Cisco has released patches for several series of Nexus switches to fix a vulnerability that could allow attackers to hide the execution of bash commands on the underlying operating system.

Although the flaw is rated with moderate severity because it requires administrative credentials to exploit, it has been exploited in the wild since April, showing that attackers don’t target just critical or high-risk flaws.

Tracked as CVE-2024-20399, the flaw is caused by insufficient validation of arguments passed with configuration commands to the command line interface of NX-OS software that powers various series of Cisco switches: MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches, Nexus 3000 Series Switches, Nexus 5500 Platform Switches, Nexus 5600 Platform Switches, Nexus 6000 Series Switches, Nexus 7000 Series Switches and Nexus 9000 Series Switches in standalone NX-OS mode.

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Nokia has announced a $2.3 billion deal to acquire Infinera, a San Jose, Calif.-based firm specializing in optical networking and optical semiconductors, in the hope of increasing its North American customer base. 

The acquisition will “strengthen the company’s technology leadership in optical and increase exposure to webscale customers, the fastest growing segment of the market,” Nokia said in a statement announcing the deal on Friday. “This transaction, along with the recently announced sale of Submarine Networks, will create a reshaped network infrastructure built on three strong pillars of fixed networks, IP networks and optical networks,” the Finnish company said.

Analysts were cautiously optimistic. Multi-billion-dollar acquisitions have a mixed history of success, usually due to company culture conflicts. The pattern is typically that the larger acquiring firm admits that it needs help in an area and then acquires a firm that is an expert in that space. But then the acquiring company often tries to reshape the acquired firm to the parent company’s culture, which undermines the whole point of the acquisition.

Ajeet Das, director of network infrastructure for market analyst IDC, said that although the history of similar acquisitions is sobering, he thinks that this one may do well.

First, he pointed to both companies having “minimal product overlap.” 

Efficiency

Due to the extreme data and power demands of generative AI and cloud environments — demands that are expected to soar over the next few years — Das sees many of the largest enterprises needing options beyond what they have today. Das is particularly concerned about power consumption: Optical communication consumes a lot of power, he said, but “Infinera has products that are far more efficient in terms of power consumption.”

“For Nokia to really make a difference in the optical networking area, they need the scale and a footprint in the data center,” Das said. “Nokia is pretty strong with routers and switches whereas Infinera is strong on optical product. And the enterprise absolutely needs both.”

Richard Kramer, managing director at Arete Research in London, tracks Nokia’s financial performance. He said that some of Nokia’s return on investment from this deal will be impacted by what firm customer contracts Infinera is bringing to Nokia.

“It will really depend on whether [Infinera] has hyperscale deals locked up with new products,” Kramer said.

Nokia is offering to pay Infinera shareholders a premium of 28% over Infinera’s share price at the close of business on June 26, and a 37% premium over the average price over the last six months, with at least 70% of the consideration paid in cash. Nokia’s board of directors has said it will accelerate Nokia’s share buyback program to offset the dilution from the deal.

In a statement, Nokia said, “Infinera has built a solid presence in the North America optical market, representing ~60% of its sales, which will improve Nokia’s optical scale in the region and complement Nokia’s strong positions in APAC, EMEA and Latin America.” Nokia’s statement pointed out that even the combined company will not have a strong position in China, which is an ongoing concern with US officials.  

“Internet content providers — ICP or webscale as Nokia typically calls this segment — make up more than 30% of Infinera’s sales. With recent wins in line systems and pluggables, Infinera is well established in this fast-growing market,” the Nokia statement said. “Infinera has also recently been developing high-speed and low-power optical components for use in intra-data center (ICE-D) applications and that are particularly suited to AI workloads, which can become a very attractive long-term growth opportunity. Overall, the acquisition offers an opportunity for a step change in Nokia’s penetration into webscale customers.”

Nokia plans to close the deal in the first half of 2025, subject to approval from Infinera shareholders and various regulators.

Nvidia is at risk of facing charges from the French antitrust authority for alleged anti-competitive behavior, a potential first in regulatory actions against the AI chip giant, according to a report by Reuters.

This development follows a series of raids conducted last September by France’s competition authority targeting Nvidia and the US Department of Justice’s plans to investigate the company alongside other major tech firms.

The recent surge in demand for AI chips, catalyzed by the launch of generative AI applications like ChatGPT, has propelled Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company.

The rapid expansion has drawn regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the US. In a filing last year, Nvidia acknowledged that it had attracted global regulatory attention.

Potential for broader market Impact

Analysts suggest that the French antitrust charges against Nvidia could have a significant impact on the global AI and cloud computing markets. For instance, it would allow competitors like AMD and Intel to gain a larger market share.

“This scenario could also lead to increased scrutiny from other jurisdictions, resulting in more investigations and potential charges against other dominant tech companies,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. “Consequently, companies might explore alternative partnerships and technologies to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, fostering innovation and potentially establishing new industry standards and practices.”

Regulatory pressures could also compel tech giants in the semiconductor and AI sectors to implement strategic operational changes. These could include efforts to enhance transparency and compliance through more detailed reporting and closer engagements with regulators.

“Diversification of product offerings is also anticipated, aimed at reducing dependency on high-margin products that draw regulatory scrutiny, potentially expanding into AI software and cloud services,” Rawat added. “Strategic partnerships and acquisitions may play a role in fortifying market positions while adhering to regulations, such as acquiring firms with complementary technologies or collaborating with competitors to establish industry standards.”

Impact on AI-driven services

Regulatory actions could impact the availability of AI-driven services for customers. R&D efforts may slow down as companies grapple with compliance challenges and legal issues, potentially delaying the rollout of new AI technologies and services.

“Moreover, the costs associated with compliance and potential fines could drive up prices for AI products and services, making them less accessible to consumers,” Rawat said. “Conversely, regulatory scrutiny might spur a shift in R&D priorities towards less regulated areas, fostering innovation in new sectors or applications of AI. This diversification could broaden the scope and benefits of AI technologies.”

However, increased regulatory oversight could also improve consumer protections, ensuring that AI services are safe, reliable, and fair. This could enhance consumer confidence and encourage wider adoption of AI technologies despite potential cost increases, Rawat added.

With the growth of artificial intelligence in data centers of all types comes not only requirements for applications and services, but the need to cool the power-hungry systems that run those workloads. With that in mind, Lenovo has announced some new enterprise hybrid AI solutions, and cooling technologies to deal with the heat they generate.

AI workloads in particular are driving up data center densities, with power consumption now topping 20 kilowatts per rack. Air-cooling systems struggle to keep up at this point, so data centers are increasingly turning to liquid cooling — almost one-quarter now have at least some workloads cooled this way.

Lenovo has offered such technology for a while, now, and has just introduced the sixth generation of its liquid cooling platform, Neptune. This now extends its reach through its ThinkSystem V3 and V4 server portfolios with options for direct open-loop water cooling for CPUs. The new generation also adds a new cold plate design for CPUs and accelerators to maximize heat extraction, new on-memory cooling for high performance computing systems, and warm water cooling that allows hot water reuse in a facility.

“For large language models that are really taking hold of the market today, sustainability is going to be a huge hurdle for them. And that’s where Neptune liquid cool portfolio comes in, and helps [companies] achieve both balancing their sustainability goals with their mission to go develop and bring new AI technology to market,” said Robert Daigle, Lenovo’s director of global AI business, at a media briefing on the new products.

For companies that can’t install liquid cooling their own data centers, Lenovo has partnered with colocation provider Digital Reality to provide liquid cooling in more than half of its global data centers.

Jeremy Roberts, senior analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “AI is subject to heavy scrutiny for its carbon footprint, and a solution — even if it does end up being more complex or expensive — that can reduce that carbon footprint in a meaningful way could be meaningfully beneficial for the purchaser.”

Liquid cooling is a great idea in theory, and has been around for a while, but vendors have struggled with the practicalities, he said: “This all sounds good, but it’s historically been difficult to do in practice. There’s a reason it’s niche and why Lenovo is pitching this as a new mainstream.”

There are a number of issues around the technology that companies need to consider, said Roberts. To begin with, most workloads don’t require a complex liquid cooling infrastructure. AI workloads might, and that’s probably why Lenovo is pushing this, he said. But liquid in data centers is not generally a good thing if it can be avoided, and managing plumbing could be a challenge.

“Do I see large-scale adoption in the short term? Probably not,” he concluded. “But do I see the need for this type of cooling solution increase as computing needs grow? That feels more likely.”

New AI services

At the same time as it unveiled the new cooling systems, Lenovo also announced new AI services running on Nvidia chips and software.

New services include Lenovo AI Fast Start for Nvidia NIM inference microservices, to give developers an easy to use and manageable containerized inference engine for Nvidia’s AI foundation models; AI Fast Start for Innovators to help companies build AI use cases with the combination of any of the 165+ turnkey Lenovo AI innovators program solutions; and upcoming AI advisory services, which will include training and tools to help customers engage and enable their employees.

There’s also Lenovo AI Discover to help customers assess their AI readiness, offering recommendations across the realms of people, process, technology, and security.

It also introduced new Fast Start services, some with broad appeal and some for extremely niche markets, including an AI-powered kiosk with a virtual employee to serve customers; a video-based analytics system for improving manufacturing efficiency and compliance; a video building block for self-checkout and retail loss prevention; and an AI-based system for reducing bird strikes at airports.

Researchers have uncovered a serious remote code execution vulnerability in the Open Secure Shell (OpenSSH) server that could let unauthenticated attackers obtain a root shell on servers and take them over. Through internet scanning services like Shodan and Censys, Qualys researchers identified over 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH instances that were exposed to the internet.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-6387, has been dubbed regreSSHion because it is a regression of an older flaw — CVE-2006-5051 — patched in the popular software 18 years ago.

“A regression in this context means that a flaw, once fixed, has reappeared in a subsequent software release, typically due to changes or updates that inadvertently reintroduce the issue,” said Qualys researchers who discovered the vulnerability. “This incident highlights the crucial role of thorough regression testing to prevent the reintroduction of known vulnerabilities into the environment. This regression was introduced in October 2020 (OpenSSH 8.5p1).”

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The new Nutanix is virtually unrecognizable from the company that created the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market in 2011. Nutanix has pivoted from selling rigid, preconfigured appliances to offering enterprise customers a flexible, software-defined platform for managing hybrid, multi-cloud environments. 

“As businesses have digitally transformed and IT operations have had to evolve to support the applications and workloads required for these transformations, Nutanix’s solution has also evolved. HCI today is not the HCI of yesterday,” says Matt Kimball, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Nutanix’s HCI solution enables the movement of apps and data from on-prem to multiple clouds – seamlessly, securely and easily.” 

IDC analyst Dave Pearson adds: “Their transition reflects what we’ve seen in the market in terms of hybrid cloud and hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Nutanix’s strategy of providing a consistent experience across datacenter/edge/cloud or dedicated/shared infrastructure is attractive to customers that have been affected by cloud cost surprises, regulatory compliance, security, privacy, or governance issues.” 

In addition to internal reinvention, Nutanix recently signed key partnerships with some unlikely on-and-off competitors: Dell, Cisco and HPE. The deals are aimed at enabling customers to gain the benefits of Nutanix’s cloud platform without having to swap out the underlying server hardware or change server vendors. 

And Nutanix is aggressively courting VMware customers who might be open to jumping ship in the wake of VMware’s purchase by Broadcom and some of the unpopular moves that have followed, such as potentially costly changes to licensing terms and disruptions to channel relationships. 

The road ahead for Nutanix holds both opportunities and some peril. The company is well positioned to drive additional revenue off the recent partnerships. It’s less clear that enterprise customers are really going to abandon VMware in significant numbers.

And despite creating a lot of buzz around HCI, Nutanix has never had a profitable year; and has only had one profitable quarter ever. It reported a loss of $207.2 million in fiscal 2023 and is on track to be in the red for fiscal 2024, which ends in July. Plus, with annual revenue at roughly $1.8 billion, Nutanix remains a relatively small player in a sea of behemoths, making it vulnerable to a takeover. Nutanix stock jumped almost 25% last December on takeover rumors, but to date no clear suitor has emerged. 

What does Nutanix offer today? 

Enterprises moving forward with digital transformation initiatives are looking to modernize their IT infrastructure to boost performance, increase agility and availability, improve ease of use and lower costs. For many enterprises, this means moving to software-defined infrastructure that has the flexibility to support bare-metal, virtualized, and container-based environments.

“Nutanix enables customers to modernize their data centers, unify all their clouds, and run any business critical and other application at any scale on software-defined infrastructure,” according to IDC. 

The company’s core HCI platform scores high marks in evaluations from Gartner and Forrester. 

Nutanix is a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for file and object storage. Gartner says: “Nutanix Files and Nutanix Objects are integrated with the Nutanix Cloud Platform to provide a unified storage offering. Nutanix’s Unified Storage platform appeals to customers looking for a single, multiprotocol platform that can be deployed either at the edge, in the data center or in the cloud.” 

Nutanix was identified as a leader in the 2023 Forrester Wave for HCI. “The Nutanix vision focuses on building a hybrid and multi-cloud platform for business applications, easing adoption of cloud-native architecture. Nutanix is a good fit for customers looking for a simple, scalable hyperconverged platform designed to enable cloud-native architecture in or out of the public cloud,” says Forrester. 

The report notes that Nutanix has built a full-stack offering that includes modern GPU support; Flow Virtual Networking for network function virtualization; and workflows for containers, including OpenShift integration, plus its own Nutanix Kubernetes Engine. 

The Nutanix Kubernetes Platform simplifies the management of container-based applications across hybrid clouds. And Nutanix is making it easier for customers to migrate off of VMware by supporting both its own AHV hypervisor as well as VMware’s ESXi hypervisor. 

