Dell called: It wants its server market share back
Dell is plotting to supercharge its server sales as other vendors keep growing. The plan is compelling, but whether it will work on everyone in the market is unclear. Read more »
More bad news for server makers
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
Updated: Will the server market ever come back? IDC research shows worldwide revenue on server sales off nearly 8 percent year over year. Read more »
‘Other’ server vendors keep gaining momentum, while HP, Oracle slide
HP and other server vendors lost more ground in the war against lesser known manufacturers in the first quarter of the year, new Gartner figures show. Read more »
I bought the fastest server so why is my app slow?
photo: Flickr / bandarj
Buying information technology is complicated and made more so by companies trying to pick the best solution without ever asking themselves what’s best for their business at this point in time. Read more »
Liquid server cooling gains a few more backers, and enterprises could follow
One company peddling products that keep servers cool in liquid, Green Revolution Cooling, expects two webscale companies to make announcements soon about production-scale plans. The company’s chief executive sees wider adoption down the line. Read more »
CloudFlare is trying to fight DDoS attacks by designing its own gear
photo: Shutterstock / teflon_timmy
Web performance and security startup CloudFlare isn’t as big as Google or Facebook, but it does handle a lot of traffic. And now, like its larger peers, the company is designing its own gear to solve it own unique brand of problems. Read more »
FWIW, Mark Hurd squelches Dell rumors
Oracle co-president Mark Hurd, in response to a question, indicates zero interest in becoming Dell CEO. Blackstone Group reportedly had Hurd on its short list of prospective picks should it win the Dell deal. Read more »
How an unknown Taiwanese server maker is eating the big guys’ lunch
In the server business, Taiwanese hardware company Quanta has shifted from an original-design manufacturer to much more of a direct seller. It wants to extend the trend and sell other products, too. Read more »
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How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much. Those optimistic about […] Read more at GigaOM Pro »
eBay shows the world how to measure MPG for data centers
eBay has released a trove of information about the efficiency of its data centers, and plans to do so quarterly as part of a mission to continuously track computing resources and tie them to bigger business goals. Read more »
‘Other’ server brands show strong growth thanks to webscale companies
photo: Open Compute Project
Lesser known server makers reported bigger revenue growth for another quarter, as Facebook and other webscale companies keep buying custom servers. Read more »
Rackspace will build its own servers just like Facebook and Google do
photo: Rackspace
Rackspace’s bet on Open Compute has been taken to a new level as the hosting provider has decided to build its own servers — a move it hopes will save it up to 30 percent in costs. Read more »
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The role of converged infrastructure in the data center
Cloud computing’s increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There’s still money in old-school tech, and maybe a lesson for startups too
photo: Shutterstock / mangostock
As startups race to become the next big thing, they often downplay the successes and sales of those they hope to replace. But large companies spend billions on old technology because they don’t have the resources to try something new. Read more »
QR codes for satellites and mineral oil baths for servers: Facebook’s top hacks
photo: Facebook
Facebook’s hackathons have generated some cool ideas. Facebook shared the top hacks from 2012 that range from silly (3-D printed globes showing where and how people use Facebook) to serious (calendar views for you upcoming events on the site). Read more »
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How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
photo: Facebook
The “mobile first” philosophy is under way today. That means a new generation of mobile-centric data centers will arise over the next three years, with chips, servers, and power architectures customized for mobile workloads. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Guess who else wants to build ARM-based servers? Texas Instruments
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
Texas Instruments will join the slew of chipmakers using cell-phone cores in servers. But it has two twists with its KeyStone architecture — integrated 10 gigabit Ethernet networking and TI’s digital signal processing cores to aid in performing complex math. Read more »
Telefónica squares up to Amazon with Instant Servers global IaaS offering
The Spanish telecoms giant has made its big infrastructure-as-a-service play with Instant Servers, which it claims will beat entrenched rivals through better reliability and scalability. Read more »
Dell has shipped 1M webscale servers in five years to arm the cloud
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
Meet ARM’s two newest cores for faster phones and greener servers
ARM has introduced two next-generation processor cores aimed at spanning the continuum of compute needs today — from mobile clients to the racks of servers supporting our web services. The new A-50 family of cores will appear in devices in 2014 and 2015. Read more »
Europe’s also trying crowdsourced law-making, but is it just too big?
