Data Center Links: September 21, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Toshiba sells Flash Memory Chip Unit for $18 Billion.  The bidding seems to be over, as Bloomberg reports that a group led by Bain Capital has acquired the chip unit from Toshiba for 2 trillion yen ($18 billion). The Bain consortium includes backing from Toshiba, as well as Japanese and other overseas companies. It was noted that financial support was added from Apple, Dell, SK Hynix and Japan's Hoya Corp.  

• Vexata launches with $54 million venture funding. After years in stealth Silicon Valley company Vexata launched, backed with $54 million from Mayfield, Intel Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Redline Capital. The company also announced its Active Data Fabric, a software-defined all-solid-state data storage infrastructure that enables extreme performance at scale for Tier 1 applications in enterprise or cloud data centers. 

• How the Internet kept humming during 2 hurricanes.  A nice recap of stories from recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida and the facilities (and people) that maintained data centers throughout them. 

• Cray 'Theta' Supercomputer used to map brain function. What do you use to face such a daunting task as mapping connections of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections? Call on the Intel-Cray 9.65 petaflops supercomputer housed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. With tera and petabyte scale datasets the Theta supercomputer along with an advanced software platform utilizes data mining, graph analytics and machine learning to meet the challenge.  Very cool stuff.

• TigerGraph nets $31 million.  Graph database startup TigerGraph (formerly GraphSQL) announced its first product Tuesday, and a new $31 million Series A funding round. The company says it has "built the first native parallel graph databased platform using proprietary technology that yields performance up to 100 fold compared with other graph platforms."  

• Comcast acquires Stringify. Comcast has acquired IoT automation service company Stringify. Stringify has been named an IoT company to watch, and I'm not sure if this is a story for the data center, other than I can't help to think there is something making this deal significant...  at the intersection of content and things....      edge... ?

• IBM claims top spot for Blockchain technology. A Juniper Research study ranked IBM as the number one player in blockchain technology, leaving Microsoft and Accenture trailing in second and third places respectively. Customer project stories for blockchain with IBM include Maersk, London Stock Exchange, and AIG. 

Data Center Links: August 24, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Apple to build data center in Iowa.  The Des Moines Register reports that Apple will build a data center in Waukee, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. Following large data center builds from Microsoft and Facebook in the Des Moines area, and Google in Council Bluffs, Apple will fulfill project 'Morgan' in a newly annexed portion of Waukee.  My thoughts? Smart move by Apple (Iowa=awesome location), data center hub in the making (enormous build-outs by Microsoft, Facebook and Google in Iowa), and good for Waukee (there is already another totally awesome data center in town). #iowa  #iowabrag

• Druva nets $80 Million Funding round.  Cloud data and protection management company Druva announced $80 million of growth equity funding Tuesday, bringing their total raised to around $200 million. Funding was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors. Druva said they will use the funds to "dramatically accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide, and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage, and use their data."

• Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing. Microsoft announced it is acquiring Cycle Computing, a leader in HPC cloud computing orchestration. Microsoft says it will integrate the Big Computing capabilities from the CycleCloud product into Azure. 

• Microsoft launches Brainwave for real-time AI. At the 2017 Hot Chips Symposium in Cupertino Microsoft announced Project Brainwave, a new deep learning acceleration platform. Leveraging a large FPGA infrastructure inside of Microsoft, the new platform is built with three main layers: a high performance, distributed system architecture, a hardware DNN (deep neural network) engine synthesized onto FPGAs, and a compiler and runtime for low-friction deployment of trained models.

• Databricks secures $140 million. Unified Analytics Paltform company Databricks announced it has received $140 million in a Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks has raised $247 million to date, and will use the new funds to accelerate the investment in making artificial intelligence achievable for enterprise organizations with its Unified Analytics Platform. 

• Red Hat, Microsoft simplify containers for hybrid clouds. Red Hat and Microsoft announced an alliance expansion, with a new initiative aimed at enabling enterprises to more easily adopt containers. The companies say this includes "native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift." 

