Category Archives: Cloud Hosting
Comcast teams with Vapor IO on multi-market edge computing pilot – Light Reading
Looking to extract a new revenue stream from its broadband infrastructure, Comcast has connected with Vapor IO on a pair of pilots that will test out an array of low-latency edge services and applications.
Initially focused on Chicago and Atlanta, the pilots will enable third-party edge service providers to host data and applications, with a goal of demonstrating "product readiness and identifying opportunities for scaling nationwide," the companies said.
(Source: kubala/Alamy Stock Photo)
Comcast and Vapor IO didn't say when the pilots might turn into a broader commercial product, but the tests in Chicago and Atlanta are set to get underway in the third quarter of 2023.
The general idea is for Vapor IO, an edge computing specialist that counts Crown Castle among its backers, and Comcast to test out an "anything-as-a-service" (XaaS) approach that takes advantage of low-latency infrastructure at the network's edge. Some of the services envisioned include computer vision, video security, private 5G, edge cloud as well as smart city, smart retail and smart factory applications, they said.
From an architecture standpoint, the pilot will interlink Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid platform, which offers services in 35 markets using Vapor IO's own facilities or those of its colocation partners, with Comcast's existing network infrastructure. That's also coming together as Comcast pushes ahead with an access network upgrade that is distributing elements of its architecture, including new fiber nodes, toward the edges.
"Our extensive network facilities are located in close proximity to businesses across the country and that presents an exciting opportunity to work with Vapor IO, specifically in Chicago and Atlanta, to enable new edge services that take advantage of the low latency and high bandwidth capabilities of our network," Elad Nafshi, Comcast's chief network officer, said in a statement.
Cable starting to size up the edge opportunity
The Comcast-Vapor IO pilot is another sign that the cable industry views edge computing as a growth target.
Another example is Cox Communications, which launched a unit called Cox Edge in mid-2021, offering a mix of edge services focused on sectors such as retail gaming, IoT, healthcare and enterprise IT. But instead of solely focusing on its cable service markets, Cox Edge has also been extended outside the company's cable footprint by working with a mix of infrastructure partners.
Bigger picture, some analysts have been bullish about edge computing's potential as network operators, cell tower owners and cloud computing providers jump in. Omdia, for example, forecasts that the global market for enterprise edge services to reach $116 billion in 2023, climbing to $245 billion by 2027. However, some of that optimism has been tempered a bit by uncertainty about when demand for edge services will rapidly accelerate and the sector will truly mature.
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Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading
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Comcast teams with Vapor IO on multi-market edge computing pilot - Light Reading
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market Is Expected to Boom … – Chatfield News-Record
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market research report has been published by Research Cognizance to give desired insights to drive the growth of businesses. The research report provides all the information related to the industry. It gives the outlook of the market by giving authentic data to its client which helps to make essential decisions. It gives an overview of the market which includes its definition, applications and developments, and manufacturing technology. This Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool market research report tracks all the recent developments and innovations in the market. It gives the data regarding the obstacles while establishing the business and guides to overcome the upcoming challenges and obstacles.
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Competitive landscape:
This Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool research report throws light on the major market players thriving in the market; it tracks their business strategies, financial status, and upcoming products.
Some of the Top companies Influencing this Market include:
Kasm, Vagrant, Ace Cloud Hosting, Amazon WorkSpaces, Nutanix, Teradici, Red Hat, Nerdio, V2 Cloud, SolarWinds, Parallels, Evolve IP, Citrix, Shells, Hysolate, Xen Project, VMware, Paperspace, Neverfail, Cisco, IBM, 10ZiG, Nvidia
Market Scenario:
Firstly this Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool research report introduces the market by providing an overview that includes definitions, applications, product launches, developments, challenges, and regions. The market is forecasted to reveal strong development by driven consumption in various markets. An analysis of the current market designs and other basic characteristics is provided in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Toolreport
This report provides a detailed and analytical look at the various companies that are working to achieve a high market share in the global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool market. Data is provided for the top and fastest-growing segments. This report implements a balanced mix of primary and secondary research methodologies for analysis. Markets are categorized according to key criteria. To this end, the report includes a section dedicated to the company profile. This report will help you identify your needs, discover problem areas, discover better opportunities, and help all your organizations primary leadership processes. You can ensure the performance of your public relations efforts and monitor customer objections to stay one step ahead and limit losses.
GlobalVirtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Toolmarket segmentation:
The market is segmented on the basis of the type, product, end users, raw materials, etc. the segmentation helps to deliver a precise explanation of the market
Market Segmentation: By Type
Cloud-basedOn-premises
Market Segmentation: By Application
SMEsLarge Enterprises
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Regional Coverage:
The region-wise coverage of the market is mentioned in the report, mainly focusing on the regions:
An assessment of the market attractiveness with regard to the competition that new players and products are likely to present to older ones has been provided in the publication. The research report also mentions the innovations, new developments, marketing strategies, branding techniques, and products of the key participants present in the global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool market. To present a clear vision of the market the competitive landscape has been thoroughly analysed utilizing the value chain analysis. The opportunities and threats present in the future for the key market players have also been emphasized in the publication.
This report aims to provide:
Table of Contents
Global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market Research Report 2023-2030
Chapter 1 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market Overview
Chapter 2 Global Economic Impact on Industry
Chapter 3 Global Market Competition by Manufacturers
Chapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region
Chapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions
Chapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type
Chapter 7 Global Market Analysis by Application
Chapter 8 Manufacturing Cost Analysis
Chapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy, and Downstream Buyers
Chapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders
Chapter 11 Market Effect Factors Analysis
Chapter 12 Global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market Forecast
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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Tool Market Is Expected to Boom ... - Chatfield News-Record
Forestry & Land Scotland grows new digital infrastructure and cuts out legacy dead wood – diginomica
(Image by Joe from Pixabay)
In a forest, it's the towering trees that draw your attention. However, a forest is a complex ecosystem, and it's within the roots and undergrowth where much of the detail and wonder takes place. Big societal changes are similar, take Scottish devolution, there's been a lot of focus on the powers that the Scottish parliament has gained, but devolution triggered a series of changes across institutions, each of which has led to technological change.
An example of this is Forestry and Land Scotland. Originally part of the Forestry Commission, Forestry and Land Scotland was founded in 2019, Nick Mahlitz, Senior Digital Infrastructure Manager at Forestry & Land Scotland, left the shores of the famous Loch Ness to describe the new technology direction and the role of cloud computing in replacing legacy systems.
Forestry & Land Scotland manages over 1.5 million acres of national forests and land, which is about 9% of the Scottish land mass. Those woods and glens are the revenue generators for Forestry & Land Scotland through sales of timber, venison, or access for holidays, hiking and mountain biking. It is an agency of the Scottish government, which employs 1,300, mostly in operational roles such as lumberjacks and archaeologists, Mahlitz says. Separation of the technology from the Forestry Commission took place in 2019. Today, Forestry & Land Scotland has IT teams at two main office locations in Edinburgh and Inverness; but Mahlitz does get out into the woods:
At forestry, for non-foresters days, I'll drive a timber harvester, spend the day on the peat restoration or work in the venison chillers, and that is where I and IT get to really engage and understand the challenges of the organization.
Talking of the separation, he says:
As a newly devolved organization, we had very little to go on when it came to predicting what IT we might need. On the plus side, we did inherit some legacy platforms, but they needed urgent updating.
Forestry & Land Scotland inherited an on-premise data center, which Mahlitz says of:
We had a diverse and old technology stack, which had received little investment. Some of the systems were 20 years old, including an ERP that was written in-house. The lack of investment was because the previous organization was waiting for devolution. So the technology had not kept up.
Initially, Forestry & Land Scotland opted for a private cloud hosting agreement for three years to give the organization time to consider its strategy, especially as a new remit brought a new appetite for what technology could do. This enabled an upgrade to the data center to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) using the Nutanix Cloud Platform, running 300 virtual machines delivering databases and back office applications.
