An introspective viewpoint of today’s hybrid infrastructure

The road to the modern IT department has taken several twists and turns over the years, which has forced the CIO position to consistently challenge the mold. The following viewpoint has been formed by many years of helping multiple companies solve business critical problems as it pertains to the strategy chosen to operate the IT function within their organization.  It is this experience and broad range of expertise that drives similar discussions in virtually every IT organization.  On top of that, the news headlines that today’s CIO follows paint a very grim picture of the risks associated with operating corporate applications and data.  While at the same time, the level of dependence on IT within the business as a whole has increased exponentially in most organizations.  The CIO role has started the blend into an operations role, and in some cases is already there.

Spotlight

Versa Networks

Versa enables simplicity, speed, and agility for the digital era by transforming how enterprises build, deploy and operate WANs and secure branch connectivity services. The software-based networking and security Cloud IP runs on x86 servers or white box appliances, combined with management, orchestration, and analytics. Its broad set of integrated, advanced networking and security services deliver SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) and Software-Defined Security (SD-Security) in the co-location, data center, and cloud.

OTHER ARTICLES
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, IT Systems Management

WIRELESS DATA CENTERS AND CLOUD COMPUTING

Article | September 14, 2023

One of the most exciting areas of Vubiq Network’s innovative millimeter wave technology is in the application of ultra high-speed, short-range communications as applied to solving the scaling constraints and costs for internal data center connectivity and switching. Today’s limits of cabled and centralized switching architectures are eliminated by leveraging the wide bandwidths of the millimeter wave spectrum for the high-density communications requirements inside the modern data center. Our patented technology has the ability to provide more than one terabit per second of wireless uplink capacity from a single server rack through an innovative approach to create a millimeter wave massive mesh network. The elimination of all inter-rack cabling – as well as the elimination of all aggregation and core switches – is combined with higher throughput, lower latency, lower power, higher reliability, and lower cost by using millimeter wave wireless connectivity.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Data Center as a Service Is the Way of the Future

Article | September 14, 2023

Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) is a hosting service that gives clients access to actual data center infrastructure and amenities. Through a Wide-Area Network, DCaaS enables clients to remotely access the provider's storage, server, and networking capabilities (WAN). Businesses can tackle their on-site data center's logistical and financial issues by outsourcing to a service provider. Many enterprises rely on DCaaS to overcome the physical constraints of their on-site infrastructure or to offload the hosting and management of non-mission-critical applications. Businesses that require robust data management solutions but lack the necessary internal resources can adopt DCaaS. DCaaS is the perfect answer for companies that are struggling with a lack of IT help or a lack of funding for system maintenance. Added benefits data Center as a Service allows businesses to be independent of their physical infrastructure: A single-provider API Data centers without Staff Effortlessly handle the influx of data Data centers in regions with more stable climates Data Center as a Service helps democratize the data center itself, allowing companies that could never afford the huge investments that have gotten us this far to benefit from these developments. This is perhaps the most important, as Infrastructure-as-a-Service enables smaller companies to get started without a huge investment. Conclusion Data center as a service (DCaaS) enables clients to access a data center remotely and its features, whereas data center services might include complete management of an organization's on-premises infrastructure resources. IT can be outsourced using data center services to manage an organization's network, storage, computing, cloud, and maintenance. The infrastructure of many businesses is outsourced to increase operational effectiveness, size, and cost-effectiveness. It might be challenging to manage your existing infrastructure while keeping up with the pace of innovation, but it's critical to be on the cutting edge of technology. Organizations may stay future-ready by working with a vendor that can supply DCaaS and data center services.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

As Edge Applications Multiply, OpenInfra Community Delivers StarlingX 5.0, Offering Cloud Infrastructure Stack for 5G, IoT

Article | October 3, 2023

StarlingX—the open source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low-latency and high-performance applications—is available in its 5.0 release today. StarlingX combines Ceph, OpenStack, Kubernetes and more to create a full-featured cloud software stack that provides everything carriers and enterprises need to deploy an edge cloud on a few servers or hundreds of them.

