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Michelle Nicolson Info

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Michelle Nicolson

Michelle Nicolson is a freelance technology writer and editor located in Eugene, Oregon. She owns Black Cat Communications, LLC, a consulting business that serves small businesses throughout North America.

Latest Articles

10/22/2014 MRV and Infonetics Research Talk Multi-Layer Packet-Optical Networks

Freedom from rigid architectures
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Featured Blog Entries

The History of Fiber in Data Centers, Part I: Past and Present

Fiber Mountain, as our company name suggests, believes fiber cabling must play a central role in helping data centers scale affordably as bandwidth needs continue to grow. Before I go further down the path to the future, however, I want to back up and provide a high-level history of fiber in the data center.

Four Reasons to Make the Leap to SDN in Your Data Center

I'm always fascinated by what causes a business trend to emerge, grow and sometimes expand to actually redefining the industry as a whole. Having spent years in the technology field, I've found the networking sector particularly exciting in this regard because true innovation can and does transform entire segments of our industry. Revolutionary processes and technologies make past deployments and best practices look laughable in light of recent innovations.

Reflections From the Fiber Mountain Launch

Over the past weeks and months, the Fiber Mountain team has worked hard to prepare for our company launch at this year's Interop New York. In this post, I want to share our thoughts from the days leading up to the October 1st unveiling and about the event itself at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan.

Network Evolution: Fiber Mountain Brings Back Simplicity

Nearly every technology evolves and improves over time as we look for more efficient ways to perform critical operations. If you look back in history, many technological solutions follow a distinct pattern. From their origins they grow increasingly complex until they reach a turning point where innovation allows them to be physically stripped down and simplified, even as the technology itself gets more advanced.

Glass Core 101: A Network Design for the 21st Century

Last week, I outlined some of the network challenges data centers currently face and those they'll encounter in the near future. In short, contemporary network infrastructure models that rely heavily on increasingly expensive and complex hardware are simply not sustainable. That's because the cost to house, power and cool this equipment is growing rapidly with no end in sight.

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