Here are comes my long list of computer technology trends for 2015:
Digitalisation is coming to change all business sectors and through our daily work even more than before. Digitalisation also changes the IT sector: Traditional software package are moving rapidly into the cloud. Need to own or rent own IT infrastructure is dramatically reduced. Automation application for configuration and monitoring will be truly possible. Workloads software implementation projects will be reduced significantly as software is a need to adjust less. Traditional IT outsourcing is definitely threatened. The security management is one of the key factors to change as security threats are increasingly digital world. IT sector digitalisation simply means: “more cheaper and better.”
The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal. The pace of change in enterprise communications and collaboration is very fast. A new set of capabilities, empowered by the combination of Mobility, the Cloud, Video, software architectures and Unified Communications, is changing expectations for what IT can deliver.
Global Citizenship: Technology Is Rapidly Dissolving National Borders. Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days? Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use? If it is, then we may see the idea of “nationality” quickly dissolve in the decades ahead. Language, currency and residency are rapidly being disrupted and dematerialized by technology. Increasingly, technological developments will allow us to live and work almost anywhere on the planet… (and even beyond). In my mind, a borderless world will be a more creative, lucrative, healthy, and frankly, exciting one. Especially for entrepreneurs.
The traditional enterprise workflow is ripe for huge change as the focus moves away from working in a single context on a single device to the workflow being portable and contextual. InfoWorld’s executive editor, Galen Gruman, has coined a phrase for this: “liquid computing.” The increase in productivity is promised be stunning, but the loss of control over data will cross an alarming threshold for many IT professionals.
Mobile will be used more and more. Currently, 49 percent of businesses across North America adopt between one and ten mobile applications, indicating a significant acceptance of these solutions. Embracing mobility promises to increase visibility and responsiveness in the supply chain when properly leveraged. Increased employee productivity and business process efficiencies are seen as key business impacts.
The Internet of things is a big, confusing field waiting to explode. Answer a call or go to a conference these days, and someone is likely trying to sell you on the concept of the Internet of things. However, the Internet of things doesn’t necessarily involve the Internet, and sometimes things aren’t actually on it, either.
The next IT revolution will come from an emerging confluence of Liquid computing plus the Internet of things. Those the two trends are connected — or should connect, at least. If we are to trust on consultants, are in sweet spot for significant change in computing that all companies and users should look forward to.
Cloud will be talked a lot and taken more into use. Cloud is the next-generation of supply chain for IT. A global survey of executives predicted a growing shift towards third party providers to supplement internal capabilities with external resources. CIOs are expected to adopt a more service-centric enterprise IT model. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion in 2014 (up a 20% from $145.2 billion in 2013), and growth will continue to be fast (“By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion in 2011“).
The rapid growth in mobile, big data, and cloud technologies has profoundly changed market dynamics in every industry, driving the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, and changing customer behavior. It’s an evolution that IT organizations struggle to keep up with.To success in this situation there is need to combine traditional IT with agile and web-scale innovation. There is value in both the back-end operational systems and the fast-changing world of user engagement. You are now effectively operating two-speed IT (bimodal IT, two-speed IT, or traditional IT/agile IT). You need a new API-centric layer in the enterprise stack, one that enables two-speed IT.
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up. Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work. Automation is not only replacing manufacturing jobs, it is displacing knowledge and service workers too.
In many countries IT recruitment market is flying, having picked up to a post-recession high. Employers beware – after years of relative inactivity, job seekers are gearing up for change. Economic improvements and an increase in business confidence have led to a burgeoning jobs market and an epidemic of itchy feet.
Hopefully the IT department is increasingly being seen as a profit rather than a cost centre with IT budgets commonly split between keeping the lights on and spend on innovation and revenue-generating projects. Historically IT was about keeping the infrastructure running and there was no real understanding outside of that, but the days of IT being locked in a basement are gradually changing.CIOs and CMOs must work more closely to increase focus on customers next year or risk losing market share, Forrester Research has warned.
Good questions to ask: Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction?
Windows Server 2003 goes end of life in summer 2015 (July 14 2015). There are millions of servers globally still running the 13 year-old OS with one in five customers forecast to miss the 14 July deadline when Microsoft turns off extended support. There were estimated to be 2.7 million WS2003 servers in operation in Europe some months back. This will keep the system administrators busy, because there is just around half year time and update for Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2012 to may be have difficulties. Microsoft and support companies do not seem to be interested in continuing Windows Server 2003 support, so those who need that the custom pricing can be ” incredibly expensive”. At this point is seems that many organizations have the desire for new architecture and consider one option to to move the servers to cloud.
