Andy Patrizio

Author Archives: Andy Patrizio

HPE, Nutanix deliver private cloud as a service

Nutanix announced the general availability of its integrated private cloud as-a-service solution with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), as well as a new integration with the popular IT management platform ServiceNow.Nutanix’s strategy has been to integrate its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software with all of the big server-hardware vendors in addition to selling its own hardware appliances. Nutanix shared the news at its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen.HPE’s services are sold under the GreenLake brand, its metered on-premises service meant to counter the allure of the cloud. Customers can get ProLiant hardware under GreenLake without massive upfront acquisition costs and pay only for their use of the hardware.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE, Nutanix deliver private cloud as a service

Nutanix announced the general availability of its integrated private cloud as-a-service solution with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), as well as a new integration with the popular IT management platform ServiceNow.Nutanix’s strategy has been to integrate its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software with all of the big server-hardware vendors in addition to selling its own hardware appliances. Nutanix shared the news at its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen.HPE’s services are sold under the GreenLake brand, its metered on-premises service meant to counter the allure of the cloud. Customers can get ProLiant hardware under GreenLake without massive upfront acquisition costs and pay only for their use of the hardware.To read this article in full, please click here

The biggest risk to uptime? Your staff

There was an old joke: "To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer." Now it seems the reverse is true. The reliability of data center equipment is vastly improved but the humans running them have not kept up and it's a threat to uptime.The Uptime Institute has surveyed thousands of IT professionals throughout the year on outages and said the vast majority of data center failures are caused by human error, from 70 percent to 75 percent.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] And some of them are severe. It found more than 30 percent of IT service and data center operators experienced downtime that they called a “severe degradation of service” over the last year, with 10 percent of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million.To read this article in full, please click here

The biggest risk to uptime? Your staff

There was an old joke: "To err is human, but to really foul up you need a computer." Now it seems the reverse is true. The reliability of data center equipment is vastly improved but the humans running them have not kept up and it's a threat to uptime.The Uptime Institute has surveyed thousands of IT professionals throughout the year on outages and said the vast majority of data center failures are caused by human error, from 70 percent to 75 percent.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] And some of them are severe. It found more than 30 percent of IT service and data center operators experienced downtime that they called a “severe degradation of service” over the last year, with 10 percent of the 2019 respondents reporting that their most recent incident cost more than $1 million.To read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric launches wall-mounted server rack

Floor space is often at a premium in a cramped data center, and Schneider Electric believes it has a fix for that: a wall-mounted server rack.The EcoStruxure Micro Data Center Wall Mount is a 6U design, meaning it has the capacity of six rack units. Schneider is pushing its space-saving option as an edge solution. The company's EcoStruxure IT Expert remote management and vulnerability assessment service will be available for the wall-mount units, even when installed in non-secured edge locations. READ MORE: Micro-modular data centers set to multiplyTo read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric launches wall-mounted server rack

Floor space is often at a premium in a cramped data center, and Schneider Electric believes it has a fix for that: a wall-mounted server rack.The EcoStruxure Micro Data Center Wall Mount is a 6U design, meaning it has the capacity of six rack units. Schneider is pushing its space-saving option as an edge solution. The company's EcoStruxure IT Expert remote management and vulnerability assessment service will be available for the wall-mount units, even when installed in non-secured edge locations. READ MORE: Micro-modular data centers set to multiplyTo read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx unveils open source FPGA platform

The Vitis unified software platform from FPGA vendor Xilinx is the result of five-year project to create software development tools using familiar languages like C++ and Python to develop a wide range of applications for its reprogrammable chip.The beauty of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) is their configurable, adaptable nature. That's also what makes programming them a king-sized challenge. They're difficult to work with for an unskilled programmer who is not well versed in hardware, and they often require esoteric languages.Vitis supports heterogeneous architectures including Xilinx’s Zynq SoCs, MPSoCs, and Versal ACAPs. Vitis is designed to enable highly optimized, domain-specific acceleration to a wide array of applications, from cloud deployments, to machine learning and AI, to IoT and desktop applications. Think of it as being for Xilinx what CUDA is to Nvidia.To read this article in full, please click here

DARPA looks for new NICs to speed up networks

The government agency that gave us the Internet 50 years ago is now looking to drastically increase network speed to address bottlenecks and chokepoints for compute-intensive applications.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Pentagon, has unveiled a computing initiative, one of many, that will attempt to overhaul the network stack and interfaces that cannot keep up with high-end processors and are often the choke point for data-driven applications.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The DARPA initiative, Fast Network Interface Cards, or FastNICs, aims to boost network performance by a factor of 100 through a clean-slate transformation of the network stack from the application to the system software layers running on top of steadily faster hardware. DARPA is soliciting proposals from networking vendors. .To read this article in full, please click here

