Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train

Being the first mover in establishing a new technology in the enterprise is important, but it is not more important than having a vast installed base and sales force peddling an existing and adjacent product set in which to sell a competing and usually lagging technology.

VMware can’t be said to have initially been particularly enthusiastic about server-SAN hybrids like those created by upstart Nutanix, with its Acropolis platform, or pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which bought into the virtual SAN market with its LeftHand Networks acquisition in October 2008 for $360 million and went back to the hyperconverged well …

Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines

International Business Machines has gone through so many changes in its eleven decades of existence, and it is important to remember that some days. If IBM’s recent changes are a bit bewildering, as they were in the late 1980s, the middle 1990s, and the early 2010s in particular, they are perhaps nothing compared the changes that were wrought to transform a maker of meat slicers, time clocks, and tabulating equipment derived from looms.

Yeah, and you thought turning GPUs into compute engines was a stretch.

Herman Hollerith, who graduated from Columbia University in 1879 when its engineering school was still …

International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker Completes Its Platform With DIY Linux

It all started with a new twist on an old idea, that of a lightweight software container running inside Linux that would house applications and make them portable. And now Docker is coming full circle and completing its eponymous platform by opening up the tools to allow users to create their own minimalist Linux operating system that is containerized and modular above the kernel and that only gives applications precisely what they need to run.

The new LinuxKit is not so much a variant of Linux as a means of creating them. The toolkit for making Linuxes, which was unveiled …

Docker Completes Its Platform With DIY Linux was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Machine Learning Gets An InfiniBand Boost With Caffe2

Scaling the performance of machine learning frameworks so they can train larger neural networks – or so the same training a lot faster – has meant that the hyperscalers of the world who are essentially creating this technology have had to rely on increasingly beefy compute nodes, these days almost universally augmented with GPUs.

There is a healthy rivalry between the hyperscalers over who has the best machine learning framework and the co-designed iron to take the best advantage of its capabilities. At its F8 developer conference, Facebook not only rolled out a significantly tweaked variant of the open source …

Machine Learning Gets An InfiniBand Boost With Caffe2 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases

So you are a system architect, and you want to make the databases behind your applications run a lot faster. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and now, there is yet another — and perhaps more disruptive — one.

You can move the database storage from disk drives to flash memory, You can move from a row-based database to a columnar data store that segments data and speeds up accesses to it. And for even more of a performance boost, you can pull that columnar data into main memory to be read and manipulated at memory …

FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express

There is no question that plenty of companies are shifting their storage infrastructure from giant NAS and SAN appliances to more generic file, block, and object storage running on plain vanilla X86 servers equipped with flash and disk. And similarly, companies are looking to the widespread availability of dual-ported NVM-Express drives on servers to give them screaming flash performance on those storage servers.

But the fact remains that very few companies want to build and support their own storage servers, and moreover, there is still room for an appliance approach to these commodity components for enterprises that want to buy …

Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Does Google’s TPU Investment Make Sense Going Forward?

Google created quite a stir when it released architectural details and performance metrics for its homegrown Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) accelerator for machine learning algorithms last week. But as we (and many of you reading) pointed out, comparing the TPU to earlier “Kepler” generation GPUs from Nvidia was not exactly a fair comparison. Nvidia has done much in the “Maxwell” and “Pascal” GPU generations specifically to boost machine learning performance.

To set the record straight, Nvidia took some time and ran some benchmarks of its own to put the performance of its latest Pascal accelerators, particularly the ones it aims …

Does Google’s TPU Investment Make Sense Going Forward? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Xeon E3: A Lesson In Moore’s Law And Dennard Scaling

If you want an object lesson in the interplay between Moore’s Law, Dennard scaling, and the desire to make money from selling chips, you need look no further than the past several years of Intel’s Xeon E3 server chip product lines.

The Xeon E3 chips are illustrative particularly because Intel has kept the core count constant for these processors, which are used in a variety of gear, from workstations (remote and local), entry servers to storage controllers to microservers employed at hyperscalers and even for certain HPC workloads (like Intel’s own massive EDA chip design and validation farms). …

Xeon E3: A Lesson In Moore’s Law And Dennard Scaling was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Fujitsu Takes On IBM Power9 With Sparc64-XII

While a lot of the applications in the world run on clusters of systems with a relatively modest amount of compute and memory compared to NUMA shared memory systems, big iron persists and large enterprises want to buy it. That is why IBM, Fujitsu, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur, NEC, Unisys, and a few others are still in the big iron racket.

Fujitsu and its reseller partner – server maker, database giant, and application powerhouse Oracle – have made a big splash at the high end of the systems space with a very high performance processor, the Sparc64-XII, and a …

Fujitsu Takes On IBM Power9 With Sparc64-XII was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel “Kaby Lake” Xeon E3 Sets The Server Cadence

The tick-tock-clock three step dance that Intel will be using to progress its Core client and Xeon server processors in the coming years is on full display now that the Xeon E3-1200 v6 processors based on the “Kaby Lake” have been unveiled.

