Navigating The Revenue Streams And Profit Pools Of AWS

It will not happen for a long time, if ever, but we surely do wish that Amazon Web Services, the public cloud division of the online retailing giant, was a separate company. Because if AWS was a separate company, and it was a public company at that, it would have finer grained financial results that might give us some insight into exactly what more than 1 million customers are actually renting on the AWS cloud.

As it is, all that the Amazon parent tells Wall Street about its AWS offspring is the revenue stream and operating profit levels for each …

Navigating The Revenue Streams And Profit Pools Of AWS was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Prying The Lid Off Black Box Switch SDKs

It would be hard to find a business that has been more proprietary, insular, and secretive than the networking industry, and for good reasons. The sealed boxes that switch vendors sell, and that are the very backbone of the Internet, have been wickedly profitable – and in a way that neither servers nor storage have been.

There are so many control points in the networking stack that it is no wonder the hyperscalers and cloud builders have been leaning so heavily on switch ASIC vendors to open up their entire stack. The only reason they don’t build their own switch …

Prying The Lid Off Black Box Switch SDKs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal

The container craze on Linux platforms just took an interesting twist now that Red Hat is sheling out $250 million to acquire its upstart rival in Linux and containers, CoreOS.

As the largest and by far the most profitable open source software company in the world – it had $2.4 billion in sales in fiscal 2017, brought $253.7 million of that to the bottom line, and ended that fiscal year in February with a $2.7 billion subscription and services backlog – Red Hat has not been afraid to spend some money to get its hands on control of key open …

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC

While no one has yet created an exploit to take advantage of the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities that were exposed by Google six months ago and that were revealed in early January, it is only a matter of time. The patching frenzy has not settled down yet, and a big concern is not just whether these patches fill the security gaps, but at what cost they do so in terms of application performance.

To try to ascertain the performance impact of the Spectre and Meltdown patches, most people have relied on comments from Google on the negligible …

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

For Many, Hyperconverged Is The Next Platform

There is a kind of dichotomy in the datacenter. The upstart hyperconverged storage makers will tell you that the server-storage half-bloods that they have created are inspired by the storage at Google or Facebook or Amazon Web Services, but this is not, strictly speaking, true.  Hyperscalers and cloud builders are creating completely disaggregated compute and storage, linked by vast Clos networks with incredible amounts of bandwidth. But enterprises, who operate on a much more modest scale, are increasingly adopting hyperconverged storage – which mixes compute and storage on the same virtualized clusters.

One camp is splitting up servers and storage, …

For Many, Hyperconverged Is The Next Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel’s Glass House Is Definitely More Than Half Full

An unexpected jump in enterprise spending coupled with the ongoing heavy spending by hyperscalers, cloud builders, and communications companies revamping their networks of gear coupled with the ramp of the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors launched last July gave Intel the best overall quarter in its history, gauged by revenues and profits, and the best one also that its Data Center Group has ever posted.

Many are wondering if this boom can last. Intel’s top brass are not among them, but they do concede that the fourth quarter of 2017 was an unusually good one. It is hard to see if …

Intel’s Glass House Is Definitely More Than Half Full was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It’s About Time For Time Series Databases

To get straight to the point: nobody wants to have large grain snapshots of data for any dataset that is actually comprised of a continuous stream of data points. With the data storage and stream processing now so cost-effective (relatively speaking, of course) that anybody can do it – not just national security agencies or hedge funds and brokerages with big budgets – there is pent up demand for a SQL-friendly time series database.

So that is what the founders of Timescale set out to create. And while they are by no means alone in this market, the open source …

It’s About Time For Time Series Databases was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Energy Giant Eni Starts Investing In Supercomputers Again

Energy is not free, not even to energy companies, and so they are just as concerned with being efficient with their supercomputers as the most penny pinching hyperscaler or cloud builder where the computing is the product.

Like the other major oil and gas producers on Earth, the last few years have not been easy ones for Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the Italian energy major that employs 33,000 people and operates in 76 countries worldwide and now has the distinction of having the most powerful supercomputer in the energy sector – and indeed, among all kinds of commercial entities in the …

Energy Giant Eni Starts Investing In Supercomputers Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mellanox Trims Down To Reach For A Profitable $1 Billion

If Mellanox Technologies had not begun investing in the Ethernet switching as it came out of the Great Recession, it would be a much different company than it is today. It might have even been long since acquired by Oracle or some other company, for instance.

To be sure, Mellanox might have been able to capture some business at the cloud builders, hyperscalers, and clustered storage makers with InfiniBand. But it would not have been the one to capitalize on moving InfiniBand-style technologies such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) to Ethernet, and it would not have been able to …

Mellanox Trims Down To Reach For A Profitable $1 Billion was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Flattening Networks – And Budgets – With 400G Ethernet

If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off.

Knowing that there are 100 million ports of switching up for grabs among these companies from 2017 through 2021 – worth tens of billions of dollars per year in revenues – is a strong motivator to get clever.

