 

A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.

"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."

And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.

Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.

It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election. 

A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.

The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.

Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.

The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.

In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk. 

"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.

Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.

"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."

The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.

The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.

The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.

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