• ORNL readies facility for 200 Petaflop Supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is getting a data center ready for its Summit supercomputer, which is expected to deliver 200 petaflops - which is about twice as powerful as the world's current leader in computer performance. The data center includes a new 20 megawatt power and cooling plant and an expanded central energy plant for the campus. 

Data Center Links: May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news.  Here are a few things I found interesting:

• Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center.  Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.

• Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld.  Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.
• Could Cisco possibly acquire Nutanix, vArmour or SnapRoute next?

• Cray launches Supercomputers built for AI.  Cray has launched new CS-Storm supercomputers that are purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads.  New CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX systems leverage NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, which foster "up to 187 TOPS (tera operations per second) per node, 2,618 TOPS per rack for machine learning application performance."   I'll take two.  :)

• NVIDIA GPU conference.  AI, self-driving cars, healthcare, Volta GPU platform, deep learning software tools.....   Too many to mention; check it out here.

• Microsoft debuts Cosmos DB. At the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database with five consistency choices. As a superset of DocumentDB Cosmos models include Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual. 

• Apple announces $1B data center expansion in Reno. 9to5Mac reports that the Reno city council approved Apple's proposal for a $1 billion expansion to its existing data center. 

2010 Reviews and 2011 Forecasts

This time of year I typically become inundated with "Top X Stories for 20xx" and reviews and predictions for the next year. Some times I have simply joined the crowd and made my own predictions, but this year I thought I would just 'link' to some of my favorites and review the news, innovations and prognostications for things to come.

Looking back at 2010:

• I made the prediction for 2010 that it would be a break-out year for desktop virtualization. I take that back…. 2011 will be that break-out year!
• Data Center Knowledge - 2010: Data Center Innovation Drives Change
• SearchDataCenter.com - Top 10 Data Center Stories of 2010
• Pingdom - The major incidents on the Internet in 2010
  
• Google's 2010 Zeitgeist
• World Energy Outlook 2010

Stocks and Mergers and Acquisitions

I think data center stocks have performed fairly well over the year and the M&A activity in the technology industry has certainly been brisk. In 2008 I started tracking my own data center stock index, using a weighted capitalization calculation. In October 2008 the initial value I tracked was $19.12, and on December 27, 2010 it was $35.55. I 'think' we will continue to see some M&A activity in the first half of 2011 as some additional target companies may get swallowed up. GigaOm has a nice summary story on acquisitions and how $10 billion was spent on data storage and warehousing companies between HP, EMC, IBM, and Dell. A Bloomberg article listed the following as 'takeover bait': F5, Brocade, Riverbed, Arista, VMware, bmc software, Citrix, Tibco, Teradata, and others that have already been acquired since they wrote the article. :)

Supercomputers

With supercomputers in 2010 it was all about GPU's and energy demands to pave the road for exascale supercomputers. A top highlight of my year was traveling to the NCSA National Petascale Compute Facility to check out the data center that will house Blue Waters. The specs for Blue Waters were recently published and at an estimated 10 Petaflops I am sure we'll see it in the top 5 of the top500.org list.

The Cloud

Cloud computing was obviously a run-away hit for 2010. Perhaps we are even coming to a point where it isn't pure hype with a sole purpose of aggravating Larry Ellison and other non-marketing people. The public/private cloud divide will help push overall cloud technologies along, as individuals and enterprises find their perfect fit. I still think security, legal issues and governance have a ways to go in the cloud - check out these videos: Gartner's Cloud Law and Order and Tom Roloff, Senior VP at EMC Consulting on private vs. public clouds.

I found another decent definition of cloud computing, that I believe is attributable to McKinsey: clouds are hardware-based services, offering compute, network and storage capacity where: 1) hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer; 2) buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable open; and 3) infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down).

