Monthly Archives: January 2023

Unless something is entirely weightless it has the potential to be pulled earthward by gravity, and the term is used figuratively for data when used in a discussion of data gravity. As you likely know from being here we do like to talk about data in our blog, and given the fact that 4GoodHosting is a Canadian web hosting provider that shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. But anyone and everyone who’s operating in the digital space has more demands than ever before when it comes to managing and warehousing data, and so if you’re not familiar with data gravity that’s where we’ll start this week.

The clinical definition for data gravity is to say that is the ‘propensity for bodies of data to draw an expanding swath of applications and services into closer proximity’. It affects an enterprise’s ability to innovate, secure customer experiences, and even deliver financial results on a global scale. As such it’s an issue that major businesses will have to deal with if they’re going to continue to have the same benchmarks for themselves operating their business in the way they have for likely more than 2 decades now. If not longer.

No one anywhere is taking their foot off the gas even a bit with making progress, so data storage and management challenges continue to be magnified. Data gravity is certainly one of them, so let’s look at it in more detail with this week’s entry.

Heavy Sets

When data piles up, applications and services are always going to move closer to the data sets and this data gravity at work. It’s already been identified as a key megatrend for certain industries, and the prominence of it is foreseen to double in the next couple of years. It may mean problems down the road with some organizations and their IT infrastructure.

Data should be openly available to access by its related applications and services, easily managed, analyzed, and activated regardless of location. In order for that to happen traffic must flow easily everywhere across a company’s network footprint and including – among other point-to-points – from the public internet to every private point of presence for the business.

The problem is that the gravity of massive data sets can lock applications and services in place within one particular operational location. When the stored data is trapped there it can’t be made useful anywhere else, and this problem related to inevitable centralization can affect every other aspect of the system as a whole.

The fix is to make sure that no particular data set becomes uncontrollable by overwhelming IT capacity with excessive data volumes. But how is that done?

Agile Architecture

The starting consideration in evaluating that approach has to be the volume of data being generated and consumed. The number and type of places where data is stored and used, the way data is distributed across such places, and the speed the data is transmitted also needs be to taken into account.

But managing data gravity effectively can become a competitive differentiator, and if you have solid and well-built infrastructure you’ll be more ahead of the curve. Data gravity affects a company’s IT ability to be innovative and agile, and whether or not that’s a big deal depends on what you’re doing with your venture.

The main thrust of addressing data gravity has to be two-fold. Teams need to start with maintaining multiple centers where data processes take place. From there they must design an architecture where applications, compute and storage resources can move efficiently within and throughout those centers. But the cost and time involved with moving data around once their IT elements are decentralized is often considerable and underestimated. Unanswered questions around scale can cause transaction and egress fees to pile up. Having vendor lock-in causing headaches is common too.

Colocation Fix

Colocation data centers can be one fix when hybrid or multi-cloud setups are being utilized. If they’re located near a cloud location, they are able to  facilitate solutions from multiple clouds. This eliminates data duplication and reduces latency at the same time. The right colocation provider can provide cross-connects, private circuit options and hyperscale-ready onramps. The only hang up can be  geographical distribution.

Doubling down on major urban centers to creating an emphasis on expanding interconnected ecosystems around existing data gravity isn’t always such a straightforward solution. But one newer approach that is being seen is where organizations differentiate themselves by focusing on data hubs in multi-tenant data centers near cloud campuses at the edge. By placing data closer to the end user they solve much of the latency problem. Further, the ability to process some data close to cloud computing applications can solve the problem of data storage being too dense to move.

Edge Data Servers to Meet Need

This leads to the seemingly most ideal approach to dealing with data gravity – using Edge data centers where the architecture is prepped for the needed hybrid or multi-cloud solutions. The best ones will be working closely alongside cloud-based models where storage capacity at the edge can reduce the size of otherwise centralized data sets. This is done by discarding unneeded data and the compressing the vital stuff.

These ones will also need to be set up for increased bandwidth as more and more processing will take place in the one data storage location. If configured properly, Edge data servers can serve as the first stop for processing before it moves to the cloud and it is predicted that within 3 years 75% of data will be processed at the Edge, including 30% of total workloads.

Looking into an industry crystal ball, it’s hard to predict which ways data gravity will influence the ways networks work and look. That said, solving data gravity in the future will involve an intermeshed collaboration between parties such as content providers, edge data centers and enterprise IT teams.

People with computing know-how won’t need an introduction to DDR5 RAM, and that’s in large part because the upgrade on DDR4 has been rolled-out in full and with widespread adoption for about a year and a half now. What also doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation is how Random Access Memory is what allows everything to happen at the most elemental levels for digital devices, and for a layman’s terms understanding of it a person can look no further than how that 8GB smartphone they used to have needed to be replaced much sooner than they thought.

