The tech world's pandemic supply chain meltdown drove ServiceNow to place orders for a year worth of datacenter kit in January 2022, believing that doing so was necessary to get the hardware it needed to cope with growing customer workloads.

"Pre-COVID, I could generally get stuff in 45 days," CTO Pat Casey told The Register at ServiceNow's Knowledge 22 conference in Sydney, Australia, today.

Well-publicized coronavirus-related supply challenges caused ServiceNow's lead time for some networking kit to stretch to 160 days, while servers can take 120 days to arrive.

So the company "literally placed our entire 2022 order in January," he explained.

"We did it to get in line with the supply chain. If we order it now, hardware starts landing in Q3. If I order in Q3 2022 to meet hardware demand for Q4 2022, I will get the product in Q3 2023."

ServiceNow can't afford to wait that long because, the biz hosts clients on its own infrastructure – Casey finds it cheaper to do so. Startups and small companies, he said, rightly balk at paying for datacenter engineers to run their own operations. ServiceNow has reached a scale at which it can afford an infrastructure staff to manage the 200,000 or so instances it runs.

Casey also feels that Amazon Web Services offers "a generic cloud." ServiceNow prefers hardware tuned to the needs of its application, which requires servers loaded up with memory and disk.

"We run one app. I can buy gear optimized for that, which means I can stack it denser; I can often get exactly the stuff I need. The price points are there," Casey elaborated.

The CTO said ServiceNow has found that "middling CPUs" meet its needs. "There is a spectrum of chips: the fast chips with a small number of cores, and the slower you get the more cores they give you for the same amount of power. We are somewhere in the middle – we can't run all that efficiently on the core-happy but fairly slow stuff, but it is not worth us to pay a pile of money for something with only four cores on it to get 12 percent faster."

ServiceNow is an x86 shop, though Casey said the company has considered alternatives including IBM's Power architecture. It has not been convinced to change.

ServiceNow's servers use locally attached NVMe storage, housed on separate cards. Shared storage is used sparingly, and usually in the same rack as the servers it, well, serves.

Casey said ServiceNow was one of the first customers of Fusion-io, the storage upstart that was early to market with flash storage on PCIe cards. "It was life changing for us because it was so much better than the spinning disk arrays we had," Casey enthused. "At one point we were buying ten percent of Fusion-io's annual production. We were their number one customer. We are still a big buyer of NVMe storage."

Yet Casey still sees some hangovers from the days of mechanical hard disks in the world of software.

"A lot of the internals of a database are really designed to work around the behaviors of spinning disk arrays," he told The Register. "On NVMe it is almost not worth it. The double write buffering behaviors you see in a lot of databases, you don't need that on NVMe. They are actually counterproductive."

Casey said ServiceNow is a big user of, and investor in, MariaDB, with around 200,000 instances running. In August 2021, ServiceNow acquired German database vendor Swarm64 in the expectation its Postgres-based tech will enable rapid analytics and potentially be useful for primary storage, too. MonetDB, an open source effort led by folks in the Netherlands, also has a home at ServiceNow. Casey said it is "very, very fast, but also sort of fragile."

"You set it up, you load your column storage fast as a thief, but if you change it, it degrades," he said. "So we have to run two of them in parallel, then swap them."

Casey doesn’t see any technology on the horizon that he thinks will have a positive impact to compare with that of NVMe, though he is keeping an eye on Compute Express Link (CXL) without being close to a decision. He's aware of SmartNICs but has no plan to adopt them.

One project that has commenced is the development of a backup tier. ServiceNow wrote its own backup solution and is thinking of using a standardized protocol – namely, Amazon Web Services' S3 – for that tech.

That's not an indication ServiceNow will adopt AWS storage. Instead, Casey said the company may deploy software that speaks the S3 protocol. ServiceNow would not be alone in doing so – AWS's cloud storage offering is so pervasive that many on-prem storage rigs and applications use its protocol to allow easier access to hybrid cloud storage. For ServiceNow, S3-compatible storage in-house therefore has value.

Casey's job isn't all infrastructure – he also guides development of ServiceNow's products. In that role, he said, an ongoing challenge is the user interface – both to ensure complexity does not become an issue and because end-user demands remain high. People expect the ease of consumer tech experiences replicated at work. ®

Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.

According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.

"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.

This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.

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