As Forestry & Land Scotland met with diginomica, the private data center agreement was coming to an end, and Mahlitz was preparing to move to a complete cloud infrastructure for the organization, so they opted to stay with Nutanix. Forestry & Land Scotland is using the Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2) platform to manage their Microsoft Azure estate, Mahiltz says:
We initially saw NC2 as a kind of stopgap that would allow us to pick up our on-premise data center and run it on Microsoft Azure while we went about re-engineering applications to run on that platform natively.
Opting for Microsoft Azure aligns Forestry & Land Scotland with the Scottish government, which is a major user of Azure. Mahiltz says his organization will therefore be able to use Azure-based services as part of the Scottish government. He says:
By the end of this year, we will be 100% on Azure. The data center has come to the end of its life, so we needed to re-tender and re-architect.
Which is what shaped Mahlitz' thinking. The NC2 platform has bought Forestry & Land Scotland time, as it doesn't need to re-architect applications in a hurry. Without refactoring, Mahiltz has also avoided having to find those skills for a medium-term benefit. Although business technology leaders would rather not lift and shift, and it is well understood that this doesn't deliver optimum cloud savings, sometimes business needs to trump best practice. Mahiltz says:
We were given the opportunity to see for ourselves how easy it would be to move our applications to the public cloud using Nutanix NC2, how they would actually perform and understand the benefit of being able to manage them using the same tools as on our existing on-premise data center. It also gave us a real insight into just what we could save by not having to re-code and acquire new specialist skills to run applications natively on the Azure platform.
We deployed everything with little assistance. So we will take a lot of the legacy to the cloud and then transform it, including the ERP.
Having avoided reskilling in order to give old applications and business processes extended life, Forestry & Land Scotland can look forward to the skills it will require to meet the agency's new remit. Infrastructure management will be brought under a single console for cloud-based virtual machines, as well as on-premises technology.
Although a lift and shift may not sound it to some, Mahlitz says this move is in keeping with the needs of Forestry & Land Scotland and its five-year transformation programme. Forestry & Land Scotland also counts Citrix, Okta, Zscaler and Oracle as its key technologies. Mahiltz adds that the ability for NC2 to manage existing product licences on the new platform and use its data replication tools for automation will be beneficial to the government agency.
Forestry & Land Scotland is an organization that finds itself central to one of the most important issues of our time - sustainability. In the years to come, the organization will be storing carbon, continue producing carbon-neutral resources from its forests and be part of Scotland's vital tourism and sports sector, which will be on display to the world in August 2023 as Scotland hosts the first ever UCI combined cycling world championships.
More importantly, Mahlitz and his team have demonstrated that infrastructure decisions are business decisions. As Forestry & Land Scotland prepares to explore the use drones, virtual reality and continue to digitise its operations, infrastructure needs to be simplified and the platform for change, not the change itself.
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Forestry & Land Scotland grows new digital infrastructure and cuts out legacy dead wood - diginomica
The cutting-edge property inspection and operations software … – Open Access Government
In the UK, approximately a quarter of all construction projects are in the public sector. From major infrastructure works to public housing to facilities, public sector output can be wide-ranging and varied.
However, to see these projects move successfully and efficiently from design to build and beyond requires a seamless blend of communication, collaboration, transparency, and resource management at every level.
This is where the Crown Commercial Service comes in. Established in 2014, the CCS is an executive agency of the UK government. It plays a pivotal role in the procurement and management of approved suppliers, thus ensuring that goods, services and works for the public sector are cost-effective and of a high standard.
The CCS engages in policy, strategy, and framework development, with a remit to deliver value for money in the public sector procurement process. Frameworks provide pre-negotiated conditions for goods and services to facilitate access to a wide range of suppliers at competitive prices.
Here at Property Inspect, were proud to be counted among the select handful of approved Crown Commercial Service providers, offering our award-winning property inspection and operations software to the public sector in order to streamline and protect public sector projects.
Although we operate globally with established footholds in markets across South Africa, Europe and the United States, we were founded in the United Kingdom in 2015 and we care passionately about the built environment in our home country.
