Vast Data

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. …

After a decade of vendor consolidation that saw some of the world’s biggest IT firms acquire first-class HPC providers such as SGI, Cray, and Sun Microsystems, as well as smaller players like Penguin Computing, WhamCloud, Appro, and Isilon, it is natural to wonder who is next. …

There is little question that storage and I/O are hot topics once again with the arrival of a host of new technologies that displaced the tried and true from decades past (disk, bulky parallel file systems, etc.). …