Servers are still monolithic pieces of machinery and the kind of disaggregated and composable infrastructure that will eventually be the norm in the datacenter is still many years into the future. …
In the previous article, we left off with the basic storage model having its objects first existing as changed in the processor’s cache, then being aged into volatile DRAM memory, often with changes first logged synchronously into I/O-based persistent storage, and later with the object’s changes proper later copied from volatile memory into persistent storage. …
Some techies are capable of writing programs in assembler, but all will agree that they are very glad that they don’t need to. …
As readers of The Next Platform are well aware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is staking a lot of the future of its systems business on The Machine, which embodies the evolving concepts for disaggregated and composable systems that are heavy on persistent storage that sometimes functions like shared memory, on various kinds of compute, and on the interconnects between the two. …
With machine learning taking off among hyperscalers and others who have massive amounts of data to chew on to better serve their customers and traditional simulation and modeling applications scaling better across multiple GPUs, all server makers are in an arm’s race to see how many GPUs they can cram into their servers to make bigger chunks of compute available to applications. …
The voracious appetite for compute and storage capacity among hyperscalers and cloud builders once again drove the server market to new heights as 2015 came to a close, and unless some wobbling from Hewlett Packard Enteprise and Cisco Systems is a leading indicator of a slowdown – and we do not think it is – then this year will probably also be a record setter. …
A year ago, at the Open Compute Summit, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which was not even called that yet, unveiled its bare-bones, vanity free, hyperscale-class Cloudline server lineup, which had the double-edged task of keeping the company selling minimalist machines in China in conjunction with manufacturing partner Foxconn while at the same time giving HPE a chance to defend against the unrelenting pressure of the handful of original design manufacturers (ODMs) that want to topple the world’s largest server maker from its perch. …
If there has been a time when the IT industry was not being roiled by multiple transitions, we can’t remember it. …
It takes a lot of engineering talent, time, and money to create custom interconnects that are the basis of scale-up servers, which is one of the reasons that so few companies have been able to sustain that investment over the years. …
I recall teaching a college class in operating systems, when well into the class, thinking I was getting the points across, a few of the students stopped the class and asked “Yes, but what really is an operating system?” …
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