photo: Shutterstock/Imoloko
It’s one thing to try crowdsourced legislation in relatively small, cohesive societies such as those in Finland and Iceland, but a whole different ballgame when you try it on a population of half a billion people. Read more »
Dell wants to tune big data apps for ARM servers
Dell is donating an ARM-based server to the Apache Software Foundation so contributors can test their projects on new, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Big data projects such as Hadoop and Cassandra are low-hanging fruit, but many webscale applications likely could use them to save power. Read more »
Why AMD must embrace ARM to stay alive
photo: AMD
AMD said last week it would lay off 15 percent of its workers, but we hope next week it will announce an ARM license for use in servers. Such a move looks like AMD’s last chance for relevance as the chip world experiences a huge upheaval. Read more »
Calxeda gets $55M as ARM-based servers near reality
Calxeda, a company making dense, low-power servers using the same ARM chip architecture found in cell phones, has raised $55 million to take on Intel as well as the myriad other vendors that want to take ARM’s low power chips and cram them into servers, Read more »
AMD introduces its new SeaMicro server for a big data world
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 »
Etsy unveils its infrastructure (and its Supermicro love)
Etsy shared the details of its hardware architecture on Friday, showing the world a whole lot of Supermicro servers running everything from web servers to Hadoop. At this point, software is the name of the game at webscale, so hardware openness is just welcome community service. Read more »
Intel immerses its servers in oil — and they like it!
photo: Intel
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read more »
Like Netflix, Facebook is boosting its edge network
photo: Pinar Ozger
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
Cores in the cloud: Does brawny or wimpy win?
photo: Pinar Ozger
The number of servers in the cloud continues to grow, but should those servers use brawny cores filled with raw power or lightweight wimpy cores? Infrastructure planning requires both, says Jason Waxman from Intel: As the cloud to evolves, a wide range of chips are needed. Read more »
Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy and DevOps 2.0
Building an enterprise app has radically changed in the last few years thanks to the DevOps movement and cloud computing. They’ve taken an incredibly manual process and translated it into reproducible code. But like in the Star Trek transporter, everything still has to go just right. Read more »
Not just networking: How Facebook plans to deconstruct the data center.
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
Making the web more efficient, a thousand servers at a time
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
What can system data tell you about your app? Everything.
Web companies like Google and Facebook invest incredible resources in making sure they know everything about their infrastructures and how server-level issues are affecting the applications that comprise their lifeblood. The rest of the business world is now catching on. Read more »
Cisco’s servers now tuned for Hadoop
Cisco and EMC have come up with a reference architecture featuring Cisco UCS server gear that’s designed to run the EMC Greenplum MR software, the company’s “enterprise-class” Hadoop distribution that features technology it OEMs from Hadoop startup MapR. Read more »
Facebook dives into storage
Facebook, the social networking giant that’s already made big waves with its open-source server plans, is now taking on storage in a very big way, according to a published report. The hardware will help Facebook keep up with the exploding demand of its 840 million users. Read more »
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What converged infrastructure means for the future of the data center staff
Large data centers are increasingly moving to converged infrastructure, and most of the chatter has been about this slick, new hardware. But it also has deep implications for enterprise employees and the CIOS and managers that must retrain them — or do away with them altogether. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Don’t run your own data center if you’re a public IaaS
photo: The Planet
Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn’t run their own data centers. Read more »
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Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intel and Micron prep for 128GB storage
Are you ready for 128 GB memory cards and solid state drives art more reasonable prices? Intel and Micron have teamed up to deliver a 128 GB multicell flash memory chip that will make incredibly dense memory a reality for tablets, cell phones and yes, servers. Read more »
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Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