Nutanix is also adding AI functionality to its portfolio. The company announced “GPT-in-a-Box,” an AI development environment that integrates with Nutanix Objects and Files, enabling developers to build GPT applications that leverage AI large language models (LLMs). 

The Nutanix Cloud Platform is a modular offering that includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Clusters, Cloud Manager, Unified Storage, and Database Services. Customers have a choice of hypervisor, a choice of hardware from a list of vendors that includes HPE, Lenovo, Dell, IBM, Cisco and Nutanix, plus a choice of public clouds (AWS and Azure.)

The Nutanix offerings seem to be resonating with customers. The latest market research from IDC shows that Nutanix was one of the only vendors that showed growth in HCI in 2023 – Nutanix was up 25.3%, while the overall market was down 2.9%. Nutanix also saw 28.6% revenue growth in Q1 2024, or roughly 7X the overall market growth, according to IDC’s Pearson. 

Deal or no deal: Dell, Cisco, HPE 

The recent flurry of parnerships reflects the changing dynamics of the market, and the trend among vendors to move beyond proprietary solutions and offer customers the opportunity to mix and match compute, storage and management. 

“I believe Nutanix is going to continue to kill it from a partner marketing perspective and start to penetrate larger enterprise opportunities through its Cisco and Dell partnerships,” says Kimball from Moor Insights & Strategy.

Pearson agrees. “These partnerships are definitely a net positive for Nutanix. Changing customers’ minds one at a time can yield dividends, but convincing a partner OEM to put resources behind your product is a multiplier.” 

• Dell: Nutanix and Dell, which have been battling against each other in the HCI market for years, surprised everyone when they signed a deal in May that would integrate the Nutanix HCI technology with Dell’s servers. The deal likely would not have been made had Broadcom not purchased VMware, which Dell once owned, but later spun off. In terms of market share, the Dell/VMware HCI offering called VxRail is No. 1 at around 40%, according to IDC. Meanwhile, Nutanix is running a distant second at around 25% market share. Uncertainty created by the Broadcom acquisition is driving customers to at least consider Nutanix as an alternative. “While Dell certainly enjoys a strong relationship with VMware, it seems to have recognized this market opportunity as well,” says Kimball. He adds, “I see this partnership as a big win for enterprise IT organizations that are on the hybrid multi-cloud journey. From a Nutanix perspective, this partnership should be seen as a huge win. Dell is number one in server and storage shipments into the enterprise. Being able to leverage everything that comes with Dell’s market presence should pay plenty of dividends for Nutanix.” 
• Cisco: In August, 2023, the companies agreed to create a new offering that integrates Cisco’s compute and networking infrastructure with the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The fully integrated and validated solution is being sold by Cisco’s global sales force. And Cisco recently announced it is discontinuing its own HyperFlex HCI platform altogether, telling customers that their migration path is Cisco UCS servers and the Nutanix Cloud Platform. 
• HPE: HPE and Nutanix became competitors in 2017, when HPE bought HCI vendor SimpliVity. But, as Kimball puts it, “After thrashing about for a few years, HPE returned to the table when it realized its customers were continuing to buy Nutanix HCI on HPE servers for the hybrid cloud. Today, we see the two companies collaborating in every aspect of go-to-market.” 

While these partnerships hold great potential, there’s another opportunity out there in the form of disgruntled VMware customers. 

The VMware migration: Fact or fiction? 

Despite warnings from Gartner analysts ahead of the Broadcom deal closing that enterprise customers should develop an exit plan, and predictions from Forrester analysts that 20% of VMware customers will flee in 2024, there not much evidence of a wholesale migration of customers from Broadcom to Nutanix – at least not yet. 

“It’s happening, for sure, but it’s not happening en masse or even at extremely high speed,” IDC’s Pearson says. “Lots of customers have long-term contracts with VMware that helps mitigate changes, and gives them time to explore alternatives, or hope for changes within the new Broadcom agreements before renewal. Still others have such deep hooks sunk into their portfolios by VMware that it’s extremely difficult to distance themselves without great effort and possibly expense, and strands a lot of internal skills they’ve spent time developing. Those customers may find it more palatable to accept higher pricing as the lesser of two evils. So yes, people are exploring alternatives, but it’s not a simple decision, and it will take some time for Nutanix to move the needle significantly.” 

Kimball adds: “I haven’t seen evidence of it yet – just a few select customers.” He points out that companies invested in VMware face a long, complex, expensive process should they decide to migrate. He adds that the real impact will be seen over time as VMware software licenses expire. 

That’s exactly what happened at the Mountain View Los Altos High School District in California, where director of IT services Bob Fishtrom switched from VMware to Nutanix when his software licenses were expiring, and the 30% price increase quoted by his VAR was “beyond prohibitive for a school district.” 

Seeking a cost-effective alternative, Fishtrom met with Nutanix, signed a contract on July 1, 2023, and was up and running in mid-July with a Nutanix HCI implementation that includes three physical servers running 24 virtual machines, plus a redundant set of three servers at a second site. The VMware license renewal, including a much-needed hardware upgrade, would have cost $750,000. He paid $533,000 to Nutanix for hardware, software licensing and training for his staff, for a savings of more than $200,000. 

“It’s been pretty awesome,” says Fishtrom. “Everything they promised us, they delivered on and then some. It’s been a really powerful and meaningful partnership.” At one point, a there was a hardware failure and the backup server kicked right in. “Nobody even felt a hiccup,” said Fishtrom, and a replacement part was delivered within 24 hours.

Fishtrom says end users are happy with the reliability and speed of the network. “It’s lightning fast. I don’t have to reboot all the time like I did with VMware.” He adds, “I’m the kind of person who really cares about how our network racks look. This is a really sexy looking stack, professional and clean.”

The district, which serves 4,400 students at the high school level across six campuses, plus more than 3,000 community members in an adult learning program, is also using Nutanix cloud backup and disaster recovery services. Fishtrom says the business continuity aspect of the Nutanix service is particularly important, since the district was once hit with a successful ransomware attack.

The road ahead 

When Nutanix announced earnings in May, the company said the number of sales opportunities in the pipeline grew more than 30% over the first three quarters of the fiscal year, and the total dollar value of those opportunities increased 50%. However, while the number of large deals currently under negotiation is increasing, so is the time it’s taking to finalize those deals. 

Jason Ader, an analyst at William Blair, wrote: “Full-year guidance assumes modest impact from the VMware displacement opportunity and developing OEM partnerships, both of which should have a more material impact in fiscal 2025,” which is when stock analysts are anticipating that Nutanix will begin showing sustained profits.

Even without an immediate impact from VMware defections, Nutanix did report solid revenue growth in its latest quarter, with a 17% increase in year-over-year revenue and a 24% increase in annual recurring revenue, as it climbs toward the $2B annual revenue mark. 

“The company is firing on all cylinders, beating earnings estimates and rapidly expanding its portfolio to match the continually shifting needs of enterprise IT,” says Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND Research. “No infrastructure management software company has as broad a portfolio, disciplined execution, and as devoted a customer base.” 

Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, otherwise known as Alibaba Cloud or Aliyun, has decided to cease data center operations in India and Australia.

“As part of Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure strategy update, following careful assessment, we have decided to cease operations at our data centers in Australia and India while enhancing our investment in the Southeast Asia and Mexico,” a notice shared by the company on its portal read.

The data centers in these two countries, located in Mumbai and Sydney, are expected to shut by July and September respectively. While the Mumbai data centers will cease operations by July 15, Australian data centers will become inactive after September 30.

The company, as per the notice, said it has “issued multiple rounds of notifications and technical migration plans to affected customers since December 2023.”

Further, Alibaba has asked affected customers to migrate their data to the Singapore region or any other region as soon as possible.

While an email sent to Alibaba seeking clarification on whether these migrations will incur charges went unanswered, analysts said the company is unlikely to charge customers for the migration.

An email query seeking the rationale for closing the data centers in the two countries also went unanswered.

Geopolitical tensions and growth concerns

The decision to shut operations in the two countries could be linked to Alibaba’s cloud business growth challenges in the two countries and geopolitical tensions.

“Alibaba is closing its operations in these two countries as they see limited business opportunities in these markets for their company,” said IDC Associate Research Director, Rajiv Ranjan.

Limited scope for generating more business in these countries can be attributed to several factors, including market maturity, Ranjan said.

“The Australian market is very mature on cloud adoption and AWS, Google, and Azure have a strong presence. Carving out a decent market share would be difficult with limited operations and customer base,” Ranjan said, adding that Alibaba’s limited operations are reflected in the size of its data centers.

In contrast to the company’s practice of deploying large data centers, its data center in Australia is a colocation facility, Ranjan explained, adding that it was the same for India where the company has two availability zones in Mumbai that are of limited size.

“On the other hand, India is fast growing on public cloud services but again is dominated by Azure and AWS with Google and Oracle increasing its presence quite aggressively, which makes things relatively difficult for Alibaba,” Ranjan said.

Both markets do not favor using Chinese brands, especially India, whose relations with China have not improved in the last few years, Jain explained.

Alibaba’s renewed focus on Southeast Asia and Mexico

Alibaba Cloud’s decision to focus its investment in Southeast Asia and Mexico is justified and logical, according to analysts.

“Alibaba has a stronger brand presence in Southeast Asia through their ecommerce business. Hence, they have decided to focus there,” Ranjan said.

Explaining further, Ranjan added that Alibaba had ramped up their data center investment in India by deploying their second availability zone in 2022 due to the data localization policy.

The company’s strategy, according to Ranjan, was to leverage the investment to acquire as many customers as possible.

“Some of their customers in India are Paytm (their largest customer) Oppo, Vivo, DLF, and Reliance Entertainment. However, the presence of hyperscalers impacted their growth plans,” Ranjan said.

In April, Alibaba Cloud reduced the price of some its public cloud products deployed in non-Mainland China regions by up to 59%.

Analysts saw this as a strategy to undercut competition from larger hyperscalers in markets, such as South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, the US, Germany, the UK, and the UAE.

Azure, AWS set to gain

The migration to a different cloud provider will result in additional investment for enterprises moving out of Alibaba Cloud, according to Charlie Dai, Forrester’s principal analyst.

Despite this, customers are likely to move to other cloud providers as they may not be comfortable shifting data outside their country, analysts said.

“Mostly Azure and AWS are expected to gain the customers moving out of Alibaba Cloud. If it’s IaaS, AWS will benefit as it has a strong 60% market share in India IaaS space,” Ranjan said.

However, the analyst pointed out that Google or Oracle might gain some price-sensitive customers as their pricing is more in line with the pricing that Alibaba Cloud offers.

“Azure and AWS might seem a bit premium for these customers. Azure anyways has increased its prices recently in the first half of 2024,” Ranjan added.

More data center news:

• Singapore government pushes energy-efficient data center plan
• Backup lessons learned from 10 major cloud outages
• AI is wild card in data center energy demand, say electricity researchers

From the editors of our sister publication CSO, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps security and network IT staff understand what endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.

Ever consider how much of AI is a hallucination? Not how much AI output is hallucination, but rather how much of what we hear or read about it is genuine? Could it be that AI success is mostly hype, and that all the hype may be hurting the technology rather than helping? Enterprises need to get to the bottom of AI, not in technical terms but in terms of making a business case. How that happens is what will determine whether AI is real or maybe a hallucination.

We’ve all heard the stories about how AI is revolutionizing work, how it’s saving companies tens of thousands of hours of labor, and how professionals all need to be learning to be effective users of AI. While that may save your job for a while, the storylines say that AI is probably going to eliminate it eventually, and maybe eliminate you, too. Most people I talk to dismiss the extreme stories about AI harm, but how about the extreme stories about its benefits?

AI is mostly hype. And the hype is hurting AI, in the sense that it’s misdirecting a lot of effort and thus hindering adoption. But AI is revolutionizing work, and it is saving time…often lots of it. It’s something you should learn to use, and maybe some should learn to fear. It’s not coming for your job, though. And, in fact, right now the most popular uses of AI couldn’t make a business case. Does any of this make sense? We’ll see.

Hype isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Building buzz generates interest, gets new technologies tried, helps your salespeople get appointments, and keeps your company in the news. Apple’s AI announcements got a lot of attention. And though many said its news was pedestrian, even boring, what could Apple do but announce AI that does the stuff everyone is already writing about? Sometimes you need to erect a massive billboard that says what everyone else is saying; it’s called marketing. We keep clicking on extravagant AI stories, so it’s working.

Wall Street loves AI, and it rewards companies that make AI announcements, even just partnerships with an AI vendor or the launching of AI tools that only match what competitors are doing. Most of this activity relates to generative AI, and most to personal productivity tools and capabilities, something we can all relate to. With all this AI love floating about, it’s no wonder people think it’s taking over the world.

But sometimes you have to wonder if we’re looking in the right places to gain insight into AI value and progress. I recently read a story about how AI had saved dozens of person-years of time in a few months. But did this make a business case? Truth is, we don’t know. What was the per-worker benefit, and how much did it cost per worker to save that time? Did any of the time savings translate to saving the company money, cutting current positions or eliminating the need to hire into new ones? If your average worker makes twenty dollars an hour, and AI tools save one hour a week, how much does that save the company? Nothing, unless you dock the employee an hour a week or can use the time to eliminate the need to hire someone else. We never seem to hear about these points, but they’re the ones that matter to CFOs.

