Finding out whether backup and recovery systems work well is more complicated than just knowing how long backups and restores take; agreeing to a core set of essential metrics is the key to properly judging your system to determine if it succeeds or needs a redesign.Here are five metrics every enterprise should gather in order to insure that their systems meet the needs of the business.Storage capacity and usage
Let's start with a very basic metric: Does your backup system have enough storage capacity to meet your current and future backup and recovery needs? Whether you are talking a tape library or a storage array, your storage system has a finite amount of capacity, and you need to monitor what that capacity is and what percentage of it you're using over time.To read this article in full, please click here
A joint report released by Forbes Insights and Vertiv found that just 29% of data-center decision-makers say their current facilities are meeting their needs, and only 6% say their data centers are updated ahead of their needs.In yet another example of the disconnect between executives and people on the front lines, 11% of executives believe their data centers are updated ahead of current bandwidth needs, while just 1% of engineers feel the same way.Future data centers, the report says, will inevitably require adequate processing power – locally in the cloud and at the edge – to effectively manage new challenges around bandwidth, security and technologiesAI, advanced analytics, 5G, edge computing and more.To read this article in full, please click here
People are washing their hands, countertops, and nearly everything else in an effort to stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In a recent trip to the supermarket I found plenty of bread and milk, but the cleaning-aisle shelves were bare.While it's easy to keep your desk clean, what about your data center? People go in and out and touch things all the time. Rubber gloves are an option, but they can be a nuisance when working with gear or touch screens.
READ MORE: COVID-19 best practices for data-center operatorsTo read this article in full, please click here
Data-center operators are trained to anticipate upheaval due to fires, floods, power outages and other catastrophic events. The novel coronavirus, however, is sending people in charge of mission-critical facilities into uncharted territory."Data centers and IT teams are typically very good at planning. We plan for normal operations, we plan for the future, we plan for abnormal events ... [but] very few people have planned for the type of pandemic that we're facing now," said Fred Dickerman, senior vice president for management services at Uptime Institute.
READ MORE: Coronavirus challenges remote networkingTo read this article in full, please click here
Computing devices should sweat when they get too hot, say scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where they have developed a materials application they claim will cool down devices more efficiently and in smaller form-factors than existing fans.It’s “a coating for electronics that releases water vapor to dissipate heat from running devices,” the team explain in a news release. “Mammals sweat to regulate body temperature,” so should electronics, they believe.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The group’s focus has been on studying porous materials that can absorb moisture from the environment and then release water vapor when warmed. MIL-101(Cr) checks the boxes, they say. The material is a metal organic framework, or MOF, which is a sorbent, a material that stores large amounts of water. The higher the water capacity one has, the greater the dissipation of heat when it's warmed.To read this article in full, please click here
As the coronavirus spreads, many companies are requiring employees to work from home, putting unanticipated stress on remote networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.Businesses have facilitated brisk growth of teleworkers over the past decades to an estimated 4 million-plus. The meteoric rise in new remote users expected to come online as a result of the novel coronavirus calls for stepped-up capacity.Research by VPN vendor Atlas shows that VPN usage in the U.S. grew by 53% between March 9 and 15, and it could grow faster. VPN usage in Italy, where the virus outbreak is about two weeks ahead of the U.S., increased by 112% during the last week. "We estimate that VPN usage in the U.S. could increase over 150% by the end of the month," said Rachel Welch, chief operating officer of Atlas VPN, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
A growing number of vendors are looking to boost network throughput with smarter network controllers. Last week I wrote about Xilinx jumping on the SmartNIC bandwagon. This week, both Mellanox and Inphi announced new products.Mellanox has begun shipping its SN4000 Ethernet switches. The new switches are powered by the vendor's Spectrum-3 12.8 Tbps Ethernet switch ASIC, which is optimized for cloud, Ethernet storage fabric, and AI interconnect applications. SN4000 platforms come in flexible form-factors that support a combination of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE.To read this article in full, please click here
A predicted explosion in power consumption by data centers has not manifested thanks to advances in power efficiency and, ironically enough, the move to the cloud, according to a new report.The study, published in the journal Science last week, notes that while there has been an increase in global data-center energy consumption over the past decade, this growth is negligible compared with the rise of workloads and deployed hardware during that time.Data centers accounted for about 205 terawatt-hours of electricity usage in 2018, which is roughly 1% of all electricity consumption worldwide, according to the report. (That's well below the often-cited stat that data centers consume 2% of the world's electricity). The 205 terawatt-hours represent a 6% increase in total power consumption since 2010, but global data center compute instances rose by 550% over that same time period.To read this article in full, please click here
The Covid-19 virus has already forced cancellation of major technology conferences, Mobile World Congress being the first and most notable, and others could follow, but there are more immediate effects on IT professionals.The availability of servers is projected to be reduced due to scaled back or halted production in China, where efforts to contain the coronavirus include closing factories. The center of the outbreak, Wuhan, is also the center of display production.10 of the world's fastest supercomputers
Processor manufacturer Nvidia acknowledges the effects of the virus on its production and predicts a $100 million revenue hit next quarter because of it.To read this article in full, please click here
