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.

IBM Combines PowerAI, Data Science Experience in Enterprise AI Push

IBM has spent the past several years putting a laser focus on what it calls cognitive computing, using its Watson platform as the foundation for its efforts in such emerging fields as artificial intelligence (AI) and is successful spinoff, deep learning. Big Blue has leaned on Watson technology, its traditional Power systems, and increasingly powerful GPUs from Nvidia to drive its efforts to not only bring AI and deep learning into the cloud, but also to push AI into the enterprise.

The technologies are part of a larger push in the industry to help enterprises transform their businesses to take …

IBM Combines PowerAI, Data Science Experience in Enterprise AI Push was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers

Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.

The …

Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IBM Brings Analytics To The Data For Faster Processing

Data analytics is a rapidly evolving field, and IBM and other vendors over the past several years have built numerous tools to address segments of it. But now Big Blue is shifting its focus to give data scientists and developers the technologies they need more easily and quickly analyze the data and derive insights that they can apply to their businesses strategies.

“We have [created] a ton of different products that solve parts of the problem,” Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, tells The Next Platform. “We’re moving toward a strategy of developing platforms for analytics. This trend …

IBM Brings Analytics To The Data For Faster Processing was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push

Microsoft is embedding Anaconda’s Python distribution into its Azure Machine Learning products, the latest move by the software vendor to expand its capabilities in the fast-growing artificial intelligence space and an example of Anaconda extending its reach beyond high performance computing and into AI.

The two companies announced the partnership this week at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, with the news dovetailing with other announcements around AI that Microsoft officials made this week at its own Ignite 2017 show. The vendors said they will offer Anaconda for Microsoft, which they described as a subset of the Anaconda …

Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Unifying Massive Data at Cloud Scale

Enterprises continue to struggle with the issue of data: how to process and move the massive amounts that are coming in from multiple sources, how to analyze the different types of data to best leverage its capabilities, and how to store and unify it across various environments, including on-premises infrastructure and cloud environments. A broad array of major storage players, such as Dell EMC, NetApp and IBM are building out their offerings to create platforms that can do a lot of those things.

MapR Technologies, which made its bones with its commercial Hadoop distribution, is moving in a similar direction. …

Unifying Massive Data at Cloud Scale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE Looks Ahead To Composable Infrastructure, Persistent Memory

Over the past several years, the server market has been roiled by the rise of cloud computing that run the applications created by companies and by services offered by hyperscalers that augment or replace such applications. This is a tougher and lumpier market, to be sure.

The top tier cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not only have become key drivers in server sales but also have turned to original design manufacturers (ODMs) from Taiwan and China for lower cost systems to help populate their massive datacenters. Overall, global server shipments have slowed, and top-tier OEMs are working to …

HPE Looks Ahead To Composable Infrastructure, Persistent Memory was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Unifying Oil and Gas Data at Scale

The oil and gas industry has been among the most aggressive in pursuing internet of things (IoT), cloud and big data technologies to collect, store, sort and analyze massive amounts of data in both the drilling and refining sectors to improve efficiencies and decision-making capabilities. Systems are increasingly becoming automated, and sensors are placed throughout processes to send back data on various the systems and software has been put in place to crunch the data to create useful information.

According to a group of researchers from Turkey, the oil and gas industry is well suited to embrace all the new …

Unifying Oil and Gas Data at Scale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Logistics in Application Path of Neural Networks

Accurately forecasting resource demand within the supply chain has never been easy, particular given the constantly changing nature of the data over periods of time.

What may have been true in measurements around demand or logistics one minute might be entirely different an hour, day or week later, which can throw off a short-term load forecast (STLF) and lead to costly over- or under-estimations, which in turn can lead to too much or too little supply.

To improve such forecasts, there are multiple efforts underway to create new models that can more accurately predict load needs, and while they have …

Logistics in Application Path of Neural Networks was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Health Check For Code And Infrastructure In The Cloud

As businesses continue their migration to the cloud, the issue of monitoring the performance and health of their applications gets more challenging as they try to track them across both on-premises environments and in both private and public clouds. At the same time, as they become more cloud-based, they have to keep an eye on the entire stack, from the customer-facing applications to the underlying infrastructure they run on.

Since its founding eight years ago, New Relic has steadily built upon its first product, a cloud-based application performance management (APM) tool that is designed to assess how well the …

A Health Check For Code And Infrastructure In The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Dell EMC Upgrades Flash in High-End Storage While Eyeing NVMe

When Dell acquired EMC in its massive $60 billon-plus deal last year, it boasted that Dell was inheriting a boatload of new technologies that would help propel forward its capabilities and ambitions with larger enterprises.

That included offerings ranging from VMware’s NSX software-defined networking (SDN) platform to VirtuStream and its cloud technologies for running mission critical applications from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft off-premises. In particular, Dell was acquiring EMC’s broad and highly popular storage portfolio, in particular the high-end VMAX, XtremeIO, and newer ScaleIO lineups as well as its Isilon storage arrays for high performance workloads.

Dell …

Dell EMC Upgrades Flash in High-End Storage While Eyeing NVMe was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Is The Gatekeeper For ARM In The Datacenter

If any new hardware technology is going to get traction in the datacenter, it has to have the software behind it. And as the dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat’s support of ARM-based servers gives the upstart chip makers like Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm the leverage to help pry the glasshouse doors open and get a slice of the server and storage business that is so utterly dominated by Intel’s Xeon processors today.

It is now or never for ARM in the datacenter, and that means Red Hat has to go all the way and not just support …

Red Hat Is The Gatekeeper For ARM In The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Gears Up OpenShift For Developers

During the five years that Red Hat has been building out its OpenShift cloud applications platform, much of the focus has been on making it easier to use by customers looking to adapt to an increasingly cloud-centric world for both new and legacy applications. Just as it did with the Linux operating system through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related middleware and tools, the vendor has worked to make it easier for enterprises to embrace OpenShift.

That has included a major reworking of the platform with the release of version 3.0 last year, which ditched Red Hat’s in-house technologies for …

Red Hat Gears Up OpenShift For Developers was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Swiss Army Knife File System Cuts Through Petabytes

Petabytes are in the future of every company, and luckily, the future is always being invented by the IT ecosystem to handle it.

Those wrestling with tens to hundreds of petabytes of data today are constantly challenged to find the best ways to store, search and manage it all. Qumulo was founded in 2012 and came out of the chute two years ago with the idea that a software-based file system that includes built-in analytics that enables the system to increase capacity as the amount of data grows. QSFS, now called Qumulo Core, also does it all: fast with big …

Swiss Army Knife File System Cuts Through Petabytes was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.