Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Timothy Prickett Morgan
Microsoft Azure Goes Back To Rack Servers With Project Olympus
The thing we hear time and time again from the hyperscalers is that technology is a differentiator, but supply chain can make or break them. Designing servers, storage, switching, and datacenters is fun, but if all of the pieces can’t be brought together at volume, and at a price that is the best in the industry, then their operations can’t scale.
It is with this in mind that we ponder Microsoft’s new “Project Olympus” hyperscale servers, which it debuted today at the Zettastructure conference in London. Or, to be more precise, the hyperscale server designs that it has created but …
Microsoft Azure Goes Back To Rack Servers With Project Olympus was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II
Because space costs so much money and having multiple machines adds complexity and even more costs on top of that, there is always pressure to increase the density of the devices that provide compute, storage, and networking capacity in the datacenter. Moore’s Law, in essence, doesn’t just drive chips, but also the devices that are comprised of chips.
Often, it is the second or third iteration of a technology that takes off because the economics and density of the initial products can’t match the space and power constraints of a system rack. Such was the case with the initial 100 …
Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-II was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution
Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.
That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …
Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There
Earlier this month, Samsung acquired Viv, the AI platform built by the creators of Siri that seeks to “open up the world of AI assistants to all developers.” The acquisition was largely overshadowed by the more high-profile news of Samsung’s struggles with its Galaxy Note smartphone, but make no mistake, this was a bold and impactful move by Samsung that aggressively launches the company into the future of smart, AI-enabled devices.
Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus makes a compelling argument for why Samsung’s ecosystem serves as an invaluable launching pad for Viv’s goal of ubiquity – the electronics giant’s …
The New Intelligence Economy, And How We Get There was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades
What happens to the datacenter when a trillion devices embedded in every manner of product and facility are chatting away with each other, trying to optimize the world? There is a very good chance that the raw amount of computing needed to chew on that data at the edge, in the middle, and in a datacenter – yes, we will still have datacenters – will absolutely explode.
The supply chain for datacenters – including the ARM collective — is absolutely counting on exponential growth in sensors, which ARM Holding’s top brass and its new owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, spent …
ARM Predicts Cambrian Server Explosion In The Coming Decades was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool
The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.
But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool
The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.
But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …
Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
IBM Overclocks Power8 To Take On “Broadwell” Xeon E7
In the absence of Power8+ processor upgrades this year, and with sales of midrange systems taking a bit of a hit in the third quarter, IBM has to do something to push its iron against Xeon E7 and Sparc M7 systems between now and when the Power9 machines are available in the second half of 2017. It also needs to entice customers who are on older Power7 and Power7+ machinery to upgrade now rather than wait the better part of a year to spend money.
To that end, IBM has launched the Power 850C four-socket server, a companion to …
IBM Overclocks Power8 To Take On “Broadwell” Xeon E7 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A Snapshot Of Big Blue’s Systems Business
It is the job of the chief financial officer and the rest of the top brass of every public company in the world to present the financial results of their firms in the best possible light every thirteen weeks when the numbers are compiled and presented to Wall Street for grading. Money is how we all keep score, and how we decide we will invest and therefore live in our old age, hopefully with a certain amount of peace.
Starting this year, IBM has been presenting its financial results in a new format, which helps it emphasize its cognitive computing …
A Snapshot Of Big Blue’s Systems Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
AWS And VMware Acquaint As Strange Cloudfellows
What happens when the world’s largest public cloud and the biggest peddler of server virtualization in the enterprise team up to create a hybrid cloud?
A few things. First, the many VMware partners who have built clouds based on the ESXi hypervisor get nervous. And second, VMware very delicately and carefully prices its software low enough that it can have a scalable public cloud play but not so low that Amazon Web Services doesn’t end up having the pricing leverage that its parent company had with the book business a decade ago. And third, AWS uses the might of a …
AWS And VMware Acquaint As Strange Cloudfellows was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Opening Up The Server Bus For Coherent Acceleration
When IBM started to use the word “open” in conjunction with its Power architecture more than three years with the formation of the OpenPower Foundation three years ago, Big Blue was not confused about what that term meant. If the Power architecture was to survive, it would do so by having open specifications that would allow third parties to not only make peripherals, but also to license the technology and make clones of Power8 or Power9 processors.
One of the key technologies that IBM wove into the Power8 chip that differentiates it from Xeon, Opteron, ARM, and Sparc processors is …
Opening Up The Server Bus For Coherent Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Adapteva Joins The Kilocore Club With Epiphany-V
The computing industry is facing a number of challenges as Moore’s Law improvements in circuitry slow down, and they don’t all have to do with transistor counts and memory bandwidth and such. Another problem is that it has gotten progressively more costly to design chips at the same time that mass customization seems to be the way to provide unique processing capability specifically for precise workloads.
In recent decades, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency pumped huge sums of money into designing and manufacturing gigascale, terascale, and petascale systems, but in recent years this development arm of the US …
Adapteva Joins The Kilocore Club With Epiphany-V was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics
People tend to obsess about processing when it comes to system design, but ultimately an application and its data lives in memory and anything that can improve the capacity, throughput, and latency of memory will make all the processing you throw at it result in useful work rather than wasted clock cycles.
This is why flash has been such a boon for systems. But we can do better, and the Gen-Z consortium announced this week is going to create a new memory fabric standard that it hopes will break down the barriers between main memory and other storage-class memories on …
Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Igneous Melds ARM Chips And Disks For Private S3 Storage
The only companies that want – and expect – all compute and storage to move to the public cloud are those public clouds that do not have a compelling private cloud story to tell. But the fact remains that for many enterprises, their most sensitive data and workloads cannot – and will not – move to the public cloud.
This almost demands, as we have discussed before, the creation of private versions of public cloud infrastructure, which interestingly enough, is not as easy as it might seem. Scaling infrastructure down so it is still cost effective and usable by …
Igneous Melds ARM Chips And Disks For Private S3 Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Emergence Of Data-Centric Computing
As data grows, a shift in computing paradigm is underway. I started my professional career in the 1990s, during massive shift from mainframe computing to the heyday of client/server computing and enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, and human resources software. Relational databases like Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and Informix offered improvements to managing data, and the technique of combining a new class of midrange servers from Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard with storage tiers from EMC and IBM reduced costs and complexity over traditional mainframes.
However, what remained was that these new applications continued to operate …
The Emergence Of Data-Centric Computing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Accelerating Slow Databases That Wear People Down
Todd Mostak, the creator of the MapD GPU-accelerated database and visualization system, made that database because he was a frustrated user of other database technologies, and as a user, he is adamant that accelerating databases and making visualization of queried data is about more than just being a speed freak.
“Analytics is ultimately a creative exercise,” Mostak tells The Next Platform during a conversation that was supposed to be about benchmark results but that, as often happens here, wandered far and wide. “Analysts start from some place, and where they go is a function of the resources that are …
Accelerating Slow Databases That Wear People Down was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Applied Micro Finds ARM Server Footing, Reaches Higher
One of the frustrating facts about peddling any new technology is that the early adopters that discover a strategic advantage in that technology want to keep that secret all to themselves. Word of mouth and real-world use cases are big factors in the adoption of any new technology, and anything that hampers this actually causes the adoption to move slower than it otherwise might.
But eventually, despite all of the secrecy, there comes a time when the critical mass is reached and adoption proceeds apace. We have been waiting for that moment for a long time now for 64-bit ARM …
Applied Micro Finds ARM Server Footing, Reaches Higher was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.