Fields of Fiber

On-premises data centers aren’t so much dying as fading into the background – still around, but neither exciting nor high-priority for many organizations. As the Cloud boom continues, it’s interesting to see a new ecosystem developing around the range of off-premises computing services, from colocation space to SaaS and IaaS, and now marketplaces to help customers to find the right ecosystem vendor or supplier for their needs.

And then there’s the International Space Station… which I think counts as the ultimate edge computing application, at least for now!

New technologies are often exciting, and I love exploring their potential for improving both lives and profit margins. There’s another side to that potential, however – as Spiderman teaches us, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Whether it’s the potential for easy-to-implement as-a-Service offerings to lock companies in for the long term, the potential for social networks to shape the standards of public interaction, or the potential for great computing power to render old security methods ineffective, we can’t afford to ignore the need to be aware of and manage the impact of the innovations going on around us.

While a lot of the articles featured here have to do with massive centralized cloud and colocation data centers, there’s also a need for compute power closer to the user. This “edge” covers a lot of ground – from the idea of a mini data center on every street corner providing real-time compute power for driverless cars, to full sized data centers built in underserved countries to address the problem of transcontinental lag.

It seems like most of the network innovations showing up this year have to do with applying abstraction of control, disaggregation of resources or both, and this week’s first two articles definitely follow that pattern! Read on for news about a new memory disaggregation technology, a game company using hybrid network architecture, and some commentary on the latest airline data center failure.

Cloud computing vs. edge computing – is it a competition or a collaboration? Personally, I think they are complementary systems, each with strengths and weaknesses to take into consideration. If you’re backing up data and retrieving it at human speeds, then the cloud can deliver – but if microseconds of latency are critical, then you need computing power on the edge, as close as possible to the task at hand.

Read on for this week’s “Edgy” network news, and let me know what you think in the comments!

Power – what does it mean to you?

It could be simple electrical power from an outlet, or the power of market dominance, or the power of leading by example and influencing how others decide to do things.

Read on for a look at the power of the cloud, in three different flavors.

Happy New Year!

How could I pass up the opportunity to fill this week’s social media schedule with predictions for 2017? I enjoyed reading predictions about Data Centers, IoT, Cloud, SD-WAN and more, but they were outnumbered – by a lot – by the articles dedicated to digital transformation in the year to come. We also had peek into Fiber Mountain’s near future, with a Q&A between TMC’s Maurice Nagle and Fiber Mountain’s Bill Miller about the upcoming ITEXPO, and what Bill sees as the key trends to watch.

The first time I heard about cloud computing, I wondered why anyone would ever want to trust all of their data and systems to a remote infrastructure owned by someone else. These days, however, cloud providers have built up impressive data centers and an even more impressive reputation for reliability and convenience, whether you’re a consumer using Gmail and Dropbox, a tech startup using AWS or Azure, or a Fortune 500 company developing a hybrid cloud infrastructure customized to serve all your business needs with speed and efficiency.

This week’s articles all touch on that ongoing transition, from the old view of “why would anyone trust the cloud” to a new world where the cloud is just another option on the menu – and often a lower-risk option than building out your own data center!

These news roundups tend to have a strong focus on new innovations and bleeding-edge technology, which is great if you’re planning a new data center network deployment.

But what about the vast majority of organizations that have an existing infrastructure to maintain, while staying competitive and keeping up with new developments? This week’s articles all relate to the question of improving efficiency and capacity through integrating new technology into existing systems. This approach means extending the life of legacy infrastructure, while architecting new network and data center infrastructure to open up future opportunities.

SDN and the plethora of other Software-Defined solutions have been making news for quite some time, but in terms of real-world applications you're probably used to seeing them in test-labs or non-critical systems, if at all. That's changing, however, and fast! This week's articles reflect on the changing landscape of production data centers - and data center jobs.