And that is precisely what …

Flattening Networks – And Budgets – With 400G Ethernet was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Gets Machines Back Into International Business

Designing and manufacturing processors – or paying a third party foundry to do some of the work – and then manufacturing systems and updating and modernizing operating systems and middleware is tough work. And it is work that few IT vendors and about the same number of hyperscalers do these days. Despite all of the gut-wrenching changes in the datacenter over the past six decades, International Business Machines is still in the game that it largely defined so long ago.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company’s System z mainframes had the highest shipment level, as gauged by aggregate …

IBM Gets Machines Back Into International Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Datacenters Brace For Spectre And Meltdown Impact

The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities fall into the category of “low probability, but very high impact” potential exploits. The holes that Spectre and Meltdown open up into systems might enable any application to read the data of any other app, when running on the same server in the same pool of system memory – bypassing any and all security permissions. These potential exploits apply to every IT shop, from single-tenant servers potentially exposed to malware to apps running in a virtual machine (VM) framework in an enterprise datacenter to apps running in a multi-tenant public cloud instance. …

Datacenters Brace For Spectre And Meltdown Impact was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

NOAA Weather Forecasts Stick With CPUs, Keep An Eye On GPUs

When it comes to supercomputing, more is almost always better. More data and more compute – and more bandwidth to link the two – almost always result in a better set of models, whether they are descriptive or predictive. This has certainly been the case in weather forecasting, where the appetite for capacity to support more complex models of the atmosphere and the oceans and the integration of models running across different (and always increasing) resolutions never abates.

This is certainly the case with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which does weather and climate forecasting on a regional, national, …

NOAA Weather Forecasts Stick With CPUs, Keep An Eye On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Quantum Computing Enters 2018 Like It Is 1968

The quantum computing competitive landscape continues to heat up in early 2018. But today’s quantum computing landscape looks a lot like the semiconductor landscape 50 years ago.

The silicon-based integrated circuit (IC) entered its “medium-scale” integration phase in 1968. Transistor counts ballooned from ten transistors on a chip to hundreds of transistors on a chip within a few short years. After a while, there were thousands of transistors on a chip, then tens of thousands, and now we have, fifty years later, tens of billions.

Quantum computing is a practical application of quantum physics using individual subatomic particles chilled to …

Quantum Computing Enters 2018 Like It Is 1968 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Spectre And Meltdown Server Tax Bill

The new year in the IT sector got off to a roaring start with the revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre security threats, the latter of which affects most of the processors used in consumer and commercial computing gear made on the last decade or so.

Much has been written about the nature of the Meltdown and Spectre threats, which leverage the speculative execution features of modern processors to give user-level applications access to operating system kernel memory, which is a very big problem. Chip suppliers and operating system and hypervisor makers have known about these exploits since last June, …

The Spectre And Meltdown Server Tax Bill was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

NVLink Shines On Power9 For AI And HPC Tests

The differences between peak theoretical computing capacity of a system and the actual performance it delivers can be stark. This is the case with any symmetric or asymmetric processing complex, where the interconnect and the method of dispatching work across the computing elements is crucial, and in modern hybrid systems that might tightly couple CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and memory class storage on various interconnects, the links could end up being as important as the compute.

As we have discussed previously, IBM’s new “Witherspoon” AC922 hybrid system, which was launched recently and which starts shipping next week, is designed from …

NVLink Shines On Power9 For AI And HPC Tests was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Two Hyperscalers Down For AMD’s Epyc, Six To Go

You can’t call them the Super 8 because the discount hotel chain already has that name. But that is what they – with the they being Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook in the United States and Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and China Mobile in China – are. They are the biggest spenders, the hardest negotiators, and the most demanding customers in the IT sector.

Any component supplier that gets them buying their stuff gets kudos for their design wins and is assured, at least for a generation of products, a very steady and large demand, even if they might not bring …

Two Hyperscalers Down For AMD’s Epyc, Six To Go was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Building An Enterprise Blockchain

The word has come down from the top: Your company is going blockchain, and you will be implementing it. You have heard the buzz and are aware there is a difference between blockchain – the distributed, peer-to-peer ledger system – and its digital currency cousin, Bitcoin, which has been in the headlines. But how do you build an enterprise-class blockchain?

Let’s start with the basic premise, as that will inform the architectural and technical choices you make. Organizations are jumping on the blockchain bandwagon as a means of making transactions that span multiple parties simpler, more efficient and available at …

Building An Enterprise Blockchain was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Battle For Datacenter Compute: Qualcomm Centriq Versus Intel Xeon

Putting more and more cores on a single CPU and then having two CPUs in a standard workhorse server is something that yields the best price/performance for certain kinds of compute-hungry workloads, and these days, particularly those who want top bin Xeon parts and the cost of the processor is no object because it saves on the total number of server nodes that has to be deployed.

But this is not the only way to pack the most compute density into a rack. A case can be made for middle bin parts, particularly for workloads that scale well across many …

Battle For Datacenter Compute: Qualcomm Centriq Versus Intel Xeon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Renting The Cleanest HPC On Earth

One of the most interesting and strategically located datacenters in the world has taken a shining to HPC, and not just because it is a great business opportunity. Rather, Verne Global is firing up an HPC system rental service in its Icelandic datacenter because its commercial customers are looking for supercomputer-style systems that they can rent rather than buy to augment their existing HPC jobs.

Verne Global, which took over a former NATO airbase and an Allied strategic forces command center outside of Keflavik, Iceland back in 2012 and converted it into a super-secure datacenter, is this week taking the …

Renting The Cleanest HPC On Earth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.