The drive toward the cloud is lifting all boats. The need for capacity and new servers combined to lift the server market in the third quarter, with more growth to come, especially for the “white box” vendors.Gartner reported worldwide server revenue grew by a very impressive 16 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2017, while unit shipments grew by 5.1 percent. That gulf between revenue and units means more higher-end, more decked-out servers are being sold than cheap, commodity hardware.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up
It helps that in recent months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC and Lenovo have all released new hardware, which is helping to drive sales as enterprises refresh their on-premises hardware. So all told, the third quarter was marked by new hardware and continued growth of the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
Vapor IO, the data center technology startup previously featured for its plans to put mini data centers at cell towers, announced a new architecture for deploying and managing distributed computing power throughout cities.As previously announced, the company launched what it calls Project Volutus, a co-location and “data center as a platform” service, powered by Vapor Edge Computing containers. What’s coming out now is details on the modules.What is Vapor Kinetic Edge?
The actual data center module design is called Vapor Kinetic Edge. The idea is to install multiple interconnected edge computing locations around a city or a region and connect them to form a single virtual data center using centralized management and orchestration software.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s the "Dirty Cloud," says journalist John Vidal in a recent tweet. Vidal is referring to energy use by data centers, which he wrote about in an article for Climate Home News.In the story, published this week, the Guardian environment writer reveals a bleak picture of future global climate change emissions. Bleak, in part, because the discouraging projections he writes of are caused not by, as one might expect, fossil fuel power plants and internal combustion engine users, but by communications and data center power use.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you don’t adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your data center will be useless.Those are the claims of Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar, who gave a presentation at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.Govekar said that as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he didn’t mention it by name, you have to think Microsoft is in that category because it is already cloud-first with its enterprise apps. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so I can see a major de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.To read this article in full, please click here
Data is clearly not what it used to be! Organizations of all types are finding new uses for data as part of their digital transformations. Examples abound in every industry, from jet engines to grocery stores, for data becoming key to competitive advantage. I call this new data because it is very different from the financial and ERP data that we are most familiar with. That old data was mostly transactional, and privately captured from internal sources, which drove the client/server revolution. New data is both transactional and unstructured, publicly available and privately collected, and its value is derived from the ability to aggregate and analyze it. Loosely speaking we can divide this new data into two categories: big data – large aggregated data sets used for batch analytics – and fast data – data collected from many sources that is used to drive immediate decision making. The big data–fast data paradigm is driving a completely new architecture for data centers (both public and private).To read this article in full, please click here
AMD built it, and now the OEM has come. In this case, its Epyc server processors have scored their first big public win, with Microsoft announcing Azure instances based on AMD’s Epyc server microprocessors.AMD was first to 64-bit x86 design with Athlon on the desktop and Opteron on the servers. Once Microsoft ported Windows Server to 64 bits, the benefit became immediately apparent. Gone was the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit processors, replaced with 16 exabytes of memory, something we won’t live to see in our lifetimes (famous last words, I know).Also on Network World: Micro-modular data centers set to multiply
When Microsoft published a white paper in 2005 detailing how it was able to consolidate 250 32-bit MSN Network servers into 25 64-bit servers thanks to the increase in memory, which meant more connections per machine, that started the ball rolling for AMD. And within a few years, Opteron had 20 percent server market share.To read this article in full, please click here
Sure, it was a cloud computing conference, and maybe the goal remains a bit unrealistic, but at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last week, the number of enterprises expressing a wish to stop running their own data centers was too big ignore.Even old-line enterprises companies said they weren’t content to create a foothold in the cloud and stay with a hybrid cloud environment, though that’s the situation many currently find themselves in. No, many are looking to exit the data center business entirely, just as soon as they can manage it.Also on Network World: How a giant like GE found a home in the cloud
And from the size and quality of the companies signing on to this stretch goal — think PG&E, Expedia, and to some extent even Goldman Sachs — it seemed clear that they represent only the tip of the iceberg.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell EMC is expanding its hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio with new systems built around 14th generation PowerEdge servers.Converged (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a fancy way of saying turnkey systems with compute, storage, networking and software all combined into a single bundle. Rather than building a system from a variety of vendors, the customer gets everything they need from one vendor and it comes pre-configured to run out of the box.It’s basically a page out of the mainframe book, when everything came from one vendor (usually IBM). As server technology moved away from big iron and the x86 market took over, pieces were fragmented. You got your servers from Dell, HP or IBM, storage from EMC or NetApp, networking from Cisco or 3Com, etc.To read this article in full, please click here
With the amount of data in the world predicted to increase at least 50 fold between 2010 and 2020, how we store that data has come into sharp focus. Collecting large volumes of raw log data from multiple applications and infrastructure components and sending it to a central location for storage and processing, for example, increases the size and cost of storage. And as the volume of data grows and storage and processing costs increase dramatically, businesses risk undermining the advantages big data brings. Furthermore, the surging demand for data has environmental implications; by 2020, 12 percent of the world’s energy consumption will be taken by our digital ecosystem, and this is expected to grow annually at approximately 7 percent until 2030. To read this article in full, please click here
