How Teachers Incorporate STEM Learning into the Classroom

To prepare students for jobs in STEM fields, the U.S. Department of Education is shining a spotlight on how educators can incorporate technology into their classroom activities. A new report from ED’s Office of Education Technology and Digital Promise identifies nine dimensions of effect STEM learning practices that are enabled by technology.

Accompanying the report, researchers produced 10 videos that are posted on YouTube showing how teachers and students are using different STEM tools.

The nine dimensions are:

1. Dynamic Representations: Students learn or master STEM concepts through interacting with digital models, simulations, and dynamic representations of mathematical, scientific and engineering systems.
2. Collaborative Reasoning: Technology tools support students’ collaborative reasoning around STEM concepts, equalizing participation among group members and helping individuals and groups improve their ideas.
3. Immediate and Individualized Feedback: Digital tools provide students practicing or learning STEM skills or concepts with immediate and individualized feedback, beyond right or wrong.
4. Science Argumentation Skills: Students use technology that supports science argumentation skills including presenting and evaluating evidence about scientific or mathematical claims.
5. Engineering Design Processes: Students plan, revise, implement and test problem solutions using engineering design processes and appropriate support technologies.
6. Computational Thinking: Students use technology to formulate and analyze problems and their solutions, reason abstractly, and automate procedures through algorithmic thinking.
7. Project-based Interdisciplinary Learning: Students use digital technology tools in the context of authentic project- or challenge-based learning activities that integrate multiple STEM fields (e.g., science and mathematics).
8. Embedded Assessments: Digital assessments are embedded in STEM instruction to prompt students' reflection on the quality of their explanations, models or problem solutions.
9. Evidence-based Models: Students use technology to develop models based on data and evidence.

The 10th video shows how students are receiving individualized feedback on mathematical problem sets in Greene Central High School in North Carolina.

The report showcases how technology can be used in practice, but researchers emphasize the need for educators to make instructional decisions to determine the best approaches that will work for their students.

The full report and links to the videos can be found on the Office of Educational Technology’s website.

https://thejournal.com/

Wireless noise protocol can extend IoT range

The effective range of Wi-Fi, and other wireless communications used in Internet of Things networks could be increased significantly by adding wireless noise, say scientists.

This counter-intuitive solution could extend the range of an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi radio by 73 yards, a group led by Brigham Young University says. Wireless noise, a disturbance in the signal, is usually unwanted.

The remarkably simple concept sends wireless noise-energy over-the-top of Wi-Fi data traffic in an additional, unrelated channel. That second channel, or carrier, which is albeit at a much lower data rate than the native Wi-Fi, travels further, and when encoded can be used to ping a sensor, say, to find out if the device is alive when the Wi-Fi link itself may have lost association through distance-caused, poor handshaking.

The independent, additional noise channel travels further than the native Wi-Fi. “It works beyond the range of Wi-Fi,” the scientists say in their paper.

Applications could be found in hard-to-reach sensor locations where the sensor might still be usefully collecting data, just be offline on the network through an iffy Wi-Fi link. Ones-and-zeroes can be encoded in the add-on channel to switch sensors on and off too.

How it works

The on-off noise power communication (ONPC) protocol, as it’s called, works via a software hack on commodity Wi-Fi access points. Through software, part of the transmitter is converted to an RF power source, and then elements in the receiver are turned into a power measuring device. Noise energy, created by the power source is encoded, emitted and picked up by the measuring setup at the other end.

“If the access point, [or] router hears this code, it says, ‘OK, I know the sensor is still alive and trying to reach me, it’s just out of range,’” Neal Patwari of Washington University says in a Brigham Young University (BYU) press release. “It’s basically sending one bit of information that says it’s alive.”

The noise channel is much leaner than the Wi-Fi one, BYU explains. “While Wi-Fi requires speeds of at least one megabit per second to maintain a signal, ONPC can maintain a signal on as low as one bit per second—one millionth of the data speed required by Wi-Fi.” That’s enough for IoT sensor housekeeping, conceivably. Additionally, “one bit of information is sufficient for many Wi-Fi enabled devices that simply need an on [and] off message,” the school says. It uses the example of an irrigation system.

