EnterpriseAI Articles, Trends & News

Oracle Unfolds Sparc Roadmap, Fujitsu Boosts Sparc64 X Clocks

With Intel having refreshed its Xeon E5 and E7 chips recently and IBM getting ready to debut its Power8 chips at the end of the month, Sparc partners Oracle and Fujitsu have to make a little noise to keep people thinking about their chips and platforms. To that end, Oracle has updated its roadmap for ... Full article

IBM System/360: The Original Enterprise Tech

Five decades ago, after three years of development in what was one of the most expensive and gutsy moves ever made by a public company, IBM launched the System/360 mainframe and in a way helped to create the modern computer business that we know today. That these virtual card wallopers are still around is a ... Full article

Federated Cloud Services Offer Response To Commodity Pricing

As cloud services rapidly become a commodity, smaller local service providers are feeling the heat as market leaders Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft engage in a price war that is quickly boiling down to who can best compete on average hourly price for storage, computing, and other cloud offerings. Hence, smaller and mid-tier service ... Full article

Cisco Counters OpenFlow SDN With OpFlex, Updates Nexus Switches

Cisco Systems has taken a different approach to software-defined networking, by baking some of its features into its Nexus switching hardware to combat OpenFlow and more generic switches with what the company will contend is better engineering. And, as you might expect, with that new switching hardware comes a new protocol, called OpFlex, which Cisco ... Full article

Five Years On, UCS Makes Cisco A Systems Player

Five years ago, when Cisco Systems launched its "California" Unified Computing System and entered the server business, that launch was not purposefully timed to come out into the gaping maw of the Great Recession. But it is probably a fortunate thing for the networking giant and systems wannabe that it worked out that way. Recessions ... Full article

IBM Chip Suitors Rumored To Narrow To GlobalFoundries

GlobalFoundries has reportedly emerged as the leading candidate to acquire IBM's remaining semiconductor manufacturing facilities. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 3 that Intel and foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp were also in talks with IBM. TSMC is believed to have dropped out of negotiations. A deal with IBM would deliver to GlobalFoundries ... Full article

The Hyperscale Lessons Of Healthcare.gov

The last six months have been a hair-graying experience for everybody involved in the Healthcare.gov rollout. While it ultimately managed to meet its goals and enroll 7.1 million people, the disastrous start and near implosion of the website behind President Obama's signature project can provide hyperscale professionals with lessons on what went right, what went ... Full article

Greenpeace Sees Progress Toward ‘Green’ Datacenters

We can't do much without power, and cloud computing services are using a growing share of the world's electrical power. That trend is expected to accelerate as emerging markets like China scramble to meet energy demand from online users, a new report cautions. Fully 50 percent of the world's projected population – 3.6 billion people ... Full article

Fusion-io Tweaks Flash To Speed Up MySQL Databases

Server flash memory maker Fusion-io has tuned up its ioMemory PCI-Express flash cards with two new features that will significantly speed up the performance of MySQL databases. The new features, called Atomic Writes and NVM Compression, have been developed in conjunction with the MySQL community. The atomic in the first new feature refers to the ... Full article

Google Lifts Veil On “Andromeda” Virtual Networking

The biggest public cloud providers have adjacent businesses that actually fund the development of the infrastructure that starts out in their own operations and eventually makes its way into their public cloud. So it is with Google's "Andromeda" software-defined networking stack, which the company was showing off because it is, after all, Interop this week. ... Full article

Amazon Gains DoD Approval For Cloud Services

Uncle Sam has approved broader use of cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) said this week it would allow the military services along with civilian agencies to use Amazon cloud services under its FedRAMP certification process. FedRAMP stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. The security authorization ... Full article

Extreme Networks Rolls Out High-End Switch, SDN Framework

Upstart Extreme Networks rolled out a new software-defined network architecture and a high-end switch during this week's Interop conference in Las Vegas. San Jose-based Extreme Networks claimed its BlackDiamond X8 offers "cloud-scale switching" using a new four-port to 100 Gb/sec line card for the modular switch. Overall switching capacity for the X8 modular switch ranges ... Full article

Contract Manufacturer Jabil Sells Straight Into Hyperscale Datacenters

The hyperscale systems market is getting a new supplier, and this one is a big one with plenty of expertise in manufacturing complex servers and storage and integrating gear at the rack level. The startup is called StackVelocity, and it is a business unit of contract manufacturer Jabil Circuit. You may not know Jabil by ... Full article

Hyperscale Titans Team To Scale MySQL

Four of the titans of hyperscale Web applications – Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – have teamed up to create a set of common extensions aimed specifically at running the open source MySQL relational database at scale. The effort, called WebScaleSQL, is leveraging the open source MySQL 5.6 database that is controlled by Oracle, which ... Full article

Cloud Price War Heats Up With Microsoft Azure Cuts

The cloud computing price war intensified this week as Microsoft Corp. announced it would return fire by cutting prices on computing and storage. The move comes in response to price cuts disclosed last week by Google and Amazon Web Services. Citing its earlier pledge to match rival Amazon on commodity cloud prices, Microsoft said in ... Full article

Arista Champions New 100GbE Optical Spec, Files To Go Public

Frustrated by the limitations of the current crop of transceivers that have been approved by the IEEE and adopted by the industry, Arista Networks is teaming up with Intel and two dozen customers and parts suppliers to create a new transceiver specification that will suit the needs of hyperscale datacenters. The news comes hot on ... Full article

Dell Z9500 Switch Pushes 40GbE Density Up, Costs Down

The increasing adoption of 10 Gb/sec Ethernet between servers and out to storage arrays is driving the need for more bandwidth higher up in the aggregation layer of the network. To many, 40 Gb/sec Ethernet switches are still too expensive, and all vendors are being pushed to deliver both 40 Gb/sec and 100 Gb/sec switches ... Full article

IBM Juices Hadoop With Java On Tesla GPUs

Commercial applications written in Java have plenty of parallel tasks that can be accelerated through the use of GPU coprocessors. IBM is very keen on leveraging the combination of its Power processors, which have high memory and I/O bandwidth, and Tesla GPU coprocessors from Nvidia, which have lots of cores and high memory bandwidth as ... Full article

Best Practices in Datacenter Cooling

Happening Now

Recent News

Contributors