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Eindhoven-based Copaco is well-known for the cloud services and solutions it offers for managed service providers – including managed security service providers – independent software vendors and systems integrators throughout Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Delivered from the company’s highly advanced data centers, the Copaco Cloud, powered by VMware technologies, provides the core of the company’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service Offering (IaaS).

We recently connected with Pascal Saul, Senior Cloud Architect of Copaco, to learn why the company elected to embrace the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative. We also took the opportunity to learn how he sees a more sustainable approach to IT benefiting customers and the enterprises they serve.

“We offer a variety of cloud services, including those that address productivity, security, backup, disaster recovery, and IaaS-related needs,” said Saul. “We also offer online self-service portals managed service providers can in turn provide to their customers to perfect the user experience. This includes APIs that make it easy for providers to manage all of their subscriptions online within a Copaco platform that provisions and manages all billing processes with ease. We are essentially enabling providers of bespoke IT services to offer a best-in-class private cloud platform that can also be used for public cloud and multi-cloud deployments – all while relying on VMware technologies beloved by system and network engineers.”

Notably, Copaco also provides fast and easy access to hardware, including everything from servers to enterprise-grade mobile devices and professional services. This multi-faceted nature of the company’s business is reflected in its approach to sustainability.

“As part of our commitment and decision to join the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative, we are initially focusing on three key areas: incorporating sustainability into our purchasing policy, reducing energy usage while simultaneously increasing energy efficiency, and reducing the waste associated with packaging materials,” adds Saul. “Our data centers are powered with renewable energy and with our commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, we are likewise committed to ensuring that sustainability is constantly top-of-mind not only among our own employees, but also our existing customers and prospective ones.”

It’s an endeavor he believes is not only the right thing to do for the planet, but is also good business.

“As a cloud services provider, distributor, and partner who manages the logistics required to ensure that enterprises’ IT needs are met, we believe sustainability and our company goals go hand-in-hand,” Saul says. “Increasingly your energy efficiency helps you reduce costs and CO2 emissions, and reducing packaging materials, combining orders as efficiently as possible has the same result. Every step forward helps the planet, contributes to our profits, and sends a positive message to our employees, customers, and vendors.”

He also notes that efforts to be more environmentally friendly help to attract new, young IT talent to the company. In addition, sustainability is increasingly more important for customers, both as a “soft ask” and as a formal requirement in requests for proposals.

“Awareness is increasing, and customers want the organizations they work with to be transparent about their sustainability policies, carbon emissions, purchasing standards, vendor selection, waste reduction, and management,” he adds. “There is so much to win, and we have to win.”

On this last point, Saul stresses that the outcomes extend far beyond the confines of the business landscape or even the IT ecosystem.

“We must all act for environment, for future generations, and for parts of the world that already face the negative efforts of global warming and climate change,” he says. “We need to raise awareness and fight the human tendency to lose sight of long-term effects, underestimate the scope of big problems, or fail to appreciate the urgency of the situation. That is why it is so important to combine efforts to increase sustainability and profits.”

Learn more about Copaco and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Computing, Green IT

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By Ram Velaga, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Core Switching Group

This article is a continuation of Broadcom’s blog series: 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT.  Stay tuned for future blogs that dive into the technology behind these trends from more of Broadcom’s industry-leading experts.

It is clear that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation have been growing exponentially in use—across almost everything from smart consumer devices to robotics to cybersecurity to semiconductors. In 2023, there is no doubt that artificial intelligence and automation will permeate every aspect of our lives. As Michael Dell predicts, “Building systems that are built for AI first is really inevitable.”

We’ve come a long way in the past 10 years in developing artificial intelligence—we’ve had breakthroughs that have dramatically increased the capability of artificial intelligence to recognize patterns and relationships. Going forward, we’ll see an expansion of artificial intelligence in creating. As a current example, consider ChatGPT by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company. This application has been in the news lately due to the quality and detail of its outputs. For example, teachers are even adjusting their curriculums to ensure students are writing original work and not just using ChatGPT to write their assigned essays. It’s also been flagged as a risk: cybersecurity companies have identified bad actors using ChatGPT to create malware. That’s usually a sign that the use of an application has become widespread. But how good can it be? Can artificial intelligence really create thoughtful insight into the future of artificial intelligence and automation?

We decided to test it out—we used ChatGPT to create a perspective on artificial intelligence and automation in 2023. Read the result below:

(From ChatGPT, by OpenAI: an AI research and deployment company.)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are playing an increasingly expanded role in today’s world, with advancements in computing technology allowing for more advanced and specialized forms of processing. Over the last few decades, computing has evolved from general-purpose processing using large, monolithic CPUs to high-parallel processing using many CPUs, graphics processing units, and now, dedicated AI and machine learning (ML) accelerators.