Everyone likes to save their own labor, to unload repetitive and boring tasks, and so there’s a lot of interest in this sort of AI application. The problem is that this kind of worker assistance doesn’t seem to monetize. I was told by CIOs who audited the use of generative AI in their companies that generative AI tools to help workers with documents, emails, etc. almost never actually saved money. However, the tools their companies were trying were either free or very cheap, and the CIOs said they might save a bit of time or improve results a bit. One CFO said that most of the AI we hear about is what we could fairly call “AI candy.” Or maybe another AI hallucination?

There are good AI projects that save money, though, and CIOs say that these do typically involve the CIO and go through the traditional CFO assessment. For example, almost every company that has tried AI as a customer support chatbot says that it has improved customer service and lowered costs, and CIOs say that they’ve had no difficulty making a business case for AI in that mission. In applications involving network management, just over 80% of CIOs said their projects met ROI goals, and three-quarters of companies that self-hosted AI models for business analysis said their projects met business goals. Why don’t we hear about these?

The problem, say CIOs, is that in the early days of adoption of any technology, it’s the potential of the technology that gets the most attention. Generative AI is easy to play with, so a lot of people do, and their interest gets a lot of attention. The specific challenges of self-hosting AI are of interest to a small number of users, too small to attract as much attention. In addition, the small number of enterprises actually involved in CIO-driven, self-hosted projects means that it takes longer to expose all the real issues to be faced, to answer the questions that will be the most critical for AI adoption.

Going back to those CIOs, over three-quarters say that they don’t have staff skills needed to launch an AI project and bring it to completion. A few admit to having hired for such a project and then found it couldn’t make the business case, pass a compliance audit, or both. Apparently, all this dabbling with generative AI in personal productivity applications isn’t educating the workforce in a way that supports staffing those real-world, money-saving, projects. One CIO told me that there were 20 training sessions offered on writing generative AI prompts for every one course about hosting business analysis applications in a way that could pass compliance muster.

The biggest problem may not be compliance muster, but financial muster. If AI is consuming hundreds of thousands of GPUs per year, requiring that those running AI data centers canvas frantically in search of the power needed to drive these GPUs and to cool them, somebody is paying to build AI, and paying a lot. Users report that the great majority of the AI tools they use are free. Let me try to grasp this; AI providers are spending big to…give stuff away? That’s an interesting business model, one I personally wish was more broadly accepted. But let’s be realistic. Vendors may be willing to pay today for AI candy, but at some point AI has to earn its place in the wallets of both supplier and user CFOs, not just in their hearts. We have AI projects that have done that, but most CIOs and CFOs aren’t hearing about them, and that’s making it harder to develop the applications that would truly make the AI business case.

So the reality of AI is buried in hype? It sure sounds like AI is more hallucination than reality, but there’s a qualifier. Millions of workers are using AI, and while what they’re currently doing with it isn’t making a real business case, that’s a lot of activity. Is it possible that someone in this mass-market AI group, will uncover something that creates enough real value to pay all those AI bills and earn a profit? Is it possible that just having millions demand AI would eventually compel companies to accept paying for the same applications CIOs and CFOs scoff at today? If that’s what happens, then today AI isn’t a hallucination after all, and it might prove that those CIOs and CFOs, and maybe even me, are the ones hallucinating…but I wouldn’t bet on it.

A slew of updates in VMware Edge Compute Stack (ECS) 3.5 are aimed at helping customers more easily manage edge devices, applications, and infrastructure across multiple locations, and industry watchers say the updated platform will support AI at the edge.

Enterprises are expanding edge computing deployments to meet the scalability and performance requirements of AI applications, and tech vendors are extending feature sets to enable AI in edge locations, according to IDC, which predicts that edge computing investments will reach $232 billion in 2024. “Edge computing will play a pivotal role in the deployment of AI applications,” says Dave McCarthy, research vice president, cloud and edge services at IDC.

Broadcom, which acquired VMware in November 2023, has been adding to the edge management capabilities in the VMware ECS and VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) solutions. Updates in its latest offering will help customers simplify operations by reducing management complexity, more easily managing dispersed locations with limited IT resources, automating software patching, and gaining visibility into application and traffic behaviors at the edge with integrated telemetry.

“Edge computing continues to be an important aspect of infrastructure design to offset limitations in public cloud deployments. These limitations include network latency, the cost of data movement, regulatory compliance requirements, and overall business continuity. However, edge computing brings with it new challenges in terms of managing large amounts of remote infrastructure,” IDC’s McCarthy says. “VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator aims to automate the management of large-scale edge deployments.”

To further simplify the deployment of applications and infrastructure across thousands of locations, ECS 3.5 includes new or updated features such as:

• Zero-touch orchestration, which simplifies deployment and application lifecycle management across multiple sites by leveraging GitOps and desired state management.
• Pull-based architecture, which puts less burden on the management plane, allowing it to achieve a much higher scale.
• Edge fleet management, which can manage large-scale edge infrastructure deployments of single hosts by providing streamlined visibility, deployment, operational processes, and automatic updates with the SaaS-based ECS service.
• SaaS delivery model, which enables Broadcom to introduce new VECO capabilities continuously.
• Decoupled management and control plane, which brings added deployment flexibility to ensure that the control plane to manage edge workloads is local to the edge location.
• Single-node updates, which support virtual machine and container workloads and also include single-node Kubernetes, making it feasible to scale to thousands of locations.
• Automatic updates, which alleviate the pain points associated with manual updates by ensuring the latest patches, compliance standards, and performance enhancements are applied.
• Edge infrastructure and application monitoring, which configures metrics gathering and transmission for infrastructure, virtual machines, and Kubernetes workloads—enabling customers to start monitoring edge components quickly.

“VECO features a pull-based architecture, which is ideal for customers with many edge sites and varying levels of connectivity. Similar to how an iPhone updates itself, edge sites update their applications and infrastructure when the edge host is connected and new updates or configuration changes are published,” according to a VMware blog announcing the product updates.

According to IDC’s McCarthy, upgrades to VMware edge products will help customers more easily manage large-scale, heterogeneous edge deployments. And VMware is looking to help customers manage whatever components they have in their edge infrastructure.

“As enterprises add edge infrastructure to existing cloud environments, they are looking for consistency. VMware is taking its successful software-defined data center concepts to create a software-defined edge. This benefits customers by leveraging similar tools and skills to manage infrastructure and applications wherever they are deployed,” McCarthy says. “Many edge offerings are tied to specific vendor ecosystems. For example, all of the major public cloud providers have edge management software, but it is limited to resources delivered by that cloud. VMware’s approach of supporting a variety of clouds and on-premises infrastructure means that it is applicable to more scenarios than the competition.”

And as AI continues to dominate technology conversations, the need to support AI at the edge increases. Enterprises are moving to a distributed data center model for real-time processing at the edge, and VMware should continue to invest in AI at the edge, according to McCarthy.

“As the AI conversation shifts from large training in the cloud to inference at the edge, VMware needs to stay on top of emerging edge AI needs from customers while continuing to build consistency between data center, cloud, and edge environments,” McCarthy says.

VMware enlisted more than 100 customers to participate in the technical preview of ECS 3.5, which is generally available now.

Pure Storage is upping its AI game with a pair of announcements, including a new storage-as-a-service offering that’s designed for AI workloads and new AI-driven security features to detect and prevent ransomware.

The company bills its new Evergreen//One product as the first purpose-built AI storage as-a-service offering. It includes guaranteed levels of storage performance for GPUs in training, inferencing and high-performance computing workloads.

To power Evergreen//One, Pure has made its Fusion infrastructure-as-code service, which automates orchestration and workload placement, a part of the Purity operating environment that runs its arrays. It unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly across structured and unstructured data stored both on-premises and in the cloud.

Also new is a storage-oriented generative AI “copilot for storage,” which Pure describes as “a new way to manage and protect data using natural language.” It uses telemetry and knowledge gained from Pure Storage customers to guide storage teams to optimize performance and management.

Ransomware detection improvements, SLA tweaks

Pure also boosted its anomaly detection capabilities with AI functions. Anomaly detection is used to discover threats such as ransomware, atypical activity, malicious behavior and denial-of-service attacks, by looking for performance anomalies. Pure already had ransomware detection based on anomaly detection, but the new release builds on those capabilities.

The expanded detection is built on multiple machine-learning models that analyze customer environments with historical data to look for anomalous patterns based on heuristics of performance as well as user context on how storage is used. In other words, it learns what is ordinary behavior and looks for what is out of the ordinary.

On the service-level front, the company is introducing multiple SLA enhancements this week. Its Enhanced Cyber Recovery and Resilience SLA is being expanded to include disaster recovery scenarios, for example. Under the terms of the agreement, customers get a customized recovery plan that includes new storage infrastructure with onsite installation and additional professional services for data transfer.

A new security assessment offering provides visibility into fleet-level security risks and offers recommendations based on intelligence aggregated from more than 10,000 customer installations. The assessment provides numerical scores and best practices for the arrays that align with NIST 2.0 standards as well as advice on how to remediate potential security anomalies and rapidly restore operations if a security-related event occurs.

All these services are available now.

Ready to travel to gain hands-on experience with new networking and infrastructure tools? Tech conferences – in person and virtual – give attendees a chance to access product demos, network with peers, earn continuing education credits, and catch a celebrity keynote or live entertainment (Elton John performed at this year’s Cisco Live event).

Check out our calendar of upcoming network, I&O and data center conferences, and let us know if we’re missing any of your favorites.

June 2024

• Cisco Live, Las Vegas: June 2-6 [related: Cisco Live: AI takes center stage]
• HPE Discover, Las Vegas: June 18-19 [related: HPE announces a cloud service for large language models]
• The Rise of AI, London, England: June 18
• Palo Alto Networks’ Ignite on Tour, Columbus, Ohio: June 19
• Arista Campus Networking Day, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: June 12
• Arista Campus Networking Day, Indianapolis, Indiana: June 20

July 2024

• XChange Security, Dallas, Texas: July 15-17
• SIGGRAPH 2024, Denver: July 28-August 1
• CompTIA ChannelCon 2024, Atlanta, Georgia: July 30-August 1

August 2024

• Black Hat USA, Las Vegas: August 3-8
• SHARE, Kansas City, Missouri: August 4-8
• Defcon 32, Las Vegas, August: 8-11
• IDC Hybrid Cloud 2024, Sandton, South Africa: August 15
• VMware Explore, Las Vegas: August 26-29

September 2024

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, Gold Coast, Australia: September 9-11
• Forrester Technology and Innovation Summit, Austin, Texas: September 9-12
• Oracle CloudWorld, Las Vegas: September 9-12
• Cloud & Datacenter Convention 2024, Sydney, Australia: September 12
• Datacloud USA 2024, Austin, Texas: September 17-18
• DCD Connect, London, England: September 17-18
• Palo Alto Networks’ CISO Retail Roundtable, London, England: September 19
• GrrCON, Grand Rapids, Michigan: September 26-27

October 2024

• IDC Hybrid Cloud Forum, Munich, Germany: October 8
• Data Centre World, Singapore: October 9-10
• Data Centre World, Madrid, Spain: October 16-17
• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, Orlando, Florida: October 21-24
• IDC Security & Cloud, Porto, Portugal: October 30

November 2024

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, Barcelona, Spain: November 4-7 
• DCD Connect, Leesburg, Virginia: November 6-7
• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, Kochi, India: November 11-13
• IDC Next-Gen Infrastructure: Cloud, AI, Sustainability, Paris, France: November 14
• Cisco Live, Melbourne, Australia: November 11-14
• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, London, U.K.: November 19-20
• Data Center Nation, Zurich, Switzerland: November 20
• Data Centre World, Paris, France: November 27-28

December 2024

• AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas: December 2-6
• Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, Grapevine, Texas: December 9-11
• Forrester Security & Risk Summit, Baltimore, Maryland: December 9-11
• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada: December 10-12
• IDC Hybrid Cloud 2024, Turkey: December 12
• IDC Enterprise Infrastructure Forum 2024, Japan: July 2

Related reading:
Cisco Live: AI takes center stage

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update.

(Note: We have archived prior-year updates, including the 2023 outage report and our coverage during the Covid-19 years, when we began tracking the performance of cloud providers and ISPs.)

Internet report for June 17-23, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 256 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 17-23. That’s a jump of 38% from 186 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 94 outages, which is up 38% from 68 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 116 to 178 outages, a 53% jump compared to the week prior. In the U.S., outages increased from 43 to 69 outages, a 60% increase.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 25 to 21 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from nine to three outages.  

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages more than doubled from to 26 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages increased from five to nine outages. 

Two notable outages

On June 21, NTT America, a global Tier 1 service provider and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore, India, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Japan. The outage lasted a total of 14 minutes and was first observed around 3:45 AM EDT. It initially centered on NTT nodes located in Chicago, IL. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes exhibiting outage conditions, increased to include nodes located in San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, and Dallas, TX. This increase in affected nodes appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. Five minutes later, all the nodes except for those located in Chicago, IL, appeared to clear. The outage was cleared around 4:00 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 20, Level 3 Communications, a U.S.-based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream partners and customers in multiple regions, including the U.S., the Netherlands, Mexico, India, and Germany. The outage lasted a total of 11 minutes over a twenty-five-minute period. It was first observed around 4:15 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Level 3 nodes located in San Francisco, CA. Around ten minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in San Francisco, CA, began exhibiting outage conditions again. The outage was cleared around 4:40 AM UTC. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for June 10-16, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 186 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 10-16. That’s down 6% from 197 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 68 outages, which is up 6% from 64 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 127 to 116 outages, a 9% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages remained at the same level as the week prior, recording 43 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages remained the same as the week prior: 25 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from eight to nine outages.  

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages dropped from 19 to 11 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages decreased from six to five outages. 

