The Pervasive Datacenter

How IBM sees the cloud

Gordon Haff — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:43:00 PDT

At the conceptual level, there isn't a huge amount of disagreement among technologists about the fundamentals of cloud computing--its forms, its characteristics, its potential benefits, and its limitations.

That said, individual vendors come at cloud computing from particular perspectives that often reflect the character and needs of an existing ...

Netbooks are notebooks

Gordon Haff — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:39:00 PDT

There's a bit of an anti-Netbooks meme making the rounds in blogs and on Twitter and the expected push-back from their fans. From where I sit, this is fueled partially by the conflating of product and product category, partially by competitive sniping, and partially by genuine consumer confusion. Let ...

Wind River brings a hypervisor to embedded systems

Gordon Haff — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:39:00 PDT

We most associate hypervisors and virtualization with servers from their beginnings as tools for development and testing, through their widespread adoption as a means to reduce the number of physical servers needed, to their current stage as a foundation for dynamic IT architectures. Virtualization on the client side has been more of a niche&#...

Microsoft talks virtualization and cloud

Gordon Haff — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:47:00 PDT

Microsoft's Server and Tools Business did the virtual conference thing for industry analysts last week. Fellow analyst Judith Hurwitz ably describes the limitations of this format. I concur with much of what she writes.

That said, I give Microsoft props for trying. A lot of companies have canceled or ...

HP ProLiant SL goes for the extreme

Gordon Haff — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:58:00 PDT

I plan to delve into Hewlett-Packard's new ProLiant SL Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) line more deeply in an Illuminata Insight over the coming weeks. But it's a significant announcement that highlights some important trends, so hitting some of the highlights of today's announcement is worthwhile.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

To ...

Standards for the cloud not what you think

Gordon Haff — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:26:00 PDT

Coming from a technical background, when I hear the word "standards," I tend to think of things that usually go by strings of numbers (802.11), inscrutable abbreviations (USB), or at best a slightly more melodious moniker dreamed up by a marketing department (WiMAX).

They may be codified by a ...

CA buys assets from data center automation firm Cassatt

Gordon Haff — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:04:00 PDT

[UPDATE: Clarification that CA "acquired some of their data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets" rather than the company as such.]

Although it's hardly unique to this area of technology, it seems as if the start-ups in the forefront of developing data center automation tools have had ...

Multi-threading reviewed

Gordon Haff — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:05:00 PDT

I've been getting a fair number of questions about multi-threading the past couple of weeks. The reason is that Intel has been previewing its "Nehalem EX" Xeon processor in advance of Advanced Micro Device's six-core "Istanbul" CPU launch. Intel's Nehalem generation has simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)--which Intel ...

IBM building 'green' data center at Syracuse

Gordon Haff — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:43:00 PDT

Not long ago the infrastructure pieces needed to construct a data center were pretty straightforward--Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, power conditioning equipment, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and electrical and plumbing to tie it all together. It wasn't unimportant. But it was largely a well-understood extension to the ...

The cloud in the forest

Gordon Haff — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:01:00 PDT

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, offers what I think may be the best way to think about the evolution toward cloud computing.

We should view computing models much more like forests than trees. These computing model forests have a variety of different trees, and ...