• Getting With The Program On Software Defined Networks

    October 17, 2017

    If the profit margins are under pressure among the switch and router makers of the world, their chief financial officers can probably place a lot of the blame on Nick McKeown and his several partners throughout the years. And if McKeown is right about what is happening as the network software is increasingly disaggregated from the hardware – what is called software defined networking – they will either have to adapt or be relegated to the dustbins of history.

    McKeown cut his teeth after university in the late 1980s at Hewlett Packard Labs in Bristol, England, one of the hotbeds …

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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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  • How Oakforest-PACS Outpaced The K Supercomputer

    September 28, 2017 Ken Strandberg

    In high performance computing in the public sector, dollars follow teraflops and now petaflops. Especially in the datacenters of academia, where cutting-edge computational research projects funded by large grants seek the most powerful supercomputers in the region.

    Institutions with limited budgets these days are creatively solving their financial supercomputing needs by creating a collective that pools funds and shares computing resources. Some institutions, such as Iowa State University, are doing this internally, with various departments pitching in to buy a single, large HPC cluster, as with their Condo supercomputer.

    In Japan, the University of Tokyo (U Tokyo) and University of …

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  • The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

    September 26, 2017

    It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

    Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

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  • A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip

    September 14, 2017

    Server processor architectures are trying to break the ties between memory and compute to allow the capacities of each to scale independently of each other, but switching and routing giant Cisco Systems has already done this for a high-end switch chip that looks remarkably like a CPU tuned for network processing.

    At the recent Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley, Jamie Markevitch, a principal engineer at Cisco showed off the guts of an unnamed but currently shipping network processor, something that happens very rarely in the switching and routing racket. With the exception of the upstarts like Barefoot Networks with …

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  • Signposts On The Roadmap Out To 10 Tb/sec Ethernet

    September 8, 2017

    The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead.

    Now, we are sitting on the cusp of the real 100 Gb/sec Ethernet rollout among hyperscalers and enterprise …

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  • The Prospects For A Leaner And Meaner HPE

    September 6, 2017

    The era of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s envious – and expensive – desire to become IT software and services behemoth like the IBM of the 1990s and 2000s is coming to a close.

    The company has finalized its spinout-merger of substantially all of its software assets to Micro Focus. HPE has already spun out the lion’s share of its outsourcing and consulting businesses to Computer Sciences and even earlier had split from its troublesome PC and very profitable printer businesses. These were spun out together to give the combined HP Inc a chance to live on Wall Street and because PCs …

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  • Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric

    September 5, 2017

    It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.

    About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched …

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  • VMware’s Platform Revolves Around ESXi, Except Where It Can’t

    August 29, 2017

    Building a platform is hard enough, and there are very few companies that can build something that scales, supports a diversity of applications, and, in the case of either cloud providers or software or whole system sellers, can be suitable for tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands or millions, of customers.

    But if building a platform is hard, keeping it relevant is even harder, and those companies who demonstrate the ability to adapt quickly and to move to new ground while holding old ground are the ones that get to make money and wield influence in the datacenter. …

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  • The Rise Of The Fourth Wave Of Computing

    August 28, 2017 Nick Tausanovitch

    According to a recent Jefferies report, the fourth wave of computing has started and it is being driven by the adoption of IoT with parallel processing as the solution. Tectonic shifts in computing have been caused by major forces dating back to the 1960s.

    With each shift, new solution providers have emerged as prominent suppliers. The latest power often cited with the fourth wave is Nvidia and its parallel processing platform for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI), namely GPUs and the CUDA programming platform. The growth of the data center segment of Nvidia’s business – from $339 million in …

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