Jeffrey Burt
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Intel Pumps Funds Into Data Processing In All Shapes And Sizes
October 20, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
Intel’s multi-year effort to expand its reach beyond its PC and server processor roots has taken the chip maker down multiple paths, some of which have ended in dead ends.
The most memorable of those was the billion-plus-dollar attempt to challenge ARM Holdings and its various partners – such as Qualcomm and Samsung – in making chips for mobile devices. Under current CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel has retrenched, dropping its mobile device efforts and pulling back from wearables, and instead is pushing to provide the foundational technologies that will underpin the trends that will continue to shape the industry, from …
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Easing Enterprise Migration To The Cloud
October 19, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
No one knows better than IBM that the time, money, energy, and risk associated with changing platforms can hinder that change. In some cases, as with the System z mainframe, this helps the company preserve its footprint in the datacenter. But in other cases, it hurts IBM’s ability to get people to try out different public or private infrastructure.
It is no secret that Big Blue wants a much bigger cloud business, and that it got a late start compared to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But IBM does have a presence at most of the large companies on earth, and …
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A Match Made In Hyperscale: Docker Borgs Kubernetes
October 18, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
For more than a year, container pioneer Docker has pushed its own Docker Swarm as the orchestration tool for managing highly distributed computing environments based on its eponymous containers in physical and virtual environments. But it is hard to deny the rapid uptake of Kubernetes, the container orchestration technology that was derived from Google’s internal Borg and Omega cluster managers and that the search engine giant open sourced three years ago.
Kubernetes has become highly popular, gaining momentum with top cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and obviously Google Cloud Platform, and is getting support from …
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Cisco Knows No One Wants To Manage The Management Stack
October 17, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
The highly distributed and increasingly cloud-based nature of the modern IT environment is adding to the complexity that organizations have to deal with, particularly in terms of managing their infrastructures. Mobility, the internet of things, new development paradigms, containerization, more distributed applications, data analytics and multi-cloud deployments are all conspiring to create even more challenges in what is an already complicated management scenario for enterprises facing cost and time constraints.
At a time when speed and scalability are imperative and human errors can be costly, the answer to many of these challenges may lie in the cloud. That’s the …
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Cisco Stretches ACI Network Fabrics, Eases Management
October 13, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
For disaster recovery, political, and organizational reasons, enterprises like to have multiple datacenters, and now they are going hybrid with public cloud capacity adding in the mix. Having networks scattered across the globe brings operational challenges, from being able to easily migrate and manage workloads across the multiple sites and increased complexity around networks, security to adopting emerging datacenter technologies like containers.
As the world becomes more cloud-centric, organizations are looking for ways to gain greater visibility and scalability across their environments, automate as many processes as possible and manage all these sites as a single entity.
Cisco Systems …
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IBM Combines PowerAI, Data Science Experience in Enterprise AI Push
October 12, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
IBM has spent the past several years putting a laser focus on what it calls cognitive computing, using its Watson platform as the foundation for its efforts in such emerging fields as artificial intelligence (AI) and is successful spinoff, deep learning. Big Blue has leaned on Watson technology, its traditional Power systems, and increasingly powerful GPUs from Nvidia to drive its efforts to not only bring AI and deep learning into the cloud, but also to push AI into the enterprise.
The technologies are part of a larger push in the industry to help enterprises transform their businesses to take …
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Red Hat Stretches Gluster Clustered Storage Under Containers
October 5, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.
The …
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IBM Brings Analytics To The Data For Faster Processing
September 29, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
Data analytics is a rapidly evolving field, and IBM and other vendors over the past several years have built numerous tools to address segments of it. But now Big Blue is shifting its focus to give data scientists and developers the technologies they need more easily and quickly analyze the data and derive insights that they can apply to their businesses strategies.
“We have [created] a ton of different products that solve parts of the problem,” Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, tells The Next Platform. “We’re moving toward a strategy of developing platforms for analytics. This trend …
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Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push
September 28, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
Microsoft is embedding Anaconda’s Python distribution into its Azure Machine Learning products, the latest move by the software vendor to expand its capabilities in the fast-growing artificial intelligence space and an example of Anaconda extending its reach beyond high performance computing and into AI.
The two companies announced the partnership this week at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, with the news dovetailing with other announcements around AI that Microsoft officials made this week at its own Ignite 2017 show. The vendors said they will offer Anaconda for Microsoft, which they described as a subset of the Anaconda …
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Unifying Massive Data at Cloud Scale
June 9, 2017 Jeffrey Burt
Enterprises continue to struggle with the issue of data: how to process and move the massive amounts that are coming in from multiple sources, how to analyze the different types of data to best leverage its capabilities, and how to store and unify it across various environments, including on-premises infrastructure and cloud environments. A broad array of major storage players, such as Dell EMC, NetApp and IBM are building out their offerings to create platforms that can do a lot of those things.
MapR Technologies, which made its bones with its commercial Hadoop distribution, is moving in a similar direction. …
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