Tough times strike Lenovo’s data center business

Lenovo has done a bang-up job in taking over IBM’s old PC business and turning it into a rousing success. Or at least as much of a success as can be had in an era of declining PC sales. Its luck with the server business? Not so much.Lenovo picked up IBM’s x86 server business in 2014 after some grumbling and consternation from the government. It seemed the government and military had quite an installed base of IBM servers and wasn’t keen on the Chinese taking ownership of them. But the deal went through after some assurances. Looks like that was the least of their problems. According to Gartner, in the first quarter of 2017, Lenovo sales fell 16 percent and its market share dropped to just 5.8 percent. Lenovo was fifth, behind HPE, Dell EMC, IBM (which is only selling Power-based RISC systems and mainframes) and Cisco. In fact, Lenovo had been ahead of Cisco in terms of units sold. When you fall behind Cisco in servers, a business Cisco didn’t even enter until a decade ago, you have a problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tough times strike Lenovo’s data center business

Lenovo has done a bang-up job in taking over IBM’s old PC business and turning it into a rousing success. Or at least as much of a success as can be had in an era of declining PC sales. Its luck with the server business? Not so much.Lenovo picked up IBM’s x86 server business in 2014 after some grumbling and consternation from the government. It seemed the government and military had quite an installed base of IBM servers and wasn’t keen on the Chinese taking ownership of them. But the deal went through after some assurances. Looks like that was the least of their problems. According to Gartner, in the first quarter of 2017, Lenovo sales fell 16 percent and its market share dropped to just 5.8 percent. Lenovo was fifth, behind HPE, Dell EMC, IBM (which is only selling Power-based RISC systems and mainframes) and Cisco. In fact, Lenovo had been ahead of Cisco in terms of units sold. When you fall behind Cisco in servers, a business Cisco didn’t even enter until a decade ago, you have a problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tough times strike Lenovo’s data center business

Lenovo has done a bang-up job in taking over IBM’s old PC business and turning it into a rousing success. Or at least as much of a success as can be had in an era of declining PC sales. Its luck with the server business? Not so much.Lenovo picked up IBM’s x86 server business in 2014 after some grumbling and consternation from the government. It seemed the government and military had quite an installed base of IBM servers and wasn’t keen on the Chinese taking ownership of them. But the deal went through after some assurances. Looks like that was the least of their problems. According to Gartner, in the first quarter of 2017, Lenovo sales fell 16 percent and its market share dropped to just 5.8 percent. Lenovo was fifth, behind HPE, Dell EMC, IBM (which is only selling Power-based RISC systems and mainframes) and Cisco. In fact, Lenovo had been ahead of Cisco in terms of units sold. When you fall behind Cisco in servers, a business Cisco didn’t even enter until a decade ago, you have a problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are you and your network ready for change?

When I began this blog in October of last year, my goal was to help readers understand both the magnitude of the digital transformation currently underway and its implications for companies and IT professionals in every industry. In particular, I focused on the role of the network in enabling digital business and best practices for transforming the network from a cost center to a growth driver.This is a subject near and dear to my heart because the networking industry has been my home for many years, and it has seen a lot of change. Come this fall, it’s likely so see a bit more. Last November, my company, Brocade, announced that it is being acquired by Broadcom Ltd., and in the next few months, that transaction is expected to be completed. I’m a perfect example of the fact that you can never fully predict how things will change; you can only know things will change. So I want to wrap up this blog series with a look back at some of the most important things you need to consider today to make sure you’re ready for whatever changes digital transformation may send in your direction.To read this Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Are you and your network ready for change?

When I began this blog in October of last year, my goal was to help readers understand both the magnitude of the digital transformation currently underway and its implications for companies and IT professionals in every industry. In particular, I focused on the role of the network in enabling digital business and best practices for transforming the network from a cost center to a growth driver.This is a subject near and dear to my heart because the networking industry has been my home for many years, and it has seen a lot of change. Come this fall, it’s likely so see a bit more. Last November, my company, Brocade, announced that it is being acquired by Broadcom Ltd., and in the next few months, that transaction is expected to be completed. I’m a perfect example of the fact that you can never fully predict how things will change; you can only know things will change. So I want to wrap up this blog series with a look back at some of the most important things you need to consider today to make sure you’re ready for whatever changes digital transformation may send in your direction.To read this Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Are you and your network ready for change?

