• Modern Storage Software Erodes Resistant Data Silos

  September 20, 2016 Lance Smith

  

  With the record-breaking $60 billion Dell/EMC acquisition now complete, both of these companies and their customers now have more options than ever before to meet evolving storage needs. Joining forces helps the newly minted Dell Technologies combine the best of both worlds to better serve customers by blending EMC storage and support with Dell pricing and procurement.

  But there is some trouble in paradise. Even when sold by the same vendor, most storage systems have been designed as secluded islands of data, meaning they aren’t terribly good at talking to each other.

  In fact, this silo effect is exacerbated …

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• The Inevitable Slide As Server Virtualization Peaks

  February 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It has been just about a decade and a half since server virtualization juggernaut VMware debuted the first release of its ESX bare metal hypervisor, and nearly a decade since this hypervisor and its virtual machine guests had enough oomph to take on the job of encapsulating and consolidating multiple operating systems and workloads on since physical servers.

  The timing of ESXi 3.5 in 2007 coincided perfectly with the beginning of the Great Recession, and VMware, with a server virtualization stack that was arguably more mature and focused mostly on Windows Server workloads, was able to get dominant share of …

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• CPU Virtualization In The Cloud: Getting Your Slice, And More

  September 30, 2015 Mark Funk

  

  In the first part in this series, we talked about the nature of processor virtualization on different systems and how this affects the underlying capacity and performance of compute in cloud infrastructure. It is important to understand the nature of the capacity that you are buying out on a cloud because not all systems and hypervisors virtualize compute in precisely the same manner. This has important ramifications for the applications that run on these clouds.

  You will recall that AWS provides at least two metrics for control: ECU (short for EC2 Compute Unit) and vCPU (meaning virtual Central Processing Unit). …

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• CPU Virtualization: The Tech Driving Cloud Economics

  September 28, 2015 Mark Funk

  

  We can rent as much or as little compute capacity or storage or connectivity as we want, and we can get it when we want it. And we don’t have to maintain or account for any of that hardware. What a great idea, this cloud. Why hasn’t that been done long ago? And the companies providing all of those resources have been increasingly making it easy for us to use. Life in the IT world sure seems good.

  Those providing the cloud to us, though, know that – as with most everything – this good life comes with a few …

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• Fat VMs Push Some Enterprises To All-Flash Arrays

  August 21, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Hyperscalers like Apple and Facebook helped flash vendors like Fusion-io, now part of SanDisk, get off the ground in such a big way that they could then attack the broader enterprise market. But not every lesson about how to make the best use of a new technology comes from on high. Some of it comes from the enterprise trenches, and such is the case of flash-accelerated virtual machines.

  Only a few years ago, when enterprise-quality flash was a lot more expensive than it is today, upstart disk array makers started adding flash to their boxes as a tier for storing …

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• Software Already Defines Your Datacenter

  August 7, 2015 Robert Wipfel

  

  Just stop and take a few minutes from your always-on day, to reflect upon how enterprise IT used to be. A lot has changed in the past two decades: X86 servers, Ethernet, storage networking (SAN and NAS), high availability clusters enabled by shared (network) storage, storage and server virtualization, flash storage, software-defined networking, and now, software-defined storage.

  Contrast all of that with the emergence of hyperscale datacenters: Internet properties leveraging commodity servers and open source software that also disrupted traditional enterprise IT architecture, with Everything-as-a-Service.

  As Marc Andreessen famously said, Software is Eating the World. What he foresaw a …

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• CoreOS Hyperscales Linux By Making It Invisible

  February 25, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Operating systems matter and they always will matter on the systems that run the applications of the world. It would just be a whole lot better if they were essentially invisible and were self-maintaining, especially at massive scale. That, in a nutshell, is the goal of the CoreOS distribution of Linux, and it looks like this upstart operating system is starting to get traction in the enterprise.

  Having a customized Linux operating system that can run at scale is not a new idea. The largest systems at the major supercomputing centers of the world have heavily customized distributions of Linux, …

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• New Protocol Targets Cloud Scalability

  February 26, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It is no accident that virtualizing the network has taken longer than virtualizing servers or storage, and it is similarly not a coincidence that the hyperscale datacenter operators and a small number of very large businesses have decided to build their own switches and routers operating systems for these devices. Networking gear is overloaded with protocols to support every possible scenario and customer, and networks are about as difficult to scale as NUMA systems.

  LANs and virtual LANs have their physical limits, and as always, customers want to expand beyond those limits, but this requires yet another layer of abstraction …

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• Tesla Compute Drives Nvidia Upwards

  February 25, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  The graphics processor business was humming along as Nvidia ended its fiscal 2015 year in late January. This part of the company broke through $1 billion in sales in a quarter for the first time, thanks in part to the growing adoption of Tesla GPU coprocessors for a variety of computing tasks.

  In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015, which ended on January 25, GPU revenue rose by 13 percent year-on-year to $1.073 billion. In her commentary, CFO Colette Kress said that the Tesla GPU business “increased strongly,” driven in particular by big deals Nvidia and its partners had won …

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• VSAN Ready For All Enterprise Workloads

  February 4, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  The hyperconverged upstarts may have created the market for server-storage hybrids to support clusters of virtual machines, but it may be VMware that benefits most from this movement as customers look to simplify their infrastructure for supporting virtualized applications in their datacenters.

  One of the sticking points for server virtualization when it was first being widely deployed in enterprise datacenters is that the cool features like vMotion live migration required sophisticated and expensive storage area networks. This an old-school way of doing things, putting shared storage with fast network links in the center of systems that may not actually be …

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