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Thursday, December 1st, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | Driving IoT Transformation with Smart Network Considerations Heitor Faroni is Director of Solutions Marketing, Network Business at ALE. The hype surrounding the potential of IoT shows no sign of subsiding, and now IoT is morphing from a smart concept to reality – investment bank Goldman Sachs cites IoT as a $7 trillion opportunity by 2020 and set to have an impact at every stage in the production and distribution of products. The “smarts” are now on parade: smart cities with their smart grids and smart transportation systems and smart cars, all demonstrating the benefits of machine to machine (M2M) connectivity. Consistent connectivity now becomes critical to how effectively these devices will perform, and this connectivity relies on having the right network infrastructure in place. There are four fundamental network requirements to enable businesses to take full advantage of the transformations that IoT will drive: Broaden Your Horizons of Network VisibilityThe sprawling nature of IoT requires comprehensive management of the entire network, wired and wireless, right to the edge as devices – smart and not so smart – seek access and data transfer to core network components. This is why the switch is key. All the connected devices and sensors are transmitting data on the network, but sending data from devices straight to the data center can be inefficient, cause bottlenecks on the network, and impact performance. An intelligent network needs to extend functionality right to the edge so data can be analysed and processed on the way to the core, or from device to device. To manage the increased flow of IoT traffic, switches at the edge of the network will need to offer enhanced security and integrated analytics. Are You Fit For IoT?It is virtually impossible for a network that has been installed and upgraded on an ad-hoc basis – often with a separate solution for voice, data, wired and wireless – to deliver on the promise of IoT. There are many enterprise IT systems out there that are simply not fit for IoT purpose. A single converged network is fundamental to an IoT environment and guarantees a greater level of interoperability and support for IoT applications and devices. Smarter Feedback for Smarter DecisionsPredictive analysis and reporting functions are vital in enabling enterprises to use big data to build proactive, data-driven, decision making. Analysis of big data can also provide valuable insight into network operations. Predictive network analytics tools delivered alongside network management systems provide reporting utilities that offer detailed network performance indicators. This can be as simple as automatically prioritizing data traffic, determining whether a new service or application being rolling out will exceed current network capacity, or that every Thursday afternoon the R&D department needs extra bandwidth to support its data heavy processes. Defending Dumber DevicesNot every device is smart. Poorly secured ‘smart’ devices such as smart watches and activity trackers pose a threat to essential network security – as do traditional ‘dumb’ devices such as door locks. Simply monitoring and controlling the flow of packets to and from IoT devices is not enough to guarantee security. All devices right out to the network edge must be made smarter by the network management and the switches on the network. Comprehensive Preparation For IoTIoT offers the chance for enterprises to deliver new applications and support deployments with millions of endpoints by providing real-time insights that help enterprises capture, understand and make more effective use of device data. But it will also bring new challenges and expectations. The key lies in having one converged network supported by state of the art switches that enable an enterprise to remotely manage, monitor and safeguard all devices, software and data to provide IT departments with in-depth intelligence to make smarter decisions. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 5:27p | The Network Gear Economy Is Becoming Commoditized People attending Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference in Las Vegas finish their dinners early so they can return to the main stage, just to hear the company’s celebrated VP and distinguished engineer, James Hamilton, spew ideas in what would be a stream-of-consciousness monologue were it not for the presence of gently guiding slides. During a late evening keynote session on Tuesday, Hamilton introduced attendees to his company’s custom network routers, explaining that no single vendor of vertically-integrated network gear is capable of responding to architecture-centered network problems within a timeframe any narrower than six months. The solution, he explained, was for Amazon engineers to collaborate with multiple, competing manufacturers of network gear along a loosely coupled stack of technologies. Those technologies would enable Amazon to produce simpler, more versatile custom routers adhering to standards of its own — even the less universally accepted ones, like 25 Gbps Ethernet instead of 10-gig or 40-gig. Attendees leaving Hamilton’s talk early might have come away thinking he was advising them to go build global retailing empires of their own, just to give them the leverage they needed to conduct negotiations with the Broadcoms and Marvells of the world. But just then, Hamilton suggested something potentially profound: The ASICs that Amazon ordered to power its custom routers are becoming cheap. Their cheapness enables them to be ordered in bulk. And with those competing network stack vendors’ products becoming more open, perhaps one need not be an Amazon to build a more moderate data center using custom networking gear. “Vertically-integrated networking equipment, where the ASICs, the hardware, these protocol stacks [were] supplied by single companies, is [like] the way the mainframe used to dominate servers,” said Hamilton.