When I began this blog in October of last year, my goal was to help readers understand both the magnitude of the digital transformation currently underway and its implications for companies and IT professionals in every industry. In particular, I focused on the role of the network in enabling digital business and best practices for transforming the network from a cost center to a growth driver.This is a subject near and dear to my heart because the networking industry has been my home for many years, and it has seen a lot of change. Come this fall, it’s likely so see a bit more. Last November, my company, Brocade, announced that it is being acquired by Broadcom Ltd., and in the next few months, that transaction is expected to be completed. I’m a perfect example of the fact that you can never fully predict how things will change; you can only know things will change. So I want to wrap up this blog series with a look back at some of the most important things you need to consider today to make sure you’re ready for whatever changes digital transformation may send in your direction.To read this Continue reading

How the hospitality industry will profit from the IoT

Connecting the world changes everything. That’s what businesses and consumers are learning as they embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) for everything from household garage door openers to smart-city applications that solve traffic congestion and reduce crime.But IoT is more significant than just adding connectivity to existing products or services. In fact, it is about changing the way products and services deliver value. In the process, products are becoming services, and services are becoming more intelligent.+ Also on Network World: IoT devices or humans? The hospitality industry is not immune to this evolution, and, in fact, it is well positioned to benefit from IoT. That’s because the industry is poised to improve the customer experience while simultaneously reducing costs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Home Automation Setup with Apple #HomeKit

As many of you know, I’ve been diving into the home automation pond for awhile now. I’ve been asked to blog out my current home setup and this is an attempt to do that. There’s MUCH too much to be put into a single post, which is why I started a new blog for this subject over at www.homekitgeek.com as well as doing some video reviews of different HomeKit accessories. Work in process, but I’ll do the short version here.

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Apple HomeKit

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I chose to use the Apple homeKit framework as the base for my home automation journey for a few reason. The biggest one is that I already owned a couple of Apple TV (gen4) devices which fit the home automation hub role. These devices are a homeKit hub and are the always-on/always-present devices that are used to perform orchestration/automation actions when I’m home or away. These also tie directly into Apple’s iCloud which allows me remote access to my homeKit gear without having to VPN into my home network.

 

Home Setup Room-By-Room

There’s a lot to talk about here, but I thought I would just do a quick description of what’s going on room-by-room Continue reading

The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come

In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days.

There are some pretty important caveats to …

The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Google Research Pushing Neural Networks Out of the Datacenter

Google has been at the bleeding edge of AI hardware development with the arrival of its TPU and other system-scale modifications to make large-scale neural network processing efficient and fast.

But just as these developments come to fruition, advances in trimmed-down deep learning could move many more machine learning training and inference operations out of the datacenter and into your palm.

Although it might be natural to think the reason that neural networks cannot be processed on devices like smartphones is because of limited CPU power, the real challenge lies in the vastness of the model sizes and hardware memory …

Google Research Pushing Neural Networks Out of the Datacenter was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: A code camps getting the boot?

Within the past week, two major learn-to-code boot camp programs have announced that they are going out of business. Iron Yard, a boot camp-style tech and coding school, was founded in 2012 and grew to twenty campuses nationwide (including Las Vegas, baby). Trouble was apparent three months ago when Iron Yard shuttered five of its locations, and the company has now announced that the rest will close by October. —Michelle Gienow @ The New Stack

The post Worth Reading: A code camps getting the boot? appeared first on rule 11 reader.

A MapReduce Accelerator to Tackle Molecular Dynamics

Novel architectures are born out of necessity and for some applications, including molecular dynamics, there have been endless attempts to push parallel performance.

In this area, there are already numerous approaches to acceleration. At the highest end is the custom ASIC-driven Anton machine from D.E. Shaw, which is the fastest system, but certainly not the cheapest. On the more accessible accelerators side are Tesla GPUs for accelerating highly parallel parts of the workload—and increasingly, FPGAs are being considered for boosting the performance of major molecular dynamics applications, most notably GROMACS as well as general purpose, high-end CPUs (Knights Landing …

A MapReduce Accelerator to Tackle Molecular Dynamics was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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