• Dell EMC Upgrades Flash in High-End Storage While Eyeing NVMe

    May 9, 2017

    When Dell acquired EMC in its massive $60 billon-plus deal last year, it boasted that Dell was inheriting a boatload of new technologies that would help propel forward its capabilities and ambitions with larger enterprises.

    That included offerings ranging from VMware’s NSX software-defined networking (SDN) platform to VirtuStream and its cloud technologies for running mission critical applications from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft off-premises. In particular, Dell was acquiring EMC’s broad and highly popular storage portfolio, in particular the high-end VMAX, XtremeIO, and newer ScaleIO lineups as well as its Isilon storage arrays for high performance workloads.

    Dell …

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  • Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays

    May 8, 2017

    There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.

    Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …

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  • Crunching Machine Learning And Databases Together On GPUs

    May 8, 2017

    While it is always best to have the right tool for the job, it is better still if a tool can be used by multiple jobs and therefore have its utilization be higher than it might otherwise be. This is one of the reasons why general purpose, X86-based computing took over the datacenter. Economies of scale trumped the efficiency that can come from limited scope or just leaving legacy applications alone in place on alternate platforms.

    The idea of offloading computational tasks from CPUs to GPU accelerators took off in academia a little more than a decade ago, and …

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  • Red Hat Is The Gatekeeper For ARM In The Datacenter

    May 5, 2017

    If any new hardware technology is going to get traction in the datacenter, it has to have the software behind it. And as the dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat’s support of ARM-based servers gives the upstart chip makers like Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm the leverage to help pry the glasshouse doors open and get a slice of the server and storage business that is so utterly dominated by Intel’s Xeon processors today.

    It is now or never for ARM in the datacenter, and that means Red Hat has to go all the way and not just support …

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  • Intel Melds Xeon E5 And E7 With Skylake

    May 4, 2017

    We have been saying for the past two year that the impending “Skylake” Xeon processors represented the biggest platform architectural change in the Xeon processor business at Intel since the transformational “Nehalem” Xeon 5500s that debuted back in March 2009 into the gaping maw of the Great Recession.

    There is no global recession breathing down the IT sector’s neck like a hungry wolf here in 2017, eight years and seven chip generations later. But Intel is facing competitive pressures from AMD’s Naples Opterons, IBM’s Power9, and the ARM collective (mainly Cavium and Qualcomm at this point, but Applied Micro is …

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  • The Datacenter Does Not Revolve Around AWS, Despite Its Gravity

    May 2, 2017

    If the public cloud computing market were our solar system, then Amazon Web Services would be Jupiter and Saturn together and the remaining five fast-growing big clouds would be like the inner planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,  and that pile of rocks that used to be a planet mixed up with those clouds that are finding growth a bit more challenging  – think Uranus and Neptune and maybe even Pluto if you still want to count it a planet.

    This analogy came to us in the wake of Amazon’s reporting of its financial results for the first quarter of …

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  • Intel Moves Xeons To The Moore’s Law Leading Edge

    April 28, 2017

    In the wake of the Technology and Manufacturing Day event that Intel hosted last month, we were pondering this week about what effect the tick-tock-clock method of advancing chip designs and manufacturing processes might have on the Xeon server chip line from Intel, and we suggested that it might close the gaps between the Core client chips and the Xeons. It turns out that Intel is not only going to close the gaps, but reverse them and put the Xeons on the leading edge.

    To be precise, Brian Krzanich, Intel’s chief financial officer, and Robert Swan, the company’s chief financial …

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  • Mapping Intel’s Tick Tock Clock Onto Xeon Processors

    April 27, 2017

    Chip maker Intel takes Moore’s Law very seriously, and not just because one of its founders observed the consistent rate at which the price of a transistor scales down with each tweak in manufacturing. Moore’s Law is not just personal with Intel. It is business because Intel is a chip maker first and a chip designer second, and that is how it has been able to take over the desktops and datacenters of the world.

    Last month, the top brass in Intel’s chip manufacturing operations vigorously defended Moore’s Law, contending that not only was the two year cadence of …

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  • Riding The Virtual SAN Gravy Train

    April 24, 2017

    Being the first mover in establishing a new technology in the enterprise is important, but it is not more important than having a vast installed base and sales force peddling an existing and adjacent product set in which to sell a competing and usually lagging technology.

    VMware can’t be said to have initially been particularly enthusiastic about server-SAN hybrids like those created by upstart Nutanix, with its Acropolis platform, or pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which bought into the virtual SAN market with its LeftHand Networks acquisition in October 2008 for $360 million and went back to the hyperconverged well …

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  • International Cognitive And Cloud Business Machines

    April 20, 2017

    International Business Machines has gone through so many changes in its eleven decades of existence, and it is important to remember that some days. If IBM’s recent changes are a bit bewildering, as they were in the late 1980s, the middle 1990s, and the early 2010s in particular, they are perhaps nothing compared the changes that were wrought to transform a maker of meat slicers, time clocks, and tabulating equipment derived from looms.

    Yeah, and you thought turning GPUs into compute engines was a stretch.

    Herman Hollerith, who graduated from Columbia University in 1879 when its engineering school was still …

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