Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World

It was 31 years ago when Alan Karp, then an IBM employee, decided to put up $100 of his own money in hopes of solving a vexing issue for him and others in the computing field. When looking at the HPC space, there were supercomputers armed with eight powerful processors and designed to run the biggest applications of the day. However, there also were people putting 1,000 wimpy chips into machines that leveraged parallelism to run workloads, a rarity at the time.

According to Amdahl’s Law in 1986, even if 95 percent of a workload runs in parallel, the speedup …

Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Europe Elbows For A Place At Exascale Table

When talking about the ongoing international race to exascale computing, it might be easy to overlook the European Union. A lot of the attention over the past several years has focused on the efforts by the United States and China, the world’s economic powerhouses and the centers of technology development.

Through its Exascale Computing Project, the United States is putting money and resources behind its plans to roll out the first of its exascale systems in 2021. For its part, China is planning at least three pre-exascale systems using mostly home-grown technologies, backed by significant investments by the Chinese …

Europe Elbows For A Place At Exascale Table was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Throws Its Full Support Behind Arm Server Chips

The gatekeeper to Arm in the datacenter has finally swung that gate wide open.

Red Hat has always been a vocal support of Arm’s efforts to migrate its low-power architecture into the datacenter. The largest distributer of commercial Linux has spent years working with other tech vendors and industry groups like Linaro to build an ecosystem of hardware and software makers to support Arm systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in servers and to build standards and policies for products that are powered by the chips. The company was a key player in the development of the Arm Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) specification …

Red Hat Throws Its Full Support Behind Arm Server Chips was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Dell EMC Wants to Take AI Mainstream

One of the challenges vendors are trying address when it comes to artificial intelligence is expanding the technology and its elements of machine learning and deep learning beyond the realm of hyoerscalers and some HPC centers and into the enterprise, where businesses can leverage them for such workloads as simulations, modeling, and analytics.

For the past several years, system makers have been trying to crack the code that will make it easier for mainstream enterprises to adopt and deploy traditional HPC technologies, and now they want to dovetail those efforts with the expanding AI opportunity. The difference with enterprises is …

Dell EMC Wants to Take AI Mainstream was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform

Nutanix has been on a journey for well over a year to transform itself from a supplier for software for hyperconverged infrastructure to a company with a platform that allows enterprises to build private datacenter environments that give them the same kinds of tools, automation, agility, scalability and consumption options that they can find in public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Nutanix was one of several vendors whose software helped propel the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space through partnerships with such top-tier system OEMs like Dell EMC, IBM and Lenovo, and is among the last independent companies standing, …

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter

For several years there has been the ongoing debate about ARM and its future in the datacenter. That debate goes on, but the talk is changing.

At the beginning of the decade, ARM Holdings, the company behind the ARM chip architecture that is now owned by Japanese high-tech conglomerate Softbank, said its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs were a good alternative to Intel’s dominant Xeon and derivative processors for servers and other hardware at a time when energy efficiency in systems was becoming increasingly important.

Over the years that has been speculation about when ARM-based chips would find a foothold …

Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI

Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence and deep learning in hopes of being able to more quickly make the right business decisions, to remake their business models and become more efficient, and to improve the experience of their customers. The fast-emerging technologies will let enterprises gain more insight into the massive amounts of data they are generating and find the trends that normally would have been hidden from them. And enterprises are quickly moving in that direction.

A Gartner survey found that 59 percent of organizations are gathering information to help them build out their AI strategies, while the rest …

Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor

The global server market is increasingly driven by the hyperscalers, and the trendsetter for all of them is Amazon Web Services. The massive company dominates the fast-growing public cloud space, outpacing rivals like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud, and is the top consumer of servers among a group of hyperscalers that are becoming the most powerful buyers of systems and new components, such as processors.

This can be seen in the numbers. According to IDC analysts, hyperscalers in the first and second quarters this year made a significant push to deploy servers, with AWS accounting for more …

New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration

Distributed telecommunications cloud environments offer service providers a way to more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver services to end users, but they come with their share of complexity, management headaches, integration challenges and coordinating operations among multiple cloud vendors.

In a recent survey by Juniper Networks, service providers noted that a lack of visibility into all parts of the network cloud was the most difficult challenge facing as they migrate to the cloud, and that more than half of respondents said they use two or more cloud vendors in their distributed environments, adding to the complexity and the lack …

Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Wraps OpenStack In Containers

Red Hat is no stranger to Linux containers, considering the work its engineers have done in creating the OpenShift application development and management platform.

As The Next Platform has noted over the past couple of years, Red Hat has rapidly expanded the capabilities within OpenShift for developing and deploying Docker containers and managing them with the open source Kubernetes orchestrator, culminating with OpenShift 3.0, which was based on Kubernetes and Docker containers. It has continued to enhance the platform since. Most recently, Red Hat in September launched OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, which added upgraded security features and more consistency across …

Red Hat Wraps OpenStack In Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Fujitsu, NetApp Tag Team For Converged Infrastructure

Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure, those tightly integrated systems that bring together compute and storage into pre-tested and pre-configured stacks, continues to be in high demand from enterprises that are looking to rework their datacenters to become private clouds that can more easily and, in the long run, more cheaply host fast-emerging technologies like analytics, mobile applications, Internet of Things telemetry, virtual and augmented reality, and various software-defined infrastructure. These CI and HCI platforms are designed to bring greater flexibility and scalability, ease deployment and management, and reduce costs in areas such as acquisition and power consumption.

