In recent days Intel and Nvidia have introduced or announced new networking products with a common goal of offloading networking traffic to the network processor, thus freeing up the CPU for computational work.

Intel announced a new networking initiative to capitalize on what it calls “a perfect storm of 5G, edge buildout and pervasive artificial intelligence” with an expanded lineup of hardware, software and solutions for network infrastructure.

This includes enhancements to Intel’s software reference architecture, FlexRAN; Intel virtualized radio access network (vRAN) dedicated accelerator; network-optimized next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable and D processors (codenamed “Ice Lake”); and upgraded Intel Select Solutions for Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI).

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With the recent release of the linear tape–open 9 (LTO-9) standard, tape drives with increased capacity and speed should be available soon, but that doesn’t mean users of tape drives should rush to buy them.

Here are some of the pros and cons to weigh when considering whether an upgrade is in order.

Tape drives are a very reliable way to write data to storage, and are very good at holding onto data for multiple decades. They make an excellent medium for long-term storage and for shipping large amounts of data across long distances (a FedEx truck has unlimited bandwidth).

What tape is not good at is going slow. LTO-8 has a compressed transfer speed of 900MB/s, which is significantly faster than most any backup you’re going to send to it. It’s definitely faster than any incremental backup that will be sent to it, and that comprises most backups. That makes tapes as the initial target of backups problematic.

It’s OK to use tape to copy your backups for off-site purposes, because your disk-based backup system can be used as a cache for your tape drive, which should allow it to stream at a decent rate during the copy process. But it is next to impossible these days to properly design a backup system that sends incremental backups across the network directly to tape.

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Arm Ltd. last week announced the Cortex-R82, a chip that is both storage and data processing-capable, which could enable a whole new generation of storage devices that help process the data they store.

Storage processor chips, such as those made by Marvell but also storage device makers like EMC, handle the I/O and disk management, but if you want to process the data, that job falls to the CPU. This means data has to be moved in and out of the drive to be processed, a job that falls to two separate devices.

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When Covid-19 reared its ugly head earlier this year it altered the way millions of corporate workers access enterprise resources.  Now that it’s obvious those changes in many cases are going to be more permanent than originally thought, many customers and vendors are looking to support remote workers in ways not really expected in the past.

“The Covid-19 pandemic brought about a huge experiment in widespread remote working,” said Gartner vice president Elisabeth Joyce, of a recent survey of 127 company leaders that found  47% said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward. “As business leaders plan and execute reopening of their workplaces, they are evaluating more permanent remote working arrangements as a way to meet employee expectations and to build more resilient business operations.”

“The fundamental shift is that we need to think about our people working from home, and the home networks they use, as the default network. What we want is to create a high-quality micro-branch office in your home,” said Greg Dorai, vice president of product management and strategy for Cisco’s Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Group.  “Now we must consider every work-from-home worker and every one of their home offices as worthy of the same level of connectivity support as our company headquarters and branches.”

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