With the release this month of the first commercial server based on its Power9 processor, IBM is reaching another milestone in its quest to be the AI-workload leader for data centers and web service providers.The Power9 chips in the systems hitting the market now don't rev up to the top speeds provided by Intel's Xeon Scalable Processor line, but they offer blazing throughput aimed to give them an edge in machine learning and accelerated database applications.IBM unveiled its first Power9 server, the Power System AC922, Tuesday at the AI Summit in New York. It runs a version of the Power9 chip tuned for Linux, with the four-way multithreading variant SMT4. Power9 chips with SMT4 can offer up to 24 cores, though the chips in the AC922 top out at 22 cores. The fastest Power9 in the AC922 runs at 3.3GHz. To read this article in full, please click here
What's going to shake things up in 2018? IT pros will have their hands full with technologies that have been hyped for some time and are now ripe for adoption, including software-defined WAN, hybrid cloud computing, hyperconvergence, and Internet of Things. See below for our collection of enterprise picks, predictions and prognostications.Why 2018 will be the year of the WAN
Thinkstock
Software-defined WAN technology is sweeping across the industry, growing from an emerging technology in 2017 to become mainstream in 2018. As SD-WAN deployments become ubiquitous for organizations with remote offices, more big changes will come. Check it out.To read this article in full, please click here
What's going to shake things up in 2018? IT pros will have their hands full with technologies that have been hyped for some time and are now ripe for adoption, including software-defined WAN, hybrid cloud computing, hyperconvergence, and Internet of Things. See below for our collection of enterprise picks, predictions and prognostications.Why 2018 will be the year of the WAN
Thinkstock
Software-defined WAN technology is sweeping across the industry, growing from an emerging technology in 2017 to become mainstream in 2018. As SD-WAN deployments become ubiquitous for organizations with remote offices, more big changes will come. Check it out.To read this article in full, please click here
IDG
Hyperconvergence is on a roll.Enterprises are shifting storage investments from legacy architectures to software-defined systems in an effort to achieve greater agility, easier provisioning and lower administrative costs. Hyperconverged systems – which combine storage, compute and network functionality in a single virtualized solution – are on their radars.Enterprise interest in hyperconverged systems as potential replacements for legacy SAN and NAS storage systems has in turn inspired major storage vendors to make hyperconvergence plays of their own, acquiring startups and building out their offerings.To read this article in full, please click here
The reality of a self-managing data center is getting closer with HPE’s announcement last week of what it claims to be the first artificial intelligence (AI) predictive engine for trouble in the data center.HPE says next year it will offer an AI recommendation engine add-on that’s designed to predict and stop storage- and general-infrastructure trouble before it starts. It’s one of a number of autonomous data center components that we should expect to see soon from players. Other AI and machine learning systems geared towards data centers will be available from companies such as Litbit (which I wrote about in the summer) and Oracle, among others.To read this article in full, please click here
IDG
Mini data centers are sprouting up on the edges of networks – in factories, on container ships, and piggybacked on cellular base stations – as enterprises and service providers look to embed compute and storage capacity closer to where data is being generated.So-called micro-modular data centers (MMDC) aren’t new, and they’re not the only distributed edge computing solution. But they’re growing in popularity with a compound annual growth rate of 42% over the last three years, according to 451 Research. Sales of MMDCs are forecast to reach nearly $30 million in 2018 from $18 million in 2017. While the market appears small, MMDC sales in 2018 will represent about 2,000 new installations and be a part of projects that cost many times greater than that, according to the research firm.To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this year, Pure Storage announced Charlie Giancarlo as CEO. Prior to leading Pure Storage, Giancarlo was a managing director and senior advisor at Silver Lake Partners.If Giancarlo's name is familiar to you, it should because he held a number of executive positions at Cisco, including chief technology officer and chief development officer, which is where I got to know him. Many people, myself included, consider Giancarlo one of the masterminds behind Cisco’s meteoric rise, as he was one of the architects that moved the company into new markets, such as ethernet switching, VoIP, Wi-Fi and TelePresence.Also on Network World: Get ready for new storage technologies and media
The one thing I always found impressive about Giancarlo is that we could be discussing the latest business and stock market trends and then a few minutes later transition into how the silicon inside a router was designed and the technical differentiation it creates. To read this article in full, please click here
The worldwide market for data center cooling equipment will reach $20 billion by 2024, a massive jump over the $8 billion spent in 2016. That is the finding of a report from Global Market Insights (GMI), which says cooling systems account for approximately 40 percent of the total energy consumption on average.Data center operators have been obsessed with lowering their PUE, or power usage effectiveness, the ratio of power consumed by the hardware to power consumed to cool it. The problem is that while Intel, AMD and the rest of the component vendors obsess over lowering thermals and overall heat generated, the density of these servers is increasing.To read this article in full, please click here
As the cloud world gears up for this week’s big AWS re:Invent 2017 cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, it seems like a good time to take look at the future of hybrid cloud.Defined as a computing architecture that — in one way or another — incorporates elements of both the public cloud and private on-premise data centers, hybrid cloud is currently having a moment. As vendors such as Microsoft, Google, and Cisco scramble to offer specific hybrid-cloud solutions, many observers are calling hybrid cloud the best of both worlds, offering the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud along with the security and control associated with on-premise infrastructures. All that has helped the hybrid market grow very quickly.To read this article in full, please click here
After years of pushing toward total domination, Linux finally did it. It is running on all 500 of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, and who knows how many more after that. That’s even more impressive than Intel’s domination of the list, with 92 percent of the processors in the top 500.So, how did Linux get here? How did this upstart operating system created by a college student from Finland 26 years ago steamroll Unix, a creation of Bell Labs and supported by giants like IBM and Sun Microsystems and HP, Microsoft’s Windows, and other Unix derivatives?To read this article in full, please click here
On Monday, Marvell Technology announced it intends to acquire embedded chip maker Cavium in a deal worth $6 billion. When it’s done, the combined company will have $3.4 billion in annual sales. That's hardly Intel territory, but their chips will be in practically every piece of equipment in your data center.There has been quite a bit of consolidation going on in the chip industry as every player gobbles up a competitor or complimentary vendor to give them a competitive advantage and diversification of products. Only Nvidia seems to be staying out of this, content to compete with what it has. And who can argue with the results? Certainly not its shareholders.To read this article in full, please click here