Data center REITs have returned more than 100 percent over the last two years. Crown Castle recently purchased Lightower for one of the highest per fiber mile prices ever. What is driving the growth? Isn’t everyone using the cloud?The data center is still the safest place to store and process your data. The data center is where the cloud resides. Cross connect capabilities like connections to financial markets, exchanges, Bloomberg, Reuters, and even cloud providers like AWS and Azure make data centers more functional for companies looking to take advantage of their geography.Geography impacts latency as light can only travel between two distances within a set span of time governed by physics. Tony Soprano said it best when talking about Real Estate to his son Anthony Junior, “Buy land AJ, ‘cause God ain’t making any more of it.” That couldn’t be more true about data centers. Areas like Ashburn, Virginia, are data center hot spots because of low taxes, bandwidth availability, and proximity to Washington, D.C. and New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux is a tried-and-true, open source operating system released in 1991 for computers, but its use has expanded to underpin systems for cars, phones, web-servers and, more recently, networking gear.It’s longevity, maturity and security make it one of the most trusted OSes available today, meaning it is ideal for commercial network devices as well as enterprises that want to use it and its peripherals to customize their own network and data center infrastructure.That in turn makes Linux skills highly sought after by IT hiring managers. Many of the new technologies associated with DevOps, for example, such as containers, OpenSource infrastructure and SDN controllers are built on Linux.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux is a tried-and-true, open source operating system released in 1991 for computers, but its use has expanded to underpin systems for cars, phones, web-servers and, more recently, networking gear.It’s longevity, maturity and security make it one of the most trusted OSes available today, meaning it is ideal for commercial network devices as well as enterprises that want to use it and its peripherals to customize their own network and data center infrastructure.That in turn makes Linux skills highly sought after by IT hiring managers. Many of the new technologies associated with DevOps, for example, such as containers, OpenSource infrastructure and SDN controllers are built on Linux.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Flash Memory Summit is taking place in the Silicon Valley, and SSD vendors are showing off some impressive new enterprise-scale drives with greater capacity and performance.Seagate showed off some new products in its Nytro line with 3D NAND, raising capacity four-fold, and also showed off a PCI Express-based card with 64TB capacity. Conveniently, the company did not give the price. Seagate Nytro 5000 SSD line The Nytro 5000 product line is an upgrade to Seagate’s existing XM1440 line of SSDs. These drives range in capacity from 400GB to 2TB. All use the M.2 interface. M.2 is a design that’s different from traditional SATA drives. A typical SATA SSD looks like a 2.5-inch hard disk and uses a SATA interface. M.2 is about the size of a stick of gum and plugs into the motherboard. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Flash Memory Summit is taking place in the Silicon Valley, and SSD vendors are showing off some impressive new enterprise-scale drives with greater capacity and performance.Seagate showed off some new products in its Nytro line with 3D NAND, raising capacity four-fold, and also showed off a PCI Express-based card with 64TB capacity. Conveniently, the company did not give the price. Seagate Nytro 5000 SSD line The Nytro 5000 product line is an upgrade to Seagate’s existing XM1440 line of SSDs. These drives range in capacity from 400GB to 2TB. All use the M.2 interface. M.2 is a design that’s different from traditional SATA drives. A typical SATA SSD looks like a 2.5-inch hard disk and uses a SATA interface. M.2 is about the size of a stick of gum and plugs into the motherboard. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lenovo has done a bang-up job in taking over IBM’s old PC business and turning it into a rousing success. Or at least as much of a success as can be had in an era of declining PC sales. Its luck with the server business? Not so much.Lenovo picked up IBM’s x86 server business in 2014 after some grumbling and consternation from the government. It seemed the government and military had quite an installed base of IBM servers and wasn’t keen on the Chinese taking ownership of them. But the deal went through after some assurances. Looks like that was the least of their problems. According to Gartner, in the first quarter of 2017, Lenovo sales fell 16 percent and its market share dropped to just 5.8 percent. Lenovo was fifth, behind HPE, Dell EMC, IBM (which is only selling Power-based RISC systems and mainframes) and Cisco. In fact, Lenovo had been ahead of Cisco in terms of units sold. When you fall behind Cisco in servers, a business Cisco didn’t even enter until a decade ago, you have a problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lenovo has done a bang-up job in taking over IBM’s old PC business and turning it into a rousing success. Or at least as much of a success as can be had in an era of declining PC sales. Its luck with the server business? Not so much.Lenovo picked up IBM’s x86 server business in 2014 after some grumbling and consternation from the government. It seemed the government and military had quite an installed base of IBM servers and wasn’t keen on the Chinese taking ownership of them. But the deal went through after some assurances. Looks like that was the least of their problems. According to Gartner, in the first quarter of 2017, Lenovo sales fell 16 percent and its market share dropped to just 5.8 percent. Lenovo was fifth, behind HPE, Dell EMC, IBM (which is only selling Power-based RISC systems and mainframes) and Cisco. In fact, Lenovo had been ahead of Cisco in terms of units sold. When you fall behind Cisco in servers, a business Cisco didn’t even enter until a decade ago, you have a problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The data transformation tool known as ETL, or extract, transfer and load, is slowing down companies’ ability to do real-time data analysis, costing those companies business opportunities and making their analytics inefficient. That is the result of a survey of 502 IT professionals conducted by IDC on behalf of InterSystems Corp., a high-performance database management vendor. The survey also found that Changed Data Capture (CDC) technology is also slowing companies down and impeding their ability to do real-time data analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The data transformation tool known as ETL, or extract, transfer and load, is slowing down companies’ ability to do real-time data analysis, costing those companies business opportunities and making their analytics inefficient. That is the result of a survey of 502 IT professionals conducted by IDC on behalf of InterSystems Corp., a high-performance database management vendor. The survey also found that Changed Data Capture (CDC) technology is also slowing companies down and impeding their ability to do real-time data analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new report from a real estate firm that specializes in data center construction and leasing says data center construction in North America is up 43 percent over the same period in 2016, and industry consolidation has driven $10 billion in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) so far. Jones Lang LaSalle just published its report on the North America data center market, highlighting trends such as consolidation, enterprise hybrid cloud, security, and high-performance computing.