Our mission, therefore, is to empower departments and professionals across the real estate landscape to streamline property operations and improve the lives of the people that invest, build, own, manage, work and live in them. We aim to achieve this by making every building compliant, transparent, and safe.
Our CCS Vertical Application Solutions Framework Contract cements our position as a trusted supplier, enabling us to deliver software that does exactly that streamlining property inspections and operations to improve property management throughout the public sector.
Obtaining the CCS award enables us to establish connections with government organisations that are in desperate need of smarter and safer solutions to enhance their operations for the benefit of society, while at the same time improving processes, increasing efficiency and saving money.
The Property Inspect platform allows for seamless administration and operations of a property, or a property portfolio, through property inspection and operation solutions that place emphasis on efficiency and compliance.
We do this using a range of smart features, such as automated tasks and seamless communication and collaboration tools for stakeholders like contractors and teams, ultimately enabling everyone involved in the process to become more agile and efficient with their processes.
Property Inspect removes the many barriers pen and paper formats have presented in recent years, digitising core areas in the property inspection process to keep all departments informed and efficient throughout the lifecycle of a project.
Whether thats through maintenance tracking, digital property inspections, client logins, scheduling or invoicing, the Property Inspect platform has been built with efficiency, compliance and safety in mind.
Maintenance is of significant importance for the continued success of any public sector project, so weve made it easy for maintenance teams to log, manage and report on maintenance issues, organise cleaning schedules and track replacements for sensors, smoke alarms, and more, thereby aiding compliance.
In addition to this, the work order option makes it easier than ever to create checklists and assign tasks to contractors, notifying them when and where to carry out essential maintenance. With clear cost breakdowns for each task, they can be quickly marked as complete, with outstanding lists updated and distributed automatically.
Another area where Property Inspect really excels is through the use of pre-built and customisable report templates. Every public sector project in the UK requires one or many inspections, but these can often be time-consuming and manual. So, from simple risk assessments to in-depth building surveys, weve built a range of ready-to-use digital templates, speeding up the process enormously.
These customisable, pre-made report templates include:
Whether youre out in the field or in the office, our desktop, iOS and Android app allows you to deliver faster, more detailed and more accurate property inspection reports, capturing building and asset conditions and tracking maintenance issues, all whilst reducing time at the property by over 50%.
Used in over 40 countries, Property Inspect is designed to give stakeholders total control and complete clarity over their property assets, enabling them to efficiently capture and accurately report on property conditions and property maintenance issues in a timely manner.
With Property Inspect, compiling reports becomes effortless, and there is also the option to work offline, edit reports and share them with project stakeholders from anywhere, at any time.
Other features of the Property Inspect app include:
At Property Inspect, we take data and security seriously so that people can be confident in the services we provide and the data held in our cloud-based software. All of Property Inspects services and data are hosted with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in secure cloud hosting. This provides the highest level of reliability and security. AWS has a highly reliable infrastructure with multiple availability zones and data centres, meaning that Property Inspect has had 99.99% uptime over a 365-day period, so will always continue to run even if there is a failure in one availability zone.
On top of that, to add even further security, AWS offers a variety of data security measures, including encryption, network security, and identity and access management.
To further show our commitment to security, were also Cyber Essentials Plus certified. This is a scheme by the UK government to help organisations improve their cybersecurity and protect against common cyber threats. This certification enables Property Inspect users to demonstrate compliance with complex data regulations, offering improved security by undergoing a more rigorous assessment of measures reducing the risk of cyber threats.
What this all amounts to is a secure, efficient, and comprehensive solution for public sector projects.
Property Inspect is an essential tool for any property inspection or management professional working in the public sector who wants to streamline operations and achieve greater efficiency, driving down costs and boosting security and compliance.
Through smart workflows, audits, and assisted scheduling, together with online and offline training and support, we empower our users to deliver faster, more detailed and accurate reports whilst removing the barriers to effective property operations.
