• How To Do Stateless Compute, Clustered Storage Like A Hyperscaler

    August 17, 2017

    There are so many companies that claim that their storage systems are inspired by those that have been created by the hyperscalers – particularly Google and Facebook – that it is hard to keep track of them all.

    But if we had to guess, and we do because the search engine giant has never revealed the nitty gritty on the hardware architecture and software stack underpinning its storage, we would venture that the foundation of the current Google File System and its Colossus successor looks a lot like what storage upstart Datrium has finally, after many years of development, brought …

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  • 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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  • How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come

    August 15, 2017

    One of the reasons that the University of California at Berkeley was been a hotbed of software technology back in the 1970s and 1980s is Michael Stonebraker, who was one of the pioneers in relational database technology and one of the industry’s biggest – and most vocal – shakers and movers and one of its most prolific serial entrepreneurs.

    Like other database pioneers, Stonebraker read the early relational data model papers by IBMer Edgar Codd, and in 1973 started work on the Ingres database along IBM’s own System R database, which eventually became DB2, and Oracle’s eponymous database, which entered …

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  • The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage

    August 14, 2017

    There is no question any longer that flash memory has found its place – in fact, many places – in the datacenter, even though the debate is still raging about when or if solid state memory will eventually replace disk drives in all datacenters of the world.

    Sometime between tomorrow and never is a good guess.

    Flash is still a hot commodity, so much so that the slower-than-expected transition to 3D NAND has caused a shortage in supply that is driving up the price of enterprise-grade flash – unfortunately at the same time that memory makers are having trouble cranking …

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  • Drilling Down Into The Xeon Skylake Architecture

    August 4, 2017

    The “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel have been in the market for nearly a month now, and we thought it would be a good time to drill down into the architecture of the new processor. We also want to see what the new Xeon SP has to offer for HPC, AI, and enterprise customers as well as compare the new X86 server motor to prior generations of Xeons and alternative processors in the market that are vying for a piece of the datacenter action.

    That’s a lot, and we relish it. So let’s get started with a deep dive …

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  • Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

    August 4, 2017

    While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.

    That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …

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  • The Skylake Calm Before The Compute Storm

    July 31, 2017

    It looks like the push to true cloud computing that many of us have been projecting for such a long time is actually coming to pass, and despite many of the misgivings that many of us have expressed about giving up control of our own datacenters and the applications that run there.

    That chip giant Intel is making money as it rolls up its 14 nanometer manufacturing process ramp is not really a surprise. During the second quarter of this year, rival AMD had not yet gotten its “Naples” Epyc X86 server processors into the field, and IBM has pushed …

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  • The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems

    July 19, 2017

    IBM is a bit of an enigma these days. It has the art – some would say black magic – of financial engineering down pat, and its system engineering is still quite good. Big Blue talks about all of the right things for modern computing platforms, although it speaks a slightly different dialect because the company still thinks that it is the one setting the pace, and therefore coining the terms, rather than chasing markets that others are blazing. And it just can’t seem to grow revenues, even after tens of billions of dollars in acquisitions and internal investments over …

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  • The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express

    July 14, 2017

    No matter what, system architects are always going to have to contend with one – and possibly more – bottlenecks when they design the machines that store and crunch the data that makes the world go around. These days, there is plenty of compute at their disposal, a reasonable amount of main memory to hang off of it, and both Ethernet and InfiniBand are on the cusp of 200 Gb/sec of performance and not too far away from 400 Gb/sec and even higher bandwidths.

    Now, it looks like the peripheral bus based on the PCI-Express protocol is becoming the bottleneck, …

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  • The New Server Economies Of Scale For AMD

    July 13, 2017 Paul Teich

    In the first story of this series, we discussed the Infinity fabric that is at the heart of the new “Naples” Epyc processor from AMD, and how this modified and extended HyperTransport interconnect glues together the cores, dies, and sockets based on Eypc processors into a unified system.

    In this follow-on story, we will expand out from the Epyc processor design to the basic feeds and speeds of the system components based on this chip and then take a look at some of the systems that AMD and its partners were showing off at the Epyc launch a few …

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