Fields of Fiber

Curating industry news to share on Fiber Mountain’s social media accounts provides an interesting insight into the ebb and flow of trends. “Digital Transformation,” for instance, first started gaining ground about two years ago and now it’s everywhere. “SDN” has been fading this year, surpassed by an assortment of other “software-defined” offerings.

And now, I’m noticing “Software-Defined Data Center” (SDDC) popping up in unexpected places, as more and more vendors try to find (or create) a role for themselves in the delivery of more dynamic and agile networks.

Happy Friday! I'll start with our own news: this week, Fiber Mountain published a Cisco-approved press release on the LS-2520 QSFP breakout solution for their NCS 1002 unit. Sushin Suresan (Cisco Product Manager) says "The Fiber Mountain team has created the a great companion to the NCS 1002 that simplifies operations for break-out applications and Cisco is enthusiastic about early customer feedback."

Moving on to industry news, is it just me, or is everyone looking at the future of data center design lately? Read on for more on SDDC, the latest from Microsoft's Project Natick team, and the potential for voice-controlled data center provisioning. (Alexa, I'd like a new VM!)

The buzz around software defined data centers (SDDCs) is growing, now that technology and adoption are starting to catch up to the dream. This week's roundup features two articles examining the challenges that face the first organizations to embrace SDDC - and make the point that all of us need to pay attention to the lessons they learn, or risk falling behind.

Digital transformation is a big topic, whether you look at how many different elements are involved in the process, or at how many business leaders think it’s important. Data center infrastructure is one of the elements that is near and dear to my heart, and the latest buzzword to explode is “software-defined data center” (SDDC). Like software-defined networking (SDN), just about anyone you talk to has their own definition of what it entails, but that hasn’t stopped SDN from having a major impact on IT across industry verticals.

While the term was originally coined by VMWare, I now see it popping up in a wide range of articles and discussions, as a way of approaching the question: “How do you structure your data center to enable rapid change, on a massive scale, whenever your business needs call for it?”

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.

It's been a great couple of weeks for Fiber Mountain to garner industry recognition of our solutions - in addition to winning an SDN Excellence award and being selected as a Best of Interop finalist, we were included in the new "Cool Vendors in Communications Service Provider Infrastructure, 2016" report published by Gartner on April 26!

The Fiber Mountain team had an exciting time this week at Interop Las Vegas, demonstrating our Glass Core and the new CrossCage Plus solution. There were some great conversations and a lot of interest in the ways our technology can transform networks, whether colocation, hyperscale or enterprise.

Of course, Interop wasn’t the only show in town – there was some interesting news out of EMC World too! Without further ado, here are my favorite links from the week:

There was a lot of Google news in the past few days, but even though I’m a huge fan, I see another pattern in the articles we shared this week that is more interesting. Specifically, the demand that the Internet of Things (IoT) places on networks everywhere is huge and growing – and is going to require new approaches to infrastructure. What’s the ideal approach? Well, that’s a question that different vendors and analysts are still weighing in on.

I’m saving up “predictions” articles for the end of the year, but this week’s articles are still very forward-thinking. Facebook is working on artificial intelligence and sharing their designs to OCP, mega-clouds loom on the horizon (though some might say they’re already overhead), and software defined data centers might be the key security measure of the future.

Facebook Open Sources Its ‘Big Sur’ AI Server Designs