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The cutting-edge property inspection and operations software ... - Open Access Government
Critical Flaws in AMI MegaRAC BMC Software Expose Servers to … – The Hacker News
Jul 20, 2023THNHardware Security / SysAdmin
Two more security flaws have been disclosed in AMI MegaRAC Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) software that, if successfully exploited, could allow threat actors to remotely commandeer vulnerable servers and deploy malware.
"These new vulnerabilities range in severity from High to Critical, including unauthenticated remote code execution and unauthorized device access with superuser permissions," Eclypsium researchers Vlad Babkin and Scott Scheferman said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
"They can be exploited by remote attackers having access to Redfish remote management interfaces, or from a compromised host operating system."
To make matters worse, the shortcomings could also be weaponized to drop persistent firmware implants that are immune to operating system reinstalls and hard drive replacements, brick motherboard components, cause physical damage through overvolting attacks, and induce indefinite reboot loops.
"As attackers shift their focus from user facing operating systems to the lower level embedded code which hardware and computing trust relies on, compromise becomes harder to detect and exponentially more complex to remediate," the researchers pointed out.
Eclypsium's findings are based on an analysis of the AMI firmware leaked in a ransomware attack carried out by the RansomExx crew targeting hardware-maker GIGABYTE in August 2021.
The vulnerabilities are the latest additions to a set of bugs affecting AMI MegaRAC BMCs that have been cumulatively named BMC&C, some of which were disclosed by the firmware security company in December 2022 (CVE-2022-40259, CVE-2022-40242, and CVE-2022-2827) and January 2023 (CVE-2022-26872 and CVE-2022-40258).
The list of new flaws is as follows -
When chained together, the two bugs carry a combined severity score of 10.0, allowing an adversary to sidestep Redfish authentication and remotely execute arbitrary code on the BMC chip with the highest privileges. In addition, the aforementioned flaws could be strung together with CVE-2022-40258 to crack passwords for the admin accounts on the BMC chip.
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It's worth pointing out that an attack of this nature could result in the installation of malware that could be used for conducting long-term cyber espionage while flying under the radar of security software, not to mention performing lateral movement and even destroy the CPU by power management tampering techniques like PMFault.
While there is no evidence that the flaws have been exploited in the wild, the popularity of MegaRAC BMC a critical supply chain component found in millions of devices shipped by major vendors makes it a lucrative target for threat actors looking to control every aspect of the targeted system.
"These vulnerabilities pose a major risk to the technology supply chain that underlies cloud computing," the researchers said. "In short, vulnerabilities in a component supplier affect many hardware vendors, which in turn can be passed on to many cloud services."
"As such these vulnerabilities can pose a risk to servers and hardware that an organization owns directly as well as the hardware that supports the cloud services that they use."
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Critical Flaws in AMI MegaRAC BMC Software Expose Servers to ... - The Hacker News
Tenable Cloud Security Now Protects Against Container Image … – Database Trends and Applications
Tenable, the exposure management company, is debuting new Tenable Cloud Security features that target OS vulnerability prevention through threat detection across container images, registries, and pipelines.
With more and more organizations turning to containerization, their risk potential increases in parallel. According to a Forrester Consulting study done on behalf of Tenable, 32% of enterprises reported that containerization will be implemented in the next year, with 51% already completing implementation. Security for these containers has left something to be desired, often involving developers more than security teams, according to Tenable.
Tenable Cloud Security agentless container scanning equips enterprises with comprehensive visibility over container images through the rigorous monitoring, reporting, and remediation of any vulnerabilities. Centralized within a single user interface, security teams benefit from the trusted OS vulnerability detection that Tenable provides, now applicable to container images stored in container image registries.
This solution integrates image scanning within DevOps and security workflows and pipelines, empowering security teams to stop risky images from entering production while reducing alert fatigue. Tenables single-policy framework drives scalable, secure, and efficient containerization across an organization, where preventative policies for system host vulnerabilities are as easy as those for infrastructure misconfigurations, according to the company.
To learn more about Tenable Cloud Security, please visit https://www.tenable.com/.