Two notable outages

On June 12, NTT America, a global Tier 1 service provider and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Romania, Australia, Egypt, Canada, France, Belgium, Switzerland, India, Poland, Austria, South Africa, Singapore, Mexico, and Japan. The outage lasted for one hour and 17 minutes in total and was first observed around 2:00 PM EDT. It appeared to be centered on NTT nodes located in Ashburn, VA. Twenty minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Ashburn, VA, began exhibiting outage conditions again. Five minutes into this outage occurrence, the nodes located in Ashburn, VA, were joined by nodes located in Atlanta, GA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:40 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 13, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 provider headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Mexico, India, France, and Italy. The disruption, which lasted a total of 13 minutes, was first observed around 12:35 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on nodes located in Phoenix, AZ. Five minutes after being first observed, the nodes located in Phoenix, AZ, cleared and were replaced by nodes located in Ghent, Belgium, Frankfurt, Germany, and Stockholm, Sweden, in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 12:45 PM EDT, all the nodes appeared to clear but five minutes later, nodes located in Madrid, Spain, Stockholm, Sweden, Dublin, Ireland, and London, England, began exhibiting outage conditions. This rise in nodes and locations exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. The outage was cleared around 12:55 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for June 3-9, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 197 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of June 3-9. That’s up 14% from 173 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 64 outages, which is up 14% from 56 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages rose from 92 to 127 outages, a 38% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages increased 26% from 34 to 43 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 27 to 25 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from six to eight outages

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages dropped from 38 to 19 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages climbed from 10 to six outages. 

Two notable outages

On June 6, Level 3 Communications, a U.S.-based Tier 1 carrier, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream partners and customers across the U.S. The outage lasted a total of 13 minutes over a twenty-five-minute period and was first observed around 12:10 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Level 3 nodes located in Atlanta, GA, Orlando, FL, and Tampa, FL. After five minutes, the nodes in Orlando, FL, appeared to clear. This reduction in nodes exhibiting outage conditions coincided with a reduction in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 12:35 AM UTC. Click here for an interactive view.

On June 6, NTT America, a global Tier 1 service provider and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., the Philippines, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan. The outage lasted for 13 minutes and was first observed around 2:45 AM EDT. It initially centered on NTT nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, Chicago, IL, Miami, FL, London, England, and Ashburn, VA. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes in these locations appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Seattle, WA, exhibiting outage conditions. This decrease in affected nodes appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. Five minutes later, the nodes in Seattle, WA, cleared and were replaced by nodes located in Newark, NJ, Ashburn, VA, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, London, England, and Paris, France, which exhibited outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:00 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 27,- June 2, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 173 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 27- June 2. That’s down 14% from 202 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 56 outages, which is down 14% from 65 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 121 to 92 outages, a 24% decline compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages decreased 33% from 51 to 34 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 37 to 27 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from five to six outages

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages more than doubled, jumping from 14 to 38 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages climbed from three to 10 outages. 

Two notable outages

On May 28, Rackspace Technology, a U.S. managed cloud computing provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers, as well as Rackspace customers within multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, Germany, Mexico, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Chile, Switzerland, Vietnam, Brazil, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey. The outage, lasting a total of 14 minutes, was first observed around 9:00 AM EDT and appeared to center on Rackspace nodes located in Chicago, IL. Around five minutes into the outage, a number of nodes located in Chicago, IL exhibiting outage conditions, appeared to clear. This decrease in impacted nodes appeared to coincide with a reduction of impacted regions. The outage was cleared around 9:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 29, Microsoft experienced an outage on its network that impacted some downstream partners and access to services running on Microsoft environments in multiple regions including the U.S., China, Ireland, Hong Kong, the U.K., India and Australia. The outage, which lasted 14 minutes, was first observed around 5:25 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on Microsoft nodes located in Des Moines, IA, Newark, NJ, Cleveland, OH, Atlanta, GA, Miami, FL, and Portland, OR. Around five minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Atlanta, GA, and Miami, FL, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Paris, France, Tokyo, Japan and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 5:40 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 20-26, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 202 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 20-26. That’s down 11% from 227 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 65 outages, which is down 23% from 84 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 157 to 121 outages, a 23% decline compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages decreased 11% from 57 to 51 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 33 to 37 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 10 to five outages

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages jumped from six to 14 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages remained the same as the week prior, recording 3 outages. 

Two notable outages

On May 21, Time Warner Cable, a U.S.-based ISP, experienced a disruption that affected numerous customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Singapore, Thailand, and Mexico. The outage occurred in a series of occurrences over a two-hour period, starting at around 6:05 AM EDT. Initially, the issue appeared to be centered on Time Warner Cable nodes in New York, NY. Five minutes after the first observation, the number of affected nodes in New York, NY, increased and nodes in Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA, were also impacted. Another five minutes later, the nodes in Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA, were no longer affected, but nodes in Chicago, IL, started exhibiting outage conditions. Twenty-five minutes after the initial observation, nodes in New York, NY, and Chicago, IL, were affected again, along with nodes in Denver, CO, and Dallas, TX. Four minutes later, all nodes seemed to recover, but then nodes in New York, NY, Chicago, IL, and Denver, CO, experienced outage conditions and recoveries across five further occurrences. The outage lasted a total of 49 minutes and was resolved around 8:05 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 21, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that affected some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. The outage lasted a total of 32 minutes and occurred in three occurrences over a one hour and 15-minute period, beginning around 3:05 PM EDT. The first occurrence, which lasted around 19 minutes, seemed to be centered on GTT nodes located in Seattle, WA, San Jose, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and San Francisco, CA. Five minutes after it appeared to be resolved, a second occurrence was observed, this time affecting nodes in San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, and Los Angeles, CA. This reduction in affected nodes coincided with a decrease in the number of regions and partners impacted. Thirty-five minutes after the nodes in San Jose, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, appeared to be cleared, they exhibited outage conditions once again. The outage was resolved around 4:20 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 13-19, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 227 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 13-19. That’s up a sizable 43% from 159 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 84 outages, which is up 27% from 66 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 105 to 157 outages, a 50% leap compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages increased 43% from 40 to 57 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 18 to 33 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages increased from nine to 10.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from seven to six outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages increased from two to three outages.

Two notable outages

On May 19, Cogent Communications, a U.S.-based multinational transit provider, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across various regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, China, Portugal, Chile, Peru, Canada, India, Thailand, South Korea, France, and Japan. The outage, which lasted 19 minutes, was first observed around 4:55 PM EDT and initially centered on Cogent nodes located in Nashville, TN. Five minutes after first being observed, the nodes experiencing outage conditions expanded to include nodes in Houston, TX, Atlanta, GA, New York, NY, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, PA. Five minutes later, the number of locations with nodes exhibiting outage conditions expanded again, this time including nodes in Bilbao, Spain, Dallas, TX, Phoenix, AZ, Charlotte, NC, and Indianapolis, IN. As a result, the number of impacted customers and providers increased. The outage was resolved around 5:15 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 16, Rackspace Technology, a U.S. managed cloud computing provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, experienced a series of outages over a period of four hours and fifteen minutes that impacted multiple downstream providers, as well as Rackspace customers within multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Singapore, Chile, Brazil, France, Spain, South Africa, Vietnam, Turkey, and Switzerland. The outage, lasting a total of 28 minutes, was first observed around 5:00 AM EDT and appeared to center on Rackspace nodes located in Chicago, IL. The outage was cleared around 9:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for May 6-12, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 159 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of May 6-12. That’s down 5% from 151 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 66 outages, which is up 32% from 50 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages declined from 113 to 105 outages, a 7% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages increased slightly (3%) from 39 to 40 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 15 to 18 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages jumped from two to nine.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from nine to seven outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages fell from three to two outages.

Two notable outages

On May 8, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed at around 7:45 PM EDT and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Five minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted a total of 23 minutes and was cleared at around 8:10 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On May 7, Comcast Communications experienced an outage that impacted a number of downstream partners and customers across the U.S. and Canada. The outage, lasting 8 minutes, was first observed around 1:20 AM EDT and appeared to be centered on Comcast nodes located in Chicago, IL and Ashburn, VA. Five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Ashburn, VA, appeared to clear, leaving the nodes located in Chicago, IL, exhibiting outage conditions. The apparent decrease of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a decrease in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 1:30 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 29- May 5, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 151 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 29- May 5. That’s down slightly (3%) from 156 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 50 outages, which is down 7% from 54 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 104 to 113 outages, a 9% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages increased 5% from 37 to 39 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 22 to 15 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from six to two.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages increased from eight to nine outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages fell from four to three outages.

Two notable outages

On April 29, NTT America, a global Tier 1 ISP and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, India, Argentina, Australia, the U.K., Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, and Canada. The outage, lasting 24 minutes, was first observed around 2:40 PM EDT and appeared to initially center on NTT nodes located in San Jose, CA. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in San Jose, CA, appeared to clear, and were replaced by nodes located in Tokyo, Japan, in exhibiting outage conditions. Ten minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in Tokyo, Japan, were joined by nodes located in Osaka, Japan, Singapore, Dallas, TX, and Los Angeles, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:05 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 29, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the US, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and customers across various regions, including the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Canada, Chile, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Spain, and France. The outage, lasting for a total of one hour and 12 minutes, was divided into two occurrences over a period of 35 minutes. The first occurrence was observed around 2:45 AM EDT and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in Ashburn, VA, and Washington, D.C. Five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Ashburn, VA, appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Baltimore, MD, New York, NY, and Phoenix, AZ, along with nodes located in Washington, D.C., in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. Twenty minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in New York, NY, and Washington, D.C., were joined by nodes located in Houston, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:20 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 22-28, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 156 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 22-28. That’s down 8% from 170 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 54 outages, which is down 36% from 85 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 99 to 104 outages, a 5% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages decreased 31% from 54 to 37 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages remained the same as the week prior, recording 22 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 10 to six.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from nine to eight outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages stayed at the same level as the week before: four outages.

Two notable outages

On April 26, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was distributed across two occurrences over a twenty-five-minute period and was first observed at around 7:45 PM EDT and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Ten minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted a total of 17 minutes and was cleared at around 8:10 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 24, NTT America, a global Tier 1 ISP and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, India, China, Hong Kong, Canada, and Japan. The outage, lasting 9 minutes, was first observed around 7:15 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on NTT nodes located in San Jose, CA. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in San Jose, CA, were joined by nodes located in Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 7:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 15-21, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 170 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 15-21. That’s up 11% from 161 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 85 outages, which is up 18% from 72 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 107 to 99 outages, a 7% decline compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages climbed 6% from 51 to 54 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Both globally (22) and in the U.S. (10), cloud provider network outages remained the same as the week prior.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages increased from five to nine outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages increased from two to four outages.

Two notable outages

On April 20, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the US, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and its own customers across various regions, including the US, Canada, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, the U.K., Italy, France, and Spain. The outage, lasting a total of one hour and 32 minutes, was divided into a series of occurrences over a period of two hours and 28 minutes. The first occurrence was observed around 10:55 PM EDT and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, and Hong Kong. Five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Hong Kong appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in Minneapolis, MN, and Cleveland OH, in exhibiting outage conditions. Thirty-five minutes into the first occurrence, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions increased to include nodes located in Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, MN, Cleveland, OH, Boston, MA, and Bilbao, Spain. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions also appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of downstream customers, partners, and regions impacted. A second occurrence was observed around five minutes after the issue initially appeared to have cleared. This second occurrence lasted approximately fourteen minutes and seemed to initially be centered around nodes located in Cleveland, OH. Around five minutes into the second occurrence, nodes located in Cleveland, OH, appeared to be temporarily replaced by nodes located in Seattle, WA, and Chicago, IL, before they themselves were replaced once again by nodes located in Cleveland, OH.  Around 15 minutes after appearing to clear, a third occurrence was observed, this time appearing to be centered around nodes located in Bilbao, Spain, and Cleveland, OH. The outage was cleared around 1:25 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 17, NTT America, a global Tier 1 ISP and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners across multiple regions including the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany. The outage, lasting 17 minutes, was first observed around 2:55 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on NTT nodes located in Seattle, WA. Five minutes into the outage nodes located in Seattle, WA, were joined by nodes located in Dallas, TX, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 3:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 8-14, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 161 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 8-14. That’s up 11% from 154 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 72 outages, which is up 4% from 69 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 97 to 107 outages, a 10% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages climbed 13% from 45 to 51 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 16 to 22 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages decreased from 14 to 10 outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages remained at the same level as the week prior, recording 5 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages decreased from three to two outages.

Two notable outages

On April 8, Rackspace Technology, a U.S. managed cloud computing provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers, as well as Rackspace customers within multiple regions including the U.S., Japan, Vietnam, Spain, Canada, Germany, Singapore, France, the Netherlands, the U.K., Brazil, and South Africa. The outage, lasting a total of 14 minutes, was first observed around 9:00 AM EDT and appeared to center on Rackspace nodes located in Chicago, IL. Around five minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in Chicago, IL, exhibiting outage conditions, appeared to clear. This decrease in impacted nodes appeared to coincide with a reduction of impacted regions. The outage was cleared around 9:15 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On Apr 10, GTT Communications, a Tier 1 ISP headquartered in Tysons, VA, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Brazil, and Canada. The outage, lasting 9 minutes, was first observed around 8:10 AM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on GTT nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Around five minutes into the outage the nodes located in Los Angeles appeared to clear and were replaced by nodes located in New York, NY, in exhibiting outage conditions. This change in location of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted regions, downstream partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 8:20 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for April 1-7, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 145 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of April 1-7. That’s up 23% from 118 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 69 outages, which is up 21% from 57 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Both globally and in the U.S., ISP outages increased by 45% compared to the week prior. Globally, the number of ISP outages climbed from 67 to 97. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages jumped from 31 to 45 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages declined slightly from 17 to 16 outages. In the U.S., they remained at the same level (14) as the previous week.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages fell from 13 to five outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages dropped from eight to three outages.

