As enterprises continue to spread their workloads around – keeping some in their core datacenters while placing others in either private clouds or sprinkling them among disparate public clouds – the portability, visibility and management of those applications becomes an issue. There is no standardization among public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, among others, and applications that run well in an on-premises datacenter may hit some rough patches when they migrate to the cloud. Developers also are finding challenges when moving applications into production, either in the datacenter or cloud, also …
Cisco’s Wide And Deep Embrace Of Kubernetes was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Cloud computing became an essential infrastructure strategy for nearly every business. Last year Gartner predicted that demand for infrastructure as a service would increase by 36.8 percent. A 2018 McAfee survey found that 97 percent of organizations are using cloud services from public, private or both. Similarly, Rightscale’s 2018 cloud survey showed that 95 percent of enteprises have a cloud strategy, including 51 percent with a hybrid cloud strategy.
Yet, despite the cloud’s ubiquity, and the fact that HPC in the cloud has been possible for more than a decade – Univa commissioned the very first HPC cluster in AWS …
Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
VMware’s $1.26 billion acquisition of network virtualization startup Nicira in 2012 sent ripples through the tech world. Through the deal, VMware, which had made its name as a pioneer of server virtualization technology, planted a flag in the burgeoning software-defined networking (SDN) space that was roiling the traditionally staid networking market.
The deal also put the company at odds with partners like Cisco Systems, which itself was developing a strategy to address SDN and which threatened to upend the business of selling networking switches and routers that had made Cisco a very rich and high-profile tech vendor. It put VMware …
Stretching NSX From The Datacenter To The Edge And Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
In the first article outlining some of the results from our AI survey, we discussed how most customers are just beginning their journey into AI and that very few have actual AI applications in production. In this article, we are going to talk about the whats and whys behind AI. In other words, why customers are looking into AI, what problems they are trying to solve, what they expect to get out of it, and what sort of data they are analyzing.
One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is that it shows how real-world customers are …
New AI Being Mostly Used To Solve Old Problems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
To give hungry customers a high quality, gourmet AI experience new and exotic recipes are being constructed in a race to dream up ever more exciting and tasty concoctions from traditional software and hardware staples.
Over at Intel, AI is clearly the highlight of its current tasting menu. Intel has announced a new set of AI offerings that use associative memory learning and reasoning based on products from Saffron Technology, which Intel carried home from the market back in 2015 for an undisclosed sum.
Saffron adds an integrated software stack to the expanding portfolio of AI hardware, from traditional …
Intel Saffron AI: Faster Answers With Just A Hint Of Spice was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.
Breaking into any part of the IT stack against incumbents with vast installed bases is not easy task. Cutting edge technology is table stakes, and targeting precise customers with specific needs is the only way to get a toehold. It also takes money. Lots of money. Innovium, the upstart Ethernet switch chip maker, has all three and is set to make some inroads among the hyperscalers and cloud builders.
We told you all about Innovium back in March last year, when the company, founded by former networking executives and engineers from Intel and Broadcom, dropped out of stealth and …
Feeding The Insatiable Bandwidth Beast was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The growing amounts of data that are being generated due to such trends as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have naturally beget the need for data scientists who can collect, analyze and, most importantly, interpret these massive stockpiles of complex information to help their companies more quickly and accurately make better business decisions to give them a competitive edge over competitors and to improve their operations and make them more efficient.
That in turn has created something of a land rush in what’s become a rapidly expanding data science platform market of more than a dozen vendors …
Playing Dominoes In Data Science was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The demand for compute is so strong among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that nothing seems to be slowing down Intel’s datacenter business. Not delays in processor rollouts due to the difficulties in ramping 14 nanometer and 10 nanometer processes as the pace of Moore’s Law increases in transistor density and the lowering of the cost of chips slows. Not what is a pretty substantial price increase that accompanies the core scale out and feature expansion in the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors. Not the credible competition from IBM, AMD, Cavium, and Qualcomm.
The sun is shining on the datacenter, and …
Sluggish Moore’s Law Doesn’t Impede Intel One Bit was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It has been more than a decade since AMD was a force in computing in the datacenter. For that reason, we have not wasted a lot of time going over the ins and outs of its quarterly financials. But now that the Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators are getting traction among hyperscalers, cloud builders, and selected enterprises, it is time to start keeping an eye on how AMD is doing financially.
With most of the financial analysis that we do here at The Next Platform, we use the middle of the Great Recession, in the first quarter …
The Slow But Sure Return Of AMD In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At the World Medical Innovation Forum this week, participants were polled with a loaded question: “Do you think healthcare will become better or worse from the use of AI?”