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IT Systems Management

What Is IaaS? A Data Center in the Cloud Packed with Services

Article | August 8, 2022

Consider IaaS (infrastructure as a service) as a virtual version of your traditional data center. IaaS is a branch of cloud computing technology that offers virtualized storage, server, and networking wrapped together as a self-service platform. It is highly cost-efficient and makes up for easier, faster workloads. Although incredibly convenient for business, it largely depends on what your company needs to use it for. What is IaaS, and How Can It Benefit Your Business? IaaS first rose to popularity in the early 2010s. Since then, it has become the standard abstraction model for many types of workloads. But with the rise of the microservices application pattern and the arrival of new technologies like containers and serverless IaaS is still a foundational service, but the field is more crowded than ever. The most common household cloud computing names—AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure— are all IaaS providers. They all maintain giant data centers around the globe. It includes tons of storage systems, physical servers, and networking equipment under a virtualization layer. Cloud customers access these resources to deploy and run applications in a highly automated manner. Developing a cloud adoption strategy is a vital step forward for modern-day business. And this subscription-based cloud computing service, IaaS, offers a remote management solution and reduces your purchase cost at the same time. Additionally, IaaS also provides key solutions vital for any company’s future plans, such as big-data analysis. It allows businesses like yours to analyze massive data sets and see future trends, patterns, and associations that a human wouldn’t. Understanding the IaaS Architecture In an IaaS service model, your cloud provider will take over your infrastructure components, such as traditional on-premises data centers and host them on the internet. This includes virtual computing, servers, networking hardware, and infrastructure components, as well as the hypervisor layer. IaaS service providers will also provide a wide array of services to accompany those infrastructure components. Monitoring Detailed billing Security Log access Load balancing Clustering Storage resiliency Backup Replication Disaster Recovery IaaS services are automated and highly policy-driven, so you can implement all your infrastructure tasks effortlessly. How Does It Work? IaaS customers access their resources through a WAN (wide area network). Leveraging the cloud provider's services, they will install the remaining elements of an application stack. For example, you can log in to the IaaS platform to create VMs (virtual machines), install operating systems on each VM, deploy middleware like databases, create storage buckets for workloads and backups, and install the enterprise workload on that VM. Afterward, you can also use the IaaS provider's services to track costs, balance network traffic, monitor performance, troubleshoot application-related issues and manage disaster recovery. IaaS Use Cases As IaaS provides general-purpose computing resources, it can be used for any kind of use case. IaaS is most often used today for the development and testing environments, websites, and web apps that interact with customers, data storage, analytics, and data warehousing workloads. Plus, it also offers backup and disaster recovery services, especially for on-premises workloads. IaaS is also a good way to set up and run common business software and apps like SAP. Real-life Examples GE Healthcare: Reputed medical imaging facility GE Healthcare adopted Amazon EC2 from AWS to design the GE Health Cloud. GE Health Cloud platform successfully empowered its consumers by collecting, storing, accessing, and processing information worldwide from different types of medical devices to obtain value from data. Coca-Cola: The beverage giant Coca-Cola collaborated with SoftLayer adopting a pay-as-you-go architecture to manage their CRM system effectively during peak seasons. Final Thoughts Before choosing a provider, you will need to think carefully about the services, reliability, and costs. First, you should thoroughly assess the capabilities of your organization’s IT department and determine how well equipped it is to deal with the ongoing demands of IaaS implementation. Accordingly, you will be prepared to choose an alternative provider and move to the alternative infrastructure if you need to.

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Spotlight

Versa Networks

Versa enables simplicity, speed, and agility for the digital era by transforming how enterprises build, deploy and operate WANs and secure branch connectivity services. The software-based networking and security Cloud IP runs on x86 servers or white box appliances, combined with management, orchestration, and analytics. Its broad set of integrated, advanced networking and security services deliver SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) and Software-Defined Security (SD-Security) in the co-location, data center, and cloud.

Related News

IT Systems Management

VMware wins 2021 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year - Infrastructure Modernization

VMware | June 17, 2022

VMware, Inc. has won the Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award for Infrastructure Modernization for 2021. VMware was honored for its contributions to the Google Cloud ecosystem, including assisting mutual clients with their enterprise cloud transformations. With Google Cloud VMware Engine, VMware and Google Cloud are enabling customers in industries like retail, telco, and manufacturing to speed cloud modernization strategies for enterprise applications. “Organizations globally are benefitting from the close collaboration of VMware and Google Cloud as we help customers accelerate their cloud-first business strategies. This recognition from Google Cloud is a testament to our shared focus on delivering the best business outcomes for our customers by helping them modernize applications, workloads, infrastructure, and consumption models with Google Cloud VMware Engine,” said Gregory Lehrer, vice president, hyperscaler partnerships, VMware. “This award recognizes VMware’s commitment to customer success, and its delivery of innovative and impactful solutions on Google Cloud in Infrastructure Modernization. “We’re proud to recognize VMware as our Technology Partner of the Year for Infrastructure Modernization, and we look forward to continuing our work together building and creating business value for customers with cloud technologies.” Bronwyn Hastings, VP of Global ISV Partnerships and Channels, Google Cloud Customers may use Google Cloud VMware Engine to update their infrastructure, operations, and applications at a cheaper cost and with fewer risks. Customers can use the power of Google Cloud with this jointly created Google Cloud-delivered solution, which provides flexible on-demand capacity and full operational consistency with current on-premises VMware systems. With the addition of Google Cloud VMware Engine to the VMware Cloud Universal program, VMware and VMware partners can now offer Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as other VMware Cross-Cloud services, to help customers complete their digital transformation initiatives on time and with lower overall costs and risk.

