A version of this article, with complete coverage of branch office WAN appliances, use cases and recommendations is available this Channel Partners report. With the pressure on IT to deliver new services without bigger budgets, organizations large and small are under pressure to cut costs and increase efficiency while simultaneously improving application performance and security. It’s a tall… Read More »
With last week’s big Altera acquisition Intel made an expensive bet on a future of data center hardware that uses significantly more customized designs than today’s monolithic racks of commodity x86 servers. As I wrote at the time, “The only justification for Intel’s move can be its perception of a secular technology shift from commodity processors to custom… Read More »
Note: a version of this article appeared on TechTarget: The Intel E7 v3 processor entered the ring against IBM Power and other systems. But will the new BI features be enough to take over scale-up workloads? Intel’s tick-tock CPU development strategy of alternating between process node shrinks and new microarchitectures has a long, consistent track record of product improvements.… Read More »
A juxtaposition of events last week saw several major technology companies reveal key strategies and product updates that collectively served to illustrate the ongoing struggles of old tech blue bloods from the client-server era striving for relevance in the world of mobile devices, social software, cloud services and big data analytics. Together, this amalgam of technologies are the… Read More »
Update: A rewritten and condensed version of this report appeared as a Forbes column, available here. Cloud software stacks, like those used at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other hyper scale operations, have radically altered how system architects design and build data centers. Out are big, gold-plated integrated hardware systems like fault-tolerant x86 boxes, mainframes and enterprise storage arrays. In… Read More »
Server operating systems seem positively boring in an era of cloud infrastructure, omni-virtualization, mobilized business and big data, but they are a necessary component of enterprise applications that still influences many IT decisions. However, we’re undeniably in the midst of technology transitions that will have profound implications for the server OS landscape over the next product cycle, many of… Read More »
Intrigued by the concept of a converged infrastructure but worry you lack the expertise to DIY? Big IT vendors see big business building insta-cloud infrastructure For IT organizations wondering how to actually build a private cloud, my latest report is for you. Plenty of CIOs like the idea of a converged data center but get headaches thinking about the complexity. Even given… Read More »
IDF, Intel’s festival for hardware geeks, better known as IDF, was largely overshadowed by some announcements from that not insignificant fruit company from Cupertino. The coincident timing was unfortunate since Intel provided plenty of news for both PC watchers and data center designers. On the server front, the company released a major update to the Xeon line based on the… Read More »
As I wrote in this column on the eve of VMworld, the last week of August saw VMware hold its annual festival to virtualization, cloud and the myriad ways software is eating the data center, for an event that’s become a milestone on the annual tech calendar where IT managers and sysadmins rub shoulders with industry executives, analysts and… Read More »
With Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) just around the corner, it’s a great time to assess the company’s current position and likely moves as it addresses tumultuous changes in its primary consumer and enterprise businesses. As I detail in this column, for IT managers, the focus should be less on PC and mobile processors, or whether Intel (finally) breaks into the smartphone… Read More »