[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Friday, October 14th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:16a | VMware Gives AWS Keys to Its Enterprise Data Center Kingdom VMware has partnered with Amazon Web Services to sell its data center automation software as a service on Amazon’s cloud. The move, aimed squarely at the enterprise market, is a strategic about-face for both companies, who in the past viewed each other as competition. As the world’s biggest provider of cloud infrastructure services, Amazon has been perceived as a huge competitive threat to VMware’s ubiquitous presence in enterprise data centers. “This becomes the primary public cloud offering of VMware,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said Thursday while standing alongside AWS CEO Andy Jassy at a press conference in San Francisco. “We will be selling this broadly through our salesforce.” News of the partnership was leaked to the press earlier this month. VMware’s own public cloud service, vCloud Air, will remain as is, he said, explaining that the company had customers who were using it for highly specialized workloads. It will not remain exactly the same, however. VMware, which is now majority owned by Dell Technologies, recently sold the portion of the business that provides cloud services to government agencies to data center provider QTS. Slated for initial release next year, VMware Cloud on AWS will offer VMware’s Software Defined Data Center platform, which encompasses tools for virtual compute, storage, and networking, as a cloud service running on bare-metal servers in AWS data centers. The companies are promising seamless integration between VMware environments in customers’ enterprise data centers and ther VMware environments in Amazon’s cloud. They will even be able to use their existing VMware accounts to pay for the cloud service. This is VMware’s second partnership with a major cloud provider. At VMworld in August, the company announced it will also provide its data center suite as a service on IBM’s cloud. While AWS’s initial period of growth was fueled by software startups to whom it offered access to hyper-scale infrastructure they could never build themselves, the company’s eye has always been on the enterprise market. “While startups were the first group of people we expected to use the cloud … we always expected that the largest consumers of AWS will be enterprises and governments,” Jassy said. Amazon and its competitors – Microsoft, IBM, and Google, among others – have been pursuing the enterprise market with a vengeance. Many companies, especially major data center hardware and software vendors disrupted by Amazon, have maintained that the hybrid infrastructure model, which combines hardware hosted in companies’ own data centers with public cloud services, has become the preferred model for most enterprises. Amazon has not been on the same page exactly. Just last year, Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy for AWS, said at a conference that the company’s end goal was to replace the enterprise data center altogether. Amazon viewed hybrid cloud as a necessary evil of sorts, a stepping stone companies need to make the transition from all-on-prem to all-cloud enterprise infrastructure. At the press conference Thursday, Jassy maintained that because of its scale, AWS can in most cases reduce the cost of infrastructure for enterprises. The new partnership is a sign of recognition by Amazon that at least some portion of the on-premise enterprise data center is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Asked just how long VMware expected enterprise data centers to stick around, Gelsinger said the hybrid model will be around for “decades.” Besides things like regulations and compliance, which require many companies to store data in-house, or at least within their countries’ borders, one of the biggest reasons it’s not easy to convince enterprises to replace on-prem environments with cloud services are the huge sums of money they have already invested in those environments. “They want to use the same hardware to run their infrastructure on premises” and the same infrastructure software to manage it, Jassy said. Turning VMware from foe to friend and making it easy to use its software on AWS gives Amazon the kind of access to the enterprise data center market it has never had. “The vast majority of enterprises in the world are virtualized on VMware,” Jassy said. “I don’t’ think this is like anything else we’ve done in the market, or intend to do.” |
| 6:50p | Google, IBM, Others Pitch Open Standard for Cloud Server Design A group of tech giants working to mount a serious challenge to Intel in the data center, has previewed an upcoming open standard for interconnecting components in a server it is positioning as an alternative to Intel’s proprietary technology. The group includes Google, hardware vendors IBM, HP Enterprise, Dell EMC, as well as Intel’s more direct rivals AMD and NVIDIA, among others. IBM’s upcoming Power9 processors, expected to launch next year, will support the standard and so will IBM’s servers they will power. Intel currently dominates the market for server chips, and hyperscale data center operators like Google, which spend enormous amounts of money on hardware every quarter, want a viable alternative. They have generally adopted a multi-vendor strategy for sourcing nearly all components