Dell-bashing is a fairly common pastime these days, but I actually think Dell has a golden opportunity to reposition itself as IT visionary if it treats hardware it as what it really is: a delivery mechanism for software and services. Read more »
VMworld can be a lot to digest, but it also can be a good barometer of where IT is and where it’s going. A couple days removed from the show, I gave some thought to the interesting trends I noticed and the insightful discussions I had. Read more »
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 »
Dell’s Crowbar installation-and-configuration tool now works VMware’s Cloud Foundry. With servers fast becoming low-margin commodities thanks to the push toward micro servers, Dell is doing its best to make deploying the software that inspired the new generation of servers a breeze. 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 »
Cell phones can teach us a lot about energy efficiency. New energy technologies that have commonly been introduced first in cell phones are now being mimicked across other industries, leading to information technology and transportation that is more energy-efficient. Read more »
After launching an open server and data center design in April, Facebook is prepping for version 2.0 of its hardware, and huge server buyers are playing along. From Rackspace to major financial services companies, big hardware buyers are getting into Open Compute. Read more »
Calxeda, the startup building servers using the same kind of ARM chips used in cell phones, has launched its partner program. Companies such as Eucalyptus, Gluster, Canonical and Opscode lined up Tuesday behind the server company to show their willingness to work with its specialized hardware. 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 »
The majority of data center operators are relying on server virtualization, hot and cold aisle containment and power monitoring software to make their operations more energy-efficient, according to data released today by an industry research group. And many data center operators are eying the cloud. Read more »
When Steve Jobs flashed inside images of Apple’s new cloud data center during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he ignited a mini firestorm of speculation about just kind hardware is filling its immense surface area. Everyone seems to agree that HP and Teradata were big winners. Read more »
After years of hype, the IT industry finally had a rude awakening this spring that reminded us that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: Everything fails sooner or later. Here’s how to build around that. Read more »
As a rule of thumb, systems can grow ten times under their current architecture or paradigm, and then they must be re-architected. This 10X effect causes old technologies to become obsolete, new ones to emerge and underlies the massive shift to cloud computing. Read more »
Yesterday, Cisco and NetApp announced more than 150 customers have adopted their joint FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture, a sign that might point to a falling out between Cisco and its VCE partners, EMC and VMware. Rumor has it Cisco isn’t happy with that arrangement. Read more »
The advent of Web 2.0 and its principles of scaling out and designing to fail have brought about something of a sea change in how companies buy servers. For evidence, one needn’t look any further than Dell, which is making a killing selling micro servers. Read more »
Cisco today took the covers off a new Allen, Texas, data center that will serve as the foundation for Cisco’s private cloud computing effort, which it calls Cisco Elastic IT Services. The new data center is designed for maximum efficiency and to withstand tornado winds. Read more »
Do you have any idea what your incessant status updates require Facebook to do on the back end? Supporting 100 million photo uploads each day and as many as 18,000 comments requires the social network to perform 24 billion calculations a second at peak times. Read more »
Facebook has shared the details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets like it has shared its software code.And that data center? It has a PUE of 1.07. Read more »
Dell is undertaking a sweeping effort to improve its place in the cloud computing market with several new data centers, services and a converged infrastructure system to compete with Cisco’s Unified Computing System. It’s a pretty significant change of pace for Dell, although not necessarily surprising. Read more »
We’re in the midst of a computing implosion: a re-centralization of resources driven by virtualization, many-core CPUs, GPU computing, flash memory, and high-speed networking. We have a lot to watch over the next few years: what I like to call the coming of the Super Server. Read more »
After hemorrhaging cash for the better part of a decade and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in three years, it looks like storied server and supercomputer maker SGI might actually turn a profit again. It’s plan involves everything from diversification to, unfortunately, cutting personnel costs. Read more »
Shortly after its second-quarter earnings statement revealed a rapidly growing server business, Cisco this revealed Tuesday morning its server-customer count was nearing 4,000 as of Jan. 29. That’s an impressive number considering that Cisco’s Unified Computing System server business has only been shipping since September 2009. Read more »
Cisco’s second-quarter earnings have investors worried, but Cisco might be able to hang some of its hopes on servers. While high-end switches are losing ground, Cisco’s server revenue grew 700 percent year over year and now has an annual run rate of $650 million. Read more »
