Bringing the Azure platform from Microsoft’s own public cloud down into the datacenters of enterprises and service providers means more than just giving these shops the same tools to manage raw virtualized compute, storage, and networking. …
In a very real sense, the world’s three biggest public cloud operators are also among the largest server and storage manufacturers. …
FPGAs might be the next big thing for a growing host of workloads in high performance and enterprise computing, but for smaller companies, not to mention research institutions, the process of onboarding is not simple—or inexpensive. …
There are many vectors to scale, and we try to examine them all here at The Next Platform as we consider the implications for the systems, storage, and switching that IT organizations buy or rent to support their applications. …
A public cloud is, at its most basic level, a giant shared computing facility that spans a datacenter or multiple datacenters, and as such, it needs a kind of operating system of its own to make the collection of servers, storage, and switches behave as a single machine to both its users and to the company that is operating the cloud. …
For certain kinds of modeling, simulation, and machine learning workloads, the advent of GPU coprocessors has been a watershed event. …
Microsoft doesn’t just love running Linux workloads on the Azure cloud. …
It looks like networking price war is getting set to break out in the largest datacenters of the world, and this is precisely what Google and Microsoft had in mind when they formed the 25G Ethernet consortium back in July 2014. …
There are many different kinds of scale that system architects are wrestling with, and over the five decades of the modern computer business, a number of techniques have been employed, often concurrently in the same system, to try to goose the overall performance of machinery over time. …
After three years of research into how it might accelerate its Bing search engine using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Microsoft came up with a scheme that would let it lash Stratix V devices from Altera to the two-socket server nodes in the minimalist Open Cloud Servers that it has designed expressly for its hyperscale datacenters. …
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