Not to state the obvious, but the cloud has been growing in popularity over the past decade. However, contrary to much of the rhetoric I hear about today, the cloud is not going to kill of private data centers any time soon. The explosion in data has driven growth in both private data centers and public clouds.Underscoring that point is that almost all the IT leaders I speak to plan to do some kind of hybrid cloud where they leverage the strengths of both.The cloud is a new compute model, but what’s different about it from other compute paradigms before it is that it is highly network centric. Everyone loves the cloud. It’s great, it’s elastic and a bunch of other things. But it won’t provide the results companies are looking for without the right network underneath it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing has become common in enterprise IT, and the hype around it remains as adoption soars. Research by IDG shows that 70 percent of enterprises currently use at least one cloud application, and in 2018, organizations with cloud-only IT infrastructure will become the majority.The global market for cloud services was worth $148 billion in 2016, according to Synergy Research Group, and it is growing by 25 percent annually. Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone reached $3.23 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2016, while Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud provider, announced Thursday that revenue has nearly doubled in the past year, giving it an annual run rate of $14 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has rolled out a second release of its Tetration Analytics package with features such as a smaller footprint and a cloud service that will go a long way toward making the system alluring to more data center customers.Announced in June of last year, Cisco’s Tetration Analytics is a turnkey analytics package that gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data and machine learning.Tetration software sensors support Linux and Windows server hosts, while hardware sensors are embedded in Cisco network switch ASICS: Nexus 9200, Nexus 9300-EX and Nexus 9500-EX, to collect flow data at line rate from all the ports. Per Cisco once in place, the Tetration platform learns its enterprise environment and any policies IT has in place. From there it can learn which applications are dependent on each other throughout their data center and into the cloud. It can monitor server behavior patterns and group servers more efficiently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A little over a week ago, HPE announced its agreement to purchase SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. Predictably, tech industry followers erupted into an uproar of opinion about stock price implications and how it would impact support for SimpliVity customers.Less than a week later, HPE announced another purchase: Cloud Cruiser, a 7-year-old startup that provides consumption-based infrastructure analytics. Interestingly, this transaction received much less attention.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.
A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.
This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Taking to President Trump’s favored communications platform, Twitter, a who’s who of prominent technology and business leaders are speaking out against the new administration’s ban on Muslims from certain countries entering the United States.Mark Cuban, entrepreneur
Twitter
David Karp, Tumblr
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Mark Benioff, Salesforce.com
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Jack Dorsey, Twitter
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Elon Musk, entrepreneur
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Satya Nadella, Microsoft
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Here is Nadella's message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to file systems, scale is the enemy, according to Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. And the best weapon in the battle for scale is the cloud. Nasuni claims to have developed the first cloud-native file system, delivering not only virtually unlimited scale in the cloud but rapid access to files from locations around the world. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The purpose of dramatic tragedy is to teach us to avoid misfortune by showing a negative example.With that in mind, I introduce our tragic hero. Let’s call him Jim.Jim is a vice president of data center operations for a bank. He’s been tasked with finding a replacement for the company’s legacy data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool set, which ran into a dead end for support and updates.Jim manages a half-dozen data centers of various ages and design. The motley portfolio is the product of acquisitions and shifting management strategies over the past decade. Some of the sites are underutilized, others are coming up against capacity constraints, while still others are running on borrowed time and would likely require significant updates if anybody dared to evaluate them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It takes a lot of horsepower to support LinkedIn’s 467 million members worldwide, especially when you consider that each member is getting a personalized experience, a web page that includes only their contacts. Supporting the load are some 100,000 servers spread across multiple data centers. To learn more about how LinkedIn makes it all happen, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently talked to Sonu Nayyar, VP of Production Operations & IT, and Zaid Ali Kahn, Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering. LinkedIn
Sonu Nayyar, LinkedIn VP of Production Operations & ITTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT operations is under a set of conflicting mandates and pressures.The business wants IT operations to be more agile and to be a partner in the process of bringing more business functionality online (also knows as digitization).The executives in charge of IT (most often the CIO) want IT operations to be more cost effective, which means spending either needs to be reduced or not grow as quickly as it has in the past.Application owners want two inherent conflicting objectives. They want IT operations to guarantee that their infrastructure will provide excellent performance for their applications, and they simultaneously want IT operations to feel more like a cloud provider with a rich set of self-service options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether it’s a new exercise program, volunteering for charitable causes or deciding to go gluten-free, studies have shown that nearly half of people who fully commit to New Year’s resolutions were over 10 times more likely to succeed at realizing real change as compared to 4 percent who do not.The concept of New Year’s resolutions dates back to the Babylonians, who at the start of each year made promises to their gods to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Romans, too, would begin each year by making promises to Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, for whom the month of January is named.+ Also on Network World: More proof the cloud is winning big +
