HPE Welcomes You To The Machine!

HPE has publicly rolled out their “The Machine” prototype, carrying 160TB of fabric-attached memory, 1280 ARM cores and 100Gb/s fiber interconnects.  Ok, so this is a whole lot of memory!  But it’s not just about memory.

In both HPC and big data analytics, and in increasingly converged applications that combine analytics with operational processes at scale, the game is all about increasing data locality to compute. Ten years ago we Hadoop unlocked massive data scale processing for certain classes of problems by “mapping/reducing” compute and big data across a cluster of commodity servers.  We might look at that as the “airy” and “cloudy” kind of approach.  Then Spark came about and showed how we really need to tackle big data sets in memory, though still across a cluster architecture.

Here today we see the bleeding edge of what aggressive hardware engineering can do to practically cram massive memory and large numbers of cores all together - compressing and converging compute and big data as densely as possible - in some ways a throwback nod to the old mainframe. Folks with highly-interconnected HPC-style modeling and simulation application needs that haven’t been well served by commodity scale-out (i.e. affordable) big data analytic architectures are going to want to look closely at this development. (and in fact, HPE has modified a Spark version to make different internal assumptions to match this new architecture to great affect (15x at least)).....

Open Wide and Say Ahh!

I’ve been immersed in “Open” for the last two weeks here in Boston, attending both Red Hat Summit 2017 and then OpenStack Summit. There are quite a few things worth paying attention to, especially if you are an enterprise IT shop still wondering how your inevitable cloud (and services) transformation is really going to play out, including accelerating application migration to containers and the rise of platform Management as a Service.

First, let’s talk about what’s new with Red Hat (RH).  As we’ve noted before, RH is an impressive company.

Nutanix is massively expanding its software-only ecosystem

Nutanix is expanding its presence as a software defined leader in the fast-growing enterprise private/hybrid cloud computing solution provider market.

VMware HCI momentum continues with vSAN 6.6 release!

With the recent release of vSAN 6.6, the maturity of the product and customer momentum shined through.

Actual Hybrid of Enterprise Storage and Public Cloud? Oracle creates a Cloud Converged System

What’s a Cloud Converged system? It is really what us naive people thought hybrid storage was all about all along.  Yet until now no high performance enterprise class storage ever actually delivered it.  But now, Oracle’s latest ZFS Storage Appliance, the ZS5, comes natively integrated with Oracle Cloud storage. What does that mean? On-premise ZS5 Storage Object pools now extend organically into Oracle Cloud storage (which is also made up of ZS storage) - no gateway or third party software required.

IBM Cloud Object Storage Provides a Strong Data Foundation for Modern Healthcare

The healthcare industry is facing tremendous data challenges as the medical community evolves to support rapid growth in digital medical imaging, new government regulations and improvements in patient care.