• The IBM Transformation Can Gather Steam Now

    October 19, 2017

    For the past five and a half years, which is not quite an eternity in the IT business but is something akin to a half of a generation or so, IBM’s revenues have been declining, quarter in and quarter out. As has happened many, many times in its more than century of existence, Big Blue, which used to be a peddler of meat slicers, time machines, scales, and punch card tabulators early in its history, has had to constantly evolve and reimagine itself.

    The transformation that IBM had to undergo in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a near …

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  • Easing Enterprise Migration To The Cloud

    October 19, 2017

    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

    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

    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

    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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  • Japan’s ABCI System Shows The Subtleties Separating AI And HPC

    October 12, 2017

    Governments like to spread the money around their indigenous IT companies when they can, and so it is with the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, or ABCI, supercomputer that is being commissioned by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. NEC built the ABCI prototype last year, and now Fujitsu has been commissioned to build the actual ABCI system.

    The resulting machine, which is being purchased specifically to offer cloud access to compute and storage capacity for artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads, would make a fine system for running HPC simulation and models. But that …

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  • Intel Takes First Steps To Universal Quantum Computing

    October 11, 2017

    Someone is going to commercialize a general purpose, universal quantum computer first, and Intel wants to be the first. So does Google. So does IBM. And D-Wave is pretty sure it already has done this, even if many academics and a slew of upstart competitors don’t agree. What we can all agree on is that there is a very long road ahead in the development of quantum computing, and it will be a costly endeavor that could nonetheless help solve some intractable problems.

    This week, Intel showed off the handiwork its engineers and those of partner QuTech, a …

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  • Public Cloud Doesn’t Dominate IT Quite Yet

    October 10, 2017

    Everyone in the IT industry likes drama, and we here at The Next Platform are no different. But it is also important as the industry in undergoing gut-wrenching transformations, as it has been for five decades now and will probably do so for a decade or two more, to keep some perspective. While the public cloud is certainly an exciting part of the IT market, it hasn’t taken over the world even if it has become the dominant metaphor that all kinds of IT – public, private, and hybrid – aspired to mimic.

    That’s something, and it is important. But …

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  • Oracle Emulates Google, AWS On Its Cloud

    October 4, 2017

    During the dot-com boom, when Oracle was the dominant supplier of relational databases to startups and established enterprises alike, it used its profits to fund the acquisition of application serving middleware, notably BEA WebLogic, and then applications, such as PeopleSoft and Siebel, and then Java and hardware systems, from its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. It was an expensive proposition, but one that paid off handsomely for the software giant.

    In the cloud and hyperscale era, open source middleware is the driving force and in a lot of cases there is nothing to acquire. Projects either go open themselves or are …

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  • Azure Stack Finally Takes Microsoft Public Cloud Private

    September 22, 2017 Paul Teich

    Microsoft announced Azure Stack at its Ignite event in September 2016 and soft-launched Azure Stack at its Inspire event in July, when it announced that the private cloud solution was available for customer orders. The first wave of Microsoft’s Azure Stack system partners – Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo – plan to ship their certified solutions to customers in September. We will be surprised if Microsoft does not announce first customer shipments with those vendors at Microsoft’s Ignite event in late September.

    Azure Stack with compete with other hybrid private cloud frameworks, such as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, HPE’s …

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