Windows 10 is coming to PCs and Mobile devices. Just few months back Microsoft unveiled a new operating system Windows 10. The new Windows 10 OS is designed to run across a wide range of machines, including everything from tiny “internet of things” devices in business offices to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to computer servers. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1 (same minimum PC requirements that have existed since 2006: 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM). There is technical review available. Microsoft says to expect AWESOME things of Windows 10 in January. Microsoft will share more about the Windows 10 ‘consumer experience’ at an event on January 21 in Redmond and is expected to show Windows 10 mobile SKU at the event.
Microsoft is going to monetize Windows differently than earlier.Microsoft Windows has made headway in the market for low-end laptops and tablets this year by reducing the price it charges device manufacturers, charging no royalty on devices with screens of 9 inches or less. That has resulted in a new wave of Windows notebooks in the $200 price range and tablets in the $99 price range. The long-term success of the strategy against Android tablets and Chromebooks remains to be seen.
Microsoft is pushing Universal Apps concept. Microsoft has announced Universal Windows Apps, allowing a single app to run across Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 for the first time, with additional support for Xbox coming. Microsoft promotes a unified Windows Store for all Windows devices. Windows Phone Store and Windows Store would be unified with the release of Windows 10.
Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft realizes that, in the modern world, its software must run on more than just Windows. Microsoft has already revealed Microsoft office programs for Apple iPad and iPhone. It also has email client compatible on both iOS and Android mobile operating systems.
With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome grabbing so much of the desktop market—and Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Google’s Android browser dominating the mobile market—Internet Explorer is no longer the force it once was. Microsoft May Soon Replace Internet Explorer With a New Web Browser article says that Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system will debut with an entirely new web browser code-named Spartan. This new browser is a departure from Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser whose relevance has waned in recent years.
SSD capacity has always lag well behind hard disk drives (hard disks are in 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB). Intel and Micron will try to kill the hard drives with new flash technologies. Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Later (next two years) Intel promises 10TB+ SSDs thanks to 3D Vertical NAND flash memory. Also interfaces to SSD are evolving from traditional hard disk interfaces. PCIe flash and NVDIMMs will make their way into shared storage devices more in 2015. The ULLtraDIMM™ SSD connects flash storage to the memory channel via standard DIMM slots, in order to close the gap between storage devices and system memory (less than five microseconds write latency at the DIMM level).
Hard disks will be still made in large amounts in 2015. It seems that NAND is not taking over the data centre immediately. The huge great problem is $/GB. Estimates of shipped disk and SSD capacity out to 2018 shows disk growing faster than flash. The world’s ability to make and ship SSDs is falling behind its ability to make and ship disk drives – for SSD capacity to match disk by 2018 we would need roughly eight times more flash foundry capacity than we have. New disk technologies such as shingling, TDMR and HAMR are upping areal density per platter and bringing down cost/GB faster than NAND technology can. At present solid-state drives with extreme capacities are very expensive. I expect that with 2015, the prices for SSD will will still be so much higher than hard disks, that everybody who needs to store large amounts of data wants to consider SSD + hard disk hybrid storage systems.
PC sales, and even laptops, are down, and manufacturers are pulling out of the market. The future is all about the device. We have entered the post-PC era so deeply, that even tablet market seem to be saturating as most people who want one have already one. The crazy years of huge tables sales growth are over. The tablet shipment in 2014 was already quite low (7.2% In 2014 To 235.7M units). There is no great reasons or growth or decline to be seen in tablet market in 2015, so I expect it to be stable. IDC expects that iPad Sees First-Ever Decline, and I expect that also because the market seems to be more and more taken by Android tablets that have turned to be “good enough”. Wearables, Bitcoin or messaging may underpin the next consumer computing epoch, after the PC, internet, and mobile.
There will be new tiny PC form factors coming. Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized “compute sticks” that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor “and bring intelligence to that”. It is likened the compute stick to similar thumb PCs that plug to HDMI port and are offered by PC makers with the Android OS and ARM processor (for example Wyse Cloud Connect and many cheap Android sticks). Such devices typically don’t have internal storage, but can be used to access files and services in the cloud. Intel expects that sticks size PC market will grow to tens of millions of devices.