+ Also on Network World: Ireland the best place to set up a data center in the EU + While construction continues at a record clip, the report also found that absorption of data center space available for lease has returned to normal levels after record leasing in 2016. So many of the cloud providers are still digesting the capacity they picked up last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new report from a real estate firm that specializes in data center construction and leasing says data center construction in North America is up 43 percent over the same period in 2016, and industry consolidation has driven $10 billion in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) so far. Jones Lang LaSalle just published its report on the North America data center market, highlighting trends such as consolidation, enterprise hybrid cloud, security, and high-performance computing.+ Also on Network World: Ireland the best place to set up a data center in the EU + While construction continues at a record clip, the report also found that absorption of data center space available for lease has returned to normal levels after record leasing in 2016. So many of the cloud providers are still digesting the capacity they picked up last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is no shortage of vendors competing for business at every part of the enterprise network - every vertical, every size business, from the edge to the core. None are created equal, but a few have separated themselves from the pack to become the 10 most powerful.This is Network World's understanding of the most powerful enterprise networking companies, which we based on our own research, consultations with trusted industry analysts and the work of our in-house journalists. For our purposes, we thought of power mostly as market share in key areas of the enterprise networking marketplace - specifically core networking, monitoring and management, WLAN and the edge, though we did consider their technology bases and important market factors as well. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is no shortage of vendors competing for business at every part of the enterprise network - every vertical, every size business, from the edge to the core. None are created equal, but a few have separated themselves from the pack to become the 10 most powerful.This is Network World's understanding of the most powerful enterprise networking companies, which we based on our own research, consultations with trusted industry analysts and the work of our in-house journalists. For our purposes, we thought of power mostly as market share in key areas of the enterprise networking marketplace - specifically core networking, monitoring and management, WLAN and the edge, though we did consider their technology bases and important market factors as well. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Edge computing, where processing takes place closer to the end user in order to reduce latency, among other things, is set to balloon according to a researcher.Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) will grow with a high compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 50.2 percent per year over the next few years (2016-2023), says Occams Business Research and Consulting, which published research in July.Yet-to-be-launched 5G wireless networks and overall increasing use of data will be among the drivers. Global mobile data should reach 69 exabytes by the close of 2022, up from 8.9 exabytes in 2016, the report says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Edge computing, where processing takes place closer to the end user in order to reduce latency, among other things, is set to balloon, according to a researcher.Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) will grow with a high compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 50.2 percent per year over the next few years (2016-2023), says Occams Business Research and Consulting, which published research in July.Yet-to-be-launched 5G wireless networks and overall increasing use of data will be among the drivers. Global mobile data should reach 69 exabytes by the close of 2022, up from 8.9 exabytes in 2016, the report says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you have, or does your data infrastructure environment have a tradecraft skills gap?Keep in mind that tradecraft is your fundamental skills along with experiences, knowing not just the tools, also the various techniques of what to use when, where, why and how.A tradecraft gap exists when there is work to be done, people are available to fulfill those tasks, yet they lack the skills and experiences to do what is needed. For example, you have a position opening to support some function in your data infrastructure environment; many people are applying for that spot. Perhaps all of those applicants have tons of certificates, yet they lack the skills experience for the position. In other words, there is no shortage of people and their certificates, yet there is a gap between the workers and work to be done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you have, or does your data infrastructure environment have a tradecraft skills gap?Keep in mind that tradecraft is your fundamental skills along with experiences, knowing not just the tools, also the various techniques of what to use when, where, why and how.A tradecraft gap exists when there is work to be done, people are available to fulfill those tasks, yet they lack the skills and experiences to do what is needed. For example, you have a position opening to support some function in your data infrastructure environment; many people are applying for that spot. Perhaps all of those applicants have tons of certificates, yet they lack the skills experience for the position. In other words, there is no shortage of people and their certificates, yet there is a gap between the workers and work to be done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Supercomputer specialist Cray announced it is acquiring Seagate’s ClusterStor HPC storage array business for an undisclosed sum as part of a strategic deal and partnership. The deal should close in the third quarter. Cray will take over development, manufacturing, support and sales of the ClusterStor product line, picking up 100 Seagate employees in the process. Seagate acquired Xyratex, the maker of ClusterStor for $374 million in 2014. Cray already sells ClusterStor under its Sonexion scale out Lustre arrays. Sonexion is based on ClusterStor, so it simply comes in-house. Cray is the biggest OEM for the ClusterStor line. Even though Cray was already knee deep in ClusterStor, it brought the technology in-house so it can reduce margins and push further on development to align with its strategy, which sounds like it intends to compete with Dell EMC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has long run a distant third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud services business, but it finally seems to be catching some momentum, if the most recent quarter is an indicator of future trajectory. During an earnings call with Wall Street analysts, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud Platform continues to experience “impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.” To be more specific, Pichai said Google closed three times as many $500,000-plus deals in the most recent quarter as it did in the same time period last year. Of course, that is kind of pointless without knowing the exact number. And given Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported overall revenue of $25.8 billion for the quarter, it’s likely a few drops in the bucket. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An inside look at the Cisco Nexus 9615 data center core switch.