The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles have almost two weeks to develop a game plan for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans Sunday, Feb. 9, but the technology team starts well before that. In fact, the planning and strategy for the next championship game — Super Bowl LX, which will be held in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara in February 2026 — are well underway.
It’s NRF week in New York, which allows technology vendors to showcase innovation for the retail industry, and at the National Retail Federation show, HPE Aruba Networking rolled out several new products to help retailers tackle industry-specific challenges. They included providing backup connectivity for mission-critical apps, supporting pop-up stores and simplifying information technology infrastructure deployment in retail environments.
Networking and complexity go hand in hand, like chocolate and peanut butter. Though this has been the norm, it’s playing havoc with business operations. A recent ZK Research/Cube Research study found that 93% of organizations state the network is more critical to business operations than two years ago. In the same period, 80% said the network was more complex. Increasing complexity leads to blind spots, unplanned downtime, security breaches and other issues that affect businesses.
When it comes to building campus networks, there is a religion around stacking versus chassis-based systems. In my network engineer days, I lived on both sides of that holy war. Initially, it was chassis or nothing, but I worked for a big financial firm with large budgets and didn’t give much credence to other options. As time went on, I began to appreciate a stack’s flexibility and budget flexibility, as one could start with a small network stack and add to it when required.
As the world of high-performance computing is getting together this week in Atlanta for SC24, Nvidia Corp. held a “special address” to showcase the company’s vision for computing and artificial intelligence, with founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang leading the charge.