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.

Making The Case For Containers

Linux container technology is IT’s shiny new thing. Containers promise to ease application development and deployment, a necessity in a business environment where getting ahead of application demand can mean the difference between staying in business or not. Containers offer many benefits, but they are not a panacea, and it’s important to understand why, where and when to use them.

Most IT pros recognize that application containers can provide a technological edge, one that translates into a clear business advantage. Containers unify and streamline application components – including the libraries and binaries upon which individual applications depend. Combining isolation with …

Making The Case For Containers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Server Encryption With An FPGA Offload Boost

Everyone talks about security on infrastructure, but it comes at a heavy cost. While datacenters have been securing their perimeters with firewalls for decades, this is far from sufficient for modern applications.

Back in the early days of the Internet, all traffic was from the client in through the web and application servers to the back-end database that fed the applications – what is known as north-south traffic in the datacenter lingo. But these days, an application is a collection of multiple services that are assembled on the fly from all over the datacenter, across untold server nodes, in what …

Server Encryption With An FPGA Offload Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Amazon Gets Serious About GPU Compute On Clouds

In the public cloud business, scale is everything – hyper, in fact – and having too many different kinds of compute, storage, or networking makes support more complex and investment in infrastructure more costly. So when a big public cloud like Amazon Web Services invests in a non-standard technology, that means something. In the case of Nvidia’s Tesla accelerators, it means that GPU compute has gone mainstream.

It may not be obvious, but AWS tends to hang back on some of the Intel Xeon compute on its cloud infrastructure, at least compared to the largest supercomputer centers and hyperscalers like …

Amazon Gets Serious About GPU Compute On Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Windows Server 2016: End Of One Era, Start Of Another

What constitutes an operating system changes with the work a system performs and the architecture that defines how that work is done. All operating systems tend to expand out from their initial core functionality, embedding more and more functions. And then, every once in a while, there is a break, a shift in technology that marks a fundamental change in how computing gets done.

It is fair to say that Windows Server 2016, which made it formal debut at Microsoft’s Ignite conference today and which starts shipping on October 1, is at the fulcrum of a profound change where an …

Windows Server 2016: End Of One Era, Start Of Another was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Rare Tour Of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters

If you want to study how datacenter design has changed over the past two decades, a good place to visit is Quincy, Washington. There are five different datacenter operators in this small farming community of around 7,000 people, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Sabey Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers, and they have located there thanks to the proximity of Quincy to hydroelectric power generated from the Columbia River and the relatively cool and arid climate, which can be used to great advantage to keep servers, storage, and switches cool.

All of the datacenter operators are pretty secretive about their glass …

A Rare Tour Of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pushing Database Scalability Up And Out With GPUs

What is good for the simulation and the machine learning is, as it turns out, also good for the database. The performance and thermal limits of traditional CPUs have made GPUs the go-to accelerator for these workloads at extreme scale, and now databases, which are thread monsters in their own right, are also turning to GPUs to get a performance and scale boost.

Commercializing GPU databases takes time, and Kinetica, formerly known as GPUdb, is making a bit of a splash ahead of the Strata+Hadoop World conference next week as it brags about the performance and scale of the parallel …

Pushing Database Scalability Up And Out With GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM Builds A Bridge Between Private And Public Power Clouds

Two years ago, when Big Blue put a stake through the heart of its impartial attitude about the X86 server business, it was also putting a stake in the ground for its Power systems business.

IBM bet that it could make more money selling Power machinery to its existing customer base and while at the same time expanding it out to hyperscalers like Google through the OpenPower Foundation while at the same time gradually building out a companion public cloud offering of Power machinery on its SoftLayer cloud and through partners like Rackspace Hosting. This is a big bet, and …

IBM Builds A Bridge Between Private And Public Power Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Modern Storage Software Erodes Resistant Data Silos

With the record-breaking $60 billion Dell/EMC acquisition now complete, both of these companies and their customers now have more options than ever before to meet evolving storage needs. Joining forces helps the newly minted Dell Technologies combine the best of both worlds to better serve customers by blending EMC storage and support with Dell pricing and procurement.