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Tenable Cloud Security Now Protects Against Container Image ... - Database Trends and Applications
Converge to Host Second Quarter Fiscal 2023 Conference Call USA … – PR Newswire
TORONTO andGATINEAU, QC, July 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - Converge Technology Solutions Corp. ("Converge" or "the Company") (TSX: CTS) (FSE: 0ZB) (OTCQX: CTSDF), a services-led, software-enabled, IT & Cloud Solutions provider focused on delivering industry-leading solutions,announced today that it will hold a conference call to discuss its second quarter fiscal 2023 results on Wednesday, August 9, 2023 at 8:00 am EST. The call will be hosted by the Converge leadership team, followed by a question-and-answer period. Converge will report its financial results in the morning prior to the call.
Conference Call Details:Date: Wednesday, Aug 9th, 2023Time: 8:00 AM Eastern Time
Participant Webcast Link:Webcast Link https://app.webinar.net/gkXqYQ1YE8v
Participant Dial-in Details with Operator Assistance:Conference ID: 70789128Toronto: 416-764-8609North American Toll Free: 888-390-0605
International Toll-Free Numbers:Germany: 08007240293Ireland: 1800939111Spain: 900834776Switzerland: 0800312635United Kingdom: 08006522435
You may register and enter your phone number to receive an instant automated call back via https://emportal.ink/3OgdiaZ
Recording Playback:Webcast Link - https://app.webinar.net/gkXqYQ1YE8vToronto: 416-764-8677North American Toll Free: 1-888-390-0541Replay Code: 789128 #Expiry Date: August 16th, 2023
Please connect at least 15 minutes prior to the conference call to ensure time for any software download that may be required to access the webcast. A live audio webcast accompanied by presentation slides and archive of the conference call and webcast will be available by visiting the Company's website athttps://convergetp.com/investor-relations/.
About Converge
Converge Technology Solutions Corp. is a services-led, software-enabled, IT & Cloud Solutions provider focused on delivering industry-leading solutions. Converge's global approach delivers advanced analytics, application modernization, cloud platforms, cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, and digital workplace offerings to clients across various industries. The Company supports these solutions with advisory, implementation, and managed services expertise across all major IT vendors in the marketplace. This multi-faceted approach enables Converge to address the unique business and technology requirements for all clients in the public and private sectors. For more information, visit convergetp.com.
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Converge to Host Second Quarter Fiscal 2023 Conference Call USA ... - PR Newswire
Scalable Digital Twin Simulations: A Powerful New Tool – Spiceworks News and Insights
Digital twin simulations can model large, dynamic data systems and simulate the behaviors of thousands of interacting entities. They can provide valuable insights to decision-makers for many applications, including transportation safety, logistics networks, and city management systems.
A powerful tool for uncovering insights about how large dynamic systems behave is emerging. Digital twin simulations can give system planners and managers invaluable information about complex interactions that are otherwise difficult to study. Digital twins are virtual models of real-world entities that can represent physical attributes, state information, and behavior for each entity. They have been used for decades in the field of product lifecycle management (PLM), where they play a crucial role in the design and testing of various devices. Recent applications have extended digital twin technology to track the behavior of live systems with many components such as vehicle fleets, IoT devices, and even people both to monitor status in real-time and to predict future events.
Now, data analysts and operational managers can harness the power of digital twins to simulate the behaviors of complex systems with thousands of interacting entities. This enables them to explore scenarios they are likely to encounter in live systems, informing their decisions and helping identify potential issues in the planning phase. These capabilities also empower professionals to make accurate predictions that guide both current and future deployments, making digital twins an indispensable asset in the modern world of complex systems and ever-changing environments.
Consider the challenge of managing a nationwide airline system comprising hundreds of thousands of passengers, thousands of aircraft, pilots, gates, bags, and more. As we have seen in the news, issues such as weather delays, equipment outages, and problems with pilot scheduling can severely disrupt the intricate interplay of these entities. Take the widespread holiday Southwest Airlines cancelationsOpens a new window or the January FAA system outageOpens a new window as prime examples. Operational managers need tools that can help them alert passengers to these problems and assess the impact of making changes to flight schedules. However, most current solutions rely on inefficient database queries and costly, time-consuming manual interventions, by which time disgruntled passengers are already on the phone with customer service, and flight delays have cascaded into intractable logjams.
