Store Archives - The Next Platform

VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter

April 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore?

That’s a very good question, and for now the answer for VMware seems to be to sell virtual storage and virtual networking networking to that vast base of virtual compute customers, and take wheelbarrows full of money to the bank on behalf of parent Dell Technologies. Virtualization took root during the Great Recession …
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Pushing Up The Scale For Hyperconverged Storage

April 16, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

Hyperconverged storage is a hot commodity right now. Enterprises want to dump their disk arrays and get an easier and less costly way to scale the capacity and performance of their storage to keep up with application demands. Nutanix has a become as significant player in a space where established vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell EMC, and Cisco Systems are broadening their portfolios and capabilities.

But as hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) becomes increasingly popular and begin moving up from midrange environments into larger enterprises, challenges are becoming evident, from the need to bring in new – and at times …
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The Evolution Of Hyperconverged Storage To Composable Systems

April 12, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

Hyperconverged infrastructure in some ways is like the credit card in those old TV ads: in this case, it’s everywhere that enterprises want to be. HCI put compute and storage on the same cluster, tightly integrate them with networking and unified management tools and essentially give enterprises a private cloud for the datacenter as well as pushing compute out to the edges in a consistent manner.

HCI also promises a bunch of other things beneficial to enterprises, including streamlined management, lower costs, faster speeds, and easier scalability than traditional IT systems to better address the rise of cloud computing, analytics, …
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MapD Fires Up GPU Cloud Service

April 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the long run, provided there are enough API pipes into the code, software as a service might be the most popular way to consume applications and systems software for all but the largest organizations that are running at such a scale that they can command almost as good prices for components as the public cloud intermediaries. The hassle of setting up and managing complex code is in a lot of cases larger than the volume pricing benefits of do it yourself. The difference can be a profit margin for both cloud builders and the software companies that peddle their …
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Removing The Storage Bottleneck For AI

March 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If the history of high performance computing has taught us anything, it is that we cannot focus too much on compute at the expense of storage and networking. Having all of the compute in the world doesn’t mean diddlysquat if the storage can’t get data to the compute elements – whatever they might be – in a timely fashion with good sustained performance.

Many organizations that have invested in GPU accelerated servers are finding this out the hard way when their performance comes up short when they get down to do work training their neural networks, and this is particularly …
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Dell EMC Puts Open Networking on the Edge

March 21, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

Computing resources – including storage and networking – are continuing their march toward the network edge, drawn like a magnet to the rapidly proliferating connected devices in the world and the huge amounts of data that they’re generating that need to be collected, processed and analyzed.

As we’ve talked about here at The Next Platform over the past few months, the distributed nature of computing, fueled by such drivers as the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and greater mobility, and the demand for capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics to manage the data call for moving …
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Open Source Data Management for All

March 14, 2018

On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we talk about an open source data management platform (and related standards group) called iRODS, which many in scientific computing already know—but that also has applicability in enterprise.

We found that several of our readers had heard of iRODS and knew it was associated with a scientific computing base, but few understood what the technology was and were not aware that there was a consortium. To dispel any confusion, we spoke with Jason Coposky, executive director of the iRODS Consortium about both the technology itself and the group’s role …
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Changing HPC Workloads Mean Tighter Storage Stacks for Panasas

March 13, 2018 Sponsored Content for Panasas

Changes to workloads in HPC mean alterations are needed up and down the stack—and that certainly includes storage. Traditionally these workloads were dominated by large file handling needs, but as newer applications (OpenFOAM is a good example) bring small file and mixed workload requirements to the HPC environment, it means storage approaches need to shift to meet the need.

With these changing workload demands in mind, recall that in the first part of our series on future directions for storage for enterprise HPC shops we focused on the ways open source parallel file systems like Lustre fall short for users …
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Expanding Use Cases Mean Tape Storage is Here to Stay

March 7, 2018

On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform we talk about the past, present, and future of tape storage with industry veteran Matt Starr.

Starr is CTO at tape giant, Spectra Logic and has been with the company for almost twenty-five years. He was the lead engineer and architect forthe design and production of Spectra’s enterprise tape library family, which is still a core product.

We talk about some of the key evolutions in tape capacity and access speeds over the course of his career before moving into where the new use cases at massive scale are. In …
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Enterprise HPC Tightens Storage, I/O Strategy Around Support

March 5, 2018 Sponsored Content for Panasas

File system changes in high performance computing, take time. Good file systems are long-lived. It took several years for some parallel file systems to win out over others and it will be many more decades before the file system as we know it is replaced by something entirely different.

In the meantime, however, there are important points to consider for real-world production HPC deployments that go beyond mere performance comparisons, especially as these workloads grow more complex, become more common, and put new pressures on storage and I/O systems.

The right combination of performance, stability, reliability, and ease of management …
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