Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the best hyperscale performer across all areas of throughput while Microsoft Azure has the best storage systems and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has the lowest network latency.Those are the findings of a series of benchmarks performed by the atrociously named Cockroach Labs, maker of a scalable, resilient database called CockroachDB that runs on all three services. The study, part of the company’s third annual Cloud Report, evaluated the performance of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in online transaction processing (OLTP) applications.In total, 54 machines were assessed and almost 1,000 benchmark runs were conducted to measure CPU, network, storage I/O, and TPC-C performance, among others.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia is offering a certification program to steer customers and partners to buy GPU servers specifically tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads from top-tier OEMs and ODMs.The program, called Nvidia-Certified Systems, is similar to those offered by Intel and AMD. It tells customers that these servers with these configurations are best optimized for running AI workloads at peak performance and in large-scale deployments.
READ MORE: How AI can create self-driving data centersTo read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia is offering a certification program to steer customers and partners to buy GPU servers specifically tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads from top-tier OEMs and ODMs.The program, called Nvidia-Certified Systems, is similar to those offered by Intel and AMD. It tells customers that these servers with these configurations are best optimized for running AI workloads at peak performance and in large-scale deployments.
READ MORE: How AI can create self-driving data centersTo read this article in full, please click here
I'm a sucker for the underdog, so shame on me for focusing on the big guys for so long. It's time to change that with some news from ExaGrid, a competitor of Dell EMC and HP Enterprise in the data backup appliance market.Earlier this month, ExaGrid announced it has increased the capacity of its Tiered Backup Storage appliances while also reducing its offerings from nine systems to seven. Appliances of any size can be mixed and matched in a cluster of up to 32 appliances.ExaGrid also changed the naming convention of the appliances to better reflect their capacity. For example, the discontinued bottom-of-the-line EX3000 had 3TB of full backup capacity, while the new bottom-end appliance is the EX6, with 6TB of full backup capacity storage.To read this article in full, please click here
I'm a sucker for the underdog, so shame on me for focusing on the big guys for so long. It's time to change that with some news from ExaGrid, a competitor of Dell EMC and HP Enterprise in the data backup appliance market.Earlier this month, ExaGrid announced it has increased the capacity of its Tiered Backup Storage appliances while also reducing its offerings from nine systems to seven. Appliances of any size can be mixed and matched in a cluster of up to 32 appliances.ExaGrid also changed the naming convention of the appliances to better reflect their capacity. For example, the discontinued bottom-of-the-line EX3000 had 3TB of full backup capacity, while the new bottom-end appliance is the EX6, with 6TB of full backup capacity storage.To read this article in full, please click here
Dan Rose, chairman of Coatue Ventures and Coatue Growth, posted a thread on Twitter the other day, 280 characters or less at a time, in which he chronicled how it came about that AWS infrastructure is built on Linux.Rose was at Amazon from 1999 to 2006, where he managed retail divisions and helped incubate the Kindle reader before moving to Facebook. So he was at Amazon in 2000 when the internet bubble popped,and one high-flying dot-com after another was shriveling up and dying, having burned through ridiculous amounts of capital on luxurious offices while often having nothing by way of a product to show for it.To read this article in full, please click here
The news that Pat Gelsinger is departing as CEO of VMware to take over at Intel generated a positive response for Intel and an equally negative response for VMware. Intel's stock jumped 7% on the day of the news, while VMware's stock fell 7%, and investment bank Piper Sandler slashed its VMware price target from $178 down to $157.Most of the discussion has been around Gelsinger and his return to Intel. VMware, meanwhile, has been overlooked in the process. So what's the outlook for VMware, which has lost more talent than just its CEO in recent months? To read this article in full, please click here
The news that Pat Gelsinger is departing as CEO of VMware to take over at Intel generated a positive response for Intel and an equally negative response for VMware. Intel's stock jumped 7% on the day of the news, while VMware's stock fell 7%, and investment bank Piper Sandler slashed its VMware price target from $178 down to $157.Most of the discussion has been around Gelsinger and his return to Intel. VMware, meanwhile, has been overlooked in the process. So what's the outlook for VMware, which has lost more talent than just its CEO in recent months? To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud migration is a necessary step for digital transformation, which is proceeding faster than planned at many enterprises because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research from Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), a cloud computing organization based in the United Kingdom.The cloud is an important steppingstone for getting off legacy on-prem technologies and outfitting today's more flexible, remote workforce. Supporting a remote workforce requires a digital transformation, and to do that, companies need the cloud – public, private, or hybrid. CIF found that in many sectors, remaining productive during lockdown depended on their cloud-readiness.To read this article in full, please click here
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be invaluable tools to spur innovation, but they have different management requirements than typical enterprise IT applications that run at moderate CPU and memory utilization rates. Because AI and ML tend to run intense calculations at very high utilization rates, power and cooling costs can consume a higher proportion of the budget than an IT group might expect.It's not a new problem, but the impact is intensifying.As more CPU-heavy applications such as data warehousing and business intelligence became prevalent, IT was often oblivious to the electric bill it was racking up – particularly since the bill usually goes to the ops department, not IT.To read this article in full, please click here
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be invaluable tools to spur innovation, but they have different management requirements than typical enterprise IT applications that run at moderate CPU and memory utilization rates. Because AI and ML tend to run intense calculations at very high utilization rates, power and cooling costs can consume a higher proportion of the budget than an IT group might expect.It's not a new problem, but the impact is intensifying.As more CPU-heavy applications such as data warehousing and business intelligence became prevalent, IT was often oblivious to the electric bill it was racking up – particularly since the bill usually goes to the ops department, not IT.To read this article in full, please click here
