HPE has agreed to buy supercomputer-maker Cray for $1.3 billion, a deal that the companies say will bring their corporate customers high-performance computing as a service to help with analytics needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also products supporting high-performance storage, compute and software.In addition to bringing HPC capabilities that can blend with and expand HPE’s current products, Cray brings with it customers in government and academia that might be interested in HPE’s existing portfolio as well.[ Now read: Who's developing quantum computers ]
The companies say they expect to close the cash deal by the end of next April.To read this article in full, please click here
It's quite a mouthful, but Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMeoF) is shaping up to become perhaps the most disruptive data center storage technology since the introduction of solid-state drives (SSD), promising to bring new levels of performance and economy to rapidly expanding storage arrays.NVMe over Fabrics is designed to deliver the high-speed and low-latency of NVMe SSD technology over a network fabric. There are currently three basic NVMe fabric implementations available: NVMe over Fibre Channel, NVMe over remote direct memory access, and NVMe over TCP.To read this article in full, please click here
Like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a technologist with a long history of leading initiatives in his company. Meg Whitman, his former boss at HPE, showed her appreciation of Neri’s acumen by promoting him to HPE Executive Vice President in 2015 – and gave him the green light to acquire Aruba, SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and Plexxi, all of which added key items to HPE’s portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here
Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here
The cloud is not just important; it's mission-critical for many companies. More and more IT and business leaders I talk to look at public cloud as a core component of their digital transformation strategies — using it as part of their hybrid cloud or public cloud implementation.That raises the bar on cloud reliability, as a cloud outage means important services are not available to the business. If this is a business-critical service, the company may not be able to operate while that key service is offline.Because of the growing importance of the cloud, it’s critical that buyers have visibility into the reliability number for the cloud providers. The challenge is the cloud providers don't disclose the disruptions in a consistent manner. In fact, some are confusing to the point where it’s difficult to glean any kind of meaningful conclusion.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises recognize that all of the new technologies they want to deploy – IoT, edge computing, serverless, containers, hybrid cloud, and AI – require a robust, flexible, secure, self-healing, software-driven network. And the industry has responded with fresh new approaches such as software-defined networking (SDN), SD-WAN, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and intent-based networking.To read this article in full, please click here
Global server shipments are not expected to return to growth momentum until the third quarter or even the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Taiwan-based tech news site DigiTimes, which cited unnamed server supply chain sources. The one bright spot remains cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which continue their buying binge.Normally I’d be reluctant to cite such a questionable source, but given most of the OEMs and ODMs are based in Taiwan and DigiTimes (the article is behind a paywall so I cannot link) has shown it has connections to them, I’m inclined to believe them.Quanta Computer chairman Barry Lam told the publication that Quanta's shipments of cloud servers have risen steadily, compared to sharp declines in shipments of enterprise servers. Lam continued that enterprise servers command only 1-2% of the firm's total server shipments.To read this article in full, please click here
A new survey has found that a growing number of IT professionals have too many data sources to even count, and they are spending more and more time just wrestling that data into usable condition.Ivanti, an IT asset management firm, surveyed 400 IT professionals on their data situation and found IT faces numerous challenges when it comes to siloes, data, and implementation. The key takeaway is data overload is starting to overwhelm IT managers and data lakes are turning into data oceans.[ Read also: Understanding mass data fragmentation | Get daily insights Sign up for Network World newsletters ]
Among the findings from Ivanti's survey:To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is looking to give traditional or legacy wide-area network users another reason to move to the software-defined WAN world.The company has rolled out an integrated hardware/software package called SD-WAN Cloud onRamp for CoLocation that lets customers tie distributed multicloud applications back to a local branch office or local private data center. The idea is that a cloud-to-branch link would be shorter, faster and possibly more secure that tying cloud-based applications directly all the way to the data center.