Assuring up-time, though, in hard-to-reach, dynamic environments, is where the school got the idea from. Researchers found that they were continually implementing sensors for environmental IoT experiments in hard to reach spots.

The team use an example of a sensor placed in a student’s bedroom where the occupant had placed a laundry basket in front of the important device. It had blocked the native Wi-Fi signal. The scientists, then, couldn’t get a site appointment for some weeks due to the vagaries of the subject student’s life, and they didn’t know if the trouble issue was sensor or link during that crucial time. ONPC would have allowed them to be reassured that data was still being collected and stored—or not—without the tricky-to-obtain site visit.

The researchers reckon cellular, Bluetooth and also LoRa could use ONPC, too. “We can send and receive data regardless of what Wi-Fi is doing; all we need is the ability to transmit energy and then receive noise measurements,” Phil Lundrigan of BYU says.

https://www.networkworld.com/

Mastercard partners on blockchain-based food supply chain

Mastercard is partnering with food track-and-trace software provider Envisible to create a blockchain-based supply chain platform to help supermarkets trace the origin of seafood.

Envisible's new Wholechain traceability system will be powered by Mastercard's blockchain-based Provenance service; it's designed to give grocery partners more insight into the ethical sourcing and environmental compliance of the seafood sold at their stores.

Topco's member grocery chains, starting with Food City, will be the first to use the supply chain ledger. The first of several species to be tracked will be salmon, cod and shrimp.

"Companies in fragmented supply chains make it harder to see end-to-end traceability," said Deborah Barta, senior vice president, Innovation and Startup Engagement, at Mastercard. "We thought, what if we brought blockchain in to track from the origin of goods to consumer's hands and give the ability to see ethical sourcing, compliance and enable consumers to discover the journey of the products they're buying."

Wholechain is a "production-grade system" – not a proof of concept or pilot, Barta said.

Customers at Topco's stores will begin seeing QR codes on seafood and by scanning the codes with their smartphone's camera, they can access background information about where the fish were caught and the journey to the store.

Mastercard has plans to extend its provenance solution to designer wear, luxury goods and more, the company said. When the company launched its Provenance blockchain service in April, it was initially aimed at tracking and monitoring the production chain for some in the fashion industry.

"Mastercard is trying to be in the middle of the lucrative $125 trillion business-to-business payment market by establishing a foothold in one of the most successful and promising use cases for blockchain, i.e. provenance – and in this case provenance for seafood that is prone to spoilage and must be handled super carefully in transit," said Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president of research.

A 2019 Gartner survey of around 850 blockchain projects across the globe found that provenance and the related asset tracking use cases are gaining the most traction and moving the fastest into pilot and limited production status when compared with other use cases, such as identity management/know-your-custoerm (KYC), trade finance, trading, voting and others.

Mastercard is also taking Visa head on in the competition for new age B2B payments, as Visa has already launched a blockchain product to support B2B payments, Litan noted.

It is also in seeming competition with JP Morgan Chase's stablecoin blockchain and other similar bank initiatives, Litan said.

Businesses on the Wholechain supply chain will, through a set of APIs, be able to also connect to Mastercard's payment system, Barta said, meaning they'll not only be able to track shipments but pay for them, too.

Mastercard's payment system can support up to 25,000 payments per second.

"Blockchain has the potential to support much more efficient and rapid payments than is possible today on legacy networks," Litan said. "Blockchain also gives participants much needed visibility into the end-to-end payment stream, helping to eliminate most of the time spent on costly disputes and resolutions."

Mastercard and Envisible's supply chain is an example of a hybrid blockchain, where B2B data is transmitted across a permissioned blockchain and the consumer-facing information resides on a public or open blockchain that can be downloaded as a mobile application. Hybrid blockchains are expected to dominate in the ecommerce arena.

IBM has been piloting its Food Trust blockchain-based supply chain for more than a year. Those pilots also involved Topco, Carrefour and retailers such as Walmart.

Martha Bennett, a vice president of research at Forrester, said in many ways Wholechain is also a competitor to Food Trust, IBM's blockchain-based produce track and trace technology.