We have entered the Post-Microsoft, post-PC programming: The portable REVOLUTION era. Tablets and smart phones are fine for consuming information: a great way to browse the web, check email, stay in touch with friends, and so on. But what does a post-PC world mean for creating things? If you’re writing platform-specific mobile apps in Objective C or Java then no, the iPad alone is not going to cut it. You’ll need some kind of iPad-to-server setup in which your iPad becomes a mythical thin client for the development environment running on your PC or in cloud. If, however, you’re working with scripting languages (such as Python and Ruby) or building web-based applications, the iPad or other tablet could be an useable development environment. At least worth to test.
You need prepare to learn new languages that are good for specific tasks. Attack of the one-letter programming languages: From D to R, these lesser-known languages tackle specific problems in ways worthy of a cult following. Watch out! The coder in the next cubicle might have been bitten and infected with a crazy-eyed obsession with a programming language that is not Java and goes by the mysterious one letter name. Each offers compelling ideas that could do the trick in solving a particular problem you need fixed.
HTML5′s “Dirty Little Secret”: It’s Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile. Just look under the hood. “The dirty little secret of native [app] development is that huge swaths of the UIs we interact with every day are powered by Web technologies under the hood.” When people say Web technology lags behind native development, what they’re really talking about is the distribution model. It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. Efforts like the Extensible Web Manifesto have been largely successful at overhauling the historically glacial pace of standardization. Vine is a great example of a modern JavaScript app. It’s lightning fast on desktop and on mobile, and shares the same codebase for ease of maintenance.
Docker, meet hype. Hype, meet Docker. Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds. Docker containers are supported by very many Linux systems. And it is not just only Linux anymore as Docker’s app containers are coming to Windows Server, says Microsoft. Containerization lets you do is launch multiple applications that share the same OS kernel and other system resources but otherwise act as though they’re running on separate machines. Each is sandboxed off from the others so that they can’t interfere with each other. What Docker brings to the table is an easy way to package, distribute, deploy, and manage containerized applications.
Domestic Software is on rise in China. China is Planning to Purge Foreign Technology and Replace With Homegrown Suppliers. China is aiming to purge most foreign technology from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020, stepping up efforts to shift to Chinese suppliers, according to people familiar with the effort. In tests workers have replaced Microsoft Corp.’s Windows with a homegrown operating system called NeoKylin (FreeBSD based desktop O/S). Dell Commercial PCs to Preinstall NeoKylin in China. The plan for changes is driven by national security concerns and marks an increasingly determined move away from foreign suppliers. There are cases of replacing foreign products at all layers from application, middleware down to the infrastructure software and hardware. Foreign suppliers may be able to avoid replacement if they share their core technology or give China’s security inspectors access to their products. The campaign could have lasting consequences for U.S. companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Intel Corp. (INTC) and Hewlett-Packard Co. A key government motivation is to bring China up from low-end manufacturing to the high end.
Data center markets will grow. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the data center rack server market to grow from $22.01 billion in 2014 to $40.25 billion by 2019, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.17%. North America (NA) is expected to be the largest region for the market’s growth in terms of revenues generated, but Asia-Pacific (APAC) is also expected to emerge as a high-growth market.
The rising need for virtualized data centers and incessantly increasing data traffic is considered as a strong driver for the global data center automation market. The SDDC comprises software defined storage (SDS), software defined networking (SDN) and software defined server/compute, wherein all the three components of networking are empowered by specialized controllers, which abstract the controlling plane from the underlying physical equipment. This controller virtualizes the network, server and storage capabilities of a data center, thereby giving a better visibility into data traffic routing and server utilization.
Large data center operators will be using more and more of their own custom hardware instead of standard PC from traditional computer manufacturers. Intel Betting on (Customized) Commodity Chips for Cloud Computing and it expects that Over half the chips Intel will sell to public clouds in 2015 will have custom designs. The biggest public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure),other big players (like Facebook or China’s Baidu) and other public clouds (like Twitter and eBay) all have huge data centers that they want to run optimally. Companies like A.W.S. “are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people — you want to optimize everything”. That is why they want specialized chips. Customers are willing to pay a little more for the special run of chips. While most of Intel’s chips still go into PCs, about one-quarter of Intel’s revenue, and a much bigger share of its profits, come from semiconductors for data centers. In the first nine months of 2014, the average selling price of PC chips fell 4 percent, but the average price on data center chips was up 10 percent.