In comparison to V4, DDR5 RAM has better speeds, better power management and efficiency, and more RAM itself in the same physical package. The reason DDR5 is so noteworthy here is that utilizing it has a lot of significance for servers too. We’ve talked about it at length and are definitely qualified to do so, but servers are really being pushed to the limit these days and that’s going to be an ongoing reality for the long-foreseeable future.

DDR4 memory bandwidth per CPU core has declined, and in the same way this means reaching its limit for next-gen CPUs the same type of ceiling has been hit for servers. Staying ahead of resultant significant lag and lessened performance is something that every good Canadian web hosting provider will be able to relate to and that certainly applies to us here at 4GoodHosting too.

Exceed 50% for First Half

The way DDR5 prices continue to fall for downstream manufacturers has created an opportunity to upgrade iterations of the product and that’s what is being seen with Intel, AMD and other manufacturers offering conversions to the point that DDR5 penetration rate will be further enhanced. As this relates to server side, new CPUs that support 12 DDR5 memory channels are right in line with what’s needed for servers now and all web hosting providers in Canada are looking to the Sapphire Rapids release for the data center sector that will be coming very soon this year.

 The penetration rate of DDR5 server memory modules will continue to rise in the future as mainstream server CPUs supporting DDR5 are shipped on a larger scale. This should mean that those of us with large data centers and reworked servers in place for them should be able to see more affordable prices attached for putting them in place. We do know that high-end DDR5 7000MHz specification products don’t stay on shelves for any time at all as it is right now. Should DDR5 prices continue to fall for downstream manufacturers it is a good opportunity to upgrade iterations of the product, and that’s what web hosting providers will be looking to see as well.

Less Power Usage Appeal Too

Data Centers have increasing power demands, and that goes a long with ever-increasing power needs to cool them as well which creates something of vicious circle with the whole thing. Greater adoption and utilization of DDR5 RAM in web hosting and data center management promises to have benefits here too. DDR5 has a lower voltage, down to 1.1 volts instead of the standard 1.2 volts. Thinking that as speeds go higher the voltage increases would make sense, but DDR5 shows how RAM manufacturers, are able to produce super-fast RAM at lower voltages.

Like most things Korean, SK Hynix chips are the best in the business and they have developed uper speedy DDR5-8400 RAM that has superior performance while not needing more than that 1.1 volts mark. DDR5 also has the server-side appeal of being able to handle voltage regulation on the modules themselves, as opposed to requiring the motherboard to handle it. Last but not least, DDR5 RAM can have on-die error correction code, which helps to detect and correct memory errors on the RAM itself and the way this will benefit web hosting data centers will need no explanation either.

Boosted Signaling and Bandwidth

The biggest appeal for the industry with DDR5 is the way that system bandwidth has the potential to be nearly doubled,  from a 33.6 gigabytes per second average for DDR4 to 69.2Gbps for DDR5. That space is certainly needed given the data collection and concentration demands we talked about earlier. Less system latency is a big plus too, but another factor that people aren’t talking about to the same extent is better bank group enabling.

There is the potential for near doubling here too when moving from DDR4 to DDR5 RAM, and this means improved memory channel efficiency. Data storage comes hand in hand with the need for efficient data retrieval, and this of course is very central to website function as it relates to web hosting. The standard for crucial DDR5 hosting being 64 as compared to 32 for DDR4 hosting is another big part of why web hosting providers can’t get DDR5 into their hardware configurations fast enough.

Fair enough to think of the World Wide Web as the most vast expanse you can think of, but when we are talking about the literal natural world there are no more vast expanses than the world’s oceans. Let’s look no further than the Pacific Ocean, with a size that exceeds that of all the continents on earth put together and is 46% of the water surface on earth. But the Indian Ocean needs a nod here too, as it has the greatest stretch of open water with absolutely nothing stand on between points. 19,000km between the Colombian Coast and the Malay Peninsula.

Enough about ocean bodies of water for now, the Web is a vast expanse in its own right but the number of devices in the world that rely on utilizing it is a fairly mammoth number in its own right. And perhaps the two are coming together now with news that researchers are well on their way to finding a way to harness the energy in the oceans to power devices needed out there.

It’s been said that there’s no stopping the tides, and when you think about the way the tides move based on lunar cycles and the all-powerful nature of all of that it’s really no surprise that this is considered as a potential supremo power source.

We’re like any other reputable Canadian web hosting provider here at 4GoodHosting in that we’re the furthest thing from scientists, but the prospect of anything that can provide solutions to the world’s growing power needs is something that we’ll take interest in right away. So this is something that is definitely interesting, and as such its our blog entry topic for this week.

Utilizing TENGs

In a world of global warming and resultant wilder weather there is even more of a need to stay on top of tsunamis, hurricanes, and maritime weather in general. There are sensors and other devices on platforms in the ocean to help keep coastal communities safe but they need a consistent and stable power supply like any other type of device.

