• 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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  • The Business Of HPC Is Evolving

    November 17, 2016

    With most of the year finished and a new one coming up fast, and a slew of new compute and networking technologies ramping for the past year and more on the horizon for a very exciting 2017, now is the natural time to take stock of what has happened in the HPC business and what is expected to happen in the coming years.

    The theme of the SC16 supercomputing conference this year is that HPC matters, and of course, we have all known this since the first such machines were distinct from enterprise-class electronic computers back in the 1960s. HPC …

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  • HPC Spending Outpaces The IT Market, And Will Continue To

    June 22, 2016

    Sales of HPC systems were a lot brisker in 2015 than anticipated, and according to the latest prognostications from the market researchers at IDC presented from the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany this week, growth in the HPC sector will continue to outpace that of the overall IT market for many years to come.

    In a sense, the good numbers that the HPC market turned in last year are perhaps a little undercounted. In his traditional early morning breakfast briefing at the conference, Earl Joseph, program vice president for high performance computing at IDC, said that he had been …

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  • Hyperscalers, Enterprises Pull Back On Server Spending

    June 6, 2016

    The server cycle has some long waves that are not always in phase with each other, and that is generally a good thing. But every now and then, the waves synchronize, and it is either really exciting as the market rises or something of a bummer as it falls. In the first quarter of this year, there was a bit of a dip but still an order of magnitude less dramatic than the collapse in shipments and sales during the Great Recession.

    It is important to keep perspective, and it is actually quite remarkable that the server market is as …

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  • China Lays The Chip Foundation For Its Next Platform

    February 17, 2016

    It would be far beyond the purview of The Next Platform to have deep insight to the complexity, scope, and scale of the Chinese economy. All the same, what does – and does not – happen in China over the next several years is going to help determine the key aspects of the platform on which many organizations will run their applications, whether or not they are located in China.

    The old adage from the 20th century was that if the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold, or the flu, or sometimes pneumonia. The roots of this saying …

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  • Custom Servers Cool, Custom Storage White Hot

    September 4, 2015

    If the server and storage markets are bellwethers for the underlying strength of the economy, as we at The Next Platform believe, then the global economy has been perhaps more healthy than other indicators might have been pointing to. There is always a several month lag in the shipment and sales data for servers and storage, so we won’t really have a sense of what is going on right now until the end of the autumn. But through the quarter ended in June, the markets looked pretty good, all things considered.

    The analysts at IDC recently released their market trackers …

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  • Why Cloud Is Taking Over Datacenter Spending

    April 22, 2015

    While there are plenty of companies that have built a core competency in IT infrastructure acquisition and management, and think they can provide themselves a competitive edge based on those skills, it looks like there is a growing and potentially much larger cadre of companies who simply do not want to be messing around with basic infrastructure anymore.

    This is not the first wave of IT outsourcing we are experiencing, but it could very well end up being the last. Datacenter consolidation and outsourcing of systems or applications was all the rage for a certain class of IT shops in …

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  • Hyperscale, Cloud Drive Infrastructure Capacity Up, Prices Down

    March 10, 2015

    If you think that the giants of the hyperscale and cloud world have a hankering for minimalist, custom servers forged by original design manufacturers, you should see the appetites they have for their storage gear–it is a lot larger perhaps than many realize.

    The rise of hyperscale web applications and commercial clouds is having a dramatic effect on the market for both servers and storage. The hyperscalers and cloud builders operate at a much larger scale than most enterprises, and are keen to remove as much cost as possible from their systems since, after all, these machines in their datacenters …

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