NETWORKING

The data center industry continues to grow. Amazon, Google, Equinix, Digital Reality Trust, and numerous other providers can’t build their data centers fast enough, spurring investments in startups and a hefty amount of M&A activity. The sector was hot before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crisis has only increased interest as companies accelerate their migrations to the cloud. Goldman Sachs is the latest to make a big play in the data center market. The firm’s Merchant…

The vehicles manufactured by Volvo Trucks keep getting smarter. More than 350,000 Volvo rigs crossing North American highways each day are outfitted with IoT sensors that monitor conditions and send data for troubleshooting and analysis. Embedded telematics allow for over-the-air updates to engine software. The on-board technology, combined with a back-end analytics platform, enables Volvo Trucks to process millions of data records instantaneously. Using IoT and artificial intelligence, Volvo Trucks has been able to reduce diagnostic…

IT and security response to the coronavirus pandemic was heroic. Although many organizations had some degree of remote-work capabilities pre-COVID-19, the past year brought this work to new levels. Enterprise security has had to quickly evolve alongside the shift to remote work and cloud adoption. For example, companies successfully ramped up VPN infrastructure, shifted to online models of collaboration software, and re-examined security policies in light of a highly distributed workforce. Yet, these changes are…

Numerous early Starlink testers have been notified that they’ll soon be linking up to the Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) internet in the “Better Than Nothing Beta” test. Better than nothing actually sounds pretty darn good. In this early stage, Starlink tells its early users to “Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be…

When Michael Bishop, senior network engineer with SolarWinds, was tasked with upgrading the IT Management company’s global network, the goals included improving network management and visibility while lowering the costs of its legacy MPLS infrastructure. Bishop says the company accomplished all of that and more by deploying the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) edge platform. After deploying EdgeConnect at all of the company’s 30 branch offices, Bishop says that SolarWinds has increased networking visibility,…

The Folding@home project has shared new results of its efforts to simulate proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to better understand how they function and how to stop them. Folding@home is a distributed computing effort that uses small clients to run simulations for biomedical research when users’ PCs are idle. The clients operate independently of each other to perform their own unique simulation and send in the results to the F@h servers. (Read more about where…

If someone had told me five months ago that the name of the game for cloud in 2020 would be “the ability to scale,” I would probably have thought they were 10 years late. Fast-forward to now, and it seems the biggest asset for organizations is indeed the ability to scale their digital selves to meet the tremendous demand of a world where their physical self is literally constrained by social-distancing mandates. The dramatic, global…

Strategic Planning Assumptions By the end of 2022, the number of enterprise network teams using a SaaS-based console to manage data center networks will increase by more than 10 times to more than 1,500.   By 2023, more than 10% of large enterprises will be running on-premises public cloud infrastructure (such as AWS Outposts) in their private data centers, which is an increase from less than 1% in 2019.   Customers who use management consoles…