• 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace

    September 13, 2017

    Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care.

    Distributed computing, in its more modern implementation of frameworks running on virtual machines or containers – or both – is by far the norm, both in the datacenter and on the public clouds. You don’t have to look any further than the latest server sales statistics …

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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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  • Mesos Borgs Google’s Kubernetes Right Back

    September 7, 2017

    The rivalry between Mesos, Kubernetes, and OpenStack just keeps getting more interesting, and instead of a winner take all situation, it has become more of a take what you need approach. That said, it is looking like Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for container control, even though Google not the first out of the gate in open sourcing Kubernetes and Docker Swam and the full Docker Enterprise are seeing plenty of momentum in the enterprise.

    Choice is a good thing for the IT industry, and the good news is that because of architectural choices made by …

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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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  • The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging For Skylake Xeons

    September 1, 2017

    There is no question that Intel has reached its peak in the datacenter when it comes to compute. For years now, it has had very little direct competition and only some indirect competition for the few remaining RISC upstarts and the threat of the newbies with their ARM architectures.

    The question now, as we ponder the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors and their “Purley” platform that launched in July, is this: Is Intel at a local maximum, with another peak off in the distance, perhaps after a decline or perhaps after steady growth or a flat spot, or is this the …

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  • Kafka Wakes Up And Is Metamorphosed Into A Database

    August 30, 2017

    Sometimes a database is like a collection of wax tablets that you can stack and sort through to update, and these days, sometimes it is more like a river that has a shape defined by its geography but it is constantly changing and flowing and that flow, more than anything else, defines the information that drives the business. There is no time to persist it, organize it, and then query it.

    In this case, embedding a database right in that stream makes good sense, and that is precisely what Confluent, the company that has commercialized Apache Kafka, which is a …

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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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