In the run up to NGON 2017 in Nice, the hype machines from optical vendors have been spinning up in anticipation of one of the most reported shows in our industry. In particular, there have been several announcements around 200G recently – many touting “first” or “lowest power” or “best performance”. It is important that…

We deal with procurement departments every day. It’s a fact of modern day corporate life. But this week, I’ve had to respond to so many RFPs asking for “blue disco balls,” (my metaphoric name for a specific kind of middle management error that most vendors, suppliers and even solutions providers love most), I’m thinking about…

There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be…

Imagine if the design of your electrical supply was optimised to apply the biggest possible voltage and current to anything that was plugged in. That would clearly be ridiculous! Imagine if the design of your kitchen tap was optimised to deliver as much water as possible at the highest possible pressure the moment you turned…

If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and is being replaced with a gleaming new residential tower. Parking lots have been ripped up…

As first reported by CNBC on Wednesday, retail and e-commerce giant Wal-Mart notified some of its technology partners that they need to move their information assets away from Amazon Web Services if they want to continue doing business. This move certainly comes as no surprise to many, as the two companies are long-standing rivals in…

On 26 December 2006, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck off the southwest coast of Taiwan. This was the Hengchun earthquake, and the quake and its aftershocks resulted in six of the seven submarine cables serving Hong Kong being cut, severely disrupting Internet services on the Special Administrative Region. PCCW, the largest Internet operator in Hong Kong,…

Standards… what a boring, old fashioned and backwards oriented term. How can the representative of a vendor that claims to be open, elastic and forward thinking use it in a headline? Be honest… this was one of the thoughts that ran through your mind while reading the title. Now relax and sit back, the following…

Tokens are a new business model that’s emerging for open source. It’s a new way to raise capital by selling tokens through an ICO (initial coin offering). If the project succeeds, its token will appreciate in value, giving early adopters a nice return. … The token is a cryptocurrency that is used to both improve…

Multicloud deployments are a major IT focus, with a whopping 85 percent of enterprises reporting that they have a multicloud strategy in 2017. That’s up from 82 percent in 2016 (RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report, February 2017). A big difficulty in pursuing a multicloud strategy is the complexity of managing different storage implementations,…