We have seen GPU acceleration taken in to wider use. Special servers and supercomputer systems have long been accelerated by moving the calculation of the graphics processors. The next step in acceleration will be adding FPGA to accelerate x86 servers. FPGAs provide a unique combination of highly parallel custom computation, relatively low manufacturing/engineering costs, and low power requirements. FPGA circuits may provide a lot more power out of a much lower power consumption, but traditionally programming then has been time consuming. But this can change with the introduction of new tools (just next step from technologies learned from GPU accelerations). Xilinx has developed a SDAccel-tools to to develop algorithms in C, C ++ – and OpenCL languages and translated it to FPGA easily. IBM and Xilinx have already demoed FPGA accelerated systems. Microsoft is also doing research on Accelerating Applications with FPGAs.
Universal Memory for Instant-On Computing will be talked about. New memory technologies promise to be strong contenders for replacing the entire memory hierarchy for instant-on operation in computers. HP is working with memristor memories that are promised to be akin to RAM but can hold data without power. The memristor is also denser than DRAM, the current RAM technology used for main memory. According to HP, it is 64 and 128 times denser, in fact. You could very well have a 512 GB memristor RAM in the near future. HP has what it calls “The Machine”, practically a researcher’s plaything for experimenting on emerging computer technologies. Hewlett-Packard’s ambitious plan to reinvent computing will begin with the release of a prototype operating system in 2015 (Linux++, in June 2015). HP must still make significant progress in both software and hardware to make its new computer a reality. A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016.
Chip designs that enable everything from a 6 Gbit/s smartphone interface to the world’s smallest SRAM cell will be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2015. Intel will describe a Xeon processor packing 5.56 billion transistors, and AMD will disclose an integrated processor sporting a new x86 core, according to a just-released preview of the event. The annual ISSCC covers the waterfront of chip designs that enable faster speeds, longer battery life, more performance, more memory, and interesting new capabilities. There will be many presentations on first designs made in 16 and 14 nm FinFET processes at IBM, Samsung, and TSMC.
1,403 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Craig Buckler / SitePoint:
Average web page size increased 15% in 2014 to almost 2MB; HTTP requests per page hardly changed at 95 — Average Page Weight Increases 15% in 2014 — The HTTP Archive Report collates information from almost half a million of the web’s most popular websites.
Average Page Weight Increases 15% in 2014
http://www.sitepoint.com/average-page-weight-increases-15-2014/
The HTTP Archive Report collates information from almost half a million of the web’s most popular websites. The latest figures indicate that average page weight has increased by 15% in one year to reach 1,953Kb — a little under 2Mb — and comprises 95 individual HTTP requests. While this is smaller than the 32% increase in 2013, it remains cause for concern.
A 2Kb rise for HTML seems reasonable although it’s a significant quantity of content given the trend for simpler, more concise text.
What surprises me most is CSS’s 11Kb rise. Responsive Web Design and CSS3 animations could account for some of this increase but there’s not been a drop in JavaScript.
JavaScript has risen by 19Kb.
27% of sites continue to use Flash — a fall of 5% over the year. The majority is used for advertising, video, and games. Flash hasn’t dropped as fast as expected but its future is clear.
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Vincent / The Verge:
New tax rules for digital goods take effect in Europe, affecting apps, ebooks, music downloads, more
Apps, ebooks, and album downloads are about to get more expensive in Europe
New legislation is making internet companies fork out more tax, and consumers will likely pay the price
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/23/7433281/eu-vat-changes-digital-goods-europe
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hybrid Cloud Adoption Set for a Big Boost in 2015
http://www.cio.com/article/2860846/hybrid-cloud/hybrid-cloud-adoption-set-for-a-big-boost-in-2015.html
Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that the global cloud market, including private, public and hybrid clouds, will hit $118 billion in 2015 and crest at $200 billion by 2018.
Spurred in large part by enterprise interest in the hybrid cloud, the overall cloud market is likely to see great growth in the coming year.
Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that the global cloud market, including private, public and hybrid clouds, will hit $118 billion in 2015 and crest at $200 billion by 2018. If the market shows that much growth next year, it will mean a 23.2% rise over the $95.8 billion market it reached in 2014.
IDC noted that 2014 showed a 25.9% increase over 2013, when the market was worth $76.1 billion.
The cloud, thanks to users gaining confidence in its security and reliability, is working on some strong momentum.
