The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that started in Wuhan, China, has now spread around the world. Countries are responding in a range of ways in attempts to reduce the impact of the virus, with many instituting stay-at-home policies. This has dramatically increased the demands on the internet while also changing internet traffic patterns. So far, the dynamic nature of the internet has responded well to these demands with no major outages or disruptions. How has the internet responded, and what measures can we take today to prepare for future crises?
Two examples highlight some of the increased demands on the Internet. The first is the shift in work-at-home mentioned above. Microsoft has announced that its group-collaboration platform, Microsoft Teams, has grown from 32 million daily active users to 44 million. As a local example of this impact, this has created a 775% increase in Team calling and meetings in a one-month period in Italy. Second, there are new, large scale customers using high-performance (cloud) computing (HPC). Research institutions worldwide are using HPC systems on a large scale to carry out calculations and simulations in the field of bioinformatics and epidemiology in the shortest possible time, which would take several months using conventional computer systems.
Since we are using the internet more we may notice slower speeds when downloading content or brief outages in our Wi-Fi connections. However, despite these local challenges, the distributed nature of the internet means that the internet is handling the increased load well. Health checks from RIPE and Ookla, two organizations that monitor connection speeds around the world, show minor slowdowns but little change overall.
The industrialization of the internet by the range of companies from Comcast (distribution) to Netflix (content) to Amazon (commerce and cloud) has driven significant investment in internet infrastructure. In 2019 alone it was estimated that the global spending on data center hardware and software exceeded $150 billion (USD). Rather than slowing down spending, the current crisis is creating one of the most rapid expansion and upgrade in years. Many companies are responding by pulling in and performing upgrades that were planned for the rest of this year and the next in a matter of a few weeks.
Another response to the current pandemic is limiting physical access to data centers and reducing staff in each data center. As an example, Equinix closed access for outside visitors to their data centers in Italy, France, and Spain. “All the data centers I know about are using various capabilities of remote monitoring and remote control to keep a better eye on their data centers with smaller shifts, a smaller number of crew, or without having roving people around the data center — protecting them,” Chris Brown, CTO of Uptime Institute, remarked.
However, limiting staff can be one of the stumbling blocks that could slow the upgrade on the internet. There are crucial parts of the internet that still require a human touch. There are always cables that need replacing or servers that need fixing somewhere and these are jobs that only human engineers can do. For Paul Barford, who runs an internet mapping service at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this is where we start to see problems. “If those people are no longer able to get out into the field, then there may be local outages that persist,” he says.
But automation can play a positive role in data center performance and maintenance post-pandemic. Removing human intervention from these processes reduces the chances of human error. Adding remote diagnostic information can have the added benefit of identifying troubles before they cause a problem and speeding up the repair by providing detailed information of the issue rather than sending a technician to troubleshoot the problem in the field.
The Telescent Network Topology Manager (NTM) is a solution that adds automation to the physical cross-connect function while offering remote diagnostic capabilities such as power monitoring or OTDR functionality. The Telescent NTM uses a robot to route a fiber to any of 1,008 ports to offer any-to-any connectivity of the 1,008 ports in the system. The NTM can be configured with fewer than the full number of port and upgraded in a pay-as-you-grow manner. Once made, the connections are low loss and fully latched, allowing traffic to continue uninterrupted as the system is upgraded. Multiple NTMs systems can be managed through software control offering scaling to 10,000 cross-connects and beyond with machine accurate record-keeping and limiting stranded capacity.
While the internet has been extremely robust in handling the demand of the current crisis based on significant investment and planning, that same crisis has identified some vulnerabilities. As such, now is the time to invest in automating the physical fiber layer of the internet so we can be prepared when the next crisis occurs. Learn more about the Telescent NTM but contacting me directly at shine@telescent.com And to read more about the way the internet is responding to the current crisis I would recommend the following articles:
Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever, MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/07/998552/why-the-coronavirus-lockdown-is-making- the-internet-better-than-ever/ )
Rules Rewritten: Managing Data Centers Through the Pandemic (Article Alan sent), Data Center Knowledge: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/rules-rewritten-managing-data-centers- through-pandemic