The Kaby Lake chips are Intel’s third generation of Xeon processors that are based on its 14 nanometer technologies, and as our naming convention for Intel’s new way of rolling out chips suggests, it is a refinement of both the architecture and the manufacturing process that, by and large, enables Intel to ramp up the clock speed on …

Intel “Kaby Lake” Xeon E3 Sets The Server Cadence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Weaving Together Flash For Nearly Unlimited Scale

It is almost a foregone conclusion that when it comes to infrastructure, the industry will follow the lead of the big hyperscalers and cloud builders, building a foundation of standardized hardware for serving, storing, and switching and implementing as much functionality and intelligence as possible in the software on top of that to allow it to scale up and have costs come down as it does.

The reason this works is that these companies have complete control of their environments, from the processors and memory in the supply chain to the Linux kernel and software stack maintained by hundreds to …

Weaving Together Flash For Nearly Unlimited Scale was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Vigorously Defends Chip Innovation Progress

With absolute dominance in datacenter and desktop compute, considerable sway in datacenter storage, a growing presence in networking, and profit margins that are the envy of the manufacturing and tech sectors alike, it is not a surprise that companies are gunning for Intel. They all talk about how Moore’s Law is dead and how that removes a significant advantage for the world’s largest – and most profitable – chip maker.

After years of this, the top brass in Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group as well as its former chief financial officer, who is now in charge of its manufacturing, operations, …

Intel Vigorously Defends Chip Innovation Progress was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Use Optane Memory Like A Hyperscaler

The ramp for Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint memory, which sits between DDR4 main memory and flash or disk storage, or beside main memory, in the storage hierarchy, is going to shake up the server market. And maybe not in the ways that Intel and its partner, Micron Technology, anticipate.

Last week, Intel unveiled its first Optane 3D XPoint solid state cards and drives, which are now being previewed by selected hyperscalers and which will be rolling out in various capacities and form factors in the coming quarters. As we anticipated, and as Intel previewed last fall, the company is …

Use Optane Memory Like A Hyperscaler was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Facebook Pushes The Search Envelope With GPUs

An increasing amount of the world’s data is encapsulated in images and video and by its very nature it is difficult and extremely compute intensive to do any kind of index and search against this data compared to the relative ease with which we can do so with the textual information that heretofore has dominated both our corporate and consumer lives.

Initially, we had to index images by hand and it is with these datasets that the hyperscalers pushed the envelope with their image recognition algorithms, evolving neural network software on CPUs and radically improving it with a jump to …

Facebook Pushes The Search Envelope With GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Squeezing The Joules Out Of DRAM, Possibly Without Stacking

Increasing parallelism is the only way to get more work out of a system. Architecting for that parallelism required requires a lot of rethinking of each and every component in a system to make everything hum along as efficiently as possible.

There are lots of ways to skin the parallelism cats and squeeze more performance and less energy out of the system, and for DRAM memory, just stacking things up helps, but according to some research done at Stanford University, the University of Texas, and GPU maker Nvidia, there is another way to boost performance and lower energy consumption. The …

Squeezing The Joules Out Of DRAM, Possibly Without Stacking was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Upstart Switch Chip Maker Tears Up The Ethernet Roadmap

Ethernet switching has its own kinds of Moore’s Law barriers. The transition from 10 Gb/sec to 100 Gb/sec devices over the past decade has been anything but smooth, and a lot of compromises had to be made to even get to the interim – and unusual – 40 Gb/sec stepping stone towards the 100 Gb/sec devices that are ramping today in the datacenter.

While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet switching is fine for a certain class of enterprise applications that are not bandwidth hungry, for the hyperscalers and cloud builders, 100 Gb/sec is nowhere near enough bandwidth, and 200 Gb/sec, which is …

Upstart Switch Chip Maker Tears Up The Ethernet Roadmap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

New ARM Architecture Offers A DynamIQ Response To Compute

ARM has rearchitected its multi-core chips to they can better compete in a world where computing needs are becoming more specialized.

The new DynamIQ architecture will provide flexible compute, with up to eight different cores in a single cluster on a system on a chip. Each core can run at a different clock speed so a company making an ARM SoC can tailor the silicon to handle multiple workloads at varying power efficiencies. The DynamIQ architecture also adds faster access to accelerators for artificial intelligence or networking jobs, and a resiliency that allows it to be used in robotics, autonomous …

New ARM Architecture Offers A DynamIQ Response To Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Like Flash, 3D XPoint Enters The Datacenter As Cache

In the datacenter, flash memory took off first as a caching layer between processors and their cache memories and main memory and the ridiculously slow disk drives that hang off the PCI-Express bus on the systems. It wasn’t until the price of flash came way down and the capacities of flash card and drives came down that companies could think about going completely to flash for some, much less all of their workloads.

So it will be with Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile memory, which Intel is starting to roll out in its initial datacenter-class SSDs and will eventually deliver …

Like Flash, 3D XPoint Enters The Datacenter As Cache was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Open Hardware Pushes GPU Computing Envelope

The hyperscalers of the world are increasingly dependent on machine learning algorithms for providing a significant part of the user experience and operations of their massive applications, so it is not much of a surprise that they are also pushing the envelope on machine learning frameworks and systems that are used to deploy those frameworks. Facebook and Microsoft were showing off their latest hybrid CPU-GPU designs at the Open Compute Summit, and they provide some insight into how to best leverage Nvidia’s latest “Pascal” Tesla accelerators.

Not coincidentally, the specialized systems that have been created for supporting machine learning workloads …

Open Hardware Pushes GPU Computing Envelope was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.