Building and operating a private cloud is a complex undertaking. Most cloud platforms are designed to play well with thousands of physical servers. This is great for public cloud providers and extremely large enterprise organizations. However, smaller organizations that need a cloud built from tens of physical servers can find these platforms challenging. I’ve written …
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From Mainframes to Containers
A few days ago, Stevie Chambers tweeted about the evolution from mainframe to container: “Why is it a surprise that VMs will decline as things miniaturise? Mainframes → Intel → VMs → Containers, etc. Normal, I’d say.” By “Intel” here, I’m going to take Stevie to mean “rackmount servers.” I’m also going to assume that by …
Goodbye to a Founding Father: Andy Grove, 1938–2016
On March 21, 2016, we lost Andy Grove, a founding father of our industry. Andy was a first-generation Hungarian immigrant who became employee number one at Intel. After earning his PhD at Berkeley, he worked with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor until Moore and Noyce co-founded Intel; Grove joined them there on the day of Intel’s incorporation.
Hardware Is Dead, Long Live Hardware
There is a growing movement to abstract hardware completely away, as we have discussed previously. Docker with SocketPlane and other application virtualization technologies are abstracting hardware away from the developer. Or are they? The hardware is not an issue, that is, until it becomes one. Virtualization may require specific versions of hardware, but these are …
4 Reasons The Calxeda Shutdown Isn’t Surprising
The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …
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A Look at the HP Moonshot 1500
Last week HP announced their “second generation” HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and Intel Atom S1260-based Proliant Moonshot systems, a high-density computing solution targeted at hyperscale computing workloads. They’re billing it as the first “software defined server” and claiming that it can save 89 percent of energy, 80 percent space, and 77 percent of the cost of their DL380 servers.