Author Archives: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Author Archives: Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the early years of Amazon Web Services, the collection of compute, storage, networking, and platform services (database, analytics, and such) were so good that Amazon, its parent company, did not have to spend a lot of money on sales and marketing to get startups to flock in droves to this public cloud to use it as their computing platform. …
AWS Invests In Iron And People To Court Enterprises was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
After two and a half quarters of tightening the purse strings, the world’s largest consumers of infrastructure – the eight major hyperscalers and cloud builders – plus their peers in the adjacent communications service provider space all started spending money on servers and storage again, and Intel can breathe a sigh of relief as it works to get its 10 nanometer manufacturing on track for the delivery of “Ice Lake” Xeon SP processors sometime in the second half of next year. …
Hyperscalers And Cloud Builders Resume Their Spending Spree was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
True to its name, Google’s famous Borg cluster controller has absorbed a lot of different ideas about how to manage server clusters and the applications that run atop them at the search engine and now cloud computing giant. …
Ma Bell, Not Google, Creates The Real Open Source Borg was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Stanford University doesn’t own software defined networking. But it sure does feel that way some days. …
Who Is In Charge Of The Datacenter Network? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the past five years or so, we have had a remarkably good – and predictable – run of increases in aggregate switching bandwidth out of the major ASIC suppliers, and it has been a boon that underpins the massive expansion in datacenters among the hyperscalers. …
Cheering On The Optical I/O Inflection Point was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. …
The Substrate To Bind Datacenter Switching And Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
HPC shops are used to doing math – it is what they do for a living, after all – and as they evaluate their hybrid computing and storage strategies, they will be doing a lot of math. …
Understanding And Balancing HPC On-Premises And In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Red Hat is coming onto IBM’s books at just the right time, and to be honest, it might have been better for Big Blue if the deal to acquire the world’s largest supplier of support and packaging services for open source software had closed maybe one or two quarters ago. …
The Potential Of Red Hat Plus Power Is Larger Than Exascale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
IBM, through the work of Edgar Codd, invented the ideas behind the relational database back in 1970. …
Is Amazon’s Database Strategy A Glimpse Into The Future? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Moore’s Law might be slowing down CPU compute capacity increases in recent years, but the innovation has been coming at a steady drumbeat for the interconnects used inside servers and between nodes in distributed computing systems. …
PCI-Express Steps Up To The Bandwidth Challenge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hybrid cloud is gaining traction as organizations seek to realize the flexibility and scale of a joint public and on-premises model of IT provisioning while also changing the way their compute and storage infrastructure is funded, transferring costs from a capital expense (capex) to an operating expense (opex). …
Automation And Policy Drive Optimal Hybrid Cloud Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Back in 2016, we wrote a column about the rise of data-centric computing. …
Staying Afloat In The Coming Data Deluge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Most people in the IT community tend to their fields, making their living in their patches, but there are some who change the landscape, and still fewer who do it again and again. …
Point To Point In The Datacenter With Andy Bechtolsheim was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Say what you will about the ruthless dominance of hyperscale companies, but they are managing to propel information technology at a rate, and in ways, that the enterprise and high performance computing markets can only dream of. …
Switch Silicon To Relieve Choke Points In Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Living in the future, as we do now, you no longer have to expend huge amounts of capital to build a petaflops-scale supercomputer. …
Cloudy Supercomputers Join the HPC Petascale Club was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Perhaps the biggest task that processor and system designers have to wrestle with these days is how to keep heavily cored and massively threaded processors fed with data. …
Accelerating Compute By Cramming It Into DRAM Memory was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
While there are plenty of distributed applications that are going to chew through the hundreds of gigabits per second of bandwidth per port that modern Ethernet or InfiniBand ASICs deliver inside of switches, there are still others that might benefit from having a more streamlined stack that is also more malleable and composable. …
A New Twist On PCI-Express Switching For The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Big Blue has become a big believer in using differential signaling to attach everything – and we mean everything – to the processor. …
IBM Readies Power9 “Bandwidth Beast” Kicker was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Bringing a new switch ASIC to market is no easy task, and it isn’t cheap, either. …
Innovium Boosts Switch Chip Performance Without A Process Shrink was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It has been two decades since Juniper Networks, then the big upstart rival to Cisco Systems and others as the dot-com boom was rising towards its crescendo several years hence, took FreeBSD Unix and turned it into a network operating system that spanned both routers and switches. …
When Diverse Network ASICs Meet A Unifying Operating System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.