What if airlines could respond to these issues immediately as they occur, or better yet, prevent them from happening altogether? Enter digital twins. This technology has the power to model entire airline systems quickly and accurately, representing various types of interacting components such as passengers, airplanes, and baggage handling. Digital twins can also maintain critical state information about each component, like aircraft types, mechanical issues, and passenger itineraries. Moreover, they can track live statistics that measure delays and bottlenecks and assess how well the airline is meeting its passengers needs.
Used in simulation, digital twins become even more powerful. They can interact by exchanging messages in a time-driven simulation that runs faster than real-time, simulating the systems future behavior to predict the effects of management decisions. Digital twin simulations also can help airlines develop new real-time analytics that continuously tracks the progress of passengers during their itineraries and proactively respond to disruptions, both reducing stress and smoothing operations. For example, if a flight is delayed, digital twins combined with AI technology could notify each passenger and confirm potential re-routings before they need to call a customer service representative. Simulations can also deliver valuable insights to third-party decision-makers such as airports, air traffic controllers, travel agencies, and more.
See More: Forget the VR Vision of the Metaverse: Digital Twins Are Coming
Transportation safety has also been in the news lately with the 50-car freight train derailment in Palestine, OhioOpens a new window and the fatal passenger train derailment in the NetherlandsOpens a new window . Digital twin simulations can help prevent similar emergencies as well as save valuable time and resources. Currently, mechanical issues that can cause derailments, such as severely overheated wheel bearings, are detected and radioed to train engineers from track-side sensors, often too late to prevent an accident. In the Ohio event, the NTSB preliminary report described increasing temperatures reported by three rail-side hot box detectors before the accident occurred. These types of detectors are positioned every few miles across the country; all the data needed to predict impending derailments is there and could help prevent these incidents if harnessed more effectively.Real-time analytics using digital twins can track this sensor data and head off possible accidents by warning of impending failures much earlier. With this technology, managers can detect anomalies and take action faster before small problems escalate into derailments. Cloud-hosted analytics can simultaneously track the entire rail networks rolling stock using scalable, in-memory computing techniques to host digital twins. They can analyze patterns of temperature changes for each cars wheel bearings, combine this with known information about the rail car, such as its maintenance history, and then assess the likelihood of failure and alert personnel within milliseconds. Conversely, this contextual information can also be valuable in preventing unnecessary false-positive alerts that create costly delays.
To help railway engineers develop and test new predictive analytics software, large-scale digital twin simulations can model the flow of information from the hundreds of thousands of freight cars that cross the U.S. each day, as well as the detectors placed along the tracks. They can also statistically simulate emerging wheel bearing issues and generate the telemetry that would be emitted from thousands of existing track-side detectors across the country. This telemetry can be fed to real-time analytics software and used to evaluate how well the software predicts and avoids impending failures. This technology allows transportation agencies and public officials to develop next-generation safety systems to help eliminate dangerous and costly derailments.
Digital twin technology is revolutionizing the way complex systems are planned and managed. Beyond airline operations and rail networks, digital twins can be used to model a wide variety of systems with many components, including trucking fleets, physical and cybersecurity systems, logistics networks for disaster recovery, smart buildings, and city management systems.
By running simulations on scalable computing infrastructures, intricate behaviors can be observed, carefully analyzed, and their real-world impact evaluated, providing valuable insights into their complex dynamics. Digital twins can predict future behavior within live systems and assist decision-makers, creating a powerful new tool for both system developers and operational managers. These many benefits of digital twin simulations indicate that they will play an ever more crucial role in managing the complex systems we rely on every day.
Whats your take on digital twin simulations for large, dynamic behavioral systems? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . Wed love to know!
