Saving money while mining your customer data, protecting data centers large and medium with hybrid mesh firewalls, and guiding the next-gen Ethernet all top this week's most-read stories.

Have you heard of graph databases? Did you know they have a special place in their hearts for data that's headed into the artificial intelligence (AI) machine? Contributor Jack Vaughan gives you a quick dive into this topic.

And finally, Comcast and Vapor IO are asking you to NOT talk them down from the ledge ... er ... edge.

Without further ado, we present this week's top 5 stories as chosen by our readers.

“Enterprises today are sitting on mountains of data that, in many cases, they do not know how to mine, analyze or use to benefit their business,” said Antoine Shagoury, global CTO of Kyndryl.

To address this problem, the multinational IT infrastructure services provider introduced its intelligent open-integration technology services platform Kyndryl Bridge in September. Over the last 10 months, the platform has experienced significant gains, including an estimated $1 billion in annualized customer savings, the IBM-spinoff company has announced.

The 3200F series firewall is the next generation of its high-end 3200 series, purposely built for hyperscale data centers. Fortinet said this new firewall has five to 10 times performance improvements and consumes 72% less energy than its competitors. It also offers four 400GE interfaces for high-traffic volume and scale management.

On the other hand, the 900G series firewall targets the mid-range market, such as firewall deployments for a large campus or a smaller data center. Fortinet claims it offers six times the firewall throughput and three times the threat protection performance (20 Gb/s) than the industry average.

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is officially launching today, as a new organization hosted by the Linux Foundation and its Joint Development Foundation initiative. The goal of the UEC is to go beyond existing Ethernet capabilities such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to provide a high performance, distributed and lossless transport layer that is optimized for high performance computing and AI. It’s an effort that is taking direct aim at rival transport protocol InfiniBand.

Graph representation provides insightful views of data – linking features and providing a view into data connectedness based on data nodes (also known as vertices) that are connected via edges to other related nodes. That is different from more established relational means comprising data tables of columns and rows.

Comcast is making an intriguing move toward the edge computing market, taking advantage of its own physical assets and partnering with long-time virtualized edge computing pioneer Vapor IO.

The move calls for Comcast to host Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge data center platform to support third-party edge service providers. Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer at Vapor IO, explained this “hosting” involves a physical fiber connection between its Kinectic Grid and Comcast’s physical infrastructure. This connection will allow the combined product to support “near-premises” edge computing applications with lower latency at lower costs.