“I don’t think the security fears go away,” he said. “I think there’s more consideration and availability of services that provide enhanced security and performance. It’s bridging the gap between low-security public cloud service and high-security private clouds.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jump-Start Your Tech Job Search in 2015
http://news.dice.com/2014/12/31/jumpstart-tech-job-search-2015/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
It’s a brand new year, and by all indications the economy’s doing pretty well, which means that a lot of people will begin looking for a new, possibly better job. If you’re one of those job seekers, here are some tips for jump-starting your search
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rich McCormick / The Verge:
Xbox One SDK leak could let developers make homebrew apps for the console
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7472393/xbox-one-sdk-leak-homebrew-apps
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seagate outs a fleet of cloud, wireless and super-thin hard drives
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/04/seagate-seven-wireless-personal-cloud-hard-drives/
First, the company is offering its ultra-thin 7mm drive in portable form with the appropriately named Seagate Seven. As you might expect, the company boasts that this is “the world’s slimmest” device for on-the-go storage, wielding 500GB of space and connecting to your gadgets via USB 3.0 inside a steel enclosure. The Seven certainly won’t take up much space in your pocket or backpack, and it’s set to arrive later this month for $100.
Prefer a wireless option for wrangling files? No worries: There’s something for you, too.
You need a more comprehensive storage solution for all of the family’s digital clutter? Seagate is ready to sort that too, and its Personal Cloud setup makes sure that stuff is accessible both at home and on the go. Keeping downloaded media in one place to watch on tablets, TVs and media streamers? Check. Serving as a central backup for laptops and other essential gadgets? It does that as well. Heck, it can even stream your content to DLNA-based wares like a PlayStation or Xbox console. Personal Cloud also handles backups of Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon and other cloud repositories
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Tracker 2015: Everything we know Google is working on for the new year
2014 included major expansions in home automation and medicine, so what’s next?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/
bi-annual Google Tracker, our roundup of all of Google’s news, rumors, and acquisitions. Hopefully it paints a clearer picture of what will happen with the company in the future.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus Torvalds Says GNOME Terminal on Fedora 21 Is Using “Emo” Mode
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Says-GNOME-Terminal-on-Fedora-21-Is-Using-Emo-Mode-468893.shtml
Linus Torvalds is not one to shy away from saying what he thinks and he apparently doesn’t have a too good opinion on what the terminal app looks like by default in the latest Fedora 21.
The terminal in the latest Fedora is from the GNOME 3.14 stack and it’s a dark one. It might be OK if you’re using the terminal only occasionally, but if you’re doing most of your work through the terminal, then you’re going to have a problem.
“The new gnome-terminal seems to default into a new ‘Emo mode’ (aka ‘Dark Theme’). I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to make a terminal application have its own depressed theme different from all other applications,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple has lost the functional high ground
http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground
Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future.
Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. “It just works” was never completely true, but I don’t think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.
Apple has always been a marketing-driven company, but there’s a balance to be struck. Marketing plays a vital role, but marketing priorities cannot come at significant expense to quality.
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.
The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.
We don’t need major OS releases every year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benefits of selling software outside the Mac App Store: lower fees, bundles, getting customers’ contact information
http://dancounsell.com/articles/the-benefits-of-selling-software-outside-the-mac-app-store
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sony, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft Now All Have a Hand In VR
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/01/04/1320238/sony-facebook-google-samsung-apple-and-microsoft-now-all-have-a-hand-in-vr
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software-defined everything: So, WHEN is the ‘future’?
Claims of invisibility and IT ‘as a service’ need to be tested
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/05/so_with_software_defined_everything_the_future_would_be_when_exactly/
The software-defined data centre concept has attracted considerable attention and hype, with its promise of reducing hardware costs and automating control of infrastructure.
Backers of the idea say the SDDC will enable policy-driven management of resources, allowing applications to be deployed across commodity hardware to suit the demands of particular workloads.
The underlying infrastructure will essentially be invisible to those managing it, delivering IT “as a service” to the rest of the business.
But while it may offer a neat vision for the future, reaping the benefits is likely to be a huge task for most firms.
It will require new technologies and different approaches to data centre design and management. Despite the flurry of vendor activity, many are waiting to see whether the SDDC is mere marketing buzz, or a glimpse of the future.
