The Internet of Things is still very much a growth industry. As a technology area whose development is dictated by the needs of the operational side of any given business, it’s a new challenge for traditional IT companies – and one that gives them an unusual array of competitors. But there are always going to be a few companies that set the tone, and we’ve collected what we think are the 10 most powerful players in the IoT sector right now.A word on methodology. We began by looking at about 25 prominent corporate names in IoT, comparing them based on how innovative their technology is, their market share and solution depth and breadth.To read this article in full, please click here
The Internet of Things is still very much a growth industry. As a technology area whose development is dictated by the needs of the operational side of any given business, it’s a new challenge for traditional IT companies – and one that gives them an unusual array of competitors. But there are always going to be a few companies that set the tone, and we’ve collected what we think are the 10 most powerful players in the IoT sector right now.A word on methodology. We began by looking at about 25 prominent corporate names in IoT, comparing them based on how innovative their technology is, their market share and solution depth and breadth.To read this article in full, please click here
Another week, another survey that finds IT cannot keep up with the ever-expanding data overload. This time the problem surrounds network bandwidth and overall performance.A survey of 300 IT professionals conducted by management consultant firm Accenture found the majority feel their enterprise networks are not up to the task of handling big data and internet of things (IoT) deployments. Only 43% of those companies polled said their networks are ready to support the cloud, IoT, and other digital technologies.To read this article in full, please click here
Data is at the center of everything we do today. It’s a massive resource that you can use to fuel innovation, steer the business with greater insights, and rev up people to do their best work. But data overload, unpredictable workload demands, and growing maintenance and security requirements can stall important initiatives when storage systems lack the performance, scale, agility, and efficiency to keep up.But there’s good news. The agility and economics of HPE storage combined with HPE GreenLake let you run IT like a finely tuned engine:
Improve economics with no up-front payment and 100% economic storage utilization
Reduce risk of running out of capacity or wasting money by overprovisioning
Accelerate value with on-demand storage solutions aligned to your workload needs
Ensure control over performance, security, and compliance.
Click here to view the complete infographic. To read this article in full, please click here
HPE GreenLake is a true pay-as-you-go, consumption-based approach to hybrid IT. It’s different from anything else on the market, so it’s not surprising that customers tend to have lots of questions. Here are some that I hear quite often:Do I have to purchase the infrastructure?No. HPE GreenLake is an “as-a-service” model, so we own and manage the equipment for you at your site, and we provide a buffer of capacity right-sized to your business. Then we measure how much you use, and we charge based on that usage.What if I run out of capacity?To read this article in full, please click here
Solid-state drives (SSDs) operate by writing to cells within the chip, and after so many writes, the cell eventually dies off and can no longer be written to. For that reason, SSDs have more actual capacity than listed. A 1TB drive, for example, has about 1.2TB of capacity, and as chips die off from repeated writes, new ones are brought online to keep the 1TB capacity.But that's for gradual wear. Sometimes SSDs just up and die completely, and without warning after a whole chip fails, not just a few cells. So Samsung is trying to address that with a new generation of SSD memory chips with a technology it calls fail-in-place (FIP).To read this article in full, please click here
In an age when every company is a technology business, digital transformation becomes imperative for enterprises to remain competitive. The first wave of digital transformation focused on moving workloads to the cloud. Enterprises undergoing large-scale digital transformations centralized data processing and storage by migrating entire operations to public or private cloud services. The recent influx of connected devices and the resulting data explosion is putting a strain on this model, and now companies are looking toward the next wave of transformation that will move them closer to the edge and their customers.Today, the explosion of IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, robotic systems, and other digital platforms has resulted in a deluge of data and a vast expansion at the edge of the network. This is putting a strain on the network and requires new ways of processing, analyzing, and acting on this data in real time. This intersection of new technologies and the massive amounts of data they produce put us at an inflection point when we consider the architectures that will help us manage the global economy.To read this article in full, please click here
About the only thing harder than building a data center is dismantling one, because the potential for disruption of business is much greater when shutting down a data center than constructing one.The recent decommissioning of the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reveals just how complicated the process can be. More than 40 people were involved with the project, including staff from ORNL, supercomputer manufacturer Cray, and external subcontractors. Electricians were required to safely shut down the 9 megawatt-capacity system, and Cray staff was on hand to disassemble and recycle Titan’s electronics and its metal components and cabinets. A separate crew handled the cooling system. In the end, 350 tons of equipment and 10,800 pounds of refrigerant were removed from the site.To read this article in full, please click here
A recent Amazon outage resulted in a small number of customers losing production data stored in their accounts. This, of course, led to typical anti-cloud comments that follows such events. The reality is that these customers data loss had nothing to do with cloud and everything to do with them not understanding the storage they were using and backing it up.Over Labor Day weekend there was a power outage in one of the availability zones in the AWS US-East-1 region. Backup generators came on, but quickly failed for unknown reasons. Customers’ Elastic Block Store (EBS) data is replicated among multiple servers, but the outage affected multiple servers. While the bulk of data stored in EBS was fine or was able to be easily recovered after outage, .5 percent of the data could not be recovered. Customers among the .5 percent who did not have a backup of their EBS data actually lost data.To read this article in full, please click here
The software-defined movement keeps marching on. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is redefining the branch edge by displacing legacy technologies like MPLS, WAN optimizers, and routers. Software-defined Perimeter (SDP) is displacing whole network access via mobile VPN with secure and optimized access from any device to specific applications in physical and cloud datacenters. These seem like unrelated developments, despite the “software-defined” buzz, because enterprise IT thinks about physical locations, mobile users, and applications separately. Each enterprise edge, location, person, or application is usually served by different technologies and often by different teams.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is significantly spreading its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology to help customers grow and control hybrid, multicloud and SD-WAN environments.ACI is Cisco’s flagship software-defined networking (SDN) data-center package, but it also delivers the company’s Intent-Based Networking technology, which brings customers the ability to automatically implement network and policy changes on the fly and ensure data delivery.
More about SD-WANTo read this article in full, please click here
Now that the technology has been with us for some time, interest in and adoption of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) is heating up. It’s a good time to look at what’s driving organizations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organizations the technology is best suited for. The technology has clearly taken off. A 2018 survey of 225 IT professionals by SevOne found 66% of respondents already had at least some percentage of their WAN software-defined, and nearly 50% had active SD-WAN projects. Perhaps most impressive, 17% of respondents said they’d connect 100 or more remote sites within 12 to 18 months.To read this article in full, please click here
Keeping an SD-WAN in Harmony with the Business Requires a Great Orchestrator
According to Merriam-Webster, orchestration is defined as 1: the arrangement of a musical composition for performance by an orchestra (a group of musicians including especially string players organized to perform ensemble music); 2: harmonious organizationIf you’ve ever attended the symphony, you have probably noticed the vibrant movement of the conductor waving his baton in front of the orchestra. The conductor has one of the most visible jobs in the music world, but despite this, many concertgoers are likely unclear about what the conductor is really doing. The conductor’s job is to assign different instruments to the musicians that play the different elements that make up the musical composition. The primary goal of the conductor is to orchestrate harmony across all of the instruments so that every instrument is audible. However, the conductor doesn’t simply keep the orchestra in time or harmony, most importantly, he serves as a messenger for the composer. The conductor intrinsically understands the music and communicates it to the musicians using his baton so that the orchestra can transmit a cohesive view of the music to the audience.To read this article in full, Continue reading
The benefits of Apple and Cisco collaborating to make the iPhone perform better across business wireless networks will continue to grow as the iPhone 11 embraces WiFi 6.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Upcoming 6G wireless, superseding 5G and arriving possibly by 2030, is envisaged to function at hundreds of gigabits per second. Slowly, the technical advances needed are being made.A hole in the tech development thus far has been at the interface between terahertz spectrum and hard, optical transmission lines. How does one connect terahertz (THz), which is basically through-the-air spectrum found between microwave and infrared, to the transmission lines that will be needed for the longer-distance data sends? The curvature of the Earth, for one thing, limits line of sight, so hard-wiring is necessary for distances. Short distances, too, can be impeded by environmental obstructions: blocking by objects, even rain or fog, becomes more apparent the higher in spectrum one goes, as wavelengths get shorter.To read this article in full, please click here
There’s little question that software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) have taken off, as companies look for increased network resiliency and control. But there’s still significant confusion about SD-WAN, including some benefits that are more myth than reality.In this post, we’ll explore three common misconceptions that surround SD-WAN, starting with what is probably the most important one.Misconception #1: SD-WAN will replace services such as MPLS
SD-WAN doesn’t necessary replace any existing network service, be it MPLS, broadband Internet, or anything else. In fact, it requires some kind of network service to work at all.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft has introduced a new virtual WAN as a competitive differentiator and is getting enough tracking that AWS and Google may follow. At present, Microsoft is the only company to offer a virtual WAN of this kind. This made me curious to discover the highs and lows of this technology. So I sat down with Sorell Slaymaker, Principal Consulting Analyst at TechVision Research to discuss. The following is a summary of our discussion.But before we proceed, let’s gain some understanding of the cloud connectivity.Cloud connectivity has evolved over time. When the cloud was introduced about a decade ago, let’s say, if you were an enterprise, you would connect to what's known as a cloud service provider (CSP). However, over the last 10 years, many providers like Equinix have started to offer carrier-neutral collocations. Now, there is the opportunity to meet a variety of cloud companies in a carrier-neutral colocation. On the other hand, there are certain limitations as well as cloud connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology can bring myriad benefits to companies of nearly any size or stripe, but as discussed in a previous post, it can be complex to deploy. For many IT teams, the solution means opting for a managed SD-WAN service. But this may lead to another issue: how to assess providers.After conversations with CenturyLink executive Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink– I’ve come up with eight considerations when assessing SD-WAN managed service providers.To read this article in full, please click here
An earlier three-part series of blog posts examined a series of questions to ask to determine whether your company may be a good candidate to implement Software-Defined Wide-area Network (SD-WAN) technology. What the series did not cover was whether you’ve got the personnel in-house that it takes to architect and implement an SD-WAN and manage it for the long-term. That requires assessing a different series of questions. While SD-WAN has been talked about for years, it is still a relatively young technology that has not yet seen widespread implementation, notes Michael Lawson, General Manager of SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink. “There’s still a lot of learning going on,” he says.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to support ever-increasing workloads, Cisco has pumped up the speed and intelligence of its storage area networking family.The company addressed the need for increased speed by saying it would add support for 64Gbps ready SAN fabric across its 9700 line of MDS storage directors.The MDS family includes the 18-slot 9718, the 10-slot 9710 and the six-slot 9706.
More about backup and recovery:
Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference
How to pick an off-site data-backup method
Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet?
The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space
The main idea here is that customers can upgrade to the new fabric module and upgrade their software to add speed and capacity for high-speed fabrics without having to rip-and-replace any of the directors, according to Adarsh Viswanathan, Cisco product manager, data center switching. A 64Gbps line card for all three chassis will be available in the future, Cisco said.To read this article in full, please click here