IDC analysts have been …

Fujitsu, NetApp Tag Team For Converged Infrastructure was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers

When enterprises talk about cloud computing, they invariably talk about hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Not all of their workloads will run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform – or only on one public cloud, for that matter.

In highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, some workloads will run in private clouds hosted by the enterprises themselves for compliance, security, and privacy reasons. Companies that have invested millions of dollars in their datacenters over the years also will want to protect those investments by leveraging them for private clouds. What’s important to them is being …

IBM Builds Private Cloud Stack With Kubernetes And Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds may be the direction many enterprises are heading in, but it is a path fraught with challenges.

Organizations may want to run some workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or IBM while keeping others in house on public clouds for such reasons ranging from security and privacy to protecting datacenter investments and regulatory compliance. The complexity and difficulty come in being able to easily and securely move workloads between the two environments and managing both in a streamlined way.

However, that is the direction many enterprises are going. IDC analysts found …

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip

The talk about ARM-based servers pushing their way into the datacenter has been going for almost a decade now, during which time we have seen companies like Samsung drop their interest before they really got going on it and others like AMD getting an ARM-based chip out but then turning their attention to other initiatives.

We have also seen vendors like Cavium and Applied Micro get chips to market with some levels of adoption. Top system OEMs like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Cray are using these chips to various degrees in commercially available or test servers. And the …

Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Connecting The Dots With Graph Databases

Graph querying of data housed in massive data lakes and data warehouses has been part of the big data and analytics scene for many years, but it hasn’t always been a particularly easy process. Understanding with graphs has in many ways been a highly manual process, and not all data scientists have had access to the Cypher graph database query language. Executives at graph company Neo4j are looking to change that.

At the GraphConnect New York show this week, Neo4j announced it has donated an early version of its Cypher for Apache Spark language toolkit to the openCypher project, a …

Connecting The Dots With Graph Databases was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Intel Pumps Funds Into Data Processing In All Shapes And Sizes

Intel’s multi-year effort to expand its reach beyond its PC and server processor roots has taken the chip maker down multiple paths, some of which have ended in dead ends.

The most memorable of those was the billion-plus-dollar attempt to challenge ARM Holdings and its various partners – such as Qualcomm and Samsung – in making chips for mobile devices. Under current CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel has retrenched, dropping its mobile device efforts and pulling back from wearables, and instead is pushing to provide the foundational technologies that will underpin the trends that will continue to shape the industry, from …

Intel Pumps Funds Into Data Processing In All Shapes And Sizes was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Easing Enterprise Migration To The Cloud

No one knows better than IBM that the time, money, energy, and risk associated with changing platforms can hinder that change. In some cases, as with the System z mainframe, this helps the company preserve its footprint in the datacenter. But in other cases, it hurts IBM’s ability to get people to try out different public or private infrastructure.

It is no secret that Big Blue wants a much bigger cloud business, and that it got a late start compared to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But IBM does have a presence at most of the large companies on earth, and …

Easing Enterprise Migration To The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Match Made In Hyperscale: Docker Borgs Kubernetes

For more than a year, container pioneer Docker has pushed its own Docker Swarm as the orchestration tool for managing highly distributed computing environments based on its eponymous containers in physical and virtual environments. But it is hard to deny the rapid uptake of Kubernetes, the container orchestration technology that was derived from Google’s internal Borg and Omega cluster managers and that the search engine giant open sourced three years ago.

Kubernetes has become highly popular, gaining momentum with top cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and obviously Google Cloud Platform, and is getting support from …

A Match Made In Hyperscale: Docker Borgs Kubernetes was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Cisco Knows No One Wants To Manage The Management Stack

The highly distributed and increasingly cloud-based nature of the modern IT environment is adding to the complexity that organizations have to deal with, particularly in terms of managing their infrastructures. Mobility, the internet of things, new development paradigms, containerization, more distributed applications, data analytics and multi-cloud deployments are all conspiring to create even more challenges in what is an already complicated management scenario for enterprises facing cost and time constraints.

At a time when speed and scalability are imperative and human errors can be costly, the answer to many of these challenges may lie in the cloud. That’s the …

Cisco Knows No One Wants To Manage The Management Stack was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Cisco Stretches ACI Network Fabrics, Eases Management

For disaster recovery, political, and organizational reasons, enterprises like to have multiple datacenters, and now they are going hybrid with public cloud capacity adding in the mix. Having networks scattered across the globe brings operational challenges, from being able to easily migrate and manage workloads across the multiple sites and increased complexity around networks, security to adopting emerging datacenter technologies like containers.

As the world becomes more cloud-centric, organizations are looking for ways to gain greater visibility and scalability across their environments, automate as many processes as possible and manage all these sites as a single entity.

Cisco Systems …

Cisco Stretches ACI Network Fabrics, Eases Management was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.