The push by established datacenter tech vendors to get into the as-a-service game has accelerated in recent months, fueled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need by organizations to more quickly embrace cloud services to help them adapt to the suddenly shifted business model that features a more widely distributed workforce, which brings a truckload of security and management issues. …
We have nothing against disk drives. Seriously. And in fact, we are amazed at the amount of innovation that continues to go into the last electromechanical device still in use in computing, which from a commercial standpoint started out with the tabulating machines created by Herman Hollerith in 1884 and used to process the 1890 census in the United States, thus laying the foundation of International Business Machines. …
The external storage market – like most sectors of the IT industry – took a beating in the first quarter, thanks in large part to the novel coronavirus pandemic. …
Every IT supplier has cloudy envy. And not just because utility-style pricing has become normalized by the big public clouds, but because they want to have a more regular, annuity-like revenue stream rather than always chasing the next deal. …
One of the common themes – and one could say even the main theme – of The Next Platform is that some of technologies developed by the high performance supercomputing centers (usually in conjunction with governments and academia), the hyperscalers, the big cloud builders, and a handful of big and innovative large enterprises eventually get hardened, commercialized, and pushed out into the larger mainstream of information technology. …
The memory and I/O wall are arguably the two most intractable bottlenecks in the modern datacenter. …
Sometimes, a startup takes such a new and profound approach to a problem that it is hard to know where to begin to describe how radical of a change that company has made in developing its product. …
When IBM’s Summit supercomputer was officially unveiled in June, some hailed it as the first exascale system because of its peak performance in applications that made heavy use of GPU acceleration at low precision. …
By definition, HPC is always at the cutting edge of computing, driving innovations in processor, system, and software design that eventually find their way into more mainstream computing systems. …
General purpose computing systems have been seen as the best way of delivering on enterprise data processing needs for decades. …
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