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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There is no sadder moment in the backup world than finding out the file or database you need to restore has never been backed up. Understanding how systems, directories, and databases are included in the backup system is the key to making sure this never happens to you.

The first step toward this goal is making sure that servers and services you want backed up are registered with your backup-and-recovery system.

For example, if you start using a new SaaS such as Salesforce, no backup system will automatically notice that addition and start backing it up for you. If you are fully virtualized on VMware, the systems will automatically notice if you add a new node to the configuration. But if you start using Hyper-V or KVM, no backup system will automatically notice there is a new hypervisor in the data center and start backing it up. And of course your backup system will not notice you installed a new physical server.

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The growth in data use and consumption means the needs of IT managers are changing, and a survey from Omdia (formerly IHS Markit) found data-center operators are looking for intelligence of all sorts, not just the artificial kind.

Omdia analysts recently surveyed IT leaders from 140 North American enterprises with at least 101 employees working in North American offices and data centers and asked them what features they wanted the most in their networking technology.

The results say respondents expect to more than double their average number of data-center sites between 2019 and 2021, and the average number of servers deployed in data centers is expected to double over the same timeline.

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