But there is some trouble in paradise. Even when sold by the same vendor, most storage systems have been designed as secluded islands of data, meaning they aren’t terribly good at talking to each other.

In fact, this silo effect is exacerbated …

Modern Storage Software Erodes Resistant Data Silos was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Server At Peak X86

One of the reasons why Dell spent $60 billion on the EMC-VMware conglomerate was to become the top supplier of infrastructure in the corporate datacenter. But even before the deal closed, Dell was on its way – somewhat surprisingly to many – to toppling Hewlett Packard Enterprise as the dominant supplier of X86 systems in the world.

But that computing world is set to change, we think. And perhaps more quickly – some might say jarringly — than any of the server incumbents are prepared to absorb.

After Intel, with the help of a push from AMD a decade ago, …

The Server At Peak X86 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs

No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day.

We spend a lot of time thinking about such things, and as Nvidia was getting ready to launch its new Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerator cards, we asked Ian Buck, vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia just how much computing could be devoted …

Nvidia Pushes Deep Learning Inference With New Pascal GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Surfing On Tech Waves With Supermicro

If money were no object and accountants allowed companies to write off investments in systems instantly, then datacenters would be tossing hardware into the scrap heap as soon as new technology came along. But in the real world, companies have to take a more measured approach to adding new systems and upgrading old ones, and that can make the time when customers buy shiny new boxes a bit tough to predict.

Forecasting sales and trying to close them are two of the many challenges that all server, storage, and switching vendors face, and Supermicro, which straddles the line between the …

Surfing On Tech Waves With Supermicro was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE Trims Back To The Core Enterprise Essentials

The Hewlett Packard that Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd created through aspiration and acquisition is hardly recognizable in the increasingly streamlined Hewlett Packard Enterprise that Meg Whitman is whittling.

We joked earlier this week that with its acquisition of VMware and EMC and the sales of its outsourcing and software businesses that the new Dell was stop trying to be the old IBM. Well, the same is true of the new HP. It is not clear when and if Oracle will get the same memo, but it seems content to build engineered systems, from top to bottom, and we …

HPE Trims Back To The Core Enterprise Essentials was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The New Dell Stops Trying To Be The Old IBM

It is week one of the new Dell Technologies, the conglomerate glued together with $60 billion from the remaining parts of the old Dell it has not sold off to raise cash to buy storage giant EMC and therefore server virtualization juggernaut VMware, which is owned mostly by EMC but remains a public company in the wake of the deal.

By adding EMC and VMware to itself and shedding its outsourcing services and software business units, Dell is becoming the largest supplier of IT gear in the world, at least by its own reckoning. You could argue that consumer PCs …

The New Dell Stops Trying To Be The Old IBM was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Refreshed IBM Power Linux Systems Add NVLink

The very first systems that allow for GPUs to be hooked directly to CPUs using Nvidia’s NVLink high-speed interconnect are coming to market now that Big Blue is updating its Power Systems LC line of Linux-based systems with the help of hardware partners in the OpenPower Foundation collective.

Interestingly, the advent of the Power Systems S822LC for HPC system, code-named “Minsky” inside of IBM because human beings like real names even if marketeers are not allowed to, gives the DGX-1 machine crafted by Nvidia for deep learning workloads some competition. Right now, these systems are the only two machines on …

Refreshed IBM Power Linux Systems Add NVLink was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Vast Potential For VMware’s OpenStack Cloud

While hyperscalers and HPC centers like the bleeding edge – their very existence commands that they be on it – enterprises are a more conservative lot. No IT supplier ever went broke counting on enterprises to be risk adverse, but plenty of companies have gone the way of all flesh by not innovating enough and not seeing market inflections when they exist.

VMware, the virtualization division of the new Dell Technologies empire that formally comes into being this week, does not want to miss such changes and very much wants to continue to extract revenues and profits from its impressively …

The Vast Potential For VMware’s OpenStack Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.