The COVID-19 virus has already forced cancellation of major technology conferences, Mobile World Congress being the first and most notable, and others could follow, but there are more immediate effects on IT professionals.The availability of servers is projected to be reduced due to scaled back or halted production in China, where efforts to contain the coronavirus include closing factories. The center of the outbreak, Wuhan, is also the center of display production.10 of the world's fastest supercomputers
Processor manufacturer Nvidia acknowledges the effects of the virus on its production and predicts a $100 million revenue hit next quarter because of it.To read this article in full, please click here
The possiblity of a future power-availability crunch – spurred in part by a global increase in data usage – is driving researchers to get creative with a slew of new and modified ways to generate and store energy.Ongoing projects include the use of seawater for batteries; grabbing ambient humidity; massive water storage systems for hydropower; and solar panels that work at night. Here are some details:Batteries based on seawater
Seawater will provide "super-batteries," says the University of Southern Denmark. Researchers there have been studying how to use sodium, which is abundant in seawater, as an alternative to lithium in batteries.To read this article in full, please click here
Demand for on-premises data center equipment is shrinking as organizations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that’s thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialized hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconvergence software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here
Demand for on-premises data center equipment is shrinking as organizations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that’s thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialized hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconvergence software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here
As the number of places where we store data increases, the basic concept of what is referred to as the 3-2-1 rule often gets forgotten. This is a problem, because the 3-2-1 rule is easily one of the most foundational concepts for designing data protection. It's important to understand why the rule was created, and how it's currently being interpreted in an increasingly tapeless world.What is the 3-2-1 rule for backup?
The 3-2-1 rule says there should be at least three copies or versions of data stored on two different pieces of media, one of which is off-site. Let's take a look at each of the three elements and what it addresses.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
3 copies or versions: Having at least three different versions of your data over different periods of time ensures that you can recover from accidents that affect multiple versions. Any good backup system will have many more than three copies.
2 different media: You should not have both copies of your data on the same media. Consider, for example, Apple's Time Machine. You can fool it using Disc Utility to split your hard drive into Continue reading
Hard drive makers are staving off obsolescence to solid-state drives (SSDs) by offering capacities that are simply not feasible in an SSD. Seagate and Western Digital are both pushing to release 20TB hard disks in the next few years. A 20TB SSD might be doable but also cost more than a new car.But Showa Denko K.K. of Japan has gone one further with the announcement of its next-generation of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media for hard drives. The platters use all-new magnetic thin films to maximize their data density, with the goal of eventually enabling 70TB to 80TB hard drives in a 3.5-inch form factor.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Showa Denko is the world’s largest independent maker of platters for hard drives, selling them to basically anyone left making hard drives not named Seagate and Western Digital. Those two make their own platters and are working on their own next-generation drives for release in the coming years.While similar in concept, Seagate and Western Digital have chosen different solutions to the same problem. HAMR, championed by Seagate and Showa, works by temporarily heating the disk material during the write Continue reading
IBM says it is consolidating its Storwize and the Flash Systems lines of storage products under a single family, the FlashSystem, that will span from entry level to advanced. It also announced a trio of all-flash storage products, spanning a range of use cases.Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels for IBM storage, made the announcing in a pair of blog posts here and here. He noted that different organizations have different requirements for storage, and that storage vendors have traditionally responded with unique storage platforms to meet themTo read this article in full, please click here
Global server sales had been projected to grow by 1.2% compared to the most recent quarter, but the chaos wrought by the coronavirus in China will cause sales to decline 9.8% sequentially, according to DigiTimes Research.DigiTimes is an IT publication based in Taiwan. Its proximity to Taiwanese and Chinese vendors gives it some good sources, but it can also be way off target. However, the signs are piling up that coronavirus is causing some real mayhem.For example, DigiTimes also reported that less than 20% of Chinese factory employees would return to work after an extended Lunar New Year break due to the coronavirus outbreak, and that many components plants in China have decided not to restart production until February 25.To read this article in full, please click here
The ease with which internet of things devices can be compromised, coupled with the potentially extreme consequences of breaches, have prompted action from legislatures and regulators, but what group is best to decide?Both the makers of IoT devices and governments are aware of the security issues, but so far they haven’t come up with standardized ways to address them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
“The challenge of this market is that it’s moving so fast that no regulation is going to be able to keep pace with the devices that are being connected,” said Forrester vice president and research director Merritt Maxim. “Regulations that are definitive are easy to enforce and helpful, but they’ll quickly become outdated.”To read this article in full, please click here
Combining 4G and 5G cellular services with SD-WAN can give enterprise IT pros connectivity options that are faster than wired alternatives such as MPLS and that provide benefits including rapid provisioning, improved reliability and more bandwidth for less money.Branch offices, which are undergoing dramatic changes in the amount of traffic they generate and where that traffic goes, can particularly benefit from 4G and 5G, and one enabler is software-defined WAN.To read this article in full, please click here