Pat Gelsinger’s return to Intel after a 12-year absence has been greeted positively, with the stock jumping 8% on the news Wednesday, analysts lauding it, and apparently even Intel staff approving, indicating he remained popular there despite leaving the firm in 2009.Replacing outgoing CEO Bob Swan with VMware CEO Gelsinger, isn’t a sign of failure on the part of Swan, who took over in early 2018. Intel is expected to meet or exceed Q1 revenue and income projections when it reports earnings Jan. 21. The fact that Swan is being given time to clean out his desk—he is staying on until mid-February—says that this is a civil parting, unlike that of his predecessor, Brian Krzanich, whom they couldn’t get out the idoor fast enough.To read this article in full, please click here
Pat Gelsinger’s return to Intel after a 12-year absence has been greeted positively, with the stock jumping 8% on the news Wednesday, analysts lauding it, and apparently even Intel staff approving, indicating he remained popular there despite leaving the firm in 2009.Replacing outgoing CEO Bob Swan with VMware CEO Gelsinger, isn’t a sign of failure on the part of Swan, who took over in early 2018. Intel is expected to meet or exceed Q1 revenue and income projections when it reports earnings Jan. 21. The fact that Swan is being given time to clean out his desk—he is staying on until mid-February—says that this is a civil parting, unlike that of his predecessor, Brian Krzanich, whom they couldn’t get out the idoor fast enough.To read this article in full, please click here
IT outsourcing giant Atos has put in a bid to acquire DXC Technology, which would give the French IT giant a big foot in the door to the U.S. market.The rumor first ran last week on Reuters, which put the purchase price at $10.1 billion. Atos issued a rather short statement confirming the talks, but did not confirm the rumored price. It said there was no certainty of an outcome and further announcements would be made “when appropriate.”For its part, DXC said it had indeed received an offer from Atos, again without mentioning the price, and said it would be “evaluating the proposal.”To read this article in full, please click here
IT outsourcing giant Atos has put in a bid to acquire DXC Technology, which would give the French IT giant a big foot in the door to the U.S. market.The rumor first ran last week on Reuters, which put the purchase price at $10.1 billion. Atos issued a rather short statement confirming the talks, but did not confirm the rumored price. It said there was no certainty of an outcome and further announcements would be made “when appropriate.”For its part, DXC said it had indeed received an offer from Atos, again without mentioning the price, and said it would be “evaluating the proposal.”To read this article in full, please click here
If you’ve noticed components are hard to get these days, you are not alone. The supply of computing components can get a little tight around the end of the year but this year is especially bad, much of it due to Covid-19-related issues.Intel spent much of 2020 struggling with CPU shortages. In the latter half of the year it was hit with chipset shortages, with the B460 and H410 chipsets reportedly out of stock through the end of last year, and availability of the Z590 chipset is also constrained.AMD also has a problem: it can’t make enough chips. Some of its Ryzen processors, particularly the Ryzen 5 line, are immensely popular, and there are simply none to be had on Amazon, Newegg, or any other online retailer.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’ve noticed components are hard to get these days, you are not alone. The supply of computing components can get a little tight around the end of the year but this year is especially bad, much of it due to Covid-19-related issues.Intel spent much of 2020 struggling with CPU shortages. In the latter half of the year it was hit with chipset shortages, with the B460 and H410 chipsets reportedly out of stock through the end of last year, and availability of the Z590 chipset is also constrained.AMD also has a problem: it can’t make enough chips. Some of its Ryzen processors, particularly the Ryzen 5 line, are immensely popular, and there are simply none to be had on Amazon, Newegg, or any other online retailer.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft has updated its Azure Stack HCI software, an on-premises version of its Azure cloud services to try and catch up with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) leaders VMware and Nutanix.Hyperconverged infrastructure is where compute, storage, and networking are all tightly integrated on the same server in a cluster. The tight hardware and software integration makes it easier to deploy than having to configure the parts separately.Azure Stack HCI was launched in 2019 and is built on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization software, Storage Spaces Direct software-defined storage, and software-defined networking.To read this article in full, please click here
The SolarWinds Orion security breach is unfolding at a rapid pace and the number of vendors and victims continues to grow. Each day brings new revelations as to its reach and depth. Of particular concern is the rate of infection and impact on government systems.In case you missed it, a backdoor was found in the SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management software. A dynamic link library called SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, a SolarWinds digitally-signed component of the Orion software framework was found to contain a backdoor that communicates via HTTP to third-party servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
After an initial dormant period of up to two weeks, the Trojan retrieves and executes commands, called jobs, that include the ability to transfer files, execute files, profile the system, reboot, and disable system services. In short, a total takeover of the machine.To read this article in full, please click here
The SolarWinds Orion security breach is unfolding at a rapid pace, and the number of vendors and victims continues to grow. Each day brings new revelations as to its reach and depth. Of particular concern are the rate of infection and impact on government systems.In case you missed it, a backdoor was found in the SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management software. A dynamic link library called SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, a SolarWinds digitally-signed component of the Orion software framework, was found to contain a backdoor that communicates via HTTP to third-party servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
After an initial dormant period of up to two weeks, the Trojan retrieves and executes commands, called jobs, that include the ability to transfer files, execute files, profile the system, reboot, and disable system services. In short, a total takeover of the machine.To read this article in full, please click here
Andy Patrizio