Two notable outages

On April 2, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Taiwan, Australia, Germany, Japan, the U.K., Ireland, India, and China. The outage, lasting 12 minutes, was first observed around 12:40 PM EDT and initially appeared to center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA, and San Jose, CA. Five minutes into the outage, the nodes exhibiting outage conditions expanded to include nodes located in Chicago, IL, and Ashburn, VA. This coincided with an increase in the number of downstream partners and countries impacted. The outage was cleared around 12:55 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On April 2, BT, a multinational Tier 1 ISP headquartered in London, U.K., experienced an outage on their European backbone that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, Spain, and Germany. The disruption, lasting 24 minutes, was first observed around 7:20 PM EDT and appeared to center on nodes located in London, England. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 25-31, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 118 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 18-24. That’s down 28% from 164 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 57 outages, which is down slightly from 58 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was nearly cut in half, falling from 128 to 67 outages, a 48% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages fell slightly from 43 to 31 outages, a decline of 28%.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, total cloud provider network outages nearly tripled, jumping from six to 17 outages. In the U.S., cloud provider network outages jumped from three to 14 outages

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages more than doubled, increasing from six to 13. Similarly, in the U.S., collaboration app network outages doubled from four to eight.

Two notable outages

On March 29, Arelion (formerly known as Telia Carrier), a global Tier 1 ISP headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., the Netherlands, and Japan. The disruption, lasting a total of 8 minutes, was first observed around 5:26 AM EDT and appeared to center on nodes located in Phoenix, AZ. The outage was cleared around 5:35 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 29, Cogent Communications, a U.S. based multinational transit provider, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Japan. The outage, lasting 9 minutes, was first observed around 1:45 AM EDT and appeared to initially center on Cogent nodes located in San Francisco, CA, Salt Lake City, UT, and Seattle, WA. Five minutes after first being observed, the nodes located in San Francisco, CA, Salt Lake City, UT and Seattle, WA, appeared to recover and were replaced by nodes located in Kansas City, MO in exhibiting outage conditions. As a result, the number of customers and providers impacted was reduced. The outage was cleared around 1:55 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 18-24, 2024

After a spike the week before, global outages decreased last week. ThousandEyes reported 164 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 18-24. That’s down 20% from 206 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 58 outages, which is down 33% from 87 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages fell slightly from 131 to 128 outages, a 2% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages fell slightly from 46 to 43 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased from 10 to six outages. In the U.S., they decreased from six to three outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages fell dramatically from 34 to six outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages dropped from 28 to four outages.

Two notable outages

On March 20, Cogent Communications, a multinational transit provider based in the US, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers and its own customers across various regions, including the US, Italy, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Canada, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Singapore, Mexico, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Finland, Japan, Ireland, and Norway. The outage occurred for a total of 24 minutes, divided into three occurrences over a period of one hour and fifteen minutes. The first occurrence of the outage was observed around 12:50 AM EDT and initially seemed to be centered on Cogent nodes located in Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg in Germany, in Paris, France, and Kyiv, Ukraine. A second occurrence was observed around fifteen minutes after the issue initially appeared to have cleared. This second occurrence lasted approximately eighteen minutes and seemed to be centered around nodes located in Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg, Germany. Around ten minutes into the second occurrence, nodes located in Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg, Germany, were joined by nodes located in Nuremberg, Germany, San Francisco, CA, San Jose, CA, Zurich, Switzerland, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Paris, France in exhibiting outage conditions. Around 30 minutes after appearing to clear, a third occurrence was observed, this time appearing to be centered around nodes located in Toronto, Canada. The outage was cleared around 2:05 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 24, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., China, Australia, Germany, the U.K., and Japan. The outage, first observed around 1:10 PM EDT, lasted 7 minutes in total and appeared to center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in New York, NY, and San Jose, CA. The outage was cleared at around 1:20 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Internet report for March 11-17, 2024

After weeks of decreasing, global outages increased significantly last week. ThousandEyes reported 206 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 11-17. That’s up 45% from 142 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 87 outages, which is up 38% from 63 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 91 to 131 outages, a 44% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages climbed slightly from 44 to 46 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from six to 10 outages. In the U.S., they increased from four to six outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages spiked from six to 34 outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages jumped from 3 to 28 outages.

Two notable outages

On March 16, Cogent Communications, a U.S. based multinational transit provider, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream providers as well as Cogent customers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Ireland, the U.K., Sweden, Austria, Germany, and Italy. The outage, lasting a total of 12 minutes, was divided into two occurrences over a one-hour and ten-minute period. The first occurrence was observed at around 6:30 PM EDT and appeared to initially be centered on Cogent nodes located in Baltimore, MD and New York, NY. Five minutes into the first occurrence, the nodes located in New York, NY, were replaced by nodes located in Philadelphia, PA, in exhibiting outage conditions. One hour after the issue initially appeared to have cleared, a second occurrence was observed. This second occurrence lasted approximately four minutes and appeared to be centered around nodes located in Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA, New York, NY, and Newark, NJ. The outage was cleared around 7:45 PM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

On March 12, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across the U.S. and Canada. The outage, first observed around 2:00 AM EDT, lasted 7 minutes in total and was divided into two occurrences over a thirty-minute period. The first occurrence appeared to initially center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in Chicago, IL. Twenty minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in Chicago, IL, were joined by nodes located in Seattle, WA in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in impacted nodes appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared at around 2:30 AM EDT. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for March 4-10, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 142 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of March 4-10. That’s down 8% from 155 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 63 outages, which is down 10% from 70 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 95 to 91 outages, a 4% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., the number of ISP outages stayed the same at 44 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages fell from 13 to six outages. In the U.S., they decreased from seven to four outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from eight outages to six. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages stayed at the same level as the week before: three outages.

Three notable outages

On March 5, several Meta services, including Facebook and Instagram, experienced a disruption that impacted users attempting to login, preventing them from accessing those applications. The disruption was first observed around 10:00 AM EST. During the disruption, Meta’s web servers remained reachable, with network paths to Meta services showing no significant error conditions, suggesting that a backend service, such as authentication, was the cause of the issue. The service was fully restored around 11:40 AM EST. More detailed analysis here.

On March 5, Comcast Communications experienced an outage that impacted a number of downstream partners and customers as well as the reachability of many applications and services, including Webex, Salesforce, and AWS. The outage, lasting 1 hour and 48 minutes, was first observed around 2:45 PM EST and appeared to impact traffic as it traversed Comcast’s network backbone in Texas, with Comcast nodes located in Dallas, TX and Houston TX, exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was completely cleared around 4:40 PM EST. More detailed analysis here.

On March 6, LinkedIn experienced a service disruption that impacted its mobile and desktop global user base. The disruption was first observed around 3:45 PM EST, with users experiencing service unavailable error messages. The major portion of the disruption lasted around one hour, during which time no network issues were observed connecting to LinkedIn web servers, further indicating the issue was application related. At around 4:38 PM EST, the service started to recover and was totally clear for all users around 4:50 PM EST. More detailed analysis here.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for February 26-March 3, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 155 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of February 26-March 3. That’s down 6% from 165 outages the week prior. Specific to the U.S., there were 70 outages, which is up 19% from 59 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 111 to 95 outages, a 14% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages increased 10%, climbing from 40 to 44 outages.

Public cloud network outages: After weeks of decreasing, cloud provider network outages began increasing again last week. Globally, cloud provider network outages climbed from eight to 13 outages. In the U.S., they increased from four to seven outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages increased from five outages to eight. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages rose from two to three outages.

Two notable outages

On February 27, Level 3 Communications, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier acquired by Lumen, experienced an outage that impacted multiple downstream partners and customers across the U.S. The outage, lasting a total of 18 minutes over a twenty-five-minute period, was first observed around 2:25 AM EST and appeared to be centered on Level 3 nodes located in Cleveland, OH. The outage was cleared around 2:50 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 28, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed at around 2:00 PM EST and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Five minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted 14 minutes and was cleared at around 2:15 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for February 19-25, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 165 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of February 19-25. That’s down significantly from 243 outages in the week prior – a decrease of 32%. Specific to the U.S., there were 59 outages, which is down 34% from 90 outages the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 121 to 111 outages, an 8% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 48 to 40 outages, a 17% decrease compared to the previous week.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased significantly from 42 to eight outages, a 81% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., they fell from eight to four outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from seven outages to five. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages remained at the same level as the week prior: two outages.

Two notable outages

On February 22, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Australia, China, the U.K., Japan, Singapore, India, France, and Canada. The outage, first observed around 9:10 AM EST, lasted 32 minutes in total and was divided into two occurrences over a forty-five-minute period. The first occurrence appeared to initially center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in New York, NY, Phoenix, AZ and Indianapolis, IN. Ten minutes after appearing to clear, the nodes located in New York, NY, were joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA in exhibiting outage conditions. Five minutes into the second occurrence, the disruption appeared to radiate out, and the nodes located in New York, NY, Phoenix, AZ and Indianapolis, IN, were joined by nodes located in Seattle, WA, Denver, CO, Ashburn, VA, Kansas City, MO and Omaha, NE in exhibiting outage conditions. This increase in impacted nodes appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared at around 9:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 21, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed at around 2:45 PM EST and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Fifteen minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted 23 minutes and was cleared at around 3:10 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for February 12-18, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 243 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of February 12-18. That’s down from 319 outages in the week prior – a decrease of 24%. Specific to the U.S., there were 90 outages, which is down slightly from 91 the week prior. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages decreased from 134 to 121 outages, a 10% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased from 60 to 48 outages, a 20% decrease compared to the previous week.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased significantly from 107 to 42 outages, a 61% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., they doubled from four to eight outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from 11 outages to seven. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages decreased from 5 to 2 outages.

Two notable outages

On February 16, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Egypt, Sweden, the U.K., Japan, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. The outage, first observed around 8:25 AM EST, lasted 23 minutes in total and was divided into two occurrences over a thirty-minute period. The first occurrence appeared to initially center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in New York, NY. Fifteen minutes into the first occurrence, the nodes located in New York, NY, were joined by nodes located in Paris, France and Amsterdam, the Netherlands in exhibiting outage conditions.  Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in New York, NY once again began exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared at around 8:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 17, AT&T experienced an outage on their network that impacted AT&T customers and partners across the U.S. The outage, lasting around 14 minutes, was first observed around 3:40 PM EST, appearing to center on AT&T nodes located in Little Rock, AR. Five minutes after first being observed, the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions located in Little Rock, AR, appeared to rise. This increase in nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with a rise in the number of impacted partners and customers. The outage was cleared at around 3:55 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for February 5-11, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 319 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of February 5-11. That’s up from 265 outages in the week prior – an increase of 20%. Specific to the U.S., there were 91 outages. That’s up from 45 outages the week prior, an increase of 102%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages increased from 106 to 134 outages, a 26% increase compared to the week prior. In the U.S., ISP outages more than doubled from 28 to 60 outages, a 114% increase compared to the previous week.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages decreased slightly from 117 to 107, a 9% decrease compared to the week prior. In the U.S., they decreased from five to four outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages climbed from three outages to 11. In the U.S., there were five collaboration app network outages, up from zero the week prior.

Two notable outages

On February 7, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Ireland, the U.K., Canada, India, Australia, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Indonesia, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, and Brazil. The outage was observed across a series of occurrences over the course of forty-five minutes. First observed at around 4:50 PM EST, the outage, consisting of five equally spaced four-minute periods, appeared to initially center on Time Warner Cable nodes in New York, NY. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in New York, NY, were again observed exhibiting outage conditions, joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA. By the third period, the nodes located in San Jose, CA, had appeared to clear and were instead replaced by nodes located in Los Angeles, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions, in addition to nodes located in New York, NY. The outage lasted a total of 20 minutes and was cleared at around 5:35 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 6, NTT America, a global Tier 1 ISP and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Hong Kong The outage, lasting 24 minutes, was first observed around 8:10 PM EST and appeared to initially center on NTT nodes located in Chicago, IL and Dallas, TX. Around five minutes into the outage, the nodes located in Chicago, IL and Dallas, TX, were joined by nodes located in Newark, NJ, in exhibiting outage conditions. The apparent increase of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 8:35 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for January 29- February 4, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 265 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of January 29- February 4. That’s more than double the number of outages in the week prior (126). Specific to the U.S., there were 45 outages. That’s down from 55 outages the week prior, a decrease of 18%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was 106, an increase of 15% compared to 92 outages the previous week. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased by 28%, dropping from 39 to 28 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages skyrocketed from five to 117 last week (the increase appeared to be a result of an increase in outages in the APJC region). In the U.S., they increased from two to five outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from five outages to three. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages decreased from one outage to zero.