"More than that, it’s yet another entry into what is already a crowded field – food tracking in general, and seafood tracking in particular is one of the most popular use cases, and there are at least half a dozen networks live already (if not more); some of these already overlap geographically as well," Bennettt said via email.

Earlier this month, IBM signed a partnership with Raw Seafoods Inc. to launch a blockchain-based seafood supply chain that includes stakeholders like fisheries, distributors, retailers and restaurateurs. It will initially track scallops.

"Of the different niche segments within supply chains, the seafood industry stands to gain a great deal from visibility into its product movement, as it remains one of the most counterfeited products within the food supply chain," IBM said in a statement.

Earlier this year, a study by ocean-conservation foundation Oceana found that one in every five seafood products tested had been mislabeled - making 20% of all seafood in the supply chain at any given moment fraudulent. Oceana's sample set ranged over 400 samples collected from 250 locations in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

This is far from Mastercard's first foray into blockchain.

In 2017, Mastercard opened access to its blockchain platform via APIs published on the Mastercard Developers site. The company has tested and validated its blockchain and is using its platform in the business-to-business (B2B) market to address "challenges of speed, transparency and costs in cross-border payments.

"The Mastercard blockchain technology will complement the company's existing capabilities including virtual cards, Mastercard Send and Vocalink to support all types of cross-border, B2B payment flows - account-based, blockchain-based and card-based," the company said in a statement.

In September, Mastercard partnered with R3, a blockchain company created by a consortium of 300 banks and other companies, to build a cross-border payment system based on the distributed ledger technology.

"Companies in fragmented supply chains make it harder to see end-to-end traceability," said Deborah Barta, senior vice president, Innovation and Startup Engagement, at Mastercard. "We thought, what if we brought blockchain in to track from the origin of goods to consumer's hands and give the ability to see ethical sourcing, compliance and enable consumers to discover the journey of the products they're buying."

Wholechain is a "production-grade system" – not a proof of concept or pilot, Barta said.

Customers at Topco's stores will begin seeing QR codes on seafood and by scanning the codes with their smartphone's camera, they can access background information about where the fish were caught and the journey to the store.

Mastercard has plans to extend its provenance solution to designer wear, luxury goods and more, the company said. When the company launched its Provenance blockchain service in April, it was initially aimed at tracking and monitoring the production chain for some in the fashion industry.

"Mastercard is trying to be in the middle of the lucrative $125 trillion business-to-business payment market by establishing a foothold in one of the most successful and promising use cases for blockchain, i.e. provenance – and in this case provenance for seafood that is prone to spoilage and must be handled super carefully in transit," said Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president of research.

A 2019 Gartner survey of around 850 blockchain projects across the globe found that provenance and the related asset tracking use cases are gaining the most traction and moving the fastest into pilot and limited production status when compared with other use cases, such as identity management/know-your-custoerm (KYC), trade finance, trading, voting and others.

Mastercard is also taking Visa head on in the competition for new age B2B payments, as Visa has already launched a blockchain product to support B2B payments, Litan noted.

It is also in seeming competition with JP Morgan Chase's stablecoin blockchain and other similar bank initiatives, Litan said.

Businesses on the Wholechain supply chain will, through a set of APIs, be able to also connect to Mastercard's payment system, Barta said, meaning they'll not only be able to track shipments but pay for them, too.

Mastercard's payment system can support up to 25,000 payments per second.

"Blockchain has the potential to support much more efficient and rapid payments than is possible today on legacy networks," Litan said. "Blockchain also gives participants much needed visibility into the end-to-end payment stream, helping to eliminate most of the time spent on costly disputes and resolutions."

Mastercard and Envisible's supply chain is an example of a hybrid blockchain, where B2B data is transmitted across a permissioned blockchain and the consumer-facing information resides on a public or open blockchain that can be downloaded as a mobile application. Hybrid blockchains are expected to dominate in the ecommerce arena.

IBM has been piloting its Food Trust blockchain-based supply chain for more than a year. Those pilots also involved Topco, Carrefour and retailers such as Walmart.

Martha Bennett, a vice president of research at Forrester, said in many ways Wholechain is also a competitor to Food Trust, IBM's blockchain-based produce track and trace technology.

