I was recently at SC15, an international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. SC15 has grown over the years and shows off some of the more interesting gear I have seen. High-performance computing (HPC) has taken off within the modern data center, whether via traditional HPC clusters, 150-teraflop machines, or even massive arrays of …
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Storages for HPC and Beyond”
For those of us working in IT infrastructure, it is easy to lose sight of why we have a job. Any kind of infrastructure is doing its job best when it is invisible. Nobody comments that the light turned on when we flick the switch. Buses that turn up on time and are clean and comfortable are …
Continue reading “IT Infrastructure: It Isn’t Even about the Applications”
For the last eighteen months, VMware has been pushing NSX as the third pillar of its software-defined data center (SDDC). NSX has three big selling points that VMware promotes: taking control of the network, automation and orchestration, and microsegmentation. The first two are standard SDDC fare: first, pull the function into software, abstract where necessary, and orchestrate to bring …
Who or what is EUC? In an industry plagued by TLAs (three-letter acronyms), EUC, or end-user computing, is the new nomenclature for VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure. This is not just the emperor’s new clothes, but a redefinition of the paradigm of adopting a more inclusive view of the software, hardware, and processes that shore up …
Continue reading “Will 2016 Be the Year of VDI — Sorry, EUC?”
The cloud is all very well—buy resources as you need them, and don’t care about the infrastructure required to deliver those resources. But there is no cloud: it’s just someone else’s computer. So you should still think about what is required and what happens when things go wrong. In particular, what happens when a cloud …
Continue reading “A Redundant Array of (In)expensive Clouds”
The big question I keep asking myself is, “Is cloud a utility yet?” In other words, can I choose an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud based on utility pricing and expect the same thing I expect from a utility—as in, “it just works”—or is there more to it than that? In order to decide if the …
