As the industry gets ready to gear up for 2020 things have been a little disquieting in networking land.That’s because some key players – Arista and Juniper in particular – have been reporting business slowdowns as new deals have been smaller than expected and cloud providers haven’t been as free-spending as in the past.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Worldwide IT spending has been on the slow side, Gartner said in October that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2019, an increase of 0.4% from 2018, the lowest growth forecast so far in 2019. The good news: global IT spending is expected to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending, Gartner stated.To read this article in full, please click here
As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?
As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?
Hard drives aren’t going to be capacious enough for future data archiving and retrieval requirements, scientists believe, as applications such as artificial intelligence, wide-scale Internet of Things connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality take hold. Glass could be the answer.Encoding in glass would have advantages over hard drives and other mediums, experts suggest. Holding capacity is greater, and the slivers of quartz being experimented with don’t need cooling or dehumidifying environments.Microsoft Research, working in the UK along with the University of Southampton, announced that it has been able to store an entire movie on a quartz, glass-based storage medium. The team stored and retrieved a full-length Superman film on a small slab of the special material that measures about 3 inches square and less than a tenth of an inch thick.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to further nudge the data-center crowd into the cloud world, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of its long-awaited Outposts hybrid-cloud service this week.Outposts delivers on-premises hardware and services that enables AWS cloud services inside enterprise data centers. That on-premises market is huge according to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy who told the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference audience 97% of the $3.7T IT market is still on-prem and that the industry is still at the very early stages of a shift from on premises to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM hopes to reduce the complexity of moving workloads to the cloud through Cloud Paks,’ its series of specialized packaged offerings that enterprise can implement relatively quickly. But is it enough?
Amazon’s initial foray into the heavily hyped world of quantum computing is a virtual sandbox in which companies can test potential quantum-enabled applications and generally get to grips with the new technology, the company announced Monday.The product is named Braket, after a system of notation used in quantum physics. The idea, according to Amazon, is to democratize access to quantum computing in a small way. Most organizations aren’t going to own their own quantum computers for the foreseeable future; they’re impractically expensive and require a huge amount of infrastructure even for the limited proof-of-concept models at the current cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here
Ampere Computing, the semiconductor startup led by former Intel president Renee James that designs Arm-based server processors, is preparing to launch its next-generation CPU by mid-2020.The upcoming chip will have 80 cores, much more than the 32-core processor the company shipped last year and vastly more than x86 CPUs by Intel and AMD. Ampere’s design is different. Instead of multiple threads per core, each core is single threaded.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Jeff Wittich, Ampere’s senior vice president of products, said that was by design, to avoid some of the CPU vulnerabilities that crept into x86 chips but also to avoid the “noisy neighbor” problem in cloud service-provider networks.To read this article in full, please click here
HP Enterprise has partnered with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a unit of the Department of Energy, to create AI and machine learning-systems for greater data-center energy efficiency.The Department of Energy lab will provide HPE with multiple years’ worth of historical data from sensors within its supercomputers and in its Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) High-Performance Computing (HPC) Data Center, one of the world's most efficient data centers. This information will help other organizations to optimize their own operations, said NREL.To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia was all over Supercomputing 19 last week, not surprisingly, and made a lot of news which we will get into later. But overlooked was perhaps the most interesting news of all: a new generation graphics-acceleration card that is faster and way more power efficient.Multiple attendees and news sites spotted it at the show, and Nvidia confirmed to me that this is indeed a new card. Nvidia’s “Volta” generation of Tesla GPU-accelerator cards has been out since 2017, so an upgrade was well overdue.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The V100S comes only in PCI Express 3 form factor for now but is expected to eventually support Nvidia’s SXM2 interface. SXM is a dual-slot card design by Nvidia that requires no connection to the power supply, unlike the PCIe cards. SXM2 allows the GPU to communicate either with each other or to the CPU through Nvidia’s NVLink, a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that can transfer data up to ten times faster than PCIe.To read this article in full, please click here
As artificial intelligence takes off in enterprise settings, so will data center power usage. AI is many things, but power efficient is not one of them.For data centers running typical enterprise applications, the average power consumption for a rack is around 7 kW. Yet it’s common for AI applications to use more than 30 kW per rack, according to data center organization AFCOM. That’s because AI requires much higher processor utilization, and the processors – especially GPUs – are power hungry. Nvidia GPUs, for example, may run several orders of magnitude faster than a CPU, but they also consume twice as much power per chip. Complicating the issue is that many data centers are already power constrained.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme this week took the wraps off new automation software and switches aimed at helping customers quickly turn-up and manage new data-center networking segments.Key to the network vendor’s data-center plans is an upgraded version of its Extreme Data Center Fabric, which has been available for over a year and is now upgraded to let customers deploy a fabric in minutes. Once devices are cabled togtther and powered on, customers run the Extreme Fabric Automation application from any Extreme SLX spine or leaf switch, which then confirms configuations, validates and tests the network to ensure it is set up and operating correctly.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM is taking aim at the challenging concept of securely locking-down company applications and data spread across multiple private and public clouds and on-premises locations.IBM is addressing this challenge with its Cloud Pak for Security, which features open-source technology for hunting threats, automation capabilities to speed response to cyberattacks, and the ability integrate customers’ existing point-product security-system information for better operational safekeeping – all under one roof.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
IBM Cloud Paks are bundles of Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift Container Platform along with Red Hat Linux and a variety of connecting technologies to let enterprise customers deploy and manage containers on their choice of infrastructure, be it private or public clouds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and IBM Cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
Third time’s the charm? Intel is hoping so. It released details of its Xe Graphics Architecture, with which it plans to span use cases from mobility to high-performance computing (HPC) servers – and which it hopes will succeed where its Larrabee GPU and Xeon Phi manycore processors failed.It’s no secret Intel wants a piece of the high-performance computing HPC action, given that it introduced the chip and other products at it Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver, Colo., this week just ahead of the Supercomputing ’19 tradeshow.To read this article in full, please click here
Windows Server 2019 includes updates that Microsoft introduced over the past three years as well as many new security, administration, storage and Azure cloud integration features.
For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.Next year promises to bring even greater disruption to the formerly staid storage market, as IT leaders seek more efficient ways of coping with the data tsunami generated by AI, IoT devices and numerous other sources. Here's a look at the five storage technologies that will create the greatest disruption in 2020, as enterprise adoption gains ground.To read this article in full, please click here
Despite the clear cost benefits, white-box switches outfitted with independent network operating systems (NOS) solutions have seen only limited adoption in leading enterprise IT shops. That’s due to the lack of a clear market leader, implementation challenges and concerns about service and support that have steered IT pros toward traditional, branded-box Ethernet switches instead.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
But maturing technology and new support alliances are making white-box switches an attractive alternative for greenfield deployments and for infrastructure that’s being upgraded to give performance boosts to data centers, campuses and branch offices.To read this article in full, please click here
Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here
Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here