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IT Systems Management

City of Williamsburg Selects Auvik to Modernize IT Infrastructure

Auvik Networks | June 08, 2022

Auvik, an award-winning provider of cloud-based network management software, today announced it has been working with the City of Williamsburg, Virginia to provide network monitoring and asset management services for automated, real-time network visibility. Williamsburg is one of Virginia’s oldest municipalities and one of the U.S.’ most popular historical destinations, renowned for its preservation of American colonial history. In addition to the city’s year-round residents the region receives an average of 1.5 million visitors per year. Ensuring superior digital service delivery is important for this bustling city, but with limited resources, Williamsburg’s IT Department had traditionally relied on basic tools like spreadsheets to log and track configuration changes, device statuses, and details of available IT assets. With zero visibility into their networks, the team had to spend hours to find the root causes behind any network issues. As part of the City Council’s Williamsburg of 2040 initiative, the IT Department was tasked with modernizing its infrastructure in order to better support the Williamsburg community and its vital tourism industry. Specifically, the IT team needed a solution that could automate many of its manual network management processes and provide real-time network visibility, so it could resolve issues quickly. “Network uptime is critical since it’s tied to so many services provided by the city, such as emergency services, citizen communications, public health access, tourism and recreation, and other aspects of daily business and citizen engagement. “By implementing Auvik, we’ve drastically reduced the amount of time spent on manually identifying and addressing network issues - improving network reliability and freeing our team up for more value-driven activities. Auvik has proven itself to be a life-saver many times over for us.” Mark Barham, Director of Information Technology, City of Williamsburg Prior to its work with Auvik, the IT team relied on support tickets for any network requests or incidents. Then, they’d have to go through lines of code for multiple devices, and refer to manual documentation to resolve the issue. With Auvik, Williamsburg has automated network inventory and documentation processes, resulting in cost and time savings and more optimized IT resources. Additionally, with improved network visibility, the IT team has not only been able to speed up troubleshooting but proactively mitigate network and device issues before they become a problem, with a streamlined troubleshooting process with a set of 50 proactive alerts and in-depth visibility. “Williamsburg may be the oldest municipality in Virginia, but the Williamsburg of today still requires a modern IT infrastructure,” said Marc Morin, CEO and co-founder, Auvik. “We’re proud to work with state and local governments like the City of Williamsburg to help achieve their digital transformation goals and deliver on the digital services citizens have come to expect in the 21st century.” About Auvik Networks Auvik makes network management easier. By automating and simplifying network management, our cloud-based software improves the efficiency and capacity of IT teams and helps protect their business from network risk. Auvik is one of the fastest growing North American technology companies, and is winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, Deloitte Fast 500, and was recognized as the #1 ranked Canadian company in the FT Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies. Visit www.auvik.com or follow @AuvikNetworks on Twitter. Auvik is a registered trademark of Auvik Networks Inc.

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5G: A Geostrategic sector for Algorithmic finance

moderndiplomacy | August 05, 2020

The last ones were days of increasing tensions between the two biggest economic superpowers, the USA and China. The geopolitical crescendo seems to become always more intense, and the two giants are trying to build up two strong alignments against one another in a competition that Bloomberg defines a “Cold War 2.0.” or a “Tech War”. The implementation of 5G technologies plays a fundamental role in this “rush to the infrastructures” also due to their linkages with the “High-Frequency Trading” world; the sector of contemporary finance based on always faster algorithms and huge Data Centres that require strong software and the analysis of tons and tons of information to predict stocks fluctuations hence “to do God’s work” as Lloyd Blankfein (the actual Senior Chairman of Goldman Sachs) said in 2009.

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IT Systems Management

VMware wins 2021 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year - Infrastructure Modernization

