As lockdowns start to ease in many countries, so the tentative return to work begins, leaving people understandably concerned about how safe a space an office will be in the middle of a global pandemic. There is likely to be an increase in the amount of technology used to monitor employees. From thermal cameras taking your temperature when you enter the building to apps or wearables to alert you if you get too close to colleagues, work could soon have the feel of the Minority Report movie.
Arguably the biggest challenge for hyperscalers is continuity and, by association, reliability. New findings generated by a survey from Uptime Institute revealed that over 10% of all respondents said their most recent reportable outage cost them more than $1m in direct and indirect costs. On March 13th, 2019, Facebook suffered its worst-ever outage, affecting the estimated 2.7 billion users of its core social network, Instagram and messaging applications, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. By extrapolating the company’s 2018 revenue figures, CCN estimated that the blackout could have cost Facebook up to $90 million in lost revenue based on an income of $106,700 per minute. With so many businesses relying on hyperscale data centers to provide the IT backbone to their operations, any downtime can have a substantial impact and sometimes catastrophic ramifications.
Major cloud providers are having trouble getting basic components for new data centers so they’ve put off some construction plans, but they have enough surplus capacity already to ride out the problem. Limiting construction are a scarcity of fiber optics, batteries, and racks.
A company called Kinsa is leveraging IoT tech to create a network of connected thermometers, collecting a huge amount of anonymous health data that could offer insights into the current and future pandemics. The ability to track fever levels across the U.S. in close to real time could be a crucial piece of information for both the public at large and for decision-makers in the healthcare sector and government.
COVID-19 has triggered “huge investment” in digital projects as organizations try to manage more operations remotely, says the head of Australian data integration company Reekoh. The company’s CEO Dale Rankine says industrial and healthcare organizations are bringing forward cloud projects in response to the COVID-19 crisis
Just as the stage is set for 400G Ethernet (GbE) to roll out in force later this year, mainly in hyperscale, telco and large data-center networks, there is a call to boost that speed to 800GbE or even higher in the coming years.The need for increased speed in data centers and cloud services speeds is driven by many things including the continued growth of hyperscale networks from players like Google, Amazon and Facebook, but also the more distributed and mobile workloads modern networks support. But the reality on the ground is that much lower speeds are what’s commonly in use.
Just a few years ago, many expected all the Internet of Things (IoT) to move to the cloud—and much of the consumer-connected IoT indeed lives there—but one of the key basics of designing and building enterprise-scale IoT solutions is to make a balanced use of edge and cloud computing. Most IoT solutions now require a mix of cloud and edge computing which can alleviate latency, increase scalability, and enhance access to information so that better, faster decisions can be made, and enterprises can become more agile as a result.
Hengtong Rockley has released a 400G QSFP-DD DR4 optical module based on silicon photonics technology geared for cloud data center networks. The new 400G QSFP-DD module is the company’s first 400G silicon photonics optical module product and is intended for use in next generation cloud-scale data center networks for low-cost, low-power consumption optical connections between switches. The deployment of such 400G transceivers will enable data center networks to deliver a 4x increase in network speed compared to existing deployments using 100G.
There are billions of connected devices in use worldwide, and that number is increasing by the millions every year. Unfortunately, many of these IoT devices, as well as those currently being developed and deployed, lack critical security features, making them easy targets for hackers and botnets. Without the proper security measures in place, these devices can lead to catastrophic events.
R&M’s new fiber optic distribution platform Netscale 72 natively supports two parallel optical cabling types, BASE8 and BASE12. That means distribution modules for both applications fit in the same system drawers. Data centers can adapt the trunk cabling within the existing racks and housing. In this way, Netscale 72 facilitates fast migration to new network generations.