Intel announces Optane for workstations, higher capacity NAND

At its Memory and Storage Day 2019 in Seoul last week, Intel made several announcements concerning its Optane persistent storage as well as NAND flash capacity.Optane is a new form of non-volatile memory from Intel that has the storage capacity of a solid state drive (SSD) but speed almost equal to DRAM. It sits between memory and storage to act as a large, fast cache. While some come in a PCI Express card design, the predominant design is DRAM memory sticks that plug into the motherboard. And they cost a fortune. A 512GB Optane stick will run you $8,000.See how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency Intel announced a new generation of Optane memory codenamed "Alder Stream," which it said has a 50x lower failure rate than 3D NAND and also triples the transfers per second compared to the current generation of Optane on the market today.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel announces Optane for workstations, higher capacity NAND

At its Memory and Storage Day 2019 in Seoul last week, Intel made several announcements concerning its Optane persistent storage as well as NAND flash capacity.Optane is a new form of non-volatile memory from Intel that has the storage capacity of a solid state drive (SSD) but speed almost equal to DRAM. It sits between memory and storage to act as a large, fast cache. While some come in a PCI Express card design, the predominant design is DRAM memory sticks that plug into the motherboard. And they cost a fortune. A 512GB Optane stick will run you $8,000.See how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency Intel announced a new generation of Optane memory codenamed "Alder Stream," which it said has a 50x lower failure rate than 3D NAND and also triples the transfers per second compared to the current generation of Optane on the market today.To read this article in full, please click here

Data center gear will increasingly move off-premises

I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Data center gear will increasingly move off-premises

I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Most enterprise networks can’t handle big data loads

Another week, another survey that finds IT cannot keep up with the ever-expanding data overload. This time the problem surrounds network bandwidth and overall performance.A survey of 300 IT professionals conducted by management consultant firm Accenture found the majority feel their enterprise networks are not up to the task of handling big data and internet of things (IoT) deployments. Only 43% of those companies polled said their networks are ready to support the cloud, IoT, and other digital technologies.To read this article in full, please click here

Samsung introduces SSDs it claims will ‘never die’

Solid-state drives (SSDs) operate by writing to cells within the chip, and after so many writes, the cell eventually dies off and can no longer be written to. For that reason, SSDs have more actual capacity than listed. A 1TB drive, for example, has about 1.2TB of capacity, and as chips die off from repeated writes, new ones are brought online to keep the 1TB capacity.But that's for gradual wear. Sometimes SSDs just up and die completely, and without warning after a whole chip fails, not just a few cells. So Samsung is trying to address that with a new generation of SSD memory chips with a technology it calls fail-in-place (FIP).To read this article in full, please click here

How to decommission a data center

About the only thing harder than building a data center is dismantling one, because the potential for disruption of business is much greater when shutting down a data center than constructing one.The recent decommissioning of the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reveals just how complicated the process can be. More than 40 people were involved with the project, including staff from ORNL, supercomputer manufacturer Cray, and external subcontractors. Electricians were required to safely shut down the 9 megawatt-capacity system, and Cray staff was on hand to disassemble and recycle Titan’s electronics and its metal components and cabinets. A separate crew handled the cooling system. In the end, 350 tons of equipment and 10,800 pounds of refrigerant were removed from the site.To read this article in full, please click here

How to decommission a data center

About the only thing harder than building a data center is dismantling one, because the potential for disruption of business is much greater when shutting down a data center than constructing one.The recent decommissioning of the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reveals just how complicated the process can be. More than 40 people were involved with the project, including staff from ORNL, supercomputer manufacturer Cray, and external subcontractors. Electricians were required to safely shut down the 9 megawatt-capacity system, and Cray staff was on hand to disassemble and recycle Titan’s electronics and its metal components and cabinets. A separate crew handled the cooling system. In the end, 350 tons of equipment and 10,800 pounds of refrigerant were removed from the site.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle updates Exadata big iron and its cloud commitment

Oracle OpenWorld 2019 is the platform for countless software announcements, but since 2010 the company has been in the hardware business thanks to the Sun Microsystems purchase, and the company remains committed to delivering integrated hardware and software systems.Proving the point, the company took the wraps off the Oracle Exadata X8M designed for acceleration of Oracle’s database applications, featuring new data analytics and business intelligence features along with Oracle's newfound religion on automation.The new Exadata X8M server platform uses second-generation Xeon Scalable processors and Intel's Optane DC persistent memory to accelerate performance. That's a big win for Intel, which is seeing quite a bit of momentum for AMD's Epyc processor. And it's another win for Optane, which pretty much every server vendor supports.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle updates Exadata big iron and its cloud commitment

Oracle OpenWorld 2019 is the platform for countless software announcements, but since 2010 the company has been in the hardware business thanks to the Sun Microsystems purchase, and the company remains committed to delivering integrated hardware and software systems.Proving the point, the company took the wraps off the Oracle Exadata X8M designed for acceleration of Oracle’s database applications, featuring new data analytics and business intelligence features along with Oracle's newfound religion on automation.The new Exadata X8M server platform uses second-generation Xeon Scalable processors and Intel's Optane DC persistent memory to accelerate performance. That's a big win for Intel, which is seeing quite a bit of momentum for AMD's Epyc processor. And it's another win for Optane, which pretty much every server vendor supports.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft brings IBM iron to Azure for on-premises migrations

When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft brings IBM iron to Azure for on-premises migrations

When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

1 28 29 30 31 32 75