of their infrastructure, but it’s difficult to extend that strategy to processors given the size of Intel’s lead in the market. OpenCAPI and Power9 are aimed at the high end of the server market – computers used for data-intensive analytics workloads or machine learning. The group claims that the standard will be capable of boosting server performance tenfold. That performance improvement comes as a result of two things: higher bandwidth on the links between CPUs and accelerators and cache coherency, which essentially means data needs to be shuffled less within the system as it is being processed, saving resources as a result. Accelerators, or additional processors that take on a portion of the CPU’s workload to free up its resources, have been a mainstay in the world of supercomputers for years, but their role is now growing in importance in server architecture for cloud data centers and for the quickly emerging field of machine learning. “The compute model going forward is the marriage between a really good data-centric processor, like Power, and a really good set of acceleration technologies,” Doug Balog, general manager for IBM Power Systems, said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. Most accelerators in use today are GPUs, made by the likes of AMD and Nvidia, and some are Intel’s Xeon Phi, but there has also been growth in the use of FPGAs, or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, as accelerators. The advantage of FPGAs is that they can be reconfigured as workload needs change. Intel has invested heavily in FPGAs last year, paying $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA specialist Altera. The most prominent user of FPGAs to accelerate cloud workloads is Microsoft, whose latest-generation cloud server design supports the technology. See also: AMD Reaches Deal With Alibaba to Use Chips in Cloud Service It’s unclear at this point what kind of architecture will dominate the market for machine-learning hardware. There are divergent views on this today, with companies like Nvidia supporting GPU-accelerated AI servers and Intel saying that model isn’t scalable, pitching the next generation of its Xeon Phi processors – codenamed Knights Mill and expected to hit the market next year – as the better alternative. Amazon’s cloud servers for data-intensive workloads, including machine learning, rely on GPUs, and so does Big Sur, Facebook’s open source server design for AI workloads. See also: Why NVIDIA Gifted Elon Musk’s AI Non-Profit Its Latest Supercomputer Google has designed its own custom chip for machine learning, called Tensor Processing Unit. The company hasn’t revealed any details about TPU’s architecture, saying only that it is an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and that it is optimized for TensorFlow, its library of open source software for making AI applications. Google is also working on a server design together with Rackspace, which will run on IBM’s Power9 processors and have the OpenCAPI interface. The OpenCAPI consortium has an FPGA player among its members, in addition to server and GPU vendors. San Jose-based Xilinx plans to support OpenCAPI-enabled FPGAs, according to Friday’s announcement. IBM’s accelerator strategy has been to support as broad an array of choices as possible. Its current-generation Power8 chip supports NVIDIA’s GPU interconnect technology NVLink, and so will Power9, Balog said. |
| 7:02p | AMD Reaches Deal With Alibaba to Use Chips in Cloud Service (Bloomberg) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc., struggling to re-establish its data center chip business, said Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. plans to provide cloud-computing services based on its graphics semiconductors. China’s largest e-commerce company is working on expanding the range of services it offers over the internet and will work with Advanced Micro Devices to use the chipmaker’s Radeon Pro graphics, the companies said Friday in a statement. For AMD, which is the second-largest maker of graphics chips used in high-end computers behind Nvidia Corp., the deal is the chance to kick start a return to the lucrative data center market dominated by Intel Corp. Graphics chips are playing an increasing role in data centers where their ability to process information in parallel makes them useful in certain work loads such as image recognition. See also: Tencent to Run OpenPower Servers in Its Data Centers Nvidia has pioneered this more general use of the chips, which had mainly been used by computer gamers to get a more realistic experience from their hardware. AMD, based in Sunnyvale, California, has begun its fight back from market share losses to Nvidia in graphics and Intel in general purpose processors with new products that have closed the gap in performance. AMD’s stock has more than doubled this year, making it the best performer on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index, spurred by improving sales and progress in its attempt to return to profitability. See also: Google, IBM, Others Pitch Open Standard for Cloud Server Design |
