General Motors today unveiled a state-of-the-art $130-million enterprise data center at its Technical Center in Warren, Mich., and said it will open a second, mirrored site at its Milford, Mich., vehicle proving grounds -- part of a sweeping overhaul of its global IT operations.
Data is the lifeblood of the trading markets. For a long time, financial firms channeled their IT energy and resources into connecting to and storing that data. Low-latency access was good, but ultra-low latency was even better.
"Six years ago, Revlon IT was seen as an impediment to the business. My first task was simply to get IT out of the way of the business." ?David Giambruno, Revlon Senior VP and CIO Simple things, such as Wi-Fi access were non-existent in some buildings. Chemists had to jog back and forth between mixing vats and manufacturing control systems to adjust product formulations.
Imagine being able to access information from a remote source with almost the same speed as a storage device within a computer. While the speed of light will always provide limits to the speed and apparent latency of data access from a distance it will be possible to build computer architectures that can use resources, including digital storage, that are located far away from the user and that ...
Many large businesses, including industrial operations, have long produced their own power instead of relying only on their local utilities. The emergence of solar, fuel cells and other low-carbon technologies are opening up new possibilities for companies that want an uninterrupted power supply while lowering their carbon footprint at the same time.
Cloud interoperability and portability seems to be a hot topic these days. This topic is one that I have a bit of experience with. Back in 2008, I had the fortune, or possibly misfortune, of starting one of the first groups dedicated to the discussion of Cloud interoperability, aptly titled, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum”. For a while this Google group was a popular forum for the ...
The disaggregated server concept designs floated at Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit last January are designed for data centers built at frighteningly large scale, but don’t scale down to small installations very well. AMD SeaMicro’s chassis was designed as a disaggregated server and it provides disaggregation benefits for small server deployments, down to 10 rack unit (10U) increments, as well ...
The Wall Street Journal tells us that the entire edifice of Europe's attempt at controlling carbon emissions has come tumbling down. They say this because the price of permits on the trading exchange has tumbled. But they seem to be unaware that low prices are just great, this is what we actually desire: One of the great policy bubbles of our times has been cap and trade for carbon emissions ...
Technology has dramatically changed the way we experience the world around us. The ease at which it’s made doing business, exchanging information and simply connecting with others is both powerful and quick to take for granted.
Mark Long wears a lot of different hats. Before he became CEO of Meteor Entertainment he was the founder of game developer Zombie Studios and a New York Times bestselling graphic novel author for The Silence of Our Friends.
With all the talk of the software-defined everything, you can quickly get the impression that we have freed ourselves completely from the physical world. Indeed, software-defined servers, networks, and storage allow an unprecedented degree of flexibility, but the picture is still incomplete. To really conquer the challenges of reliability and optimization of resources, you have to add software-defined power and cooling to the mix. Without these capabilities, according to Clemens Pfeiffer, CTO of Power Assure, your software-defined data center has a good chance of running into any number of brick walls.
These pipes carry water in and out of Google's The Dalles, Ore., data center. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled.
HP launched today a game-changing line of servers called the HP Moonshot 1500. It is easily their biggest server launch since HP introduced the industry’s first X86-based server in 1989. At a high level, the Moonshot 1500 is the beginning of the slow death of the vanilla, homogenous server and the rise of specialized servers for specialized workloads for scale-out datacenters. The HP Moonshot 1500 System uses a modular, server cartridge and an ecosystem approach including a wide range of silicon partners to differentiate based on choice of workloads and acceleration technologies. While my firm has published a detailed white paper you can read here, I wanted to share with you the highlights. A good place to start is to examine what is the driving need for a different kind of server architecture. While datacenters have grown significantly over the last 10 years, we haven’t seen anything near ...
I’m sitting on an Acela train from Washington, D.C., to New York City, comfortably tapping my keyboard at 100 MPH. Just a few hours earlier, I was not in such a calm condition. Super Storm Saturn was bearing down on the East Coast. Twenty-four hours ahead of the storm, under a perfectly clear sky, my airline canceled my flight from DC to NYC. My customer meetings were also canceled in anticipation of a cold-weather calamity. Disruption dumped down on me, but the snow never did. The storm blew out to sea, dropping only a mild rain. The only thing right about a forecast is that it’s wrong.
Just as rising tides lift all boats, the upcoming data flood will provide opportunities for companies big and small.
Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy as well as OpenStack Foundation board member recently told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer, Renski said. "The grand vision for project is, over time, they will replace all of their virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay, together," Renski said.
Plenty has been said or written on cloud computing in recent years -- pro, con and somewhere in between. Periodically throughout the rise of cloud computing, there have been some real gems put out there, aptly describing what's on people's minds -- and maybe what was needed to be said. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's famous rant back in 2008 is the stuff of legend, and makes this list, compiled below. Here are some memorable quotes and apropos quotes about cloud that that have surfaced over the years:
Yesterday I had the honor of being included in Charles Babcock's InfomationWeek list of early cloud pioneers. It's a great list and includes an extensive group of early cloud trailblazers including James Urquhart, David Linthicum, Michael Crandell, John Keagy and others. Although an impressive list, I couldn't help but think it was missing a few of the folks I've looked up to in the early years of cloud computing. So without further ado, here's my list of a few early cloud computing mavericks.
I've been online personally since 1979, and through school terminals since about 1973 (anyone out there remember playing lunar landing games on the university timesharing systems?).
As cloud computing technology reaches a saturation point in North America many in the space are beginning to look at other markets to supplement growth prospects. According to IDC, the Middle East could be the next major market to adopt cloud computing. A recent report by IDC expects total spending on cloud delivery in Saudi Arabia to increase 34.86 percent year on year in 2012 with long term spending to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 49.7 percent between 2012 and 2016.
Bill Gates didn’t say if we get a carbon tax, he said when we get a carbon tax: “When we get a carbon tax we should put some of that into innovation,” Gates told energy executives gathered at Houston’s IHS CERAWeek conference Thursday evening.
Environmental concerns have become important for most businesses but in the high tech world they have become de rigeur because of the staggering amount of power and computing resources that are used.