Two notable outages

On January 31, Comcast Communications experienced an outage that impacted a number of downstream partners and customers across multiple regions including the U.S., Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. The outage, lasting 18 minutes, was first observed around 8:00 PM EST and appeared to be centered on Comcast nodes located in Ashburn, VA. Ten minutes into the outage, the nodes exhibiting outage conditions, located in Ashburn, VA, appeared to increase. The apparent increase of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream customers and partners. The outage was cleared around 8:20 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On February 2, NTT America, a global Tier 1 ISP and subsidiary of NTT Global, experienced an outage that impacted some of its customers and downstream partners in multiple regions, including the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K. The outage, lasting 23 minutes, was first observed around 1:25 PM EST and appeared to center on NTT nodes located in Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL. The outage was cleared around 1:50 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for January 22-28, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 126 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of January 22-28. That’s down from 156 the week prior, a decrease of 19%. Specific to the U.S., there were 55 outages. That’s down from 91 outages the week prior, a decrease of 40%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was 92, a decrease of 14% compared to 107 outages the previous week. In the U.S., ISP outages decreased by 35%, dropping from 60 to 39 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages dropped from 14 to five last week. In the U.S., they decreased from seven to two outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages remained the same as the week prior: five outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages decreased from four outages to one.

Three notable outages

On January 26, Microsoft experienced an issue that affected its customers in various regions around the globe. The outage was first observed around 11:00 AM EST and seemed to cause service failures in Microsoft Teams, which affected the usability of the application for users across the globe. While there was no packet loss when connecting to the Microsoft Teams edge servers, the failures were consistent with reported issues within Microsoft’s network that may have prevented the edge servers from reaching the application components on the backend. The incident was resolved for many users by 6:10 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 24, Akamai experienced an outage on its network that impacted content delivery connectivity for customers and partners using Akamai Edge delivery services in the Washington D.C. area. The outage was first observed around 12:10 PM EST and appeared to center on Akamai nodes located in Washington D.C. The outage lasted a total of 24 minutes. Akamai announced that normal operations had resumed at 1:00 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 23, Internap, a U.S based cloud service provider, experienced an outage that impacted many of its downstream partners and customers in multiple regions, including the U.S., and Singapore. The outage, which was first observed around 2:30 AM EST, lasted 18 minutes in total and appeared to be centered on Internap nodes located in Boston, MA. The outage was at its peak around fifteen minutes after being observed, with the highest number of impacted regions, partners, and customers. The outage was cleared around 2:55 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for January 15-21, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 156 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of January 15-21. That’s up from 151 the week prior, an increase of 3%. Specific to the U.S., there were 91 outages. That’s up significantly from 63 outages the week prior, an increase of 44%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was 107, an increase of 8% compared to 83 outages the previous week, and in the U.S. ISP outages increased by 58%, climbing from 38 to 60 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages dropped from 30 to 14 last week. In the U.S., they increased from six to seven outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages decreased from seven to five outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages stayed at the same level: four outages.

Two notable outages

On January 16, Oracle experienced an outage on its network that impacted Oracle customers and downstream partners interacting with Oracle Cloud services in multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, China, Panama, Norway, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Malaysia, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Norway. The outage was first observed around 8:45 AM EST and appeared to center on Oracle nodes located in various regions worldwide, including Ashburn, VA, Tokyo, Japan, San Jose, CA, Melbourne, Australia, Cardiff, Wales, London, England, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Frankfurt, Germany, Slough, England, Phoenix, AZ, San Francisco, CA, Atlanta, GA, Washington D.C., Richmond, VA, Sydney, Australia, New York, NY, Osaka, Japan, and Chicago, IL. Thirty-five minutes after first being observed, all the nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to clear. A further ten minutes later, nodes located in Toronto, Canada, Phoenix, AZ, Frankfurt, Germany, Cleveland, OH, Slough, England, Ashburn, VA, Washington, D.C., Cardiff, Wales, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Montreal, Canada, London, England, Sydney, Australia, and Melbourne, Australia began exhibiting outage conditions again.  The outage lasted 40 minutes in total and was cleared at around 9:50 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 20, Hurricane Electric, a network transit provider headquartered in Fremont, CA, experienced an outage that impacted customers and downstream partners across multiple regions, including the U.S., Thailand, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Australia. The outage, first observed around 7:15 PM EST, lasted 11 minutes in total and was divided into two occurrences over a one-hour five-minute period. The first occurrence appeared to center on Hurricane Electric nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Fifty minutes after the first occurrence appeared to clear, the second occurrence was observed. Lasting 8 minutes, the outage initially appeared to center on nodes located in Los Angeles, CA. Around five minutes into the second occurrence, the nodes in Los Angeles, CA were joined by nodes located in San Jose, CA, in exhibiting outage conditions. The outage was cleared at around 8:20 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for January 8-14, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 151 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of January 8-14. That’s up from 122 the week prior, an increase of 24%. Specific to the U.S., there were 63 outages. That’s up from 58 outages the week prior, an increase of 9%. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was 83, an increase of 8% compared to the previous week, and in the U.S. they increased by 6%, climbing from 36 to 38 outages.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages jumped from 19 to 30 last week. In the U.S., they decreased from 10 to six outages.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages increased from five to seven outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages increased from one to four outages.

Two notable outages

On January 14, Zayo Group, a U.S. based Tier 1 carrier headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, experienced an outage that impacted some of its partners and customers across multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Germany. The outage lasted around 14 minutes, was first observed around 7:10 PM EST, and appeared to initially center on Zayo Group nodes located in Houston, TX. Ten minutes after first being observed, nodes located in Houston, TX, were joined by nodes located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in exhibiting outage conditions. This rise of the number of nodes exhibiting outage conditions appeared to coincide with an increase in the number of impacted downstream partners and customers. The outage was cleared around 7:25 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 13, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed at around 12:45 PM EST and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Fifteen minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted 19 minutes and was cleared at around 1:05 PM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

Internet report for January 1-7, 2024

ThousandEyes reported 122 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week ofJanuary 1-7. Over the prior three weeks, all outage categories continuously decreased for two weeks before increasing in the last week. Specific to the U.S., there were 58 outages. Here’s a breakdown by category:

ISP outages: Globally, the number of ISP outages was 77, an increase of 43% compared to the previous week, and in the U.S. they nearly doubled from 20 to 36.

Public cloud network outages: Globally, cloud provider network outages increased from 13 to 19 last week. In the U.S., they increased from 6 to 10.

Collaboration app network outages: Globally, collaboration app network outages increased from one to five outages. In the U.S., collaboration app network outages increased from zero to one. 

Two notable outages

On January 4, Time Warner Cable, a U.S. based ISP, experienced a disruption that impacted a number of customers and partners across the U.S. The outage was first observed at around 10:45 AM EST and appeared to center on Time Warner Cable nodes located in New York, NY.  Five minutes into the outage, the number of nodes located in New York, NY, exhibiting outage conditions increased. The outage lasted 13 minutes and was cleared at around 11:00 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

On January 4, Telecom Italia Sparkle, a Tier 1 provider headquartered in Rome, Italy, and part of the Italian-owned Telecom Italia, experienced an outage that impacted many of its downstream partners and customers in multiple regions, including the U.S., Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The outage lasted 28 minutes in total and was divided into two episodes over a 35-minute period. It was first observed around 4:00 AM EST. The first period of the outage, lasting around 24 minutes, appeared to be centered on Telecom Italia Sparkle nodes located in Miami, FL. Five minutes after appearing to clear, nodes located in Miami, FL, again exhibited outage conditions. The outage was cleared around 4:35 AM EST. Click here for an interactive view.

Additional details from ThousandEyes are available here.

As large enterprise and hyperscaler networks process increasingly greater AI workloads and other applications that require high-bandwidth performance, the demand for optical connectivity technologies is growing as well.

Ultimately, optical is the only type of connectivity technology that can deliver the capacity organizations require, over the distances needed, to connect data centers, servers, routers, switches and all of the distributed components that make up today’s network architectures, said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s optical systems and optics group.

But greater use of fiber optics in networks is not without its challenges.

Providers are making plans to effectively and sustainably move to higher speeds such as 400G Ethernet, 800G Ethernet and beyond, while at the same time they’re also trying to develop advanced technologies to support AI networks. Efforts to develop more energy efficient technologies for optical networks and interfaces are also in the works.

Optical circuit switches are currently being offered or developed by vendors including Cisco, Calient Networks, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Telescent. Google, too, is developing its own optical circuit switching platform called Apollo. While the need to support high bandwidth and speed is critical, these players are also focused on improving energy usage.

Google advances Apollo optical circuit switching

In a recent blog about Apollo, Google stated that traditional networks use a “Clos” topology, also known as a spine and leaf configuration, to connect all servers and racks within a data center, while its Apollo platform uses optical circuit switching (OCS) for data center networking:

“In a spine and leaf architecture, compute resources – racks of servers equipped with CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, storage, and/or ASICs – are connected to leaf or top-of-rack switches, which then connect through various aggregation layers to the spine,” Google wrote. “Traditionally, the spine of this network uses Electronic Packet Switches (EPS), which are standard network switches provided by companies like Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, and Nvidia. However, these EPS consume a significant amount of power.”

“Apollo is believed to be the first large-scale deployment of optical circuit switching (OCS) for data center networking. The Apollo OCS platform includes a homegrown, internally developed OCS, circulators, and customized wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) optical transceiver technology that supports bidirectional links through the OCS and circulators. Apollo has served as the backbone of all Google data center networks, having been in production for nearly a decade, supporting all data center use cases.

“Incorporating the Apollo OCS layer replaces the spine blocks, resulting in significant cost and power savings by eliminating the electrical switches and optical interfaces used in the spine layer. Google uses these optical switches in a direct connect architecture to link the leaves through a patch panel. This method is not packet switching; it functions as an optical cross-connect,” Google stated.

“OCS switches offer high bandwidth and low network latency, along with a significant reduction in capital expenditures. This is due to their ability to reduce the number of required electrical switches, thereby eliminating costly optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversions,” said Sameh Boujelbene, vice president with the Dell’Oro Group. “Moreover, unlike electrical switches, OCS switches do not need frequent upgrades when servers adopt next-generation optical transceivers.”

However, OCS is still an emerging technology. “To date, only Google has managed to deploy them at scale in its data center networks after many years of development. Additionally, OCS switches may necessitate changes to the existing fiber infrastructure, depending on the cloud service provider,” Boujelbene said.

“OCS switches have been deployed at Google in spine layer but with the emergence of AI applications, we see them being deployed more inside the AI clusters because of the benefits that they bring,” Boujelbene said.

Standardizing optical transport technologies

Requirements for higher speed Ethernet networking equipment are evolving as AI networks expand. For example, there’s rising demand for 800G Ethernet employing 800ZR high-speed optical transmission technology and OpenZR+, the industry initiative to develop interoperable standards for coherent optical transceivers.

At the 400G Ethernet level, 400ZR has been “a great success for the coherent pluggable industry with multiple suppliers and a tremendous volume of 400ZR QSFP-DD and OSFP modules deployed in metro DCI [data center interconnect] applications,” according to Cisco’s Acacia website. (Cisco acquired optical maker Acacia Communications for $4.5 billion deal in 2021.) 

“Network grade pluggable optics such as 400ZR and others will see significant uptick in deployments in 2024 in communication service provider networks,” IDC reported recently. 

Effectively tying together dispersed data centers via DCI will be a key driver for AI and fiber optic networks as the distance between AI data centers becomes an issue, Gartner said.

Capacity of these links will need to increase with AI applications, Cisco’s Gartner said. “Right now, we’ve got 400 gig on one wavelength, but the industry wants much better performance, lower costs, lower density, better density, and that will happen too,” Gartner said. “So, what comes out initially might be optimized for five nanometer. We need to do better, and this is going to be progression on this technology.”

AI cluster sizes growing

The scale of emerging AI applications appears to be expanding exponentially, with the number of parameters that these applications have to process growing 1000X every 2 to 3 years, according to Boujelbene. “Consequently, the average size of AI clusters in terms of number of accelerators is quadrupling every 2 years, evolving from a typical size of 256 to 1000, then rapidly to 4K, and now some clusters boast 32K and 64K accelerators.”

At Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2023, vendors introduced numerous 1.6 Tbps optical components and transceivers based on 200 G per lambda, and there were a number of demonstrations of these 1.6 Tbps products at OFC 2024, Boujelbene wrote in a blog about OFC 2024.

“While we don’t anticipate volume shipment of 1.6 Tbps until 2025/2026, the industry must already begin efforts towards achieving 3.2 Tbps and exploring various paths and options to reach this milestone,” Boujelbene wrote.

“This sense of urgency arises from a combination of factors, including the exponential growth in bandwidth demand within AI clusters and the escalating power and cost concerns associated with higher speeds.”

In Dell ’Oro’s recently published “AI Networks for AI workloads” report, the researchers forecast that by 2025, the majority of ports in AI networks will be 800 Gbps, and by 2027, the majority of ports will be 1600 Gbps, showing a very fast adoption of the highest speeds available in the market, Boujelbene stated.

However, the increase in optic speed is challenged by a significant increase in cost and power consumption. Substantial investments in AI infrastructure are accelerating the development of innovative optical connectivity solutions tailored to meet the demands of AI clusters while solving some of the cost and power consumption challenges, Boujelbene said.

LPOs vs. CPOs

While optics and AI networking issues may trend toward the future, a more current issue is the battle between Linear Drive Pluggable Optics (LPOs) and Co-Packaged Optics (CPOs). LPOs typically set up direct links between fiber optic modules, eliminating the need for traditional components such as a Digital Signal Processor. CPOs feature the integration of optical components directly into a switch ASIC. 

Both technologies have their place in optical networks, experts say, as both promise to reduce power consumption and support improved bandwidth density. Both have advantages and disadvantages as well – CPOs are more complex to deploy given the amount of technology included in a CPO package, whereas LPOs promise more simplicity. 

Backers of LPO have been pushing that technology hard this year. For example, in March a group of 12 core optics vendors, including Cisco, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Arista and AMD, formed the Linear Pluggable Optics Multi-Source Agreement group to further LPO technology development.