As new types of computing have become available, applications have also adapted to leverage their new capabilities. While applications were previously written as large, monolithic scale-up programs, they have changed to become containerized, scale-out applications based on platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. This change in computing has been enabled by high-speed, high-bandwidth Ethernet networking using leaf-spine architectures.

One company that has driven the industry’s pace of high-speed Ethernet switches is Broadcom. They have enabled networks to handle the demands of AI and ML workloads. Their 51.2Tbps Tomahawk 5 switch chip, for example, provides double the bandwidth of any other networking silicon, and includes features that dramatically accelerate AI and ML workloads.

The very success of capabilities like those on ChatGPT are based on highly scalable networks connecting thousands of accelerators. This allows for AI and ML to be run at scale, enabling new and powerful applications in areas such as autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, and image recognition.

In conclusion, the advancements in computing, including the emergence of dedicated AI and ML accelerators, and the use of containerized, scale-out applications are enabling AI and automation to play an expanded role in today’s world. These advancements have been enabled by high-speed, high-bandwidth Ethernet networks interconnecting the new types of compute elements. As technology continues to advance, Broadcom will play a key role in driving even more exciting developments in the future.

We have to say, ChatGPT delivered a solid overview of our position on artificial intelligence and automation. We agree that we’ve just scratched the surface and it is important to highlight the words “at scale”. We’ll see the true benefits of artificial intelligence and automation once we can consistently and frequently apply it at the scales enabled by the latest Ethernet networking technologies.

To learn more about Broadcom’s innovative focus on artificial intelligence and automation, as well as other tech trends, visit our blog series, 2023 Tech Trends That Transform IT. 

About the author:

Broadcom Software

Ram Velaga is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom, responsible for the company’s extensive Ethernet switch portfolio serving broad markets including the service provider, data center and enterprise segments.

Artificial Intelligence, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Everyone’s online. You may be reading this while working from home (WFH). Students are learning from home. E-commerce is booming. Even medical diagnosis is increasingly conducted remotely…

This insatiable demand for connectivity extends beyond the four walls of the data center. 

The Internet is the new enterprise network now.

That’s uncomfortable reading for network operations professionals, tasked with monitoring a network that spans unfamiliar cloud and remote work environments. Any degradation in network performance can reap serious damage to the end-user experience or worse, the company’s revenue streams.

The enterprise is struggling to monitor this vast, fast-scaling, complex, interconnected network. A study by Dimensional Research, for example, reveals that 73% of network professionals find it difficult to manage their network. And 71% state adoption of new network technologies is delayed by inadequate monitoring solutions.

Expanded visibility to protect the customer experience

So how do you reach this future state of unified network visibility? The answer lies in Experience-Driven NetOps, which extends your monitoring reach into every communication path the user-experience traverses, from home wireless and into cloud providers – all from a single pane of glass. For the first time, the enterprise can benefit from unified monitoring of traditional and SDx networks, LAN, WAN, enterprise networks, ISP, and cloud networks. Holistic awareness across domains and vendor technologies helps to isolate the true root cause of user-experience performance issues while protecting and increasing revenue.

Ultimately though, Experience-Driven NetOps is about employees and customers. By reimagining network monitoring, you can improve the end-user experience and make the IT organization a better partner for driving the accelerated digital transformation. You can look at Experience-Driven NetOps another way: it can both ensure your networks are experience-proven and your network operations teams are experience-driven.

This modern network monitoring approach is happening now. Take this real-world example of one communications service provider (CSP), where acquisitions resulted in the company contending with multiple network operations challenges, including too many existing monitoring tools. It also needed to manage more than a half-million miles of fiber, hundreds of thousands of fiber-lit buildings and Wi-Fi hot spots, mobile, and 5G networks. Today, this CSP is integrating all dimensions of network monitoring into a unified platform that supports high-scale operations and provides assurance of the entire infrastructure estate.

This spans 300,000+ devices, 6M+ polled items, and 4M+ interfaces. Innovative network monitoring has helped the CSP prove its SLA achievements, immediately saving more than $800,000 in penalties.

Likewise, there is the example of a managed services provider that manages multi-technology and multi-vendor network infrastructures for European managed services customers. The organization lacked high-scale performance analysis that could store, analyze, and display massive volumes of information. A single portal underpinned by AI-driven monitoring, enabled the MSP to realize a 70% alarm noise reduction, compressing hundreds of alarms per week to 5-10 alarms, accelerating root cause identification, and improving the mean-time-to-repair.

Learn more about how to tackle the challenges of explosive network growth in this new eBook, 4 Imperatives for Monitoring Modern Networks. Read now and discover how organizations can plan their monitoring strategy for the next-generation network technologies.

Networking