The use of Ethernet for industrial automation applications is on the rise and is rapidly displacing traditional Fieldbus protocols that are more complex, often proprietary and have limited distance and performance. In fact, Industrial Ethernet is now bigger than traditional Fieldbus and growing at an annual rate nearly four times that of Fieldbuses. Download this White Paper from Fluke Networks to learn more.
Dark fiber provider United Fiber & Data is building a global data center & colocation provider” for an unknown customer in the New York City area. The facility will use 25 pairs (50 fiber strands total) of dark fiber to connect a Manhattan-based data center to the customer’s facility in Secaucus, NJ, and another data center in Newark, NJ. The dark fiber is part of UFD’s wholly owned and operated, greenfield built, low-latency network that connects the company’s more than 60-mile metro fiber-optic network in New York City, which has more than 330 buildings on net.
EdgeConneX has launched its newest facility in Buenos Aires, Argentina. According to EdgeConneX, global service providers and local organizations throughout the region will gain access to scalable data capacity with low-latency connectivity, critical content delivery solutions, and advanced cloud services previously unavailable in this region. The data center supports and provides local connectivity, peering, and internet exchange solutions from leading network providers, including Metrotel, Silica Networks, CenturyLink, and others. It also facilitates interconnection between multiple networks and other service provider customers.
Cignal AI reports that cloud and colocation network operators in North America increased their optical systems purchases by 50% during this year’s first three months. The market research firm notes in its newly released “Optical Customer Markets Report” that other customer segments should be expected to increase purchases this year as well.
CenturyLink plans to spend several hundreds of millions of dollars to enhance its edge networks to support edge compute services. The initiative initially will see the creation of more than 100 edge compute locations across the U.S., which CenturyLink will use to deliver hybrid cloud and managed services. The service provider says it will be able to deliver these services via the integration of high-performance, low-latency networking with major cloud service provider platforms in customized configurations.
Vendors offering pure-cloud solutions believe that hybrid cloud only delays the inevitable full migration to the cloud, while vendors offering hybrid solutions (generally those with legacy premises-based systems) claim that it offers benefits that pure-cloud solutions can’t provide. Is hybrid cloud the best or the worst of both worlds? The answer is, “It depends.”
Most people think of 5G as a new wireless service for faster smartphones, but it is also a medium that enables a city to become smarter. In the future, cities will use new applications and the Internet of Things (IoT) to enrich the lives and safety of their residents and visitors. In fact, citizens and visitors will experience new, 5G-enabled technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and autonomous vehicle applications by using smartphones in their daily lives. They will demand these technologies from cities as well. We’ll see an increasing expectation for integration of technology into city services and capabilities.
What are the key trends that are impacting data centers so deeply? Growth. By 2021 global internet traffic will increase up to three times. The role of hyperscale data centers pushing speed and innovation.New network architectures are required to support virtualization and unimagined transmission speeds.; and FOG Computing, which extends the cloud to the edge.
L-com has launched a series of active optical cables (AOCs), designed to address high-speed data centers and enterprise networking applications. The new AOCs are hot swappable, pluggable cable assemblies that support high-speed Ethernet, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel connectivity (10Gbps-100Gbps). Although they use the same electrical interface as Direct-Attach Cables (DACs), AOCs utilize fiber-optic cable instead of copper wiring, so they are able to support distances up to 100 meters. Furthermore, DACs are limited by crosstalk since they utilize copper cabling and generally cannot support distances over 10 meters.
The green data center market is forecast to grow from $43.24 billion USD in 2018 to $147.88 billion in 2024. Sustainability has become as central to data centers as, well, data. Uptime may be king, but the energy cost of that uptime is a factor the crown cannot afford to ignore.
