The Pervasive Data Center

Systems are getting more general-purpose. At least in terms of units sold, servers with two x86 processors dominate the landscape.

And it's more than just servers. For example, on Tuesday Vyatta announced a new series of network appliances, the Vyatta 3500. These systems, like the other appliances that Vyatta sells, combine standard off-the-shelf x86 server hardware with an integrated software subscription that provides networking functions such as Firewall, VPN, IP address management, administration, diagnostics, and so forth. Vyatta pitches its appliance as a much lower-priced alternative to dedicated networking hardware from the likes of Cisco.

We've seen similar … Read more

Technology can improve the customer experience. This usually translates into more money for the company doing the improving.

So-called self-service retail is a great example of this. For most purposes, I'm much happier using Expedia and similar services online than I was going to a travel agent's office in the old days. The recommendation engine, customer reviews, streamlined ordering system, and sheer scale of Amazon.com present for many things a vast improvement over traditional brick-and-mortar shopping.

This isn't always the case, of course. I find it stupefying that Lowes and Home Depot are the two chains … Read more

I've been an IT industry analyst for almost 10 years. I've seen many technologies come, go, or fail to even arrive in the first place. However, during that time, a few techs have emerged that play a big part in fundamentally defining how businesses do computing. Most first emerged prior to 2000, but it has been during the past decade that they've truly changed things.

1. x86 processors were already well entrenched in corporate computing by the end of the 1990s, especially in their role as the "(In)tel" part of "Wintel" servers … Read more

Computing is cheap. Both by historical standards and compared to many other machines and services that we purchase. All of us appreciate that intellectually at some level. But, when it comes to thinking about which devices make sense and which don't, it often seems as if we're treating computing like it's a scarce and expensive resource.

I see this tendency again and again when discussions turn to new types of devices or software such as Google's Chrome OS. I often get asked when will a certain shiny-new-thing replace desktops running Windows or some other existing gadget.… Read more

EMC hasn't exactly kept its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) a secret. The company has talked about the technology at analyst events and its global marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis, has blogged on the topic.

But now version 1 has officially launched, despite earlier reports that it wouldn't arrive until 2010. I'll get to why there have probably been some mixed signals about availability in a bit, but first let's look at what FAST is.

Different types of storage associated with computers perform relatively better or worse. Faster is usually better of course. But faster also tends … Read more

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

This old saw is arguably less true than in years past. Today, for a lot of reasons, there's more pressure to reach agreement on one way to do a certain thing. (Think the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray debacle for an example of what happens when vendors can't agree on a single approach.)

Standards aren't a single thing. Some have been blessed with the appropriate incantations by some official or quasi-official body. Others come from an industry consortium. And still others are "de facto&… Read more

There was legitimate debate at one point whether the style of cloud computing often called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) was really going to take off in a big way.

The aim of PaaS is to supply developers with a set of services that they can use to build scalable applications without doing all the underlying grunt work themselves.

Such a platform might automatically add additional capacity in response to increased load. Or it could offer various middleware services, such as databases and application servers. (The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a definition document that I and many others use to … Read more

More and more of our computing happens through applications and Web sites out in the network. It's in the "cloud" to use the current trendy lingo.

One consequence is that we're starting to look at our clients differently. That's because they're increasingly a sort of window into the cloud rather than devices that run a lot of application-specific code and store a lot of application-specific data locally. Clients can therefore be "thinner," which is to say loaded with less software and less tailored to the needs and wants of a given user. … Read more

This is the time of year to take stock in where high-performance computing (HPC) sits and where it is headed. That's because the SC09 conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week and it's the biggest HPC conference around.

SC is an odd duck as conferences go. Last year it had more than 10,000 attendees and, yet, it's a largely volunteer-organized event in a world where trade shows of this scope are packaged by conference specialists or some specific corporation. Think the much-renamed LinuxWorld  (run by IDG) or VMworld (run by VMware).

"SC&… Read more