For any given server size, Hamilton explained, the overhead of networking required to service that node is rising. That wasn’t the case, he said, back when network equipment was artificially expensive. In a more commodity-driven economy, this no longer can be the case. Amazon’s custom-built routers are built with the assistance of the company’s own protocol development team, he said. This fact is responsible for what Hamilton characterized as a steep reduction in costs. When a vendor is bound to supporting the protocol needs of a vast plurality of customers, he argued, the complexity of the resulting product renders its reliability, in practice, unmaintainable. “And the next release comes out, and they don’t test all that stuff that people like me ask for, because nobody uses it anyway,” the AWS VP continued. “And it doesn’t work! It just doesn’t work!” By comparison, Amazon’s protocols only have to serve Amazon’s requirements. It’s the flip side of the argument in favor of standards, which in the older economy were vitally necessary to ensure interoperability. In certain facets of Amazon’s network, standards are absolutely not required at all. In fact, Hamilton argued, the demands on standard protocols are so high that they end up working against customers with Amazon’s scale. Later, Hamilton showed off one of AWS’ ASICs of choice: a custom-built Broadcom Tomahawk. Because the vertical networking stack is breaking loose from the ties that bind, he said, custom ASICs are becoming a market. And that means costs are coming down — for everyone. “These are absolute monsters!” he exclaimed. “This is a 3.2-terabit part. What does that mean? It’s 128 ports of 25-gig. All ports can be running flat out, with no blocking. It’ll flow at 3.2 terabits at the same time. . . Why do I like that? Non-blocking is a wonderful place to be, but the real reason I like it is, there’s a healthy ecosystem. Cavium, Mellanox, Broadcom, Marvell, Barefoot, and Innovium are all building parts. There’s 6-terabit and 13-terabit parts coming. And they will be around the same price, in just the same way the server was.” Hamilton described an environment for networking gear whose situation was similar to the bright, beautiful world that Intel brought forth, when Moore’s Law was in its heyday. (I would call it a new stack, but that phrase has been taken.) |
| 7:58p | Amazon Unveils Image Recognition, Voice-Activated Cloud Services BLOOMBERG – Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition service, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly and “Lex,” which will let customers build conversational apps similar to its Alexa voice-activated platform. Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of the Amazon Web Services unit, introduced the new cloud computing products Wednesday at the company’s fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas. He pitched Amazon’s wide breadth of services and ability to customize them for clients, while poking fun at a company Amazon considers a cloud pretender — Oracle Corp. A slide in Jassy’s presentation that highlighted the “ability to see through the hand-waving and bombast” featured a photo of Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison popping up intermittently. The event drew people from financial services, health care, gaming and other industries interested in learning more about how to use cloud computing, and let Amazon flex its muscles as a market leader in the fast-growing industry. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc. Amazon is trying to maintain its lead over Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and IBM as more companies transition from using their servers to renting computing power and data space hosted remotely, which they access via the internet. Movie-service Netflix Inc. is a prominent example of a web company powered by Amazon Web Services. Capital One Financial Corp. announced Tuesday it would transition more of its data to Amazon, highlighting growing interest of the financial sector in the speed and flexibility of cloud computing. Amazon’s Web Services division is the Seattle-based company’s fastest-growing and most profitable source of revenue, offsetting regular quarterly losses from its e-commerce operation. Cloud computing revenue is projected to top $10 billion this year. Amazon’s new AI services will let customers create applications hosted on Amazon Web Services that understand what’s displayed in photos and what users are saying. Microsoft offers the ability to bake similar artificial intelligence into applications run on its Azure cloud services and Google earlier this year launched business tools and products based on its own AI technology to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services. |
| 8:31p | Amazon Promotes New Tool to Protect Cloud Customers From Attacks BLOOMBERG — Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a new security tool for cloud customers, part of a slew of product announcements this week designed to fend off competition from Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others in the fast-growing cloud computing market. Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced Amazon Shield, new layers of protection designed against service interruptions like the cyber attack that took down top websites and affected some Amazon Web Services customers in October. “This will really help you protect yourselves even against the largest and most sophisticated attacks we’ve seen,” he said on Thursday at AWS re:Invent, a conference in Las Vegas that drew 32,000 attendees. Making the cloud secure is a major part of persuading companies to shift their data and computing workloads from on-premise servers they control to rented resources accessed via the internet. Renting servers through the cloud offers lower costs, greater speed and flexibility. AWS has clients in a broad range of sectors, including health care, financial services, retail and transportation, highlighting rapid adoption of this approach to computing. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc. Vogel’s announcement followed Wednesday’s unveiling of an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps that highlighted Amazon’s push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings. Amazon’s Web Services division is the Seattle-based company’s fastest-growing and most profitable source of revenue, offsetting regular quarterly losses from its e-commerce operation. Cloud computing revenue is projected to top $10 billion this year. The security tool was reported earlier by TechCrunch. |
