A Checklist for Interconnecting Data Centers

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Todd Bundy

Whether interconnecting facilities in support of high-frequency trading, high-performance computing, business continuity, disaster recovery, migration of virtual machines among physical servers or some other demanding application, there are certain networking requirements that tend to be shared among enterprise data-center managers. Optical networking is not a commodity technology space, and data-center managers must investigate at least seven primary areas of technological differentiation in doing their due diligence to deploy the right solution for their given organization’s specific interconnection requirements:

  • Latency—Critically important in electronic trading and a growing range of industries, network latency varies substantially from fiber path to fiber path and multiplexing platform to multiplexing platform. Reducing the fiber path by one physical kilometer of fiber translates into five microseconds of one-way latency that is eliminated, and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) introduces significantly more packet delay than does Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). Read more →
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Are We Expecting Too Much from WiFi?

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Gareth Spence

Over the weekend I spent a little time digging into O2′s plans to offer a free citywide WiFi blanket across London. As any regular readers of the blog will know, I’m a huge supporter of WiFi blankets. In 2011 we saw some encouraging signs that rollouts were starting to grow in size and frequency. New York had a number of interesting projects deployed and some European cities also moved forward with rollouts in parks and other public places.

If successful, O2′s network will be a first for the U.K. and for Europe and will hopefully stimulate similar developments in other cities. There can be no question that the U.K. needs to start driving forward with mobile connectivity. However, while I was reading about this project, I was reminded of an article in Gigaom from last year. This article discussed whether our WiFi expectations are simply too high and misaligned with service providers’ plans. Read more →

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Ultra-low Latency for Linking Data Centers

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Todd Bundy

Certain local and storage area network (LAN and SAN) applications have such severe intolerance of packet delay that even deploying the latest and greatest network interface cards, high-capacity core network switches and multi-core servers will not necessarily ensure that required performance characteristics are achieved. Delivering ultra-low latency in connecting data centers demands its own targeted strategy.

How long does it take for a packet of data to make its way from one point in a network to another? That measurement of time is defined as the latency of a path, and it can be influenced by a tremendous range of factors. Data-center managers in the most latency-sensitive markets must steep themselves in an understanding of all of those factors if they are to give their companies optimal competitive advantage. Read more →

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Software Defined Networking Comes of Age

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Michael Ritter

New trends and rapid technological advances in IT and telecommunications are changing the way telecom networks are designed, deployed and managed. The list of innovations driving the continuously increasing demand for bandwidth is long. Mobile end-user devices are becoming smarter, rich media content such as video is commonly adopted for business and private consumption, applications are increasingly implemented in a network-based fashion and are pushed into the cloud, social media became part of our daily lives – and many more. Consequently, the architecture of the Internet has changed as well over the last years. Widely spread usage of e-mail, e-commerce, search engines, social networks and cloud computing are only a few examples driving this change.

Many of the new and trendy innovations have been enabled through migrating telecom networks from a static, circuit-switched infrastructure to a more flexible and scalable packet-based technology. The wide-scale adoption of Ethernet as a transport protocol and the increased usage of fiber in all parts of the network allowed operators to provide more bandwidth at significantly lower cost. Read more →

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Are Supercomputers Going Mainstream?

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Gareth Spence

Supercomputing and the development of High Performance Computing (HPC) is an area that fascinates me. Over the past few years I’ve worked on a number of projects in the Research and Education (R&E) space that focus on sharing enormous amounts of data processing power on a global scale. These networks use this processing power to develop applications that are addressing some of humankind’s most critical needs.

Yet what would happen if access to this type of processing power were opened up? What if it was democratized to the point that it’s available to a mass audience? How would this impact upon our society and our future? These are some of the questions asked in a recent Gigaom article that demands entrepreneurs and technologists to think bigger. To look beyond the continued development of lifestyle and gaming applications and assess how they can use their talents and the considerable advancements in technology to drive humanity forward. Read more →

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