The SDDC term was coined in 2012 by former CTO of virtualisation giant VMware
But VMware is far from the only one pushing this software-defined agenda. The trend has since been more widely adopted across the IT industry – from vendors to service providers – spawning other comparable monikers such as SDx, virtual data centre, or software-defined everything, all of which have taken hold to a lesser degree.
There has been evidence of growing interest in various “software defined” technologies. For instance, many claim the SDN market – which is estimated to have only around 500 deployments globally at this point – is set for strong growth in coming years. IDC forecasts revenues will hit $3.7bn by 2016.
The software-defined storage market has seen greater activity, too, with EMC’s ViPR, NetApp’s ONTAP and from Nexenta, and Nutanix. Despite this early activity, there is some way to go before the real benefits of software automation are felt.
451 Research analyst John Abbott says SDDC will need the full support of white-labeled hardware, coming from low-priced Asia-based OEMs and new entrants. “The ideal in the future would be that you use white-box systems underneath: commodity x86 servers and x86 storage modules and even white box x86 switches, rather than the current Cisco or Juniper hardware dependent switches,” he said.
“When you get to that stage you can really start getting some of the benefits of improved utilisation; more flexibility, faster provision of services, and you can then drive down the price of your hardware procurement and standardise that as well.”
The approach bears some resemblance to the huge scale-out data centres deployed by the big web firms such as Facebook, Amazon and Google, which rely heavily on software – in some cases container-based virtualisation – to manage their vast infrastructure. These companies have led the way with smarter management of data resources, allowing servers and other hardware to be shut down or run at lower power levels.
“The danger of SDDC for businesses is that it can involve a lot of Frankenstein thinking: ‘I am going to marry some of what the web-scale guys do, like automation and scale-out, but I am going to use classic enterprise patterns, and I am not going to give up my ways of doing things’. The result is that you can’t recognise all of the value.”
Although some of these techniques have attracted the interest of service providers and telcos, such thinking is still a long way off for more traditional businesses at this point. In fact, many continue to rely on complex, heterogeneous infrastructure, and some – such as large banks – are tied into legacy non-x86 systems.
At the same time, certain applications built for the client-server world would need to be re-architected if they are to fit the SDDC model of distributed systems.
Along with initiatives like the Open Compute Project and OpenFlow, OpenStack is an attempt to provide an open standards-based approach to developing data-centre designs.
OpenStack is just a part of the puzzle
Modernising data centre infrastructure is just one challenge on the road towards that SDDC Holy Grail.
Architecting software-defined environments requires changes to IT processes including orchestration, automation, metering and billing. It also involves a change in the role of the IT department as it becomes a service broker to business units, providing policy-driven delivery of resources to meet the needs of applications.
“It is not just a technology change – that is almost the easy part,”
He believes that staff need to learn new skills to gain the broader technical knowledge required as data centre technologies converge.
There should also be awareness of security management, as physical security is moved to the logical layer with controls placed in the hypervisor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel rolls 14nm Broadwell in Vegas
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/ces/4438203/Intel-rolls-14nm-Broadwell-in-Vegas?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150106&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150106&elq=6db3b65852a342ad98aa923f6efbb3d2&elqCampaignId=21020
Intel announced at CES 2015 the Broadwell family, its fifth-generation Core processors. The 14 new chips are essentially versions of the company’s 22nm Haswell architecture made in its new 14nm process, providing enhancements it hopes encourages PC and notebook users to upgrade.
Intel will offer dual and quad-core chips — 10 processors at 15W (both Core i5 and i7 chips) with Intel HD graphics, and four 28W products with Intel Iris Graphics spanning i3, i5, and i7 lines. The dual-core chips have 1.9 billion transistors, a 35% increase over the prior generation, and a 133 mm2 footprint that is approximately 50mm2 smaller than its predecessors. The 15W chips have data rates up to 3.1 GHz while 28W i7 cores hit up to 3.4 GHz.
The Broadwell chips have L3 caches ranging from 2 to 4 Mbytes, roughly the same as Haswell.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Office Preview apps for Android tablets are now open to anyone
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/office-for-android-tablets-opens-to-anyone/
Two months to the day after Microsoft launched a trio of all-new Office apps for Android tablets, the software giant has today revealed that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now available for anyone to download with a compatible device.