| 7:25p | What Does AWS and VMware Alliance Mean for MSPs?  Brought to you by MSPmentor Amazon Web Services and VMware this week announced a strategic partnership that will make it easier for partners to cross-sell and leverage the products of both companies. At the heart of the agreement is VMware Cloud on AWS, designed to give customers a seamless software-defined data center (SDDC) experience that integrates VMware on-prem and hybrid technologies with the AWS public cloud. But what precisely the deal means for managed services providers (MSPs) and other third-party IT solution providers remained unclear in the hours after the cooperation was announced. “It is fair to say that partners and solution providers will be a key element of our strategy and that we will communicate out more regarding VMware Cloud on AWS as details become available,” a VMware spokesman told MSPmentor. See also: VMware Gives AWS Keys to Its Enterprise Data Center Kingdom Certainly, hopes are the new relationship could help mitigate a frequent complaint among tech solution providers: the cost of VMware products. “Customers will have the ability to purchase services through their existing VMware commercial agreement and use their existing VMware software investments to secure additional loyalty discounts for their VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid environment,” the companies said in a joint statement. Geoffrey Waters, VMware’s vice president of service provider channel, has been working to convince IT solution and services providers of the rich opportunities surrounding virtualization and cloud services. “There’s two ways we can help service providers and MSPs,” he told MSPmentor during an afternoon chat at VMworld in Las Vegas in August. “We either help reduce their costs of managing their own clouds … or we give the ability to add new services to drive new revenue streams.” Wide adoption of VMware solutions is translating into strong momentum for the channel ecosystem, where 4,200 partners in 119 countries are serving about 99 percent of the cloud total addressable market, Waters said then. “That means our network of partners across the globe are able to offer end users choice and flexibility on a local basis, so you can get your cloud on a local basis.” he said. “Think about data sovereignty. Think about the different compliances that people need. Think about the different vertical markets.” Some observers said the move helps AWS to better compete with rival Microsoft Corp. in hybrid cloud solutions. “Our customers continue to ask us to make it easier for them to run their existing data center investments alongside AWS,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in the joint statement with VMware. “Most enterprises are already virtualized using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operating model.” The alliance represents a “very powerful collaboration” that gives companies flexibility in deciding whether to transition their data to the public cloud while maintaining investments they’ve made in on-premise data centers, said Tim Feeney, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. told Bloomberg. “Essentially, the process of managing the hybrid cloud environment is significantly less of a hassle now,” Feeney said. “This is a very powerful move for VMware because IT managers are more likely to retain VMware’s services for longer.” Bloomberg Content Service contributed to this report. This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/technologies/what-d |
| 8:48p | Aligned Claims Breakthrough in Data Center Waste Heat Reuse Aligned Energy claims it has achieved a breakthrough in reusing waste heat exhausted by servers in the data center – a concept that is not new but difficult to implement in data centers effectively. The Danbury, Connecticut-based company says the combination of its data center cooling system and a system by the Swedish company Climeon, which converts low-grade waste heat into electricity, can serve as an effective energy source for a data center. The solution addresses two fundamental problems in data center waste-heat reuse: low-temperature heat produced by servers and the difficulty of transporting heat efficiently. Climeon’s technology is able to put low-grade heat to use efficiently, while using energy produced by a data center to power the same data center means heat doesn’t have to be moved over long distances. Learn about the challenges in reusing data center waste heat in depth: How to Reuse Waste Heat From Data Centers Intelligently Climeon’s heat power units use incoming heat to turn its “unique working media” from liquid to gas. As that happens, pressure goes up – since gas needs more space than liquid – and rotates a turbine that generates electricity. The company claims it has found a way to do this “without any losses during the condensation process.” In the joint solution, heat source for Climeon’s units will be Aligned’s data center cooling system, which removes heat directly at the rack by a heat sink and transports it by a thermal bus, which, according to Aligned, is a much more efficient way to move heat than forced air. The cooling system is sold by Aligned subsidiary Inertech. One of the company’s other subsidiaries, data center service provider Aligned Data Centers, has deployed the system in its Dallas data center and also plans to use it in another data center it is building in Phoenix. In addition to efficiency, the cooling system is what enables Aligned Data Centers to offer customers capacity that’s expandable on-demand, rather than charging them for capacity reserved for future expansion. |
| << Previous Day |
2016/10/14 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |