
Big business still builds data centres
451 Research has a new report out this morning, as part of its ongoing Voice of the Enterprise: Datacenters series. I’ll probably dig into the report’s results in more detail elsewhere, but this graphic seemed noteworthy for today’s Thought for the Day: (Source: 451 Research) 25% of the 560 respondents would consider building a new […]

DigitalOcean does Germany
DigitalOcean does Germany: DigitalOcean is very much an outlier. It calls itself a cloud infrastructure provider but essentially it is a traditional hosting provider (although, I’ll have to admit, there is very little to differentiate between a hosting provider and a raw cloud infrastructure vendor). Whatever it does, it is doing it well. DigitalOcean […] […]

Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde talks about Big Data, and lessons from the world of High Performance Computing
It’s sometimes easy to assume that the large clusters of commodity servers commonly associated with open source big data and NoSQL approaches like Hadoop have made supercomputers and eye-wateringly expensive high performance computing (HPC) installations a thing of the past. But Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde argues that the world of HPC has evolved, and […]

Discussing Virtual Machine interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this […]

Survey lifts covers on Cloud Promiscuity: good thing, bad thing, or who cares?
Figures from RightScale‘s latest State of the Cloud Report (free registration required) suggest “a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies” amongst respondents. The rationale for hybrid cloud (mixing a public cloud service like Amazon’s with something running in your own data centre, colocation site or hosting facility) is reasonably well understood, but why might companies choose to use more […]

Solar power in the data centre – solution or window dressing?
Most of us recognise that the Earth is warming and that — despite our planet’s temperatures having dramatically risen and fallen before — we humans must accept some measure of responsibility for the current changes. Already consuming at least 1.1-1.5% of global power, and only forecast to grow ever-more rapacious, the data centres that power our information […]

Wendy Mars talks about Cisco's Unified Computing System
Global networking giant Cisco unveiled Unified Service Delivery (USD) last week, following up on the company’s Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware announcement that was covered by Krishnan back in March. Taken together, these announcements shed light on the company’s strategy to strengthen its hold over the data centre, and to offer solutions tailored toward the evolving needs of […]

Microsoft, Google, Azure and Data Centres
Microsoft has been spending a lot of money over many years to ramp up their data centre infrastructure. Once again the difference between Microsoft and Google becomes apparent when we look at their data centre build strategies. First up Microsoft – with the recent announcement of its Azure cloud based OS, Microsoft once and for […]