• Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide

    August 16, 2017

    Every new paradigm of computing has its own framework, and it is the adoption of that framework that usually makes it consumable for the regular enterprises that don’t have fleets of PhDs on hand to create their own frameworks before a technology is mature.

    Serverless computing – something that strikes fear in the hearts of many whose living is dependent on the vast inefficiencies that still lurk in the datacenter – and event-driven computing are two different and often associated technologies where the frameworks are still evolving.

    The serverless movement, which we have discussed before in analyzing the Lambda efforts …

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  • When Agility Outweighs Cost for Big Cloud Operations

    August 14, 2017

    If anything has become clear over the last several years of watching infrastructure and application trends among SaaS-businesses, it is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Even relatively straightforward services, like transactional email processing, have some hidden layers of complexity, which tends to equal cost.

    For most businesses providing web-based services, the solution for complexity was found by offloading infrastructure concerns to the public cloud. This provided geographic availability, pricing flexibility, and development agility, but not all web companies went the cloud route out of the gate. Consider SendGrid, which pushes out over 30 billion emails per month. …

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  • The Heart Of AMD’s Epyc Comeback Is Infinity Fabric

    July 12, 2017 Paul Teich

    At AMD’s Epyc launch few weeks ago, Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster, and the rest of the AMD Epyc team hammered home that AMD designed its new Zen processor core for servers first. This server-first approach has implications for performance, performance per watt, and cost perspectives in both datacenter and consumer markets.

    AMD designed Epyc as a modular architecture around its “Zeppelin” processor die with its eight “Zen” architecture cores. To allow multi-die scalability, AMD first reworked its HyperTransport socket-to-socket system I/O architecture for use on a chip, across a multi-chip module (MCM), and for inter-socket connectivity. AMD has named this …

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  • The X86 Battle Lines Drawn With Intel’s Skylake Launch

    July 11, 2017

    At long last, Intel’s “Skylake” converged Xeon server processors are entering the field, and the competition with AMD’s “Naples” Epyc X86 alternatives can begin and the ARM server chips from Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm and the Power9 chip from IBM know exactly what they are aiming at.

    It is a good time to be negotiating with a chip maker for compute power.

    The Skylake chips, which are formally known as the Xeon Scalable Processor family, are the result of the convergence of the workhorse Xeon E5 family of chips for two-socket and four-socket servers with the higher-end Xeon E7 …

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  • Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track

    July 10, 2017

    It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud.

    But Ethernet has pulls out of its boots and left them in the swamp and is back to being barefoot again on much more solid ground where it can run faster. The move from 10 Gb/sec …

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  • Using The Network To Break Down Server Silos

    July 10, 2017 Daniel Proch

    Virtual machines and virtual network functions, or VMs and VNFs for short, are the standard compute units in modern enterprise, cloud, and telecommunications datacenters. But varying VM and VNF resource needs as well as networking and security requirements often force IT departments to manage servers in separate silos, each with their own respective capabilities.

    For example, some VMs or VNFs may require a moderate number of vCPU cores and lower I/O bandwidth, while VMs and VNFs associated with real-time voice and video, IoT, and telco applications require a moderate-to-high number of vCPU cores, rich networking services, and high I/O bandwidth, …

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  • Unifying Massive Data at Cloud Scale

    June 9, 2017

    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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  • One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined

    June 7, 2017

    Well, it could have been a lot worse. About 5.6 percent worse, if you do the math.

    As we here at The Next Platform have been anticipating for quite some time, with so many stars aligning here in 2017 and a slew of server processor and GPU coprocessor announcements and deliveries expected starting in the summer and rolling into the fall, there is indeed a slowdown in the server market and one that savvy customers might be able to take advantage of. But we thought those on the bleeding edge of performance were going to wait to see what Intel, …

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  • When No One Can Make Money In Systems

    June 6, 2017

    Making money in the information technology market has always been a challenge, but it keeps getting increasingly difficult as the tumultuous change in how companies consume compute, storage, and networking rips through all aspects of this $3 trillion market.

    It is tough to know exactly what do to, and we see companies chasing the hot new things, doing acquisitions to bolster their positions, and selling off legacy businesses to generate the cash to do the deals and to keep Wall Street at bay. Companies like IBM, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo have sold things off and bought other things to try …

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  • HPE Looks Ahead To Composable Infrastructure, Persistent Memory

    June 6, 2017

    Over the past several years, the server market has been roiled by the rise of cloud computing that run the applications created by companies and by services offered by hyperscalers that augment or replace such applications. This is a tougher and lumpier market, to be sure.

    The top tier cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not only have become key drivers in server sales but also have turned to original design manufacturers (ODMs) from Taiwan and China for lower cost systems to help populate their massive datacenters. Overall, global server shipments have slowed, and top-tier OEMs are working to …

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