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Scalable Digital Twin Simulations: A Powerful New Tool - Spiceworks News and Insights
Microsoft Azure Boost Launches to Offload Virtualization Processes – Petri.com
Microsoft has announced a public preview of Azure Boost for enterprise customers this week. The new offering is designed to offload virtualization processes onto dedicated hardware and software.
The new Azure Boost service enables customers to access experimental SKUs. This release should make it easier to test integrations with their existing virtual machines (VMs) ahead of the general availability in the coming months.
By separating hypervisor and host OS functions from the host infrastructure, Azure Boost enables greater network and storage performance at scale, improves security by adding another layer of logical isolation, and reduces the maintenance impact for future Azure software and hardware upgrades, Microsoft explained.
Microsofts new Azure Boost service offers various benefits to meet the specific needs of customers. Azure Boost virtual machines provide significant performance improvements over existing Azure VMs with up to 200 Gbps networking throughput. Its powered by the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) to ensure stability, higher network availability, and faster data transfers.
According to Microsoft, Azure Boost brings improved storage performance similar to Ev5 and Dv5 virtual machines. The service also brings enhancements to existing storage capabilities, including disk caching support for Azure Premium SSDs.
Microsoft mentioned that Azure Boost runs storage and networking processes on dedicated hardware to boost security for organizations. It comes with robust hardware-based secure boot and attestation features to reduce the potential attack surface. Moreover, the new offering reduces maintenance downtime in enterprise environments.
Microsoft notes that Azure Boost should be a welcome addition for businesses with high-performance network and storage requirements. Azure Boost marks a significant leap forward in Azure infrastructure innovation, paving the way for accelerated improvements in performance, security, and reliability. Microsoft added. If youre interested, you can sign up for the preview of Azure Boost on this page.
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Microsoft Azure Boost Launches to Offload Virtualization Processes - Petri.com
Akamai announces five cloud computing sites in Europe, the US … – DatacenterDynamics
Content delivery network (CDN) player Akamai has launched three cloud computing sites in the US and France, with more planned in the coming weeks in the US and India.
The company this week announced the launch of sites in Washington, DC and Chicago in the US as well as Paris, France, with Seattle and Chennai, India opening later this quarter. The company also announced new instances, doubled the capacity of its object storage product to one petabyte and one billion objects per bucket, and will be launching a load balancing service later this year.
The new cloud sites will be located in colocation facilities - Akamai did not specify which.
The company said new sites mark the first step in Akamais push to put compute, storage, database, and other services on top of the same underlying backbone that powers its Edge network globally.
Distributed workloads require distributed infrastructure, said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager, cloud technology group, Akamai Technologies. Legacy, centralized cloud architecture was not designed for the demands of developers and companies challenged with delivering better user experiences that increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer.
Akamai was one of the first content delivery networks, originally created at the end of the last century to speed up Internet pages to users and now has some 4,100 locations in 135 countries, where it places racks of equipment to support the delivery of content locally.
Launched in February 2023, Akamais Connected Cloud is intended as a more distributed alternative to the likes of AWS and Azure. It offers dedicated and shared CPU, GPU, containers, storage, database, and serverless services.
The services are delivered from an expanded set of locations beyond the initial 11 sites Akamai took over when it bought cloud hosting company Linode for $900 million in February 2022. Akamai promises to drive down the cost of cloud computing with cheaper egress charges based on "bringing CDN-like economics to cloud data transfer."
Founded in 2003, at the time of the acquisition Linode operated in colocation space in 11 data centers across America, Canada, Germany, the UK, India, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. On Akamai's website, the company lists future planned core sites in Los Angeles, California; Miami, Florida; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Jakarta, Indonesia; Seoul, South Korea; Osaka, Japan; Milan, Itlay; Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Stockholm, Sweden.
Like other CDNs, Akamai noticed the similarity of its offering and the concept of Edge networking, which attempts to make good on the weaknesses of centralized clouds by serving applications closer to users and data sources. CDN players including Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly are all making efforts to grow the role of CDNs in Edge applications.
In March 2023, Akamai acquired cloud storage provider Ondat.
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Akamai announces five cloud computing sites in Europe, the US ... - DatacenterDynamics