Looking forward to 2011

• IBM's five predictions for the next five years: for instance - "heat from data centers may help power cities"
• 11 predictions for 2011 from Chris O'Brien at Mercury News
• 7 Ramblings for 2011 in Telecom and Internet Infrastructure - Telecom Ramblings
• Five smartphone hardware trends in 2011. Big impact here on the back-end data centers supporting all of these smartphones.
• CleanTech Media - 11 predictions for 2011

The "A" companies

I think the "A" companies have it for 2011. Apple and Amazon. Apple's 505,000 square foot North Carolina data center had a big spotlight in 2010 and I think 2011 we will finally see the streaming iTunes service come to life that everyone has been talking about. Continued success of the iPhone and iPad will drive data center requirements as well -- just today it was reported that Apple put an order in for 20-21 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011. The really interesting company behind the scenes for producing the iPhone, among many other devices, is Foxconn. Bloomberg had a nice article a few months back on this company.

I can never seem to find too much information on Amazon data centers, but they certainly have the intellectual capital behind them between Werner Vogels and James Hamilton. Amazon acquired Quidsi this year, the company behind the wildly successful site diapers.com. With that acquisition they gained a 1,250,000 square foot warehouse in Gouldsboro, PA. Now there is a place to put data center containers and build-out a warehouse-scale data center. :) In 2010 AWS introduced Cluster Compute Services for EC2, where for $1.60 an hour anyone could 'rent a supercomputer' -- VERY cool stuff. Amazon Web Services had a number of innovations in 2010 and I think we'll see them continue to dominate in 2011.

Finally - as LEED is a big part of data center design, did anyone else make their holiday ginger bread houses LEED-compliant?

The Greenest Supercomputer

SGI performed quite well in the semi-annual ranking of the world's TOP500 Supercomputer sites this past June. They had the #4 supercomputer -- the Pleiades - Altix ICE 8200EX at the NASA/Ames Research Center. Although not an official award, they also were heralded as the industry's "greenest" supercomputer, as measured by performance efficiency.

Performance efficiency, or “LINPACK efficiency,” measures the ratio between maximum performance (RMax) and peak performance (RPeak). SGI dominated this new category with 12 of the 20 most performance-efficient supercomputers in the world."

Additionally the SGI Altix ICE cluster is the first time that an x86 scalar-based system outperformed vector-based systems.

Last week SGI/Rackable announced their x86 scale-out servers to support both on-board Quad Data Rate 40Gb InfiniBand and 10Gb Ethernet connections.

"The features of the expanded Rackable x86 server lines include dual QSFP InfiniBand/Ethernet ports at up to 40 Gb/s (gigabits-per-second), Intel Xeon 5500 series "Nehalem" processors, including the top-bin W5580 running at 3.2 GHz, and large memory capability with up to 96 GB (gigabytes) of ECC registered DDR3 DIMMs. It is also power optimized with over 90 percent voltage regulator module efficiency on the server board, which perfectly complements SGI’s up-to-96.5 percent-efficient power supplies."

96GB of memory! One of the things that made me such a fan of SGI was a computer I saw in 1994; a SGI with 4GB of memory (which was a TON back then). It ran a flight simulator that looked Amazing.....

Cray Jaguar - 1 Petaflop!

Next Monday, the Top500 list comes out for the second half of 2008. I am not involved with super computers at all, but the geek in me loves to follow who has the fastest computer in the world. eWeek.com reports that the Cray Jaguar is set to top the IBM Roadrunner in the #1 position. The XT Jaguar now offers a performance of more than 1 quadrillion calculations (1 petaflop) per second.

"The Cray XT Jaguar system now boasts of 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 362 terabytes of system memory and a 10-petabyte file system. Jaguar also now offers 362 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an I/O bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second."

The supercomputer belongs to the DOE and resides at their Oak Ridge National Laboratory. See their press release here.

The Washington Post also has an article (with picture!) here.

U of Illinois Petascale Project

Buried at the bottom of a story about the University of Illinois is an update on their $72.5 Million Petscale Computing Facility. When it comes online in 2011 it will become the world's most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research. The 95,000 square foot facility was designed by EYP Mission Critical Facilities (now HP).

Check out the article here