The LPO group is developing myriad optical networking equipment such as switches, NICs, and Ethernet GPUs aimed at high-speed, high-volume applications such as AI and high-performance computing.

“There is an urgent need to reduce the network power consumption for AI and other high-performance applications,” Mark Nowell, LPO MSA Chair said in a statement. “LPO materially reduces power consumption both for the module and the system while maintaining a pluggable interface, providing the economics and flexibility that customers need for high-volume deployments.”

Indeed, both LPO and CPO aim to reduce power and potentially the cost of optics when moving to higher speeds. However, multivendor support, time-to-market, serviceability, manufacturability, and testability are critical requirements for volume adoption, Boujelbene said. “LPO appears to be ahead of CPO in meeting these requirements because it retains a pluggable form factor (only the DSP is removed). Therefore, we expect LPO to achieve volume deployment before CPO.”

Tata Communications has entered the fast-growing SASE market with a hosted offering for global enterprises.

It said that Hosted Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), offered in partnership with unified SASE platform vendor Versa Networks, “converges software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) and secure service edge (SSE) capabilities in a single pass technology.”

Versa Networks chief development officer Kumar Mehta said, “There is a huge amount of interest for unified SASE from enterprises today, with many organizations looking for a managed solution. The demand is primarily driven by the need to support hybrid work and digital transformation.”

Read the full story on CSOonline.com

The US has launched investigations into China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom amid concerns that these firms could misuse their access to US data, according to a Reuters report.

The country’s Commerce Department has completed “risk-based analyses” on state-backed Chinese enterprises China Mobile and China Telecom, and issued subpoenas, according to the report. The investigation into China Unicom is reportedly less advanced.

The three Chinese companies have been under the US authority’s scrutiny for quite a while now. In 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rejected China Mobile’s application to offer telephone services.

Subsequently, the licenses of China Telecom and China Unicom for similar services were revoked in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Additionally, the FCC extended these restrictions by prohibiting the companies from providing broadband services.

In 2021, the New York Stock Exchange delisted China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom in compliance with an executive order issued by the Trump administration. This order prohibited US citizens from investing in companies linked to the Chinese military.

Potential impact on enterprises

Despite the existing restrictions, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom maintain a modest presence in the US, offering cloud services and managing the routing of wholesale US internet traffic, according to Reuters.

Analysts point out that further efforts to block them could disrupt critical services for US enterprises.

“The crackdown on Chinese telecom firms may impact the efficiency of US enterprises’ data management and global connectivity by limiting competitive options and increasing transition costs,” said Prabhu Ram, head of the Industry Intelligence Group at CyberMedia Research. “Enterprises must prioritize thorough due diligence, robust contractual agreements, and strict compliance with data protection regulations to mitigate potential data security risks. Enterprises should also consider diversifying their suppliers and adapting their compliance strategies to effectively navigate the escalating US-China tech tensions.”

Tightening controls

The US government has intensified efforts in recent years to limit China’s access to data and technology, citing security concerns. Earlier this year, the US Department of Defense unveiled a fresh list of Chinese companies, which it alleged to have ties to the country’s military.

The latest actions may be seen as a clear indication that the current US administration will persist in creating hurdles for Chinese companies that access sensitive data to conduct business in the US, either directly or indirectly.

“While the current and additional proposed controls by regulators may cause some customers of these services to lose access, it is the right path to attempt to shore up networks and reduce potential risks,” said Daniel Newman, chief analyst at Futurum Research. “And while the unfortunate circumstances of such regulation may leave companies operating in good faith in a difficult situation, the US has to make decisions based on what it sees as the greater good – which at this point has to be de-risking as much as possible as US-China tensions remain high and will likely stay elevated for the foreseeable future.”

The Linux find command makes it easy to find files on your system – even if you don’t remember their names or exactly when you last updated them. Some of the options are a bit more challenging than others, but all are very handy. This post provides insights into the types of criteria you can use to find just what you’re looking for.

To begin, move into your terminal window and get ready to use the find command. The trick is understanding all of the criteria that you can use with find to describe the file you’re looking for. Just about anything you know about the file can help you with the search.

The basic syntax of the find command takes the form shown below, though find commands can be considerably more complicated.

find [starting point]  [what to look for]  [what to display]

Finding files by name

A very basic example of a find command might look like this:

$ find . -name myfile -print

This command would have the find command starting its search at your current location in the file system, looking for a file named “myfile” and then displaying any matching files (including their paths relative to the current position). And, yes, you might end up finding more than a single file.

$ find . -name myfile -print
./tests/eg/myfile
./tests/myfile

In the above example, the command displays only the name and location of the files that it finds. Use the -ls command instead of -print and you get the kind of details you’d expect when you list files with the ls -l command.

$ find . -name myfile -ls
    36417      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs       188 Jun 10 09:57 ./tests/eg/myfile
    36418      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs        83 Jun 10 09:57 ./tests/myfile

Understand that starting locations don’t have to be relative. You can always use a complete path like /home/jdoe or /usr/local/bin wherever you are sitting in the file system provided you have read access to those locations or use the sudo command to give you root-level access.

Finding files by partial name

To find differently named files that share only some portion of their filenames, enclose the shared portion of the file names in a string using quotes and use asterisks to specify the location of the variable portions of the file names (e.g., “*txt“ to find files with names that end in “txt”). In the command below, we find files that start with “zip”.

$ find /usr/bin -name "zip*"
/usr/bin/zipgrep
/usr/bin/zipinfo
/usr/bin/zip
/usr/bin/zipcloak
/usr/bin/zipnote
/usr/bin/zipsplit

Finding files by age

To find files that have been modified within the last 24 hours, use a command like this with the -mtime (modification time) option:

$ find . -mtime 0 -ls
     3060      0 drwx------   1 shs      shs          3050 Jun 10 10:35 .
    36415      0 drwxr-xr-x   1 shs      shs            16 Jun 10 09:54 ./tests
    36416      0 drwxr-xr-x   1 shs      shs            12 Jun 10 09:53 ./tests/eg

The 0 in that command means “0 days old” (i.e., less than a day old). You can also use -mtime with positive and negative signs. For example -mtime -2 or -mtime +4. Using -mtime -1 means “less than one day old”. Using -mtime +1 means “more than one day old”, so the results would be dramatically different.  If you’re looking for a file that you were working on a week ago, a command like this might work just fine:

$ find . -mtime -8 -ls

Another easy way to list recently modified files is to use the ls command. The -ltr arguments represent a long listing (-l), sort in newest-first time order (-t) and reverse the order (-r). Using these options, the files will be listed with the most recently modified files shown last.

$ ls -ltr | tail -11

Finding files by owner

You can find files by owner using a command like the one below but, depending on the location, you might need to use sudo to have sufficient privileges.

$ sudo find /home/george -user george -name report -ls
    36424    4 -rw-r--r--   1 george  george   201 Jun 10 11:21 /home/george/report

Finding files by group

To find files by the associated group, run a command like this:

$ sudo find /tmp -group lola -ls
      153      4 -rw-r--r--   1 lola     lola           53 Jun 10 12:08 /tmp/ToDo

Finding files by age relative to some other file

You can find files younger than other files by using the -newer option as in the command below that finds files that are newer than another file or directory called “tests”.

$ find -newer tests -ls
     3060      0 drwx------   1 shs      shs          3058 Jun 10 12:51 .
    36417      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs           188 Jun 10 09:57 ./tests/eg/myfile
    36418      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs            83 Jun 10 09:57 ./tests/myfile
    36421      0 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs             0 Jun 10 10:39 ./hoho
    36427      4 -rw-------   1 shs      shs            59 Jun 10 12:00 ./.lesshst

You can find files older than other files by using the -not and -newer options.

$ find -not -newer index.html -ls
    10116      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs    shs     1256 Oct 17  2019 ./index.html
    10114      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs    shs     1216 Oct 17  2019 ./example.com/index.html
    10137      4 -rw-r--r--   1 shs    shs     1886 Oct 17  2019 ./shen.org/index.html

The find command doesn’t appear to have an option for “older”.

Finding files by size

The command below finds files that are larger than 10 MB.

$ find . -type f -size +10M
./.cache/gnome-software/flatpak-system-default/components.xmlb
./.cache/mozilla/firefox/c8n9kgaz.default-release/safebrowsing/google4/goog-phish-proto.vlpset

You can also look for files smaller than a particular size as in this example:

$ cd /usr/bin
$ find . -type f -size -10M | head -5
./abrt-action-analyze-java
./amuFormat.sh
./anaconda-cleanup
./anaconda-disable-nm-ibft-plugin
./anaconda-nm-disable-autocons

Finding files by type

You can easily search for files based on the file type (i.e., file extension).

$ find . -name *.jpg -print
./images/guitar.jpg

Finding empty files

To find empty files, you can use the -size 0 option or just specify -empty as in the following examples:

$ find . -type f -size 0 -ls
    27503      0 -rw-r-----   1 shs      shs             0 Apr  2 12:04 ./junkfile
    36421      0 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs             0 Jun 10 10:39 ./hoho

$ find . -type f -empty -ls
    27503      0 -rw-r-----   1 shs      shs             0 Apr  2 12:04 ./junkfile
    36421      0 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs             0 Jun 10 10:39 ./hoho

Finding files with no current user or group

If you want to find files with no current user or group associated with them (i.e., the accounts are no longer included in the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files), you can use the -nouser or the -nogroup options with the find command as shown in the examples below. These commands are being run with sudo to ensure we have permission to see the file details.

$ sudo find -nouser -ls
      153      4 -rw-r--r--   1 1005     1005           53 Jun 10 12:08 ./ToDo
$ sudo find -nogroup -ls
      153      4 -rw-r--r--   1 1005     1005           53 Jun 10 12:08 ./ToDo 

Finding files by inode number

If needed, you can also find files using their inode numbers. An example is shown below.

$ find . -inum 10551 -ls
    10551      8 -rw-r--r--   1 shs      shs          6261 Oct  2  2023 ./links

How deeply to look

You can limit how deeply into the file system the find command will search for a particular file by using the -maxdepth option. In the scenario below, we create a ten-level directory structure, set up a file in the tenth directory, toss some text into it with the fortune command and then use the find command – first with and then without the -maxdepth option — to look for the new file. The -maxdepth option prevents the first search from continuing past the depth specified, so only one of these find commands finds it.

$ mkdir -p 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10
$ fortune > 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/TheEnd
$ find . -maxdepth 7 -name TheEnd
$ find . -name TheEnd
./1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/TheEnd

Removing files once you’ve found them

To remove a file after finding it with the find command, add the -delete option like this:

$ find . -name TheEnd -delete

Wrap-up

There really are a lot of very useful options to help you find files on your Linux system – so many, in fact, that it may take a while to digest them all!

Cato Networks is targeting managed service providers with its new Managed SASE Partner Platform. The MSASE platform is aimed at helping channel partners more efficiently deliver Cato’s SASE Cloud Platform, which combines threat prevention, data protection, and incident detection and response, to their customers. It enables multi-tenancy, immediate access to new features, and centralized management capabilities geared for MSPs.

“Channel partners now have vendor-level powers over licensing, account management, visibility, and more,” said Frank Rauch, global channel chief at Cato Networks, in a statement.

MSPs that partner with Cato Networks say the platform will simplify the training and onboarding for their companies to more quickly deliver value to customers.

“With the introduction of Cato MSASE Partner Platform, Cato is making it easier for us to help customers fully deploy SASE or seamlessly shift into a full SASE deployment when they’re ready to do so,” said David Humes II, vice president of product development at US Signal, in a statement. US Signal’s SASE services are powered by Cato.

SASE, which stands for secure access service edge, is a networking model that combines network and security capabilities into a single, cloud-based service that enterprises can extend to their on-premises employees, remote workers, and branch offices. (Check out Network World’s SASE buyer’s guide.)

According to Gartner, managed SASE service adoption will rise significantly in the next two years as enterprises opt to gain SASE capabilities via service providers. “By 2026, at least 45% of enterprises will use managed SASE services—an increase of three times from early 2023,” Gartner said in its report, How to Choose Between Managed SASE Services.

Cato SASE Cloud runs on a private global backbone of more than 90+ points of presence (PoPs) connected via multiple SLA-backed network providers. The PoPs software continuously monitors the providers for latency, packet loss, and jitter to determine in real-time the best route for every packet. Cato applies optimization and acceleration to all traffic going through the backbone to enhance application performance and the user experience. To ensure all locations benefit, Cato optimizes traffic from all the edges and toward all destinations—on-premises and in the cloud.

Cato MSASE provides a multi-tenant partner dashboard that provides visibility into the details of customer account status. The dashboard also enables MSPs to manage customer environments from planning through deployment and into production.

“As a Cato Networks Distinguished Support Provider partner, we have been delivering managed SASE services to mid-market customers,” said Matt Hiles, chief operating officer at Mosaic NetworX, in a statement. “We look forward to harnessing the power of the Cato MSASE Partner Platform to further simplify the delivery of managed SASE services for our customers.”

The supercomputer facility that will power Elon Musk’s new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, will be built as part of a hardware collaboration with Dell and Super Micro Computer (Supermicro), it has been announced.

News of the companies’ involvement in the new datacenter that will house the would-be ChatGPT rival emerged on the X (Twitter) platform from Dell CEO, Michael Dell, who tweeted: “We’re building a Dell AI factory with Nvidia to power Grok for xAI.”

In fact, this will be a joint enterprise, Musk tweeted back shortly after, “To be precise, Dell is assembling half of the racks that are going into the supercomputer that xAI is building.”

From other announcements, we know that Dell and Supermicro will build the Grok supercomputer cluster using Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPU platform, announced in March.