Across the respondents, 98 percent said it would be either “Better” or “Much Better” and not a single one thought it would become “Much Worse.” This is an interesting statistic, and the results were not entirely surprising, especially given that artificial intelligence was the theme for the meeting.
This continual stream of adoption of new technologies in both clinical and post clinical settings is remarkable. Today, healthcare is a technology operation. …
AI Software Writing AI Software For Healthcare? was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.
Analytics systems have been downing in data for years, and the edge is going to flood it unless the architecture changes. There is so much data that is going to be generated at the edge of the network that it can’t be practically moved back to the datacenter for processing in a timely enough fashion to be useful in a way that the gathering of the information was done in the first place.
That is the premise behind our expanding coverage of edge computing and what is evolving into a distributed, multi-tier data processing complex – you can’t really call …
Swim In Data At The Edge, Don’t Drown In It In the Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
All kinds of convergence is going on in infrastructure these days, with the mashing up of servers and storage or servers and networking, or sometimes all three at once. This convergence is not just occurring at the system hardware or basic system software level. It is also happening up and down the software stack, with a lot of codebases branching out from various starting points and building platforms of one kind or another.
Some platforms stay down at the server hardware level – think of the Cisco Systems UCS blade server, which mashes up servers and networking – while others …
Recruiting The Puppet Masters Of Infrastructure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If there is one consistent complaint about open source software over the past three decades that it has been on the rise, it is that it is too difficult to integrate various components to solve a particular problem because the software is not really enterprise grade stuff. Well, that is two complaints, and really, there are three because even if you can get the stuff integrated and running well, that doesn’t mean you can keep it in that state as you patch and update it. So now we are up to three complaints.
Eventually, all software needs to be packaged …
Red Hat Gets Serious About Selling Open Source Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Without splitting a lot of hairs on definitions, it is safe to say that machine learning in its myriad forms is absolutely shaking up data processing. The techniques for training neural networks to chew through mountains of labeled data and make inferences against new data are set to transform every aspect of computation and automation. There is a mad dash to do something, as there always is at the beginning of every technology hype cycle.
Enterprises need to breathe. The hyperscalers are perfecting these technologies, which are changing fast, and by the time things settle out and the software …
Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
There has been a lot of research and development devoted to bringing the Arm architecture to servers and storage in the datacenter, and a lot of that has focused on making beefier and usually custom Arm cores that look more like an X86 core than they do the kind of compute element we find in our smartphones and tablets. The other way to bring Arm to the datacenter is to use more modest processing elements and to gang a lot of them up together, cramming a lot more cores in a rack and making up the performance in volume.
This …
Making The Case For Fully Converged Arm Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In the early days of computing in the datacenter, vendors of systems pretty much owned their platforms, from the chip all the way up to the compiler.
When you invested in an IBM, Sperry, Burroughs, NEC, Bull, Hitachi, or Fujitsu mainframe, or one of the myriad minicomputer systems from Big Blue, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, or eventually Unix systems from Sun Microsystems and its competition (mainly Data General, SGI, HP, and IBM), you were really investing in a way of computing life. A lot of the decisions about what to buy were already made, and you didn’t have to think much about …
The Majority Of Systems Sold Are Converged, Maybe was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When looking for all-flash storage arrays, there is no lack of options. Small businesses and hyperscalers alike helped fuel the initial uptake of flash storage several years ago, and since then larger businesses have taken the plunge to help drive savings in such areas as power and cooling costs, floor and rack space, and software licensing.
The increasing demand for the technology – see the rapid growth of Pure Storage, the original flash array upstart over the past nine years – has not only fueled the rise of smaller vendors but also the portfolio expansion of such established …
Vexata Has Its Own Twist On Scaling Flash Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.
And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …
Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel has been making some interesting moves in the community space recently, including free licenses for its compiler suite for educators and open source contributors can now be had, as can rotating 90 day licenses for its full System Studio environment for anyone who takes the time to sign up.
In the AI space, Intel recently announced that its nGraph code for managing AI graph APIs has also been opened to the community. After opening it up last month, Intel has been followed up on the initial work on MXNet with further improvements to TensorFlow.
The Next Platform …
Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel? was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.
The European Union has never been willing to cede the exascale computing race to the United States, Japan, or China.
In recent years, Europe has ramped up its investments in the HPC space through such programs as Horizon 2020, an effort to grow R&D in Europe, and EuroHPC to drive development of exascale systems, and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), which aims to develop a distributed supercomputing infrastructure that will be accessible to researchers, businesses, and academic institutions throughout the EU. The SAGE project will create a multi-tiered storage platform for data-centric exascale computing to enable …
EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.