The initial launch back in November accompanied a broader shift in the Office strategy on mobile, as Microsoft made creating and editing documents completely free, removing the need for an Office 365 subscription. This was in addition to new standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPhone and Android tablets, though the latter incarnations were made available in limited “Preview mode” at first.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Little-Known Programming Languages That Actually Pay
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/06/1714242/little-known-programming-languages-that-actually-pay
There is no shortage of programming languages, from the well-known ones (Java and C++) to the outright esoteric (intended just for research or even humor). While the vast majority of people learn to program the most-popular ones, the lesser-known programming languages can also secure you a good gig in a specific industry. Which languages?
Client-server programming with Opa, Salesforce’s APEX language, Mathematica and MATLAB, ASN.1, and even MIT’s App Inventor 2 all belong on that list
Little-Known Programming Languages That Pay
http://news.dice.com/2015/01/05/little-known-programming-languages-that-pay/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency
http://www.cio.com/article/2860697/it-strategy/cios-need-to-snap-out-of-complacency.html
Your business colleagues aren’t as impressed with you as you are. Our 14th annual State of the CIO research rewrites your priorities for 2015.
As CIOs cope with digital disruption, the good news is that personal indicators lean positive. Compensation is up 7 percent, tenure holds steady, at about six years, and so does the portion of CIOs reporting to the CEO, at 44 percent, according to our 14th annual State of the CIO survey.
But don’t rest easy. This year’s results also reveal a collection of alarming disparities between what business colleagues want from IT and what CIOs think they’re providing. That gap came to light
When conceiving big projects, CIOs often talk about finding the “pain points” in a process and fixing them. That’s IT Management 101. But it seems CIOs haven’t identified all of the pain points in the interaction between IT and the rest of the company. For example, 54 percent of business leaders see the IT group as an obstacle to getting things done, but only 33 percent of CIOs have the same impression.
Business leaders want the CIO to simplify technology; it’s the most important thing CIOs can do to improve relations, they say
CIOs are spending more time overseeing the nitty-gritty of digital transformation work, such as implementing new systems and redesigning business processes, according to our survey. In some cases, that means a diminished role in big-picture strategic activities such as identifying new commercial opportunities.
36 percent of CIOs admit they are fighting turf battles against others in the C-suite–a kind of tumult that can arise in times of big change.
Make IT Easier
Thanks to the consumerization of the enterprise, employees today not only want technology that’s so easy to use that it requires no training; they also want the IT team to be easier to work with.
What this means for the future of the CIO will depend on how CIOs manage today.
Moving traditionally back-office workers out into the open, among the people they serve, has helped make IT more accessible. “At first the guys were uncomfortable, but now they love the attention and the interaction,”
At least one age-old IT practice appears to have lost its impact. Many business leaders are no longer impressed by the quick win. Pick a small but high-impact project and do it fast to prove IT’s value and generate goodwill, says conventional wisdom.
Sustainable change works better
For CIOs struggling to correct bad relationships, Wood recommends creating an interdisciplinary staff.
Make IT Smarter
For some years, CIOs have created opportunities for the IT group to learn about customers and envision news ways to keep them happy and help them spend their money. But business colleagues clearly want more.
Ciano at DHL says visiting customers produces two major benefits. One is warm relationships between IT and sales. The other is customer loyalty which, when cultivated, results in revenue.
Generating repeat business is key to Wayfair’s growth and so, therefore, is analytics to figure out two things: how to attract loyal customers and how to induce them to buy more than once in a quarter.
IT is hungry for customer feedback. “We look at every piece.”
IT has as much responsibility as other departments for helping the company meet its business objectives, including Web traffic targets and conversion goals
Make Your Own Future
As roles emerge that bump against CIO boundaries–chief digital officer, chief data officer, chief transformation officer–some observers are quick to declare that the strategic value of the CIO is waning.
Because more corporate departments have their fingers in the technology pie, a whopping 36 percent of CIOs say they’re involved in a turf battle in the C-suite.
Another move: Smarter hiring. IT staffing is notoriously difficult because CIOs have to respond to business conditions and customer demands as they shift. Hiring for IT isn’t as predictable as hiring for, say, accounting, where the volume of work stays steady in a given year, says Swislow, CIO at Cars.com. A healthy economy may trigger more business ideas for the technology group to support.
The IT talent search will only get harder. Our survey says 56 percent of CIOs expect a talent shortage in the coming year, led by shortfalls in big data, security, programming and mobile.
CIOs must also demonstrate deft handling of budgets and a facility with financial matters, says Hackenson.
IT costs will rise, but business units will see cost savings or productivity improvements.