It is required for those ocean sensors to collect critical wave and weather data, and if that’s not guaranteed then there are safety concerns for coastal communities that rely on accurate maritime weather information. As you’d guess, replacing batteries at sea is also expensive and so what if this could all be avoided by powering devices indefinitely from the energy in ocean waves?

There are overweight researchers working to make this a reality with the development of TENGS – triboelectric nanogenerators that are small powerhouses that convert wave energy into electricity to power devices at sea. Developed to a larger scale these TENGS may be able to power ocean observation and communications systems with acoustic and satellite telemetry.

The good news to that end are they are low cost, lightweight, and can efficiently convert slow, uniform or random waves into power. This makes them especially well-suited to powering devices in the open ocean where monitoring and access are going to be a challenged and likely coming with a lot of cost too.

Converter Magnets

TENGS work by means of carefully placed magnets converting energy more efficiently than other cylindrical versions of the same technology so that they are better for transform slow, uniform waves into electricity. More on how they work is related to triboelectric effect and for most of us the best way to conceptualize this is to think of all of the times we’ve received a static electric shock from clothing that’s fresh out of the dryer

A cylindrical TENG is made up of two nested cylinders with the inner cylinder rotating freely. Between the two cylinders are strips of artificial fur, aluminum electrodes, and a material similar to Teflon called fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP). With the device rolling along the surface of an ocean wave, the artificial fur and aluminum electrodes on one cylinder rub against the FEP material on the other cylinder. The static electricity that results can be converted into power.

More movement, more energy and researchers have been positioning magnets to stop the inner cylinder in the device from rotating until it reached the crest of a wave, allowing it to build up ever increasing amounts of potential energy. Nearing the crest of the wave, the magnets released and the internal cylinder started rolling down the wave very quickly. The faster movement produced electricity more efficiently, generating more energy from a slower wave.

The FMC-TENG is lightweight and can be used in both free-floating devices and moored platforms. Eventually it may be able to power integrated buoys with sensor arrays to track open ocean water, wind, and climate data entirely using renewable ocean energy.

Slow page load speeds are one thing, but the frustrations that people have with them are only just a small part of what grows out of digital network congestion. In the same motor vehicle traffic becomes even more of a problem when cities become more populated a network only has so much capacity. And when that capacity is exceeded, performance – and namely the speed at which requests are handled – starts to suffer. Interpersonal communications are way down the list of issues that are seen with urgency related to this though, and that doesn’t need explanation.

Excess latency with networks resulting from over congestion can be a big problem when major operations are relying on those networks. This is even more of a looming potential issue with the way healthcare is increasingly relying on 5G network connectivity, and that’s one are where they especially can’t have lapses or downtime because of network congestion. And what is being seen interestingly with this network congestion issue is that some key algorithms designed to control these delays on computer networks are actually allowing some users to have access to most of the bandwidth while others get essentially nothing.

Network speeds are of interest because of operations for a lot of service providers, and here at 4GoodHosting that will apply to us to a Canadian web hosting providers like any other. This is definitely a worthy topic of discussion, because everyone of us with a smartphone is relying on some network functioning as it should every day. So what’s to be made of increasing network congestion?

Average Algorithms / Jitters

A better understanding of how networks work may be the place to start. Computers and other devices that send data over the internet before breaking it into smaller packets and having special algorithms decide how fast these packets need to be sent. These congestion-control algorithms aim to discover and exploit all the available network capacity while sharing it with other users on the same network.

There are also congestion-control algorithms, but they don’t work very well as mentioned above.  This is because a user’s computer does not know how fast to send data packets because it lacks knowledge about the network. Sending packets too slowly results in poor use of the available bandwidth but sending them too quickly may overwhelm a network and mean packets get dropped.

Congestion-control algorithms take notes on packet losses and delays as details to infer congestion and making decisions on how quickly data packets need to be sent. But they can get lost and delayed for reasons other than network congestion and one common way that is occurring now more than ever before is what is called a ‘jitter’ in the industry. This is where data may be held up and then released in a burst with other packets and inevitably some of them have to delayed in sending as the bulk of them can’t all go at once.

More Predictable Performance

Congestion-control algorithms are not able to distinguish the difference between delays caused by congestion and jitter. This can be problematic because delays caused by jitter are unpredictable and the resulting ambiguity with data packets confuses senders so that they estimate delays differently and send packets at unequal rates. The researchers found this eventually leads to what they call ‘starvation’ – the term for what was described above where some get most and many get next to nothing.

Even with tests for new and better data packet control and sending algorithms there were always scenarios with each algorithm where some people got all the bandwidth, and at least one person got basically nothing. Researchers found that all existing congestion-control algorithms that have been designed to curb delays are delay-convergent and this means that starvation continues to be a possibility.

