What's going on in networking, operating systems, servers, storage and data centres?
It's been mildly amusing to see, once more, a vendor of two-factor authentication call the end of the line for passwords as a security mechanism. We've been around this particular block so many times in the last 20 years that I've lost count.
Security has take another knock as a prime barrier to the adoption of cloud computing.A survey commissioned by Microsoft (whose involvement was not revealed to the respondees) found that small to medium-sized businesses might gain a fair amount from adopting cloud computing.
A big selling point for cloud computing is what's become known as cloud bursting. What this means is the ability to move spikes in demand for computing resources into the cloud, rather than having to build infrastructure to cope with peak loads.
Now there's more data that could help answer that question.Greenpeace has just released a report entitled How Clean is Your Cloud?
It's like that final shoot-out in For a Few Dollars More. You've seen it: as Morricone's music builds, the three protagonists arrange themselves slowly in a circle, not taking their eyes off each other.
When you think of Quantum, you usually think of tape drives. But the company's been morphing into a software developer -- and now has something to show for it in the area of backup, cloud and data reduction.
Cloud management platforms -- they're a little bit like those desktop search and indexing applications that gained brief popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, and which had to be updated each time a new application or file format appeared.Why might you want one?
Soaking your servers to keep them cool is not a new concept. Cray was doing it way back in the 1980s with the Cray-2.
Amid the explosion of activity on the hypervisor technology market sits a company that could save you money and hassle -- and it's just launched a new management console and 40Gbps server fabric.Xsigo sells datacentre fabrics: these consist of boxes designed to reduce the cabling load by connecting any server to any network or storage system.
What would you say if you were offered hosting or cloud services by a company which not only built its own datacentres but whose datacentres are water-cooled using its own proprietary cooling systems, and its own servers and storage systems? In other words, a much more vertically integrated provider than the ones you're used to.
There's a new way of datacentre networking coming down the road: software-defined networking (SDN). Powered by the Open Flow protocol, the idea is that the control plane -- the intelligence that routes packets -- is separated from the data plane -- the mechanism that actually shunts packets from one port to another.
When data was stored on paper (remember those days? It seems so long ago), information was stored for as long as we needed it, then discarded.
It would seem that cloud computing has crossed the Rubicon. Until quite recently, the main objection to cloud computing cited by surveys and anecdotal evidence alike has been the issue of security.
Is there a shift towards parallelism going on? You could fairly argue that, obviously, with multi-core CPUs and GPUs now standard fare on desktops and in servers, the answer is yes.
Yet another PCIe-connected flash vendor has joined what will, I suspect, become a fairly crowded market over the next year or so. And with this straw in the wind, it may be worth having a quick look at what this means for the future of applications and computer architectures.
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