In the traditional approach to branch office networking, organizations backhauled their Internet traffic to one or more of their data centers. The advantage of backhauling is that it gives network organizations the ability to secure this traffic relatively easily. The disadvantages of this approach are that it adds delay and cost. These disadvantages are clearly…
Once upon a time, ‘data center’ was really just a fancy name for a server room. Now, data centers are big business — and huge consumers of power and other resources. Indeed, their hunger for power means that they now account for a significant proportion of the world’s carbon emissions. The rising cost of power…
When I was younger I waited tables at a neighborhood restaurant. When I first met with the general manager, I promised to work hard to make the customer’s dining experience exceptional. I knew the difference between a good dining experience and a bad one. Little did I know how difficult it would be to deliver…
CRN has just released its annual Data Center 100 list, which highlights channel-friendly technology vendors that are powering, supporting and protecting today’s data center. As part of that list, CRN highlights the top infrastructure providers in what it calls the “Infrastructure 20.” The CRN Infrastructure 20 is a who’s-who list of the top technology infrastructure…
When I come back from an industry conference, I always like to see what members of the press have had to say about it. It’s interesting to compare the writer’s take to my own and see if we agree or differ on some of the prime messaging that occurred at the show. One synopsis of…
It’s hard to miss that this is the year of SSD, or solid-state disk. There is a certain irony therefore – or possibly, given its location, schadenfreude – in an event being ‘themed’ to keep up with the latest trends, only to find out that the new theme is already out of date. So it…
Is there anything currently server-based that will not be virtualized in the future? It is starting to look as if the answer is “Not a lot”, with analysts reporting that one of the last hold-outs for actual physical hardware – the market for data center load balancers and WAN optimizers – is starting to make…
I realize we are at the tail-end of the political season, though politics seems to be a never-ending news topic. Personally, I don’t like politics, whether it’s government or state politics, politics in business, or especially when politics worms its way into personal relationships. After watching this election year’s political debates — the third and…
When you think of liquid assets, the first thing that probably comes to mind is cash. But, in today’s Internet-driven world, an enterprise’s biggest liquid asset is data. Vast amounts of highly valuable and extremely prized data flows over public and shared networks. This data is highly mobile; moving across diverse and distributed networks, and…
The year started off with a resounding thud for the WAN optimization market, with a 20% falloff in sales in the first quarter. While that big a drop was a surprise to Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research, he said his company had been predicting that WANop, especially for…
