The related but distinct HPC and AI markets gave Nvidia a taste for building systems, and it looks like the company wants to control more of the hardware and systems software stack than it currently does given that it is willing to shell out $6.9 billion – just about all of the cash it has on hand – to acquire high-end networking equipment provider and long-time partner Mellanox Technologies. …
The amount of rejiggering among the IT vendors serving enterprise customers (as distinct from hyperscalers, cloud builders, and HPC centers) in the past decade and a half has been astounding. …
For the past decade, we have documented the attempted rise of ARM processors in the datacenter, specifically in general purpose servers. …
For the past decade, flash has been used as a kind of storage accelerator, sprinkled into systems here and crammed into bigger chunks there, often with hierarchical tiering software to make it all work as a go-between that sits between slower storage (or sometimes no other tier of storage) and either CPU DRAM or GPU HBM or GDDR memory. …
Sometimes, a startup takes such a new and profound approach to a problem that it is hard to know where to begin to describe how radical of a change that company has made in developing its product. …
Any on premises HPC cluster has its own limits of scale and throughput. …
There are two camps of server makers in the world. Those that are aimed at hyperscalers and cloud builders, which buy in lots of 50,000 or 100,000 servers and which therefore have enough leverage for the tail to wag the manufacturing dogs. …
One of the big problems of servers, storage, and networking, oddly enough, is that in the individual elements in which they are sold, there is a perception that they are not all that expensive. …
It has been our position from the beginning, when Google first open sourced the Kubernetes container controller, that it wanted for this to be the controller that ruled the datacenter. …
When Arm Holdings, the division of the Softbank conglomerate that designs and licenses the core component of the processor architecture that bears its name, launched its Neoverse revamping of the Arm architecture for the datacenter and the edge last October, the company put the architecture on a strict annual cadence and promised to deliver 30 percent performance increases at the system level with each generation. …
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