Apple officially stopped producing and selling its Xserve servers today, but that doesn’t mean the consumer-centric company is done in the data center. Mac OS X as a guest operating system atop VMware is an intriguing notion should Apple decide to pursue it. Read more »
There are two sides to every story: cloud computing might be a problem or a solution; the responsibility for online privacy might lie with web sites or the government; the ideal server might be either underpowered or overclocked; and Oracle might or might not ruin Java. Read more »
Smooth-Stone, the company building servers using chips used in today’s cell phones changed its name to Calxeda, hired some executives and made one of the first public statements about what it plans to deliver in terms of energy efficiency for the data center: a 10x improvement. Read more »
Marvell said today that it has built a chip designed for servers that uses the same architecture as chips inside cell phones. As vendors release ARM-based server chips, and challenge Intel and AMD’s dominance it opens the server market to more competition and innovation. Read more »
Dell is often characterized as a mere server maker. It’s easy to see why when Dell is compared with competitors like HP and IBM, both of which complement their hardware with software and services that add the real value – and account for most of the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IBM today increased the scope of its internal cloud-computing portfolio with three new CloudBurst offerings. The most important of the bunch might be IBM’s Service Delivery Manager software, which has been decoupled so that it can run atop any standard x86- or Power-based servers. Read more »
Conventional wisdom suggests buying into the convenience and performance of converged infrastructure means buying into the dreaded vendor lock-in problem. As it turns out, however, that doesn’t have to be the case — Dell and Egenera are two players leading the charge for open converged infrastructure. Read more »
If you’ve been following the data center hardware space for the past year, you might be under the impression that integrated stacks are the future of IT. After all, Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems was all about integration, and HP and Cisco appear locked in a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A cluster of recent announcements, launches and other maneuvers indicate that energy-efficient ARM chips could be headed from mobile devices to the data center. Read more »
If you have a smartphone, it’s a safe bet that there’s an ARM-based chip under the hood. Why not Intel? For the same reasons you wouldn’t stuff a V8 engine into a Smart Car; it’s overkill and it would deplete the gas tank in a hurry ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Talk of data centers can be equal parts fascinating and mind-numbing; speculating about what new data centers signify, however, is nothing short of riotous. And, this week, Apple and Facebook gave us plenty to talk about. Facebook emerged as the mystery Company X building a large ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
[qi:gigaom_icon_cloud-computing] Love it or fear it, there is no denying the impact cloud computing is having on IT practices. Despite a summer full of high-profile outages, cloud computing spent the season continuing its march toward ubiquity, as our third-quarter wrap-up at GigaOM Pro showed (subscription required). Read more »
Data center hardware infrastructure can be roughly categorized into servers, networking and storage. But two of those areas are merging before our eyes, as Cisco and HP battle for server and network integration. The business and technical implications of this consolidation affect other companies and customers […] Read more »
Something’s rotten in Cupertino, and Apple fans running the 3.0 firmware are beginning to get anxious as a result. I’m talking about push notifications, of course, which have yet to dazzle and amaze most iPhone owners running 3.0. A few apps are trickling in with some […] Read more »
According to a report in Friday’s Charlotte Observer, North Carolina lawmakers are falling over themselves to entice Apple to build a state-of-the-art server farm in their backyard — specifically, Catawba or Cleveland county. The carrot they’re dangling? In this case, nothing short of a multimillion-dollar tax […] Read more »
The storage industry is on the cusp of the biggest structural change since networked storage began to substitute for direct-attached storage a decade ago. Despite being one of the fastest growing technology sectors in terms of capacity, the economics for many participants are deteriorating. Several major technology shifts will radically redefine the economics of the industry leading to slimmer margins for all but the most innovative, software-driven players. In essence, the future of storage is about storage software that increasingly absorbs intelligence that used to be hard-wired in a proprietary storage controller and array, which in turn is increasingly becoming an abundant pool of commodity disks. It is the pace of this transition that is at issue. In this report, we show how the different customer segments and associated workloads will evolve at different paces, and examine the associated opportunities for both incumbents and new market entrants. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dell, the world’s second-largest server maker, is responding to Cisco Systems and its new blade servers by doing what it knows best: Taking a neutral stance and helping to sell devices to customers that want a more heterogeneous data center environment. That’s code for people who […] Read more »