Finding a fix for this is going to be essential if huge growth in network users is going to be the reality, and of course it is going to be the reality given the way world’s going and with population growth.  The need is for better algorithms can enable predictable performance at a reduced cost and in the bigger picture to build systems with predictable performance, which is important since we rely on computers for increasingly critical things.

Here we are in a brand-new year the same way we were at this time last year, and one thing we can likely all agree on is that they sure do go by quickly. As is always the case a lot is being made of what to expect in the digital communication world for the coming year, and in many ways it is a lot of the usual suspects in the list but with more in the way of even more advances. We specialize in web hosting in Canada here at 4GoodHosting, and we took the chance a few blog entries back to talk about what might be seen with advances in web hosting for 2023.

But as is always the way we like to talk about the industry at-large and beyond quite often with our blog here, and that’s what we will be doing again here considering the ongoing shift to 5G continues to be a forefront newsworthy topic as we all look at what might be a part of the coming year. Every person that has major newfound success nearly always has some behind-the-scenes individuals who have been integral to their success, and in the same way any time a new digital technology or profound new tech advancement reorients the landscape there are buttresses underneath it that not a lot of people talk about.

One of these with 5G is CBRS, and this is something that will be of interest for us in the same way it will be for any good Canadian web hosting provide. Those who like to know the ALL of what’s contributing to people being able to make better use of Web 3 technology and in doing so getting more of the websites that we make available on the World Wide Web.

So let’s get into it, and happy New Year 2023 to all of you.

Definition

CBRS is Citizens Broadband Radio Service, and it is a band (band 48) of radio frequency spectra from 3.5 GHz to 3.7 GHz with applications for incumbent users, priority access licensees, and general authorized access cases – the most common of which would be the thousands of different potential instances where software is being accessed and utilized by unlicensed users.

This band was originally reserved for use by the U.S Department of Defense, and for U.S. Navy radar systems in particular. 7+ years ago the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) named the 3.5 GHz band as the ‘innovation band’ and earmarked it for being opened up to new mobile users. It has since then evolved into CBRS.

What it has the potential to do now is an create an opportunity for unlicensed users and enterprise organizations who want to use 5G, LTE, or even 3GPP spectra to establish their own private mobile networks. This has led to the Googles, Qualcomms, Intels, Federated Wireless etc of the world to band together to form the OnGo Alliance to support CBRS implementers and adopters with development, commercialization, and adoption of LTE solutions for CBRS.

These OnGo technology, specifications, and certifications ensure interoperability of network components, and with them businesses have more of an ability to create services and run applications running on 4G LTE and 5G wireless networks. The greater relevance of all of this is in how this is being enabled to the extent that entirely new industries could be sprouting from this greater access to and interoperability within the best new broadband technologies.

How it Works‍

CBRS Band 48 is a total of 150MHz of spectrum ranging from 3.55 to 3.7 GHz. CBRS can be used for 4G LTE or for fixed or mobile 5G NR. The entire system is reliant on a series of CBRS standards that were set up and put in place by over 300 engineers and 60 different organizations working in conjunction with the FCC.

Contained within them are security measures, licensing details, and protocols that have been tested and determined to be most suitable and performing at a high level for communicating with devices. Certification programs were developed to help establish standards for installing proper CBRS deployments that follow the proper guidelines in identifying itself, as well as communicating with the necessary FCC databases for operation.

The architecture of this is very noteworthy. Each CBRS domain features a Spectrum Access System (SAS) that connects to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) databases and incumbent reporting systems. The SAS will also bounce back and forth info with Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) systems that automatically detect radar use in the area.

Components that support a CBRS antenna or antenna array is the Citizens Broadband Radio Service Device (CBSD). CBSDs register with an SAS and request spectrum grants and they also pass along their unique geolocation, height, indoor or outdoor status, along with a unique call sign registered with the FCC. All of this is done within HTTPS protocol and messages are encoded via JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

Major Advantages

As we have stated, CBRS enables enterprise organizations to establish their own private LTE or 5G networks, and what this does is create and ‘express lane’ of sorts where wireless connectivity for enterprise applications that require wider coverage, interference-free wireless spectrum, and guaranteed service level agreement (SLAs) for network performance metrics such as latency and throughput have those needs met to the extent they need to be.

The most prominent CBRS benefits – at this point – are looking likely they will be the ability to:

• Deliver up to 10x wider coverage, indoors or outdoors
• Offer superior SIM authentication and authentication of the type that relies on centralized encryption, by default
• Enabling mobile devices handover between access points at an unnoticeable speed
• Better scaling of digital automation initiatives as they invest in new generation of use cases with computer vision sensors, automated mobile robots (AMR), voice and video communication tools that require real-time exchanges to make computations and provide data that can be relied on for making major decisions