But wait, dear data center manager. You say you don’t have time to do gut-crunchers every morning and balk at the prospect of giving up bread and pasta? To be perfectly clear, I understand but do not condone your lack of commitment. Change is difficult. And besides, some who follow cultural trends claim that dad bods are slowly coming into fashion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China intends to develop a prototype of an exascale supercomputer by the end of 2017, tweaking an exascale delivery date that's already well ahead of the U.S. The timing of the announcement, reported by an official government news service, raised the possibility it was a message to President-elect Donald Trump.China's announcement comes the same week Trump takes office. The Trump administration is bringing a lot of uncertainty to supercomputing research, which is heavily dependent on government funding."The exascale race is also a publicity and mindshare race," said Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC. "The Chinese are putting a stake in the ground and saying we're going to have a prototype computer soon, maybe a year or so sooner than people expected," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One way to track the growth of cloud computing is to follow the investments in the infrastructure and equipment that make it run. That’s why IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is so revealing.The cloud is growing faster
According to the IDC report, total spending on IT infrastructure products—including server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches—for use in cloud environments will grow a healthy 18 percent this year to top $44 billion. Meanwhile, IDC said, investment in old-school non-cloud architecture equipment will actually decline by more than 3 percent in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stratoscale is a small company with a very big ambition: to turn your datacenter into an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region. Forget OpenStack, forget VMware. Stratoscale aims to help IT shops get beyond device-level virtualization and deliver the same app-friendly building blocks AWS provides. In the process, the company promises to cut the cost of operating datacenters by more than 80 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
I’ve been following Cumulus Networks almost since its inception. The company was co-founded by J.R. Rivers, something of a legend in the networking space. Cumulus Networks’ raisan d’etre was to provide an open source operating system (eponymously called Cumulus Linux) that organizations could install on different networking hardware devices and, in doing so, gain all the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN) without any of the hassles of proprietary and locked-down software.It was a compelling story (at least for this commentator). And given the credibility that Rivers bought to the table, I was sold.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook has chosen Odense in Denmark as the site of its third data center outside the U.S.Denmark's moderate climate will allow the company to use outdoor air and indirect evaporative cooling to keep temperatures in the data center down, and servers will be powered entirely with renewable energy, the company said Thursday.Most of Denmark's renewable energy comes from wind power, a highly variable resource. On one day in 2015, it was able to satisfy the nation's entire electricity demand with wind power, and also become a net exporter of electricity. At other times, around a quarter of the country's electricity demand is met by wind power, according to the latest figures from Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Complexity in data centers has grown exponentially with the introduction of new technologies to scale IT infrastructure to keep pace with business demands. This dynamic has caused IT departments to seek out new tools to help manage and secure complex IT environments in modern data centers. The broad adoption of these tools has created new, arduous challenges, including the difficulty of managing various network connections and monitoring specific traffic flows at scale. Leading-edge IT organizations have started adopting software-based network packet broker (NPB) solutions to solve these complex IT challenges with increased agility and flexibility. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eight years is but a blink in the grand scheme, yet so much will have changed on the technology and social-media landscape between when Barack Obama took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009 and Donald Trump does so Friday.Before he got started, Obama needed to plead and perhaps pull rank to keep his beloved BlackBerry, a gadget preference which at the time did not seem all that odd. Obama would remain loyal to the device, too, even as its popularity diminished, only relinquishing it last year in exchange for a customized smartphone that he mocked as more suitable for a toddler than a commander in chief.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to buy SimpliVity for US$650 million as expands its hyperconverged offerings, and analysts believe it's a great deal.SimpliVity makes management software that helps administrators gain control over data-center resources. The tools help enterprises make efficient use of server, storage and networking resources.The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.For months, HPE was rumored to be pursuing SimpliVity, which also offers convergence tools for servers from Dell, Lenovo and Huawei. Hyperconvergence companies are a hot commodity. Nutanix, a top player in the market, went public in September last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here