• Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking

    April 20, 2018

    It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.

    And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …

    Read more

  • The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy

    April 20, 2018

    The thing about platforms that have a wide adoption and deep history is that they tend to persist. They have such economic inertia that, so long as they can keep morphing and grafting on new technologies, that they persist long after alternatives have emerged and dominated data processing. Every company ultimately wants to build a platform for this reason, and has since the dawn of commercial computing, for precisely this reason, for this inertia – it takes too much effort to change or replace it – is what generates the profits.

    It is with this in mind that we contemplate …

    Read more

  • Open Compute Iron Is All About Acceleration

    April 6, 2018 Paul Teich

    The Open Compute Project (OCP) held its 9th annual US Summit recently, with 3,441 registered attendees this year. While that might seem small for a top-tier high tech event, there were also 80 exhibitors representing most of the cloud datacenter supply chain, plus a host of outstanding technical sessions. We are always on the hunt for new iron, and not surprisingly the most important gear we saw at OCP this year was related to compute acceleration.

    Here is how that new iron we saw breaks down across the major trends in acceleration.

    The first interesting thing we saw was a …

    Read more

  • MapD Fires Up GPU Cloud Service

    April 5, 2018

    In the long run, provided there are enough API pipes into the code, software as a service might be the most popular way to consume applications and systems software for all but the largest organizations that are running at such a scale that they can command almost as good prices for components as the public cloud intermediaries. The hassle of setting up and managing complex code is in a lot of cases larger than the volume pricing benefits of do it yourself. The difference can be a profit margin for both cloud builders and the software companies that peddle their …

    Read more

  • AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database

    April 4, 2018

    Amazon Web Services essentially sparked the public cloud race a dozen years ago when it first launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and then in short order the Simple Storage Service (S3), giving enterprises access to the large amount compute and storage resources that its giant retail business leaned on.

    Since that time, AWS has grown rapidly in the number of services it offers, the number of customers it serves, the amount of money it brings in and the number of competitors – including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle – looking to chip away …

    Read more

  • Startup Tackles Cloud Migration And Management Hassle

    April 4, 2018

    Enterprises can see cost and efficiency benefits when they migrate workloads into the cloud, but such moves also come with their share of challenges in complexity and management.

    This is particularly true as organizations embrace a compute environment that includes multiple clouds – both public and private – as well as one or more on-premises datacenters. True, the cloud enables businesses to easily scale up or down depending on the workloads they’re running, to pay for only the infrastructure they’re using rather than having to invest upfront in hardware, to put the onus of integration on the cloud providers, and …

    Read more

  • Singularity Containers for HPC & Deep Learning

    March 19, 2018 Nishanth Dandapanthula

    Containerization as a concept of isolating application processes while sharing the same operating system (OS) kernel has been around since the beginning of this century. It started its journey from as early as Jails from the FreeBSD era. Jails heavily leveraged the chroot environment but expanded capabilities to include a virtualized path to other system attributes such as storage, interconnects and users. Solaris Zones and AIX Workload Partitions also fall into a similar category.

    Since then, the advent and advancement in technologies such as cgroups, systemd and user-namespaces greatly improved the security and isolation of containers when compared to their …

    Read more

  • IBM Unwinds Tangled Data for Enterprise AI

    March 16, 2018

    These days, organizations are creating and storing massive amounts of data, and in theory this data can be used to drive business decisions through application development, particularly with new techniques such as machine learning. Data is arguably the most important asset, and it is also probably the most difficult thing to manage. Well, excepting people.

    Data is tangled mess. It can be structured or unstructured, and it is increasingly scattered in different locations – in on-premises infrastructure, in a public cloud, on a mobile device. It is a challenge to move, thanks to the costs in everything from bandwidth to …

    Read more

  • FPGA Interconnect Boosted In Concert With Compute

    March 12, 2018

    To keep their niche in computing, field programmable gate arrays not only need to stay on the cutting edge of chip manufacturing processes. They also have to include the most advanced networking to balance out that compute, rivalling that which the makers of switch ASICs provide in their chips.

    By comparison, CPUs have it easy. They don’t have the serializer/deserializer (SerDes) circuits that switch chips have as the foundation of their switch fabric. Rather, they might have a couple of integrated Ethernet network interface controllers embedded on the die, maybe running at 1 Gb/sec or 10 Gb/sec, and they offload …

    Read more

  • Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

    March 9, 2018

    Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

    Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

    Read more

Previous Articles

HPE Solutions

The Next Platform Weekly

Tap the stack to painlessly subscribe for a weekly email from The Next Platform, featuring highlights, analysis, and stories from the week directly from us to your inbox with nothing in between.