"More than that, it’s yet another entry into what is already a crowded field – food tracking in general, and seafood tracking in particular is one of the most popular use cases, and there are at least half a dozen networks live already (if not more); some of these already overlap geographically as well," Bennettt said via email.

Earlier this month, IBM signed a partnership with Raw Seafoods Inc. to launch a blockchain-based seafood supply chain that includes stakeholders like fisheries, distributors, retailers and restaurateurs. It will initially track scallops.

"Of the different niche segments within supply chains, the seafood industry stands to gain a great deal from visibility into its product movement, as it remains one of the most counterfeited products within the food supply chain," IBM said in a statement.

Earlier this year, a study by ocean-conservation foundation Oceana found that one in every five seafood products tested had been mislabeled - making 20% of all seafood in the supply chain at any given moment fraudulent. Oceana's sample set ranged over 400 samples collected from 250 locations in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

This is far from Mastercard's first foray into blockchain.

In 2017, Mastercard opened access to its blockchain platform via APIs published on the Mastercard Developers site. The company has tested and validated its blockchain and is using its platform in the business-to-business (B2B) market to address "challenges of speed, transparency and costs in cross-border payments.

"The Mastercard blockchain technology will complement the company's existing capabilities including virtual cards, Mastercard Send and Vocalink to support all types of cross-border, B2B payment flows - account-based, blockchain-based and card-based," the company said in a statement.

In September, Mastercard partnered with R3, a blockchain company created by a consortium of 300 banks and other companies, to build a cross-border payment system based on the distributed ledger technology.

https://www.computerworld.com

Aruba rounds out edge-to-cloud strategy

Aruba has expanded its switch portfolio to include new software and switches that bring the company’s automation and software intelligence to campus networks.

The HPE company is offering up a new release of its switch software – AOS-CX 10.4 – and the Aruba stackable CX 6300 and modular CX 6400 Series switches. The company also said it had integrated its switch-configuration software, NetEdit, into its Network Analytics Engine (NAE).  NAE uses embedded analytics and automation to simplify management, accelerate troubleshooting of application-performance issues and remediate common network problems, Aruba stated. 

AOS-CX is the network operating system software that Aruba introduced with its first core switch – the 19.2Tb/sec 8400 programmable, modular campus core and aggregation switch in 2017.  Aruba describes AOS-CX as a cloud-native, programmable software package that can  automate and simplify many critical and complex network functions such as end-to-end network monitoring, troubleshooting, network performance and security-related issues. 

The NOS enables automation and programmability support via  built-in REST APIs and Python scripts to boost automation and web application development.

AOS-CX 10.4 includes what Aruba calls dynamic segmentation that lets customers secure access and set unified policies across wired and wireless networks.  

The new version of AOS-CX extends the system to the new switches and includes over 140 access features, including a new one called dynamic segmentation that provides secure, unified policy across wired and wireless networks down to every user and IoT device, said Michael Dickman, vice president of Product Line Management at HPE Aruba. 

It also now includes support for Ethernet VPN (EVPN) over VxLAN for secure connectivity from enterprises to data centers and support for Virtual Switching Extension (VSX) live upgrades that keeps the system up during maintenance-cycle downtime, as well as power over Ethernet (POE) to improve uptime, Dickman said.

AOS-CX is the key to Aruba’s future competitive success, experts said. 

“First, its distributed, non-blocking architecture supports collapsed 1-tier and 2-tier architectures without the threat of oversubscription," wrote researchers at Moor Insights & Strategy about the new release. "Second, it provides exceptional investment protection for future needs. Case in point, Aruba CX scales to support multi-device access up to 28TB on the same platform, and its fully extensible fabric design allows enterprises to flex their bandwidth needs.”

The company also rolled out  a new version of its switch configuration software, NetEdit 2.0 that ties into Aruba’s Network Analytics Engine which is part of the AOS-CX and keeps track of data from CX-OS networked devices, applications and security activities to help IT quickly discover and fix the root cause of problems.

On the hardware side, the Aruba CX 6300 Series is a family of stackable switches that supports 10/25/50Gbps uplinks. The Aruba CX 6400 Series modular switches include a 5-slot and a 10-slot chassis with a non-blocking fabric that scales from gigabit POE access to a 100Gbps core.

The expansion of its product line with a common operating system is key to the company competing against the likes of Arista, Cisco, Juniper and others. 

“Building on the success of the 8400 it is a natural and necessary progression for Aruba to fill out this portfolio with access and aggregation switches,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president of Network Infrastructure at IDC. “The single operating system simplifies operations and lets customers build commonality between their data center and campus environments.”

The knock against HPE/Aruba has been its variety of network software for its data center products, which can cause confusion, Gartner said in its  Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking report in July. Gartner wrote that  the “company’s data center portfolio includes FlexFabric and Plexxi which have different codebases and management platforms, which limits deep integration and investment protection across its portfolio.”

FlexFabric products offer a single network architecture for the data center, campus and branch offices. When it bought Plexxi in 2018, HPE said it would integrate Plexxi technology into its hyperconverged offering, which is in part the technology HPE got from buying SimpliVity for $650 million last year. SimpliVity’s management software helps administrators control data-center resources and make more efficient use of hyperconverged server, storage and networking resources.

For its part Aruba said it sees little confusion. “Our go-forward product strategy is to standardize on the AOS-CX operating system, which is why we’ve put so much focus and R&D on its development in order to deliver a common, unified switching platform from the enterprise edge to the data center... Plexxi is now the HPE Composable Fabric, a software-driven, automated, and workload intent-based network fabric that is used for the HPE Simplivity hyperconverged platform, and is complementary to the Aruba CX switching portfolio.”

The company said its HPE FlexFabric switch family, based on the Comware OS, is independent, and that Aruba will continue to support it for installed-base customers.

The software and switches are the underpinning for future Aruba data center and campus plans.

“The role of the network has changed from being purely a conduit from Point A to Point B to now providing intelligence that provides true application and business value right at the point where the data is born. That is why we see the emergence of intelligent edge, a very, very big opportunity for us and really the next evolution of the architecture of the enterprise itself,” said Keerti Melkote, HPE's President, Intelligent Edge in a recent interview with Network World.

“The next set of applications are coming directly from the cloud, whether it is SaaS applications like Office 365 and Salesforce.com or whether it’s enterprise apps like SAP being delivered from the cloud. The intelligent-edge vision that we have in this edge-to-cloud framework will include a data-center capability that we will  call a micro data center that will be deployed at that point where the data gets created.”

The CX Switching Portfolio, including the Aruba CX 6300 and CX 6400 Series switches, the new version of AOS-CX and Aruba NetEdit 2.0 will begin shipping in November. List pricing for the Aruba CX 6300 and CX 6400 Series starts at $5,899 and $13,499, respectively.

https://www.networkworld.com/

VMware boosts load balancing, security intelligence, analytics

VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. 

At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.

The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. 

VMware bought Avi in June with the plan to punch up its data-center network-virtualization capabilities by adding Avi’s load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology to NSX. Avi’s integration with VMware NSX delivers an application-services fabric that synchronizes with the NSX controller to provide automated, elastic load balancing including real-time analytics for applications deployed in a software-defined network environment. The Avi technology also monitors, scales and reconfigures application services in real time in response to changing performance requirements.

“The load balancer uses a modern interface and architecture to deliver and optimize application delivery in a dynamic fashion," said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure for IDC. "Leveraging inbuilt advanced analytics and monitoring to deliver scale that is much needed for cloud applications and micro-services, the advanced load balancer will essentially be a nice add-on option to VMware’s NSX networking portfolio. While many customers may benefit from its integration into NSX, VMware will likely keep it as an optional add-on, given the vast majority of its networking clients currently use other ADC platforms.”

NSX-T Data Center software is targeted at organizations looking to support multi-vendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments and the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds. The software offers a range of services layer 2 to Layer 7 for workloads running on all types of infrastructure – virtual machines, containers, physical servers and both private and public clouds. NSX-T is the underpinning technology for VMware’s overarching Virtual Cloud Network portfolio that offers a communications-software layer to connect everything from the data center to cloud and edge.

“NSX now provides a complete set of networking services offered in software. Customers don’t need dedicated hardware systems to do switching, routing or traffic load balancing as NSX treats VM, container and app traffic all the same from the cloud to data center and network edge,” said Tom Gillis, VMware senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit. 

Now customers can distribute workloads uniformly across network improving capacity, efficiency and reliability, he said.

Speaking at the event, a VMware customer said VMware NSX-T Data Center is helping the company secure workloads at a granular level with micro-segmentation, and to fundamentally re-think network design. "We are looking to develop apps as quickly as possible and use NSX to do automation and move faster,” said Andrew Hrycaj, principal network engineer at IHS Markit – a business information provider headquartered in London.

NSX also helps IT manage a common security policy across different platforms, from containers, to the public cloud with AWS and Azure, to on-prem, simplifying operations and helping with regulatory compliance, while fostering a pervasive security strategy, Hrycaj said.

At VMworld the company announced version 2.5 of NSX which includes a distributed  \analytics engine called NSX Intelligence that VMware says will help eliminate blind spots to reduce security risk and accelerate security-incident remediation through visualization and deep insight into every flow across the entire data center.

“Traditional approaches involve sending extensive packet data and telemetry to multiple disparate centralized engines for analysis, which increase cost, operational complexity, and limit the depth of analytics,” wrote VMware’s Umesh Mahajan, a senior vice president and general manager networking and security in a blog about version 2.5.

“In contrast, NSX Intelligence, built natively within the NSX platform, distributes the analytics within the hypervisor on each host, sending back relevant metadata… [and providing] detailed application--topology visualization, automated security-policy recommendations, continuous monitoring of every flow, and an audit trail of security policies, all built into the NSX management console.”

IDC’s Mehra said: “The NSX Intelligence functionality is indeed very interesting, in that it delivers on the emerging need for deeper visibility and analytics capabilities in cloud IT environments. This can then be used either for network and app optimization goals, or in many cases, will facilitate NSX security and policy enforcement via micro-segmentation and other tools. This functionality, built into NSX, runs parallel to vRealize Network Insight, so it will be interesting to see how they mirror, or rather, complement each other,” he said.

NSX-T 2.5, also introduces a new deployment and operational approach VMware calls Native Cloud Enforced mode.

“This mode provides a consistent policy model across the hybrid cloud network and reduces overhead by eliminating the need to install NSX tools in workload VMs in the public cloud,” Mahajan wrote. “The NSX security policies are translated into the cloud provider’s native security constructs via APIs, enabling common and centralized policy enforcement across clouds.”

Networking software vendor Apstra got into the NSX act by announcing it had more deeply integrated the Apstra Operating System (AOS) with NSX. 

AOS includes a tighter design and operational interoperability between the underlying physical network and software-defined overlay networks with a solution that liberates customers from being locked into any specific network hardware vendor, said Mansour Karam, CEO and founder of Apstra. 

AOS 3.1 adds automation to provide consistent network and security policy for workloads across the physical and virtual/NSX infrastructure, Apstra said. AOS supports VMware vSphere and allows for automatic remediation of network anomalies. AOS’ intent-based analytics perform regular  network checks to safeguard configurations between the Apstra managed environment and the vSphere servers are in sync.

Like other AOS releases, version 3.1 is hardware agnostic and integrated with other networking vendors including Cisco, Arista, Dell and Juniper as well as other vendors such as Microsoft and Cumulus.

Big Switch also announced that it has extended its Enterprise Virtual Private Cloud (E-VPC) integration to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and NSX-T.   The company's  Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) underlay now fully integrates with VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) portfolio, including NSX-T, vSphere, VxRail and vSAN, providing unmatched automation, visibility and troubleshooting capabilities.

https://www.networkworld.com

Powering edge data centers: Blue energy might be the perfect solution

About a cubic yard of freshwater mixed with seawater provides almost two-thirds of a kilowatt-hour of energy. And scientists say a revolutionary new battery chemistry based on that theme could power edge data centers.

The idea is to harness power from wastewater treatment plants located along coasts, which happen to be ideal locations for edge data centers and are heavy electricity users.

“Places where salty ocean water and freshwater mingle could provide a massive source of renewable power,” writes Rob Jordan in a Stanford University article.

The chemical process harnesses a mix of sodium and chloride ions. They’re squirted from battery electrodes into a solution and cause current to flow. That initial infusion is then followed by seawater being exchanged with wastewater effluent. It reverses the current flow and creates the energy, the researchers explain.

“Energy is recovered during both the freshwater and seawater flushes, with no upfront energy investment and no need for charging,” the article says.

In other words, the battery is continually recharging and discharging with no added input—such as electricity from the grid. The Stanford researchers say the technology could be ideal for making coastal wastewater plants energy independent.

Coastal edge data centers

But edge data centers, also taking up location on the coasts, could also benefit. Those data centers are already exploring kinetic wave-energy to harvest power, as well as using seawater to cool data centers.

I’ve written about Ocean Energy’s offshore, power platform using kinetic wave energy. That 125-feet-long, wave converter solution, not only uses ocean water for power generation, but its sea-environment implementation means the same body of water can be used for cooling, too.

“Ocean cooling and ocean energy in the one device” is a seductive solution, the head of that company said at the time.

Microsoft, too, has an underwater data center that proffers the same kinds of power benefits.

Locating data centers on coasts or in the sea rather than inland doesn’t just provide virtually free-of-cost, power and cooling advantages, plus the associated eco-emissions advantages. The coasts tend to be where the populous is, and locating data center operations near to where the actual calculations, data stores, and other activities need to take place fits neatly into low-latency edge computing, conceptually.

Other advantages to placing a data center actually in the ocean, although close to land, include the fact that there’s no rent in open waters. And in international waters, one could imagine regulatory advantages—there isn’t a country’s official hovering around.

However, by placing the installation on terra firma (as the seawater-saltwater mix power solution would be designed for) but close to water at a coast, one can use the necessary seawater and gain an advantage of ease of access to the real estate, connections, and so on.

The Stanford University engineers, in their seawater/wastewater mix tests, flushed a battery prototype 180 times with wastewater from the Palo Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant and seawater from nearby Half Moon Bay. The group says they obtained 97% “capturing [of] the salinity gradient energy,” or the blue energy, as it’s sometimes called.

“Surplus power production could even be diverted to nearby industrial operations,” the article continues.

“Tapping blue energy at the global scale: rivers running into the ocean” is yet to be solved. “But it is a good starting point,” says Stanford scholar Kristian Dubrawski in the article.

https://www.networkworld.com

IBM expands its storage management software to support competitor products

Most companies like to keep their specialty software to themselves, but IBM is making a move to expand its Spectrum Discover metadata management software to support competitive storage products.

Spectrum Discover is modern metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale unstructured storage. It was designed for IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale, a clustered file system, to rapidly ingest, consolidate and index metadata for billions of files and objects.

Its metadata layer enables storage administrators, data stewards and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data while helping to mitigate risk and accelerate large-scale analytics.

And now it’s coming to competitive storage systems. IBM has announced the availability of connectors for Spectrum Discover to Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp, Amazon S3, Ceph, and other S3- and NFSv3-compliant data sources.

IBM has also added new content-based data classification and tagging capabilities with the ability to extract metadata from over a thousand different file types. It has also added the ability to automatically detect certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) and other types of sensitive data, making it potentially easier for organizations to manage data in compliance with GDPR and other regulations.

“These enhancements are designed to enable your enterprise to create an open and transparent data ecosystem for AI and analytics, make it easier for data scientists to find and curate data for analysis, and enable storage administrators to optimize storage and manage unstructured data,” IBM said in a blog post announcing the news.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus enhanced

IBM also announced enhancements to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, its data protection and access control on virtual environments, including integration with IBM tape products, support for Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure archive and IBM Cloud Object Storage archive tier, and new disaster recovery from backup repositories running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Other improvements include a new user interface and additional language translations. All of the improvements are aimed at making things easier for partners to help customers perform needed operations in hybrid multicloud environments.

IBM cloud storage improved

Finally, IBM announced the next generation of capabilities for IBM Cloud Object Storage, its cloud-based storage service similar to Amazon Redshift. IBM Cloud Object Storage Gen 2 delivers a new architecture for object storage that’s scalable to over 10 PB in a single rack at a cost of less than one cent per GB per month. It also is now more flexible to allow the creation of tailored configurations that meet unique requirements for performance or capacity.

https://www.networkworld.com