Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: November 13 Edition

Keeping up with today’s new technologies and the slew of products and services introduced to support them is a daunting task. Here is a brief list of some networking and infrastructure news of the week to help you navigate the choices.

Send your networking and infrastructure news to [email protected].

Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) announced the conclusion of five trial deployments of Wi-Fi 6 across diverse markets. The deployments show that Wi-Fi 6, with wider channels up to 160 MHz, and capacity up to 9.6 Gbps (compared to 3.5 Gbps in Wi-Fi 5), can enable nearly three times faster gigabit data rates. Wi-Fi 6 is also now proven to deliver better reliability, lower latency, more deterministic behavior, and better network efficiency, especially in environments with many connected devices. Wi-Fi 6 will help with congestion problems, increase densification of the network – helping to connect more devices and enable new use cases. The trials covering a range of different verticals and deployment scenarios demonstrate the key capabilities of Wi-Fi 6 in live networks, establishing its readiness for carrier Wi-Fi deployments around the world. This lays the foundation for the deployment of Wi-Fi 6 in enterprises, homes, schools, transportation hubs, travelers, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Schneider Electric announced the introduction of Dispatch Services and the expansion of its EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series. The Dispatch Services is a solution to help businesses manage their critical IT environments across sites. It provides advanced remote troubleshooting and on-site support for customers and partners monitoring with EcoStruxure IT Expert. The EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series offers is a new micro data center, targeted for rugged indoor environments, that offers a fast and simple way to deploy and manage edge computing infrastructure in challenging indoor spaces for industrial use. This micro data center is equipped with security features and built to withstand harsh indoor environments and applications with high levels of dust, moisture, and wide temperature variations. 

Instana announced the ability to monitor and trace applications using Google Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, and Storage technologies. Like other technologies supported by Instana, automated monitoring and tracing occur with zero configuration and no sampling. This is true for all three new pieces, including Google Cloud Run, the Container, and Function as a Service platform. While Instana has always managed applications running on Google Cloud Platform, this is the first time that platform-specific details for Google Cloud technologies are available through Instana’s automated monitoring and tracing. It’s also the first application monitoring tool to have complete automated support for application and infrastructure performance monitoring for Google Cloud Run applications. Another important platform Instana is debuting monitoring for in this announcement is Google Pub/Sub messaging middleware. It’s critical to Ops and Development teams to see how applications perform across messaging systems, including the performance of message queues. Having PubSub support will make an already quick troubleshooting process with Instana even faster and easier. The last piece of today’s announcement includes the ability to monitor and trace requests into the Google Cloud Storage platform. Having visibility all the way to back-end storage allows Instana to provide a complete picture of applications and transactions to its users.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a new HPE GreenLake cloud services and partnerships for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that support organizations’ expanding remote workforces and provide essential business continuity. The new HPE GreenLake for VDI cloud services provide organizations with a proven set of technologies to adapt to a rapidly growing remote employee population through simplified management, faster time to productivity, more security and control, and cost savings. The new cloud services also leverage technologies from key HPE partners, including Citrix, Nutanix, NVIDIA, and VMware.

Scale Computing introduced new HC3 infrastructure appliances that deliver the extra processing power of Nvidia GPUs. For power-users on virtual desktops or computing-intensive applications for design or analytics, the HC1250DFG and HC5250DFG appliances engage high-performance GPUs to provide increased speed and processing efficiency. Scale Computing is the only technology provider delivering high-performance applications from the data center to the edge on the same software platform and interface. As remote work becomes a long term reality, organizations are getting systems in place to support all remote users, whether they leverage applications in the cloud or work with very high-performance applications that require dedicated GPU and high frame buffer requirements for remote users hosted on-premises. These HC3 hyperconverged appliances are designed to enhance support for performance-intensive use cases such as high-density Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, 3D Imaging/Modeling, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and GIS. With flexible deployment options from one appliance to clusters of multiple appliances, these appliances provide a highly-available, high-performance, hyperconverged virtualization platform.

BT announced the launch of a new generation of cloud-optimized managed network services to expand its offerings of software-based connectivity solutions. BT’s new managed service is based on generic hardware capable of supporting a choice of software-based networking solutions from different vendors. The service, based on VMware SD-WAN, is available to customers globally and already in a live deployment. VMware SD-WAN is a foundational component of the VMware Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. The BT service can be managed or co-managed remotely by BT on its new digital service platform. This gives customers a single view of their entire network and a choice of management controls. 

Concentric Inc. announced the latest enhancements to its Semantic Intelligence data access governance solution that addresses the industry's continued challenges with unstructured data security threats by autonomously identifying risk created by inappropriate access, sharing, and management of unstructured data. Concentric’s Semantic Intelligence solution now offers patent-pending Risk Distance analysis for autonomous assessment of file and activity-based risk. Risk Distance uniquely uses advanced deep learning technology (a type of artificial intelligence) to find at-risk data by comparing each file to its peers. These peer file comparisons give security professionals for the first time the highly targeted and actionable guidance they need to finally secure their business-critical unstructured data without hard-to-maintain rules or complex configurations.

cPacket Networks has worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to integrate with its newly launched AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) service, which makes it easy to deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual appliances. cPacket solutions also integrate with the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Traffic Mirroring service. cPacket cVu-V is a multi-cloud virtual packet broker supporting both in-line and traffic-mirroring modes in the cloud. GWLB, with ingress routing, front-ends the cVu-V providing seamless network intelligence, security delivery, and brokering services to cloud-native tools. With the integrated solution, network packet data can be delivered effectively and securely in north-south directions across the internet, availability zones, and VPCs. cPacket cCloud solution provides actionable insights built on rich packet data analysis such as stateful analysis for TCP and real-time UDP applications for application experience monitoring, as well as access to packet data for security delivery and forensics.

ODVA, the international standards development and trade organization, announced that HARTING, one of the world’s leading suppliers of industrial connectivity technology, has become a principal member of ODVA alongside Cisco Systems, Endress+Hauser, Honeywell, Omron, Rockwell Automation, and Schneider Electric. HARTING’s enhanced participation in ODVA reflects its growth in expertise and leadership in industrial Ethernet and connectivity throughout the automation industry, as well as the company’s commitment to EtherNet/IP products. HARTING is working to drive the advancement of industrial Ethernet as a part of IIoT and Industry 4.0, and its increased participation in ODVA will aid efforts to identify and standardize different technologies and devices that will be needed for the automation industry to successfully implement IIoT.

Park Place Technologies announced the acquisition of Curvature, Inc., an IT support, products, and services company. The acquisition provides new opportunities to introduce Curvature’s customers to Discover, Monitor, Support, and Optimize (DMSO), a fully integrated approach to managing critical infrastructure. In 2020, Park Place introduced and developed DMSO in response to customers’ needs to maximize uptime, create cost efficiencies, enable greater infrastructure control and visibility, and enhance asset performance.

If your company has networking and infrastructure news, send your announcements to [email protected].