| 8:37p | Google, Facebook Targeted by Indonesia in Push for More Tax BLOOMBERG – Indonesia is widening its tax net to target global technology giants like Google and Facebook Inc., a strategy that’s raising red flags for fear it may deter foreign investment. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati is seeking to squeeze more revenue out of an economy that’s been hit by weak commodity prices and subdued demand from China, Indonesia’s biggest trading partner. Halfway through a tax amnesty plan, the government has raised almost 100 trillion rupiah ($7.4 billion) in income from penalties and is now turning its focus to companies like Apple Inc., Twitter Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. The latest salvo from the tax office underscores the challenge President Joko Widodo faces in funding his ambitious infrastructure goals, and the risk that it may backfire by scaring off investors. “We’re just looking for fair treatment,” said Lin Neumann, managing director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia. “The concern is that if companies feel that they’re spending an enormous amount of time in negotiations over tax assessments that go beyond what they believe they have agreed to in their contracts and under the law, then that can hurt foreign investment.” If companies “end up in a kind of red-tape situation, that is not conducive to making plans for growth,” he said. “Ultimately, that situation hurts Indonesia.” The chamber helps to promote U.S. businesses in Indonesia, and Google is among its members. Budget PressureIndonesia had initially put Google’s tax and penalty bill at 5 trillion rupiah, but could lower that to 1 trillion rupiah in a settlement that may come as soon as this week, according to Muhammad Haniv, head of the special taxpayers office with the Finance Ministry’s Tax Directorate-General. He said last week that Facebook owed as much as 3 trillion rupiah. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Yahoo! didn’t respond to requests for comment. Taj Meadows, Google’s head of policy communications for Asia Pacific, declined to comment, and referred to an earlier statement that said the company had paid all applicable taxes and will continue to fully cooperate with the Indonesian government. Indrawati — a former World Bank managing director who tried to clean up the tax system during her previous tenure as finance minister — needs to keep the budget deficit below the legal limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product. That goal is complicated by an economy that expanded last year at the slowest pace since 2009 and is forecast to grow only slightly better at about 5 percent this year. The central bank projects growth of 5 percent to 5.4 percent in 2017. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report this week that while the Widodo government had embarked on a string of reforms over the past year to “improve the business environment, streamline investment and liberalize inward investment”, the fiscal balance was deteriorating owing to slower growth and low commodity prices. Tax Settlement“While an ongoing tax amnesty may help ease this constraint in the short term, in the longer term tax revenues, which are very low, will have to be boosted,” it said. “Policies are needed to address the narrow tax base, the low number of taxpayers and weak compliance.” Indonesia’s tax agency’s Haniv said last week a letter had been sent to Facebook’s offices in Ireland seeking a meeting, as well as data on its operations in Indonesia, where it has 88 million users. Google has faced tax investigations elsewhere, including in the U.K., where tax authorities reached a 130 million-pound ($162 million) settlement with the company’s parent Alphabet Inc. in January. Alex Cobham, director of research at the Tax Justice Network in London, who closely followed the Google probe in the U.K., said the case confirmed “just how embedded among multinationals is the practice of separating sales, and the jurisdiction where they take place, from the profits that those sales give rise to.” Under new OECD rules, all major multinationals are now required to produce country-by-country data on their economic activity, profits and taxes paid, he said. “At present, most multinationals do not publish sufficient information about their Indonesian operations, or operations in other countries, to make an equivalent calculation,” he said. The resistance of companies to this kind of disclosure, “reflects just how worried they are about the public seeing the scale of misalignment between profits and the location of real economic activity,” he said. |
“If you look at where the networking world is, it’s sort of where the server world was 20 or 30 years ago. It started out with, you buy a mainframe. . . and that’s it. And it comes from all one company. The networking world is the same place. And we know what happened in the server world: As soon as you chop up these vertical stacks, you’ve got companies focused on every layer, and they’re innovating together, and they’re all competing. You can get great things happening.”| << Previous Day |
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