More about SD-WANTo read this article in full, please click here
The latest news from Dell Technologies World is a high-end machine learning server for the data center that has four, eight, or even 10 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs for processing power.The Dell EMC DSS 8440 is a two-socket server with two of the new Xeon Scalable processors and is specifically designed for machine learning applications and other demanding workloads. Each Tesla is capable of more than 100 teraflops, so the 10 GPU machine is one petaflop of processing power. Dell claims the DSS 8440 is almost on par with performance by the DGX-1, which is also Tesla-powered.[ Read also: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ]
Obviously this is not a machine for beginners. That would be Dell EMC’s 740 and 7425 servers, which support up to three GPUs, and the 4140, which supports up to four GPU cards.To read this article in full, please click here
The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here
There’s a major problem with today’s money-saving memory compression used for storing more data in less space. The issue is that computers store and run memory in predetermined blocks, yet many modern programs function and play out in variable chunks.The way it’s currently done is actually, highly inefficient. That’s because the compressed programs, which use objects rather than evenly configured slabs of data, don’t match the space used to store and run them, explain scientists working on a revolutionary new compression system called Zippads.The answer, they say—and something that if it works would drastically reduce those inefficiencies, speed things up, and importantly, reduce compute costs—is to compress the varied objects and not the cache lines, as is the case now. Cache lines are fixed-size blocks of memory that are transferred to memory cache.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco issued some 40 security advisories today but only one of them was deemed “critical” – a vulnerability in the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode data-center switch that could let an attacker secretly access system resources.The exposure, which was given a Common Vulnerability Scoring System importance of 9.8 out of 10, is described as a problem with secure shell (SSH) key-management for the Cisco Nexus 9000 that lets a remote attacker to connect to the affected system with the privileges of a root user, Cisco said.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell EMC kicked off its Dell Technologies World show by announcing an alliance with VMware to offer Dell EMC hardware on-premises without having to buy it outright.The VMware Cloud on Dell EMC program offers the entire VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on hyperconverged VxRail hardware. Rather than purchasing it outright, customers can pay for the service every month based on use. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ]
Sound familiar? HP Enterprise has a similar program called GreenLake that does the same thing. Also, Dell has a program called Cloud Flex, a consumption financing offering for on-premises hardware.To read this article in full, please click here
You’d almost think I’d get tired of writing this story over and over and over… but the ongoing growth of cloud computing is too big a trend to ignore.Critically, the impressive growth numbers of the three leading cloud infrastructure providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not just about new workloads being run in the cloud; it’s also about more and more enterprises moving existing workloads to the cloud from on-premises data centers.To read this article in full, please click here
Edge computing startup Vapor IO now offers a direct connection between its edge containers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) via a high-speed fiber network link.The company said that connection between its Kinetic Edge containers and AWS will be provided by Crown Castle's Cloud Connect fiber network, which uses Amazon Direct Connect Services. This would help reduce network latency by essentially drawing a straight fiber line from Vapor IO's edge computing data centers to Amazon's cloud computing data centers.“When combined with Crown Castle’s high-speed Cloud Connect fiber, the Kinetic Edge lets AWS developers build applications that span the entire continuum from core to edge. By enabling new classes of applications at the edge, we make it possible for any AWS developer to unlock the next generation of real-time, innovative use cases,” wrote Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer of Vapor IO, in a blog post.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed a collaboration on converged infrastructure (CI) products that has run for more than a decade, even as the momentum shifts elsewhere. The news was announced via a blog post by Pete Manca, senior vice president for solutions engineering at Dell EMC.The deal is centered around Dell EMC’s VxBlock product line, which originally started out in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco called VCE (Virtual Computing Environment). EMC bought out Cisco’s stake in the venture before Dell bought EMC.To read this article in full, please click here
If you thought cloud storage was digging in its heels to become the go-to method for storing data, and at the same time grabbing share from own-server, in-house storage, you may be interested to hear that some think both are on the way out. Instead organizations will use blockchain-based storage.Decentralized blockchain-based file storage will be more secure, will make it harder to lose data, and will be cheaper than anything seen before, say organizations actively promoting the slant on encrypted, distributed technology.[ Read also: Why blockchain (might be) coming to an IoT implementation near you ]
Storing transactional data in a blockchain
China company FileStorm, which describes itself in marketing materials as the first Interplanetary File Storage (IPFS) platform on blockchain, says the key to making it all work is to only store the transactional data in blockchain. The actual data files, such as large video files, are distributed in IPFS.To read this article in full, please click here
Gartner has updated its forecasts for IT spending this year with a downward projection, but it's not necessarily due to declining sales. It’s because the strengthening U.S. dollar is driving prices down and undercutting previous predictions.Overall spending is expected to increase by 1.1% over 2018, to $3.79 trillion, down from a prediction of 2.8% growth made in January.“Currency headwinds fueled by the strengthening U.S. dollar have caused us to revise our 2019 IT spending forecast down from the previous quarter,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “Through the remainder of 2019, the U.S. dollar is expected to trend stronger, while enduring tremendous volatility due to uncertain economic and political environments and trade wars."To read this article in full, please click here
Gartner has updated its forecasts for IT spending this year with a downward projection, but it's not necessarily due to declining sales. It’s because the strengthening U.S. dollar is driving prices down and undercutting previous predictions.Overall spending is expected to increase by 1.1% over 2018, to $3.79 trillion, down from a prediction of 2.8% growth made in January.“Currency headwinds fueled by the strengthening U.S. dollar have caused us to revise our 2019 IT spending forecast down from the previous quarter,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “Through the remainder of 2019, the U.S. dollar is expected to trend stronger, while enduring tremendous volatility due to uncertain economic and political environments and trade wars."To read this article in full, please click here