A new report from IHS says microserver shipments will triple this year. The question is, Who will emerge as the leading microserver providers? Read more »
The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent, publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines, with a shift toward those companies able to scale with little additional capital. Read more »
In 2013 cleantech investing will move toward companies serving unsubsidized markets where software plays a role in reducing power consumption. In many ways this is a return to plays for energy efficiency, and there’s still money to be made from business models built around saving energy. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intel has released its first Atom system on a chip aimed at the data center. The new SoC consumes 6 watts and has many enterprise-class features. But with ARM taking aim at the same market Intel has a totally different type of competition to worry about. Read more »
Despite the difficult year in cleantech, there’s quite a few things that excited me this year. Here’s 10 things to be thankful for in cleantech. Read more »
AMD, which has fallen behind its chief rival Intel in the x86 processor business, announced on Monday plans to make new 64-bit chips based on ARM’s chip technology that will target data center and cloud computing companies. AMD will continue to make x86 processors as well. Read more »
In the first announcement since SeaMicro was acquired by AMD, AMD has detailed its new server tech, which is optimized for big data and cloud computing. The new platform improves performance by moving storage closer to the computing center. Read more »
Cloud computing is changing the world of microprocessor-chip design. Soon we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) and a group of new incumbents (Tilera and others) that offer fresh solutions to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook has made waves by detailing its plans to use what an executive calls chips that have a cell-phone architecture in its future data centers. The social network plans to test such chips now and next year and will likely have them in production in 2014. Read more »
Will hyperscale data centers like those at Facebook, Google and Amazon be willing to adopt low power ARM or even Linux based multi core processors in their data centers? Read more »
As we move into the age of webscale and cloud computing the traditional data center architecture is blowing apart, according to execs of startups that have built new kinds of disruptive data center gear and software at the Structure conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell showed off a box that contains 48 ARM-based servers, joining others making boxes with processors that uses the same architecture as the chips inside your cell phone. The server consumes less power and could find a home in web servers and Hadoop clusters. Read more »
Intel and AMD are at it again. Intel could have bought SeaMicro, the energy efficient server vendor that recently got snapped up by AMD, but it decided to pass, said Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. Read more »
AMD acquired low-power server maker SeaMicro in a move that says a lot about how low power is the new black and how the relationships and market dynamics between chip makers and server OEMs is transforming. Read more »
The ongoing imperative to lower power consumption in the data center drove another key acquisition last week. AMD, a company that has fought a decades-long losing war with Intel over building the best CPU, acquired low-power server maker SeaMicro in a move that says a lot ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Now that AMD has confirmed its purchase of low-power server maker SeaMicro, I bet its next move will be an announcement around licensing the ARM architecture. That’s right: AMD will do a deal with the company that provides the architecture for chips inside your cell phone. Read more »
GigaOM has learned that AMD is planning to announce its acquisition of low-power server maker SeaMicro according to industry sources. This would be a huge move for AMD, which has to double down in the server market since it has failed in the mobile market. Read more »
The compute and server world is changing rapidly, with webscale companies such as Facebook and Amazon dominating the web and creating new lines of business. With that comes change to the value chain of server and silicon companies, and we now stand at an inflection point ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
ARM said its next generation architecture will offer cores capable of 64-bit computing. The boost from 32-bits to 64-bits will push ARM-based processors over the last big hurdle keeping the chip IP company outside the enterprise and corporate computing market, and pit it squarely against Intel. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Both mobile and high performance computing are placing huge power efficiency and performance demands on chips, but the real $64,000 question is how long until such extreme computing use cases hit the server mainstream. Asked another way, how long till Amazon adopts ARM-based servers? Read more »
Intel is very serious about low power chips, although it won’t have them until 2013. The company showed off the long-rumored Haswell chips at its developer forum on Tuesday, which it says can can run all day and offer a 20x reduction in power. Read more »
The world of networking is changing, thanks to shifting traffic patterns, more widely distributed webscale systems and the economic need for the networking world to catch up to where the computing and server world is today. This trend toward networking virtualization has huge implications for vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Dell and Intel, but it also could become the foundation for an entire new ecosystem of startups and value creation, much like what the creation of the hypervisor did for computing. In this research note we look at what network virtualization is, why we’re moving toward it, what OpenFlow is and what the opportunities are for companies, both large and small, beyond that technology. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, SeaMicro and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With power accounting for between 30 and 50 percent of functional operating costs in a data center, power consumption is on everyone’s mind. So much so that at semiconductor conference Hotchips on Friday, Intel and AMD, two companies that have long competed around processor performance, spent hours discussing ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The future of data centers is not about performance. It’s about performance per watt. It’s about building a data center that uses less power, lowers operating costs and leaves a smaller carbon footprint. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SeaMicro, a low-power server maker, has managed to increase the amount of computing power under its hood by 50 percent while decreasing the power consumption of its machines by a quarter. But perhaps most interesting, it has managed three new products in the last year. Read more »
We give Intel a lot of flack here at GigaOM for not being mobile enough or low power enough for scale out computing, but the chipmaker is doing all right in the server category. We discussed how well and the future for servers in this video. Read more »
Big processors or little processors, scale-up or scale-out, on-premise or in the cloud: the answers might not be as easy as one would think. Web-style, scale-out architectures, low-power server processors and cloud computing are getting more attention by the day, but they have their limits. Read more »
In the debate over the future of server hardware, it comes down to the need for highly efficient hardware using up a fraction of the space and a fraction of the power of legacy hardware solutions, versus the desire for more powerful options from existing manufacturers. Read more »
For decades, innovation in the chip industry has largely been governed by the needs of personal computers. But thanks to the proliferation of connected mobile devices, the growth of the consumer web and services available online and on-demand, the PC’s influence on chip design is fading. Read more »
Online dating service eHarmony is using SeaMicro’s specialized Intel Atom-powered servers as the foundation of its Hadoop infrastructure, demonstrating that big data applications such as Hadoop might be a killer app for low-powered micro servers. Read more »
Low-power server maker SeaMicro has raised another $20 million in funding, according to a filing. SeaMicro’s server technology consumes a quarter of the power of a regular server but packs more than 2,000 CPU cores. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For this year’s Green:Net, a team of GigaOM editors and industry insiders chose 10 innovators in the digital energy space to present their “big ideas” for using information technology to fight climate change. Here are some of the insights they shared. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Data centers are becoming greener across the board, and the latest proof of this came from Facebook. Here’s a list of 10 innovations from entrepreneurs and engineers that are leading to more energy efficient, and less carbon intensive, data centers. Learn more at Green:Net 2011! Read more »
Our third annual Green:Net event is coming up on April 21 (yep, next week!) and we’re getting really excited about all the great speakers, announcements and discussions that will go on. Here’s a cheat sheet of 10 things you can’t miss at the show. Read more »
Presenting our 10 Big Ideas winners, which are some of the most innovative in the digital energy space, and have novel “Big Ideas” for how to use information technology to fight climate change. The winners will present at Green:Net 2011 on April 21 in San Francisco. Read more »
