When Oracle consumed Sun Microsystems in January 2010, founder Larry Ellison promised new hiring and new investment in the hardware line, plus a plan to offer fully integrated, turnkey systems.By and large, he kept that promise. Oracle dispensed with the commodity server market in favor of high-end, decked-out servers such as Exadata and Exalogic fully loaded with Oracle software, which included Java.Earlier this year, word leaked that the company had gutted its Solaris Unix and Sparc processor development, but after eight years of spinning its wheels, no one could say Oracle had been impatient. It had invested rather heavily in Sparc for a long time, but the writing was on the wall.To read this article in full, please click here
Supercomputer maker Cray announced what it calls its last supercomputer architecture before entering the era of exascale computing. It is code-named “Shasta,” and the Department of Energy, already a regular customer of supercomputing, said it will be the first to deploy it, in 2020.The Shasta architecture is unique in that it will be the first server (unless someone beats Cray to it) to support multiple processor types. Users will be able to deploy a mix of x86, GPU, ARM and FPGA processors in a single system.Up to now, servers either came with x86 or, in a few select cases, ARM processors, with GPUs and FPGAs as add-in cards plugged into PCI Express slots. This will be the first case of fully native onboard processors, and I hardly expect Cray to be alone in using this design.To read this article in full, please click here
Researchers reckon they could speed up the internet a hundredfold with a new technique that twists light beams within fiber optic cable rather than sending them in a straight path.“What we’ve managed to do is accurately transmit data via light at its highest capacity in a way that will allow us to massively increase our bandwidth,” Dr. Haoran Ren, of Australia’s RMIT University, said in a press release.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ]
The corkscrewing configuration, in development over the last few years and now recently physically miniaturized, uses a technique called orbital angular momentum (OAM).To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has made a bold move to blast its way into the enterprise multicloud world by saying it would buy open source software pioneer Red Hat in a $34 billion stock acquisition.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
The digital transformation era is upon us, and it’s changing the business landscape faster than ever.I’ve seen numerous studies that show that digital companies are more profitable and have more share in their respective markets. Businesses that master being digital will be able to sustain market leadership, and those that can’t will struggle to survive; many will go away.This is why digital transformation is now a top initiative for every business and IT leader. A recent ZK Research study found that a whopping 89% of organizations now have at least one digital initiative under way, showing the level of interest across all industry verticals.To read this article in full, please click here
Give managed cloud computing provider Rackspace points for timing. Coming right after the Uptime Institute issued a warning for data center operators to improve their environmental disaster plans, the company announced it is broadening its existing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) program for on-premises, colocation, and multi-cloud environments.The expansion utilizes Zerto’s disaster recovery software, which is specifically designed to provide business continuity and disaster recovery in a cloud and virtualized environment.To read this article in full, please click here
Xilinx isn’t about to sit on its hands in the FPGA battle with Intel. The last major independent FPGA chip maker is supplementing its partnership with AMD by teaming with three of the largest cloud vendors in China as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS).At its developer forum in Beijing, Xilinx announced that Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and server vendor Inspur will begin to offer data center platforms based on Xilinx’s FPGA-as-a-service model, mostly targeting artificial intelligence (AI) inference workloads.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Separately, Xilinx announced a partnership with AWS to begin previewing FPGA instances in its Chinese regional hub in Beijing. You have to figure that will eventually make its way to the U.S., but there is nothing concrete as of yet.To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft is recommending that those who have downloaded Windows Server 2019 should not install it until the company has resolved an isolated issue with Windows 10, which runs on the same code base.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
OEM Lenovo and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform developer Scale Computing have partnered to offer an out-of-the-box HCI platform specifically for edge computing deployments.Dubbed the Scale Computing HC3 Edge Platform on Lenovo Servers, the solution is an integration of Scale's HC3 software platform — what it calls “a data center in a box” — on Lenovo server hardware. HC3 brings together compute, storage, and virtualization into a comprehensive system with automated management.The Lenovo/Scale solution provides "edge infrastructure that has the capacity to run various IT and OT workloads, is space-conscious, and can be managed at each individual location by generalists," said Wilfredo Sotolongo, vice president and general manager of IoT for Lenovo's data center group, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
The selection process for our business-continuity-startup roundup began with dozens of recommendations and nominations sent via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribers to the Startup50 email newsletter.This roundup, however, was challenging to flesh out because in the IT world, business continuity is a subset of storage.[ Check out 10 hot storage companies to watch. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
Plenty of vendors pitched DevOps, security, and networking companie but none of those were a good fit for business continuity. You could make a case that all of those things help ensure business continuity, but they all fit better in different categories.To read this article in full, please click here
In the current landscape business continuity is about a lot more than natural disasters: Denial of service attacks, ransomware and even network outages can undermine business continuity, and while moving applications to the cloud might seem like a viable solution, cloud providers aren’t immune to outages.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
It might surprise some that despite the popularity of disk storage, the amount of data currently being placed on tape continues to rise.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Data center operators have to take a number of contingencies into account, but many are failing to pay attention to the increase in natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.That’s the word from The 451 Group’s Uptime Institute, which published a report on the impact of natural disasters on data centers. Uptime issued the report to remind data center operators of the growing impact of climate change on data center operations.“Climate change is making us rethink resiliency and operational uptime. Now more than ever, it is crucial to understand any potential vulnerabilities to make new and existing facilities better prepared for extreme weather events,” the report states.To read this article in full, please click here
Offshore, underwater data centers are going to be powered using wave motion, says a sustainable energy developer. And it's going to happen soon.Commercial wave energy company Ocean Energy says it’s almost completed a marine hydrokinetic wave generator build and that the 1.25 Megawatt power-production capacity vessel will be ready to deploy in 2019.The 125-feet-long wave converter OE Buoy will provide enough electricity for a subsea data center platform, the company claims.“Technology companies will be able to benefit from wave power [in] marine-based data storage and processing centers,” Ocean Energy CEO John McCarthy said in a press release earlier this month. “OE Buoy presents them with the potential double-benefit of ocean cooling and ocean energy in the one device.”To read this article in full, please click here
Private cloud is a well-defined term that government standards groups and the commercial cloud industry have pretty much agreed upon, and while some think its use is waning, recent analysis indicates that spending on private cloud is still growing at a breakneck pace.A study by IDC projects that sales from private-cloud investment hit $4.6 billion in the second quarter of 2018 alone, which is a 28.2 percent increase from the same period in 2017.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
So why are organizations attracted to private cloud?To read this article in full, please click here
Private cloud is a well-defined term that government standards groups and the commercial cloud industry have pretty much agreed upon, and while some think its use is waning, recent analysis indicates that spending on private cloud is still growing at a breakneck pace.A study by IDC projects that sales from private-cloud investment hit $4.6 billion in the second quarter of 2018 alone, which is a 28.2 percent increase from the same period in 2017.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.]
So why are organizations attracted to private cloud?To read this article in full, please click here
Microsoft has released Windows Server 2019 to general availability, formally bringing to market the first major release of the Windows Server operating system in three years.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)