• 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 …

    Read more

  • Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

    May 6, 2017

    Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

    Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

    In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

    Read more

  • Swiss Army Knife File System Cuts Through Petabytes

    May 1, 2017

    Petabytes are in the future of every company, and luckily, the future is always being invented by the IT ecosystem to handle it.

    Those wrestling with tens to hundreds of petabytes of data today are constantly challenged to find the best ways to store, search and manage it all. Qumulo was founded in 2012 and came out of the chute two years ago with the idea that a software-based file system that includes built-in analytics that enables the system to increase capacity as the amount of data grows. QSFS, now called Qumulo Core, also does it all: fast with big …

    Read more

  • 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 …

    Read more

  • Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

    April 20, 2017

    Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

    But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

    Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

    Read more

  • FPGAs To Shake Up Stodgy Relational Databases

    April 18, 2017

    So you are a system architect, and you want to make the databases behind your applications run a lot faster. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and now, there is yet another — and perhaps more disruptive — one.

    You can move the database storage from disk drives to flash memory, You can move from a row-based database to a columnar data store that segments data and speeds up accesses to it. And for even more of a performance boost, you can pull that columnar data into main memory to be read and manipulated at memory …

    Read more

  • Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express

    April 14, 2017

    There is no question that plenty of companies are shifting their storage infrastructure from giant NAS and SAN appliances to more generic file, block, and object storage running on plain vanilla X86 servers equipped with flash and disk. And similarly, companies are looking to the widespread availability of dual-ported NVM-Express drives on servers to give them screaming flash performance on those storage servers.

    But the fact remains that very few companies want to build and support their own storage servers, and moreover, there is still room for an appliance approach to these commodity components for enterprises that want to buy …

    Read more

  • Weaving Together Flash For Nearly Unlimited Scale

    March 29, 2017

    It is almost a foregone conclusion that when it comes to infrastructure, the industry will follow the lead of the big hyperscalers and cloud builders, building a foundation of standardized hardware for serving, storing, and switching and implementing as much functionality and intelligence as possible in the software on top of that to allow it to scale up and have costs come down as it does.

    The reason this works is that these companies have complete control of their environments, from the processors and memory in the supply chain to the Linux kernel and software stack maintained by hundreds to …

    Read more

  • Squeezing The Joules Out Of DRAM, Possibly Without Stacking

    March 23, 2017

    Increasing parallelism is the only way to get more work out of a system. Architecting for that parallelism required requires a lot of rethinking of each and every component in a system to make everything hum along as efficiently as possible.

    There are lots of ways to skin the parallelism cats and squeeze more performance and less energy out of the system, and for DRAM memory, just stacking things up helps, but according to some research done at Stanford University, the University of Texas, and GPU maker Nvidia, there is another way to boost performance and lower energy consumption. The …

    Read more

  • Memory And Logic In A Post Moore’s Law World

    March 22, 2017

    The future of Moore’s Law has become a topic of hot debate in recent years, as the challenge of continually shrinking transistors and other components has grown.

    Intel, AMD, IBM, and others continue to drive the development of smaller electronic components as a way of ensuring advancements in compute performance while driving down the cost of that compute. Processors from Intel and others are moving now from 14 nanometer processes down to 10 nanometers, with plans to continue onto 7 nanometers and smaller.

    For more than a decade, Intel had relied on a tick-tock manufacturing schedule to keep up with …

    Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles

Mellanox
HPE Solutions

The Next Platform Weekly

Tap the stack to painlessly subscribe for a weekly email from The Next Platform, featuring highlights, analysis, and stories from the week directly from us to your inbox with nothing in between.