Even before the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the way much of America conducted business, having enough connectivity speed was crucial in today’s increasingly tech-driven world.
As the pandemic now stretches past 18 months and Zoom meetings have become commonplace along with a remote workforce often sharing large files and cloud-based applications, a lack of bandwidth can be a deal breaker for your business.
Data Center demand has surged in the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years.
“In just a few months’ time, the COVID-19 crisis brought about years of change in the way companies in all sectors and regions do business,” said a McKinsey & Company report. “According to a new McKinsey Global Survey of executives, their companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. And the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years.”
It’s been 30 years since fiber optic cables ushered in a new networking era that fueled the rise of the internet and our modern digital world.
Fiber optic cables, with their ability to transmit more data at a higher speed, became the backbone of the internet, and during the COVID-19 pandemic became a lifeline with work, school and social life shifting online. Fiber optic connections were no longer a luxury but a necessity.
It is hard to imagine navigating the COVID-19 pandemic without the internet which allowed the world to work, learn, play, and connect while staying physically remote.
A decade ago, if your boss told you that your “head was in the clouds” it probably meant you were goofing off on company time, but today we all have our heads in the clouds as businesses have migrated much of their workloads to “the cloud”.
When it comes to data center terminology you may know DC from your CR, but you most likely are more invested in your ROI rather than understanding cold aisles vs. hot aisles. DCs or data centers have their own terminology even from CRs or computer rooms.
Your return on investment or ROI on a data center may very well be a function of data center design including factors such as cold aisles – aisles where racks face forward into the aisle and airflow is directed so that it can enter the front of the racks in a an efficient manner – and hot aisles -- aisles between two rows of racks where the heat from the back of the equipment discharges.
Our concept of data centers has shifted from the early days of computing when a “data center” was simply a “computer room” where a massive mainframe – some weighing 30 tons! – was housed. Data centers kept on evolving, adapting to colocation services, virtual servers, cloud computing and edge networks. “M
As 5G mobile technology rolls out across the country networks are responding with seemingly contrasting decentralized edge computing and centralized C-RAN architecture that, surprisingly, can not only coexist, but can take advantage of existing infrastructure.
Since the first 32GFC Gen 6 Fibre Channel devices for storage area networking went into production in 2016 the amount of world-wide data has increased by four times. The industry, led by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), is prepared for the next bump in bandwidth with the FCIA predicting that “2021 will be the year of 64GFC Gen 7.”
We live, work, and play in a connected world but that would not be possible if there were not a set of standards to guide the installation, maintenance and testing of products and technologies.