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Friday, September 9th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | IBM: Tencent to Run OpenPower Servers in Its Data Centers Tencent, China’s answer to Facebook which this week became the country’s most valuable publicly traded company, is integrating new servers powered by OpenPower, IBM’s alternative to Intel’s ubiquitous x86 chip architecture, into its hyperscale data centers. That’s according to IBM. Yesterday, the company rolled out a new OpenPower chip and three new OpenPower servers, including the one being deployed at Tencent data centers to run Big Data workloads. OpenPower is at the center of IBM’s current server play, focused on high-horsepower workloads as opposed to the general-purpose x86 market the company got out of in 2014 when it sold its commodity server business to Lenovo. OpenPower is a chip architecture developed through a foundation whose members include Google, Nvidia, and Broadcom, among many others. Unlike x86, which Intel keeps exclusive to itself, IBM licenses OpenPower to other companies wishing to build chips using the architecture. Tencent, according to IBM, recently tested a large cluster of its new servers, finding that they performed three times faster than the x86-based infrastructure it had in place, with fewer servers. The announcement didn’t specify, however, what kind of x86 servers the cluster was compared to and how old they were. The results were convincing enough for Tencent to go ahead with a production deployment of the IBM servers, but it’s unclear how big that deployment will be. According to IBM, the Chinese company is “integrating the new servers into its hyperscale data centers for big data workloads.” Social networking giant Tencent drives revenue growth through advertising and gaming on its messaging apps WeChat and QQ. On Monday, when its shares rose 4.2 percent, the company’s market value reached $256.6 billion, surpassing China Mobile as the most valuable company in China and joining the likes of Apple and Alphabet on the list of 10 largest public companies in the world. If the scale of Tencent’s deployment is significant, it should be concerning for Intel, whose x86 architecture has dominated the data center market for years with little trouble from challengers. Other two hyperscale data center operators, Google and Rackspace, have been co-designing a server based on IBM’s Power9 CPU, with plans to open source the server architecture through the Open Compute Project. Founded by Facebook, OCP has become the primary hub for open source hardware design for hyperscale data centers. IBM announced Power9 last month, but systems based on these 14nm chips are not expected to ship until sometime in 2017. Internet giants like Tencent, Google, and Facebook, which operate some of the world’s largest data centers, are now the primary growth drivers for suppliers in the data center hardware food chain, and emergence of a serious challenger to Intel in this space would threaten to slow the chip giant’s future revenue gains. And OpenPower isn’t the only challenger that’s gathering up steam. At the high end of the data center market, Intel is also being challenged by Nvidia. Much of the computing might in IBM’s new Linux servers comes from integration with Nvidia GPUs, working in tandem with OpenPower CPUs as accelerators. The most powerful of the three new models comes with the GPU maker’s latest and greatest interconnect technology, NVLink, which links the new Power8 processor to Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs. Bill Boday, IBM’s senior offering manager for Linux on Power, said Power8 is the “first CPU designed for acceleration,” meaning acceleration via GPUs, while NVLink provides five times the bandwidth of PCIe interconnects. Nvidia’s latest Pascal processors also power its first supercomputer, DGX-1. The chipmaker recently gifted a DGX-1 system to OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research non-profit founded by Elon Musk. Read more: Why Nvidia Gave Elon Musk’s AI Non-Profit a Supercomputer The IBM system with NVLink is S822LC for High Performance Computing. It has two Power8 CPUs, tightly integrated with four Tesla P100 GPUs via NVLink. The other two systems (S822LC for Big Data and S821C) are compatible with Nvidia GPUs but interconnection with CPUs is done via PCIe ports. Intel’s answer to high-octane, GPU-accelerated computing is Xeon Phi. The next-gen part in this line (Knights Mill) – its first designed specifically with machine learning in mind – is expected to ship next year. |
| 4:42p | Dell Technologies to Cut at Least 2,000 Jobs After EMC Deal (Bloomberg) — Dell Technologies plans to cut about 2,000 to 3,000 jobs after acquiring EMC in the largest technology acquisition ever, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. The reductions are planned for later this year and will be mostly in the US and in areas such as supply chain and general and administrative positions, as well as some marketing jobs, said the people. They asked not to be named because the dismissals aren’t public yet. Dell is looking for cost savings of about $1.7 billion in the first 18 months after the transaction but is largely focused on using the deal to boost sales by several times that amount, the people added. The new company has 140,000 employees. “As is common with deals of this size, there will be some overlaps we will need to manage and where some employee reduction will occur. We will do everything possible to minimize the impact on jobs,” Dave Farmer, spokesman for Dell, wrote in an e-mail. “We expect revenue gains will outweigh any cost savings, and revenue growth drives employment growth.” See also: EMC, VMware to Vie for Hybrid Cloud After Dell Reorg The acquisition, valued at about $67 billion when it was first announced almost a year ago, brings together the leading provider of data-storage products and one of the top makers of servers and personal computers. Both companies have grappled with rising interest in cloud services from rivals such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. While expanding revenue is the main focus of the deal, Dell Founder Michael Dell said Sept. 7 “there are some overlapping functions and that sort of thing — that’s not the primary feature of this, but there is some of that.” He declined to give any estimate for job reductions. |
| 5:06p | Friday Funny: Ours is an Open-Plan Data Center – You really get the optimal airflow with this layout. Here’s the cartoon for this month’s Data Center Knowledge caption contest. This is how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon, and we challenge our readers to submit the funniest, most clever caption they think will be a fit. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Submit your caption for the cartoon above in the comments. Congratulations to “Batman,” whose caption won the Underwater edition of the contest. His caption was: “I know we need to get closer to the fiber, but something is off about this broker…” Some good submissions came in for last month’s Groundbreaking edition – all we need now is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below!
For previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 6:26p | Silicon Valley Billionaires’ Wealth Manager Enters Data Center Market With corporate adoption of cloud services on the rise, the market for data centers – facilities that house infrastructure for those cloud services – is hotter than ever, and everybody, including some of Silicon Valley’s richest players, wants a piece of the action. Iconiq Capital, the investment management firm whose clients include the likes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, has registered a subsidiary that will focus squarely on investing in data center assets. Called Iconiq DC Management, the company plans to pool client money into private funds that will go after opportunities to invest into data center properties directly, enter joint ventures, buy securities and entities that own or invest in data centers, make debt and equity investments in companies that provide data center-related services, and sponsor investment in data center REITs. Iconiq filed papers for the subsidiary (first reported by Bloomberg) with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July and completed registration in August. The biggest cloud providers have been racing to expand their data center infrastructure as they scale and compete for share of the rapidly growing enterprise cloud market, fueling a boom for third-party data center providers, especially the top data center REITs, such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, and CoreSite Realty. Read more: Another Huge Quarter for Data Center REITs: What’s Next? All seven US data center REIT stocks have greatly outperformed S&P 500 so far this year. The group as a whole was up 31 percent this year as of this past Wednesday, compared to the 7 percent gain by the S&P 500 index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. These providers have had no trouble filling up empty data center space in primary data center markets like Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, New York, Dallas, and Chicago. In fact, there is a shortage of big multi-megawatt chunks of available data center capacity in the top markets, and all the large providers are racing to build and fit out new space. Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? In its SEC filing, Iconiq acknowledged that data centers are a popular asset class, and competition among investors is fierce:
Five-year-old Iconiq Capital’s specialization is wealth management for Silicon Valley’s richest. The company was managing about $16.7 billion in assets as of the end of last year, according to Bloomberg. Its new subsidiary plans to leverage the parent company’s deep connections in the tech world to identify the best investments in the data center market:
See also: What Data Center Investors Should Know |
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