Cloud is a new technology domain, and data centre engineering is still a developing discipline. I have interviewed a top expert in cloud infrastructure, Pete Cladingbowl. He has a vision of the 'lean' data centre and a better kind of Internet for users to reach it. He also has a roadmap for how these can be practically realised. The key is to apply established theories of value flow from more mature industries. more
Back in early 2012, the media was all over stack wars that reportedly were taking place between Cisco and VMware. This culminated in VMware's Nicira acquisition in July 2012, paving the way for the coming of software-based networking. Four years later, the market still remains in development mode. Many service providers and enterprises are trying to come to grips with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). more
If you are passionate about ICT policy, Peering, and Interconnection, then the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) is the place to be. The 7th annual AfPIF takes place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 30 August – 1 September 2016. AfPIF is a multistakeholder forum organized by the Internet Society that brings together a diverse range of business leaders, infrastructure providers, Internet service providers (ISPs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), international financial institutions, policy-makers, and regulators from all over the world. more
In a recent talk at Black Hat, Apple's head of security engineering (Ivan Krsti?) described many security mechanisms in iOS. One in particular stood out: Apple's Cloud Key Vault, the way that Apple protects cryptographic keys stored in iCloud. A number of people have criticized Apple for this design, saying that they have effectively conceded the "Going Dark" encryption debate to the FBI. They didn't, and what they did was done for very valid business reasons -- but they're taking a serious risk... more
Iran has officially launched its first cloud data center in Tehran during a ceremony attended by the Minister of Communication and Information Technology," according to reports from local news sites. more
China's home grown firms are not only grabbing domestic businesses but also venturing to different countries across the world. On the other hand, foreign players face regulatory walls that make it difficult to tap businesses in China." Saibal Dasgupta reporting today in VOA more
The world of networking tends to be bistable: we either centralize everything, or we decentralize everything. We started with mainframes, passed through Lotus 123 hidden in corners, then to mini's and middleware, then to laptops, and now to the cloud, to be followed by fog. This particular cycle of centralization/decentralization, however, has produced a series of overlapping changes that are difficult to decipher. You can somehow hear someone arguing about disaggregation and hyperconvergence through the fog -- but just barely. more
A press conference in West Des Moines, Iowa, revealed Microsoft has chosen the city to build an estimated 1.7 million square feet data center, dubbed Project Osmium, spanning two counties (160 acres in Warren County and 40 acres in Madison County). more
Public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings are rapidly gaining acceptance among enterprises as a viable alternative to on-premises hardware for IT infrastructure, According to new IDC study more
I have spent the day here in Berlin attending my second advisory board meeting for the EU research project reTHINK. I'm chewing over what I learnt about the possible future of the telecoms and cloud industry. There has been a decades-long tussle between the communications and computing parts of the ICT industry. Both sides wish to exert power over the digital economy. Sometimes this tussle works for the common good, sometimes not. more
A new report, released today from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is reporting that electricity consumption by data centers nationwide, after rising rapidly for more than a decade, started to plateau in 2010 and has remained steady since, at just under 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. more
Could Brexit spell turbulence for cloud computing? Larry Dignan reporting in ZDNet: "Get ready for the pause in U.K. data center build-outs. The only certainty about the United Kingdom's move to exit the European Union is the cloud computing ecosystem is going to see some turbulence and uncertainty ahead. more
Over the past two weeks Andrew Lerner, Vice President in Gartner Research covering enterprise networking products, has put out two successive blogs that raise really interesting questions about the changing world of network management in an increasingly cloud-centric world. In "What Keeps Network Folks Up at Night?", Andrew writes about the worrisome challenges in the Banking/Financial industry related to frequent manual network configuration errors. more
Between September of 2015 and May 2016, (last 8 months) Port25 saw almost a 30 percent jump in new cloud-based email infrastructure interest outside the United States... While most of the influential senders are not abandoning on-premises mail transfer agent (MTA) solutions, many are looking to cloud infrastructure for managing higher-volumes by bifurcating individual email streams to the cloud. more
Software-defined networking (SDN) itself represents a deconstructed view of current switching and routing architectures providing the abstractions of control from dataplane. With this newfound control, the industry is leveraging multiple virtualization strategies to build out public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures, delivering multiple new application services to the market. more
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