The Pervasive Data Center

I'm often called on to explain cloud computing to people who aren't in the tech industry. It's hard. Sure there's some ambiguity in the term but that's not really my issue. It's also the case that some of the attributes associated with cloud computing like scalable, self-service, and so forth aren't necessarily that easy to put in layman's terms, at least without a lot of words and background. But that's not my core problem either.

Rather, I've come to think that my biggest stumbling block is this: When I talk … Read more

A little under 10 years ago, I paid a visit to a Boston hotel suite where Gary Stimac was showing off a new server that his company, RLX Technologies, would soon be announcing. Stimac had been employee No. 5 at Compaq. He signed on as chief executive officer of RLX to bring the company's so-called blade servers to market.

Blade servers are a modular, pluggable design that often lets more computing capacity be crammed into a smaller footprint than with conventional rackmount servers, reduces the number of cables needed, and shares some of the physical infrastructure such as power … Read more

Virtualization first hit the big time because it let users consolidate many system images onto a single physical server, thereby reducing the amount of hardware they needed to buy. However, as time has passed, the mobility of virtual machines, the ability to move them from one server to another at the click of a button, has come to be seen as a big win as well. Going by names such as VMotion (in VMware's case), mobility enables system maintenance and workload balancing without interrupting users. And, ultimately, it underpins visions of more dynamic computing environments where workloads transparently and … Read more

I continue to think that device convergence is overrated, a relic of a time when electronics cost relatively more than they do today. That's not to say it never happens. Today, smartphones often function as MP3 players as well and game consoles increasingly are a portal to many types of digital entertainment, not just games. That said, the general trend seems to be toward more consoles, displays, PCs, pads, and mobile devices rather than fewer.

There's an important point to consider though. Reader cvaldes1831 sums it up nicely:

There is one very practical reason to limit the number … Read more

One of the dynamics of the server virtualization marketplace that doesn't get the attention it probably should is the question of where the hypervisor "lives" and gets delivered to buyers. Services, such as load balancing and replication, that leverage a virtualized foundation to construct what goes by names like Dynamic IT may be ultimately more important than the foundation's components. However, the choice of hypervisor matters today if only because it serves as a sort of control point for the profitable components above.

Hypervisors get delivered in three different ways.

The first is in the form … Read more

It's not exactly news that business applications aren't modernized on a whim. That's because organizations tend to operate on a rule that can be paraphrased something like, "If it's more or less working, leave it be. There's plenty of work that actually needs to be done."

But every now and then I run across an example that emphasizes just how long software can hang around. We're not talking a revision or two of a packaged application but genuinely obsolete technology.

In the course of doing some research, I ran across a 2009 … Read more

It's been a long time coming, but earlier this week, Intel finally launched "Tukwila," the latest iteration in its Itanium family of high-end microprocessors.

Coming on the same day as IBM introduced both its Power7 chip and the first of an associated line of servers, Tukwila didn't garner as much attention as it might have otherwise. It's also true that today's Itanium is something of a specialty product. But that doesn't make it irrelevant.

Tukwila will be the first Itanium to incorporate Intel's serial processor communications link (QuickPath Interconnect, or QPI) and … Read more

After announcing earlier Wednesday that it closed its $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle followed up with a previously scheduled Webcast during which executives laid out the rationale for the acquisition and detailed plans for much of Sun's product portfolio.

When the acquisition was first announced, it seemed an odd match to many. Oracle was a software company, and Sun was widely thought of as a hardware company--though it was really more than that. But there was always another aspect to this, if you thought more broadly about where the computer industry was headed.

The big boys were all aligning through either acquisition or partnership into the sort of vertically integrated computer companies that were once familiar but were largely displaced by processor, operating system, server, storage, and networking specialists.

At the time of Oracle's announcement that it was acquiring Sun, we had already seen moves like Hewlett-Packard's purchase of EDS and the ramp-up of its ProCurve networking business. The subsequent months have only highlighted this trend, with the increasingly close partnership between Cisco Systems, EMC, and EMC's VMware subsidiary. And HP's acquisition of 3Com and partnership announcement with Microsoft. IBM never abandoned a considerable vertical bent.

With Sun and Oracle's announcement of a database appliance last fall, there could no longer be any doubt that delivering factory-integrated stacks from server to storage to software was a big part of this acquisition. The only surprise today was the strength of the all-Oracle stack message.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, among others, made it clear that the IBM of the 1960s was the company's integration model. There were a few references to selling "best-of-breed components" to customers who wanted to purchase that way. But promoting the benefits of buying a complete hardware and software stack designed to work together was one of the other overriding themes of the day. I'm not sure that I heard "heterogeneous"--one of the terms that computer companies like to use, even when they don't really mean it--uttered once during the five-hour broadcast.

The other big theme could be summed up as something along the lines of: Sun had great innovation but executed really poorly. For example, Oracle President Charles Phillips said "Sun had created a very complex supply chain" and that Oracle was going to "implement a more attractive systems support plan. Some [support was] done by Sun, some by others, some by no one." Ellison was, if anything, more blunt: "We just need to do a better job of taking engineering output and delivering to customers."

There was much throughout the day on that theme, and it's hard to argue with the basic contention.… Read more

As cloud computing in its various forms increasingly happens rather than just being talked about, I'm starting to hear the idea of a cloud-computing exchange floated. There are certainly things to like about the concept but I don't see it playing out in pure form anytime soon for reasons that I'll get into.

Let's start by defining what I'm talking about when I say "exchange" here. The idea is that different hosted infrastructure providers would put their unused capacity onto a spot market and buyers would bid for it. Different pricing and auction … Read more