VMware | June 17, 2022

VMware, Inc. has won the Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year Award for Infrastructure Modernization for 2021. VMware was honored for its contributions to the Google Cloud ecosystem, including assisting mutual clients with their enterprise cloud transformations. With Google Cloud VMware Engine, VMware and Google Cloud are enabling customers in industries like retail, telco, and manufacturing to speed cloud modernization strategies for enterprise applications. “Organizations globally are benefitting from the close collaboration of VMware and Google Cloud as we help customers accelerate their cloud-first business strategies. This recognition from Google Cloud is a testament to our shared focus on delivering the best business outcomes for our customers by helping them modernize applications, workloads, infrastructure, and consumption models with Google Cloud VMware Engine,” said Gregory Lehrer, vice president, hyperscaler partnerships, VMware. “This award recognizes VMware’s commitment to customer success, and its delivery of innovative and impactful solutions on Google Cloud in Infrastructure Modernization. “We’re proud to recognize VMware as our Technology Partner of the Year for Infrastructure Modernization, and we look forward to continuing our work together building and creating business value for customers with cloud technologies.” Bronwyn Hastings, VP of Global ISV Partnerships and Channels, Google Cloud Customers may use Google Cloud VMware Engine to update their infrastructure, operations, and applications at a cheaper cost and with fewer risks. Customers can use the power of Google Cloud with this jointly created Google Cloud-delivered solution, which provides flexible on-demand capacity and full operational consistency with current on-premises VMware systems. With the addition of Google Cloud VMware Engine to the VMware Cloud Universal program, VMware and VMware partners can now offer Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as other VMware Cross-Cloud services, to help customers complete their digital transformation initiatives on time and with lower overall costs and risk.

Read More

IT Systems Management

City of Williamsburg Selects Auvik to Modernize IT Infrastructure

Auvik Networks | June 08, 2022

Auvik, an award-winning provider of cloud-based network management software, today announced it has been working with the City of Williamsburg, Virginia to provide network monitoring and asset management services for automated, real-time network visibility. Williamsburg is one of Virginia’s oldest municipalities and one of the U.S.’ most popular historical destinations, renowned for its preservation of American colonial history. In addition to the city’s year-round residents the region receives an average of 1.5 million visitors per year. Ensuring superior digital service delivery is important for this bustling city, but with limited resources, Williamsburg’s IT Department had traditionally relied on basic tools like spreadsheets to log and track configuration changes, device statuses, and details of available IT assets. With zero visibility into their networks, the team had to spend hours to find the root causes behind any network issues. As part of the City Council’s Williamsburg of 2040 initiative, the IT Department was tasked with modernizing its infrastructure in order to better support the Williamsburg community and its vital tourism industry. Specifically, the IT team needed a solution that could automate many of its manual network management processes and provide real-time network visibility, so it could resolve issues quickly. “Network uptime is critical since it’s tied to so many services provided by the city, such as emergency services, citizen communications, public health access, tourism and recreation, and other aspects of daily business and citizen engagement. “By implementing Auvik, we’ve drastically reduced the amount of time spent on manually identifying and addressing network issues - improving network reliability and freeing our team up for more value-driven activities. Auvik has proven itself to be a life-saver many times over for us.” Mark Barham, Director of Information Technology, City of Williamsburg Prior to its work with Auvik, the IT team relied on support tickets for any network requests or incidents. Then, they’d have to go through lines of code for multiple devices, and refer to manual documentation to resolve the issue. With Auvik, Williamsburg has automated network inventory and documentation processes, resulting in cost and time savings and more optimized IT resources. Additionally, with improved network visibility, the IT team has not only been able to speed up troubleshooting but proactively mitigate network and device issues before they become a problem, with a streamlined troubleshooting process with a set of 50 proactive alerts and in-depth visibility. “Williamsburg may be the oldest municipality in Virginia, but the Williamsburg of today still requires a modern IT infrastructure,” said Marc Morin, CEO and co-founder, Auvik. “We’re proud to work with state and local governments like the City of Williamsburg to help achieve their digital transformation goals and deliver on the digital services citizens have come to expect in the 21st century.” About Auvik Networks Auvik makes network management easier. By automating and simplifying network management, our cloud-based software improves the efficiency and capacity of IT teams and helps protect their business from network risk. Auvik is one of the fastest growing North American technology companies, and is winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, Deloitte Fast 500, and was recognized as the #1 ranked Canadian company in the FT Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies. Visit www.auvik.com or follow @AuvikNetworks on Twitter. Auvik is a registered trademark of Auvik Networks Inc.

Read More

5G: A Geostrategic sector for Algorithmic finance

moderndiplomacy | August 05, 2020

The last ones were days of increasing tensions between the two biggest economic superpowers, the USA and China. The geopolitical crescendo seems to become always more intense, and the two giants are trying to build up two strong alignments against one another in a competition that Bloomberg defines a “Cold War 2.0.” or a “Tech War”. The implementation of 5G technologies plays a fundamental role in this “rush to the infrastructures” also due to their linkages with the “High-Frequency Trading” world; the sector of contemporary finance based on always faster algorithms and huge Data Centres that require strong software and the analysis of tons and tons of information to predict stocks fluctuations hence “to do God’s work” as Lloyd Blankfein (the actual Senior Chairman of Goldman Sachs) said in 2009.

Read More

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