The image accompanying Dell’s tweet showed lines of rack-bound Nvidia servers still in their plastic-wrapped shipping state, which underlines that the project to build the dedicated facility in an unconfirmed location is still in its early stages.

AI gigafactory

Currently, for its development phase, xAI’s chatbot uses the Grok 1.5/1.5v multimodal large language model (LLM) whose big feature is that it can process images, speech, and video in addition to text.

However, as of today, Grok is only available to X’s $16 per month Premium+ subscribers. Presumably that’s because the physical capacity of the system remains limited. Musk has previously said he wants to have Grok to reach its higher-capacity supercomputer incarnation — housed in what Musk has dubbed “the gigafactory of compute” — by late 2025.

The whole project is a cocktail of old and new ingredients of the sort the tech industry excels at. Elon Musk is the most famous tech entrepreneur of his generation. The startup he founded to build Grok, xAI, recently raised a huge $6 billion in series B funding.

Nvidia, whose hardware will be used by Dell and Supermicro, now vies with Microsoft to be the world’s most valuable company with a market cap around $3 trillion.

Meanwhile, the world can’t get enough of a new generation of chatbots, a sector Musk thinks Grok can dominate. Dell and Supermicro are old hands by comparison but have a long track record of making computer systems.

The term “Grok” is jargon used loosely in programming to signify that something is fully intuited or understood. Its origin is widely claimed online to be from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

If Musk and Nvidia’s GPUs get most of the publicity around Grok, the involvement of Dell and Supermicro is at least as significant. Supermicro, for example, is known for its cooling expertise, a critical part of any datacenter clustering, as well as its understanding of the Nvidia platform.

Key differentiators

A bigger issue for the Grok project might simply be who it’s for in what is starting to become a crowded and competitive chatbot/LLM field:

“I can’t see what the userbase is for Grok when it’s charging for access and not offering anything to differentiate itself except a, Musk himself and b, its access to Twitter data,” tech commentator Kate Bevan told Network World.

Network and infrastructure roles continue to shift as enterprises adopt technologies such as AI-driven network operations, multicloud networking, zero trust network access (ZTNA), and SD-WAN. Here’s a recap of some of the latest industry research, hiring statistics, and certification trends that impact today’s network professionals, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders, and data center teams. Check back for regular updates.

CompTIA Network+ cert gets an update

CompTIA updated its Network+ certification to include more extensive coverage of modern network environments, factors related to physical network installations, and know-how to better secure and harden networks.

Software-defined networking (SDN) and SD-WAN are covered in the updated Network+ exam, or N10-009. According to CompTIA, “the program introduces infrastructure as code (IaC), which is considered a transformative approach that leverages code for improved provisioning and support for computing infrastructure.”

The updated Network+ certification program also now integrates zero-trust architecture and other forms of network fortification. Read more in the full story: CompTIA updates Network+ certification

June 2024

AWS adds two AI-focused certifications

Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched two new certifications in artificial intelligence for IT professionals looking to boost their skills and land AI-related jobs. The additional know-how will help practitioners secure jobs that require emerging AI skills, which could offer a 47% higher salary in IT, according to an AWS study.

AWS Certified AI Practitioner is a foundational program that validates knowledge of AI, machine learning (ML), and generative AI concepts and use cases, according to AWS. Candidates who are familiar with using AI/ML technologies on AWS and who complete a 120-minute, 85-question course will be able to sharpen their skills with fundamental concepts as well as use cases for AI, ML, and genAI. The exam will cover topics such as prompt engineering, responsible AI, security and compliance for AI systems, and more.

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer—Associate is a 170-minute exam with 85 questions that validates technical ability to implement ML workloads in production and to operationalize them. Individuals with at least one year of experience using Amazon SageMaker and other ML engineering AWS services would be good candidates for this certification. The exam will cover topics such as data preparation for ML models, feature engineering, model training, security, and more.

Registration for both new AWS certifications opens August 13.

June 2024

Cisco unveils AI-focused certification

Cisco’s new AI certification aims to help prepare IT pros to design, provision and optimize networks and systems needed for demanding AI/ML workloads. Unveiled at its Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas, the Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE)-AI Infrastructure certification is a vendor-agnostic, expert-level certification. With it, tech professionals will be able to design network architectures optimized for AI workloads, and “they’ll be able to do this while incorporating the unique business requirements of AI, such as trade-offs for cost optimization and power, and the matching of computing power and cloud needs to measured carbon use,” wrote Par Merat, vice president of Cisco Learning and Certifications, in a blog post about the new cert.

According to Cisco, the new CCDE-AI Infrastructure certification addresses topics including designing for GPU optimization as well as building high-performance generative AI network fabrics. Those seeking this certification will also learn about sustainability and compliance of networks that support AI. The skills will be needed across organizations, according to the Cisco AI Readiness Index, which found that 90% of organizations are investing to try to overcome AI skills gaps. Read more here: Cisco debuts CCDE-AI Infrastructure certification

June 2024

U.S. cybersecurity talent demand outpaces supply

As businesses continue to seek cybersecurity talent, the current supply of skilled workers will not meet the demand in 2024, according to recent data from CyberSeek, a data analysis and aggregation tool powered by a collaboration among Lightcast, NICE, and CompTIA.

There are only enough available workers to fill 85% of the current cybersecurity jobs throughout the U.S. economy, according to CyberSeek data, and more than 225,000 workers are needed to close the cybersecurity skills gap. The data also shows that job postings for all tech occupations declined by 37% between May 2023 and April 2024.

“Although demand for cybersecurity jobs is beginning to normalize to pre-pandemic levels, the longstanding cyber talent gap persists,” said Will Markow, vice president of applied research at Lightcast, in a statement. “At the same time, new threats and technologies are causing cybersecurity skill requirements to evolve at a breakneck pace, forcing employers, educators, and individuals to proactively anticipate and prepare for an ever-changing cyber landscape.”

Positions in the highest demand include network engineers, systems administrators, cybersecurity engineers, cybersecurity analysts, security engineers, systems engineers, information systems security officers, network administrators, information security analysts, and software engineers, according to the CyberSeek data.

“Building a robust cybersecurity presence often requires changes in talent acquisition strategies and tactics,” said Hannah Johnson, senior vice president, tech talent programs, CompTIA, in a statement. “That can include upskilling less experienced cybersecurity professionals for more advanced roles, or hiring people who demonstrate subject matter expertise via professional certifications or other credentials.”

June 2024

Average salary for IT pros surpasses $100k

Recent employment data shows that the median salary for IT professionals is now $100,399, with total compensation (including bonuses and fringe benefits) reaching $103,692. Management consulting firm Janco Associates, Inc. reported that IT salaries have risen by 3.28% in the past 12 months, even while the unemployment rate for IT workers hits 5%. Executives continue to see the biggest paychecks with total compensation packages increasing by 7.48% and median compensation reaching $184,354.

“Salary compression” is another trend Janco Associates noted. This occurs when new hires are offered salaries at the higher end of the pay range for existing positions, often getting paid more than current employees in the same roles.

Midsized enterprise companies are seeing more attrition than their large enterprise counterparts, while salaries in midsized companies are also rising faster than they are in large enterprises. Salary levels in midsized enterprises increased 5.46% versus 2.56% in larger enterprises, according to Janco Associates.

May 2024

AI, IT operations among the most in-demand IT skills

New research and survey results from IDC show that a growing lack of in-demand IT skills could be negatively impacting businesses’ bottom lines.

The IDC report, Enterprise Resilience: IT Skilling Strategies, 2024, reveals the most in-demand skills at enterprise organizations right now. Among the 811 respondents, artificial intelligence tops the list, cited by 45% of respondents, followed closely by IT operations (44%) and cloud solutions-architecture (36%). Other skills in demand right now include: API integration (33%), generative AI (32%), cloud solutions-data management/storage (32%), data analysis (30%), cybersecurity/data security (28%), IoT software development (28%), and IT service management (27%).

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the IT leaders at North American organizations said the lack of these skills has delayed digital transformation initiatives, most by an average of three to 10 months. Survey respondents detailed the negative impacts of lacking skills in their IT organizations:

• Missed revenue goals: 62%
• Product delays: 61%
• Quality problems: 59%
• Declining customer satisfaction: 59%
• Lost revenue: 57%

Considering these survey results, IDC predicts that by 2026, 90% of organizations worldwide will feel the pain of the IT skills crisis, potentially costing up to $5.5 trillion in delays, quality issues, and revenue loss. “Getting the right people with the right skills into the right roles has never been so difficult,” says Gina Smith, PhD, research director for IDC’s IT Skills for Digital Business practice, said in a statement. “As IT skills shortages widen and the arrival of new technology accelerates, enterprises must find creative ways to hire, train, upskill, and reskill their employees. A culture of learning is the single best way to get there.”

May 2024

Organizations abandon IT projects due to skills gap

A lack of specific technology skills worries IT executives, who report they will not be able to adopt new technologies, maintain legacy systems, keep business opportunities, and retain clients if the skills gap persists.

In a recent survey by online professional training provider Pluralsight, 96% of technologists said their workload has increased due to the skills gap, and 78% also reported that they abandoned projects partway through because they didn’t have employees with the necessary IT skills to successfully finish. While most organizations (78%) said their skills gap has improved since last year, survey respondents reported that cybersecurity, cloud, and software development are the top three areas in which a skills gap exists. IT executives surveyed said they worry the skills gap in their organizations will make it difficult to:

• Adopt new technology: 57%
• Maintain legacy systems: 53%
• Keep business opportunities: 44%
• Retain clients: 33%

Pluralsight surveyed 1,400 executives and IT professionals across the U.S., U.K., and India to learn more about the technical skills gap and how organizations are addressing a lack of expertise in specific technology areas.

May 2024

Lack of skills stymies network automation efforts

Network automation continues to challenge IT leaders, and one factor is a lack of skills on staff.

When research firm Enterprise Management Associates surveyed 354 IT professionals about network automation, just 18% rated their network automation strategies as a complete success, and 54% said they have achieved partial success. The remaining 38% said they were uncertain of the level of success achieved or admitted failure with their network automation projects.

More than one-fourth (26.8%) of the respondents pointed to staffing issues such as skills gaps and staff churn as a business challenge. “The most challenging thing for me is the lack of network engineers who can contribute to automation,” said a network engineer at a midmarket business services company in the EMA report. “The community is small, and it’s hard to find people who can help you solve a problem.”

April 2024

CompTIA plans AI certification roadmap

IT certification and training group CompTIA is expanding its product and program roadmap to meet the growing demand for AI-related skill sets.

AI becoming critical to existing job functions. At the same time, new roles are starting to land on employers’ radar. “Two entirely new job roles—prompt engineering and AI systems architects—are emerging. These positions align with the AI priorities of many organizations,” said Teresa Sears, vice president of product management at CompTIA.

Millions of IT professionals will need to acquire new AI skills to meet the needs of the job market, said Thomas Reilly, CompTIA’s chief product officer, in a statement. “We intend to create a range of certifications and training offerings spanning the complete career arc, from foundational knowledge for pre-career and early career learners to advanced skills for professionals with years of workforce experience.”

February 2024

IT job growth flattened in 2023

The number of new IT jobs created in calendar year 2023 flattened with just 700 positions added, which signals continued concerns about the economy and growing demand for skills focused on emerging technologies. For comparison, 2022 saw 267,000 jobs added, with industry watchers attributing the dramatic difference to tech layoffs and other cost-cutting measures.

According to Janco Associates, despite companies adding some 21,300 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2023, the overall increase for the entire calendar year still comes to just 700 new positions. 

“Based on our analysis, the IT job market and opportunities for IT professionals are poor at best. In the past 12 months, telecommunications lost 26,400 jobs, content providers lost 9,300 jobs, and other information services lost 10,300 jobs,” said M. Victor Janulaitis, CEO at Janco, in a statement. “Gainers in the same period were computer system designers gaining 32,300 jobs and hosting providers gaining 14,000.”

January 2024

Positive hiring plans for new year

Robert Half reports that the job market will remain resilient heading into 2024. According to the talent solutions provider’s recent survey, more than half of U.S. companies plan to increase hiring in the first half of 2024. While the data is not limited to the IT sector, the research shows 57% plan to add new permanent positions in the first six months of the year while another 39% anticipate hiring for vacant positions and 67% will hire contract workers as a staffing strategy.

Specific to the technology sector, 69% of the more than 1,850 hiring managers surveyed reported they would be adding new permanent roles for those professions. Still, challenges will persist into the new year, according to Robert Half, which reported 90% of hiring managers have difficulty finding skilled professionals and 58% said it takes longer to hire for open roles compared to a year ago.

December 2023

Cisco CCNA and AWS cloud networking rank among highest paying IT certifications

Cloud expertise and security know-how remain critical in building today’s networks, and these skills pay top dollar, according to Skillsoft’s annual ranking of the most valuable IT certifications. At number one on its list of the 20 top-paying IT certifications is Google Cloud-Professional Cloud Architect with an average annual salary of $200,960.

In addition to several cloud certifications, there are five security, networking, and system architect certifications on Skillsoft’s top 20 list:

• ISACA Certified Information Security Manager (CISM): Average annual salaries for those with CISM certification is $167,396, a slight increase over last year’s 162,347 salary.
• ISC2 Certification Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP): This certification consistently delivers an average annual salary of $156,699, according to Skillsoft.
• ISACA Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA): Professionals with a CISA certification earn an average annual salary of $154,500, an increase over last year’s $142,336.
• AWS Certified Advanced Networking-Specialty: This certification commands an annual average salary of $153,031.
• Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA): This certification commands an average annual salary of $128,651.

November 2023