AMD Epyc sounds pretty epic, with epoch-defining memory, I/O, and even cores of a dual-socket server in a single socket. And that’s something to get excited about, especially considering that the Zen cores inside these chips are almost at IPC parity with Intel’s latest, and can handle dual threads like Intel, too.
The Year of Cloud Extension
If data is locked in the datacenter, so are applications. The first step towards overcoming data gravity is to discard the concept of data locality and begin building a new infrastructure. Once data is “there”, in the cloud, applications may begin moving as well.
Wavebox: All Your Web Apps Are Belong To Us
Wavebox offers the ability to bring in all your web apps to a single app, including email, Office 365, G Suite, and Slack. You get full notification support and a consistent interface wrapped around these apps. We tried it out for a week to replace all of our desktop clients and browser tabs.
Excelero’s NVMesh Magic
Excelero recently came out of stealth, and wants to provide the software layer to allow businesses to build a high performance scale out storage infrastructure. It’s a software only play, running on commodity hardware. That may not sound like the new hotness, but I’m here to tell you, Excelero is exciting!
Datera Elastic Data Fabric
The public cloud certainly has profoundly changed enterprise IT. It provides limitless scale, impressive utilization, and changed capital investments. However, it often fails to provide enterprise level performance on a consistent level, and can lack the fine tune controls organizations have come to expect. Datera is building a cloud data management foundation for on-site clouds. Their goal is to make this autonomous and transparent layer to the organization to offer the agility of the public cloud, but with enterprise class performance and control.
HyperGrid: On-Demand & On-Site
Want on-demand pricing, but need your infrastructure to stay on-site? HyperGrid now offers just such a solution.
NetApp Heads Into Microsoft’s Azure Cloud
Although most of the attention at NetApp’s “Data Driven” event yesterday in Boulder, CO was focused on the new HCI offering, my interest was aroused by a different announcement: NetApp is now powering an enterprise-class storage offering integrated with Microsoft Azure. In the long run, this move into the cloud might well prove more important than even a solid entrant in the hot hyperconverged infrastructure market.
Touch Bar Update After WWDC
In the seemingly endless onslaught of announcements from Apple’s WWDC, there didn’t seem to be any specific updates or news on the Touch Bar. Released about six-months ago as “a revolutionary new way to use your Mac”, I was expecting to get something out of the event. Perhaps a roll out of the Touch Bar to the desktop keyboards. Maybe some statistics about how many developers have adopted the new interface. But instead, we got nothing…
NetApp Announces HCI
Hyperconverged infrastructure has been around for a while. We’ve seen companies go public on the strength of the market, and companies get acquired for the same reason. It’s a way to simply the often complex world of provisioning and managing a virtualization infrastructure. But HCI has been around long enough that the limitations of that model have become clear to the enterprise. Any new entrant to the crowded market should have solutions to those problems.
Today, NetApp announced their entry into the HCI market. In their messaging, they hammered in on those limitations.
Back to the Storage Future with Intel’s SPDK
A decade ago, flash began changing the storage market in profound ways. We’re now seeing similar disruptions with NVMe. But the speeds of the new interface bring to light new bottlenecks for performance, especially at scale. Intel designed their Storage Performance Development Kit to specifically focus on driving down latency to allow for scaling that borders on linear.