Drew Robb

Data centers, by their very nature, have been centralized affairs. Instead of having a server in every office, or a small server room on every floor, it is far more efficient to have one data center to serve the entire building or campus.  Taking that a stage further, it is far more efficient to have […]

Data center storage is a fascinating area.  On the one hand, there are compliance mandates about storing certain material and never deleting it. There are also retention policies about how long data is to be kept for and afterward discarded.  But the value of data should also be considered. Most data, it turns out, is […]

Hardware has always defined the data center. You looked into a big room and there stood aisle after aisle of servers, storage, and networking equipment. Along the walls were massive cooling systems and power management hardware, such as switches, batteries, and more.  For resilience and disaster recovery (DR), the solution was simple. You build a […]

The world of data center equipment has been turned on its head over the past two years due to issues surrounding the global supply chain.  It no longer is a case of calling up a vendor to order data center equipment and expecting it to arrive a short time later.  Here are some of the […]

Computer vision is one facet of artificial intelligence (AI) that is all about helping computer systems understand the visual world and distinguish objects within it. Deep learning (DL) models are developed, which then need to be trained to recognize faces, objects, and the many different categories of digital images. Computer vision has long suffered from […]

Voice recognition has not had an easy pathway to broad application. Early systems were incredibly buggy. Even the broadly used systems suffer from the occasional problem. Case in point: My wife asked on app to phone me and was given a list of the nearest dog kennels. But by and large, the technology is getting there. […]

The rise of the cloud, virtualization, and especially containers, has exposed some weaknesses in traditional approaches to networking. Security issues probably rank the highest among networking challenges. But further problems are related to data consistency, resiliency, and availability.   Kubernetes networking has addressed many of these challenges. It enables real-time communication between containers and other applications. […]

Wireless and cellular networking is so popular than landlines may soon become obsolete. 40% of users have stopped using a landline phone completely according to a survey from Uswitch. Demographically, 95% of over-65-year-olds still have a traditional phone while about half of under-25s don’t have one installed. About three quarters of homes still have a […]

With the surging popularity of the cloud, and the hyperscalers appearing to conquer all before them, it might be surprising to learn that the data center market in general is alive and well. Both the local data centers as well as hyperscalers are thriving. Enterprises continue to operate data centers and most have no intention […]

Software-defined architectures are all about decoupling the software from the underlying hardware, i.e., you don’t have to buy a proprietary box to take advantage of the features of the software. This was the traditional model.  As time went on, though, being locked into one vendor lost its appeal. A great many software companies began providing […]