Reporting to the CEO may mean you’ve arrived, but it doesn’t mean you’ll stay.
Retailers Seem Less Concerned About Data Security
Despite the data disasters at Target and Home Depot, retail CIOs have a below-average interest in upgrading cybersecurity
Overall, 23 percent of CIOs say that increasing cybersecurity will be the most significant reason for IT investments this year.
But for now, the focus is on profits. “Retailers are under enormous strain to keep afloat.”
While many retail CIOs did not place security atop their priority lists, they’re not ignoring it. “I definitely put security near the top, in light of recent events like Home Depot,” says Jack Wood, CIO of Wayfair, a $916 million online retailer. “Anything that touches customer data tends to be a priority for us. Cybersecurity ranks among the highest for those.”
Wood says he’s addressing security by examining Wayfair’s technology stack and making risk assessments to ensure that he has made the right investments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Resume Makeover: How (and When) to Break the Rules
http://www.cio.com/article/2684941/careers-staffing/it-resume-makeover-how-and-when-to-break-the-rules.html#tk.cio_nsdr_intrcpt
The ironclad rule of resume writing is to highlight your career in reverse chronological order – all the time, every time, right? Wrong. Resume expert Donald Burns explains why.
“As a resume writer I must condense a typical two-hour career story into a document that can be read and understood in about six seconds,” says Burns.
What does resume makeover candidate Michael Wallace have in common with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? Each created something very big at the beginning of their careers and spent the rest of their professional lives building on that initial success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sean Portnoy / ZDNet:
Intel Compute Stick: quad-core CPU, built in Wi-Fi, on board storage; plugs into any HDMI display, ships with Windows for $149, or Linux for $89, avail. March — CES 2015: Intel introduces Compute Stick with Atom quad-core CPU — Summary:The PC-on-a-stick will come pre-loaded with Windows 8.1 for $149
CES 2015: Intel introduces Compute Stick with Atom quad-core CPU
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-intel-introduces-compute-stick-with-atom-quad-core-cpu/
The PC-on-a-stick will come pre-loaded with Windows 8.1 for $149, or Linux for just $89, when it starts shipping in March.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES 2015: Samsung unveils tiny SSD that packs 1TB
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2015-samsung-unveils-tiny-ssd-that-packs-1tb/
Summary:New drive crams 1TB of data into a package smaller than a credit card – and boasts fast read/write speeds to boot.
It’s a new year and there is no sign that the pace of innovation in storage is slowing anytime soon, with Samsung choosing CES 2015 to roll out its latest tiny solid-state disk drive (SSD) with an enormous data capacity.
The Samsung Portable SSD T1 is a one terabyte disk drive in a package that is smaller than a credit card – 72mm by 52mm in comparison to a credit card’s dimensions of 85mm by 53.98mm. That is one small package in which to cram one terabyte – or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes – of data.
The drive is aimed at business travellers, creative professionals, and content creators who need secure local storage in large quantities. It is available in three sizes: 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB and according to Samsung it should be available in 15 countries across Asia, Europe (including the UK), and the US later this month.
Each unit of the Portable SSD T1 comes with a three-year limited warranty, and the price starts at £154.79 for the smaller 250GB version. No price for the larger drives has been given yet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 technologies that made me more productive in 2014
http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/10-technologies-that-made-me-more-productive-in-2014/
Summary: Hardware. Software. Services. We live in amazing times, and the technologies we use every day would have been considered magical just a few short years ago. Here are 10 small pieces of magic that made my life easier this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel® Compute Stick
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html
Compute when, where, and how you want
The Intel® Compute Stick is a new generation compute-on-a-stick device that’s ready-to-go out-of–the-box and offers the performance, quality, and value you expect from Intel. Pre-installed with Windows 8.1* or Linux, get a complete experience on an ultra-small, power-efficient device that is just four inches long, yet packs the power and reliability of a quad-core Intel® Atom™ processor, with built-in wireless connectivity, on-board storage, and a micro SD card slot for additional storage. It’s everything you love about your desktop computer in a device that fits in the palm of your hand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows XP beats 8.1 in December market share stats
Merry Christmas, Satya Nadella
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/08/windows_xp_overtakes_81_in_december_stats/
Windows 7 remains the planet’s dominant desktop operating system, but Windows XP again claimed second place during December 2014 according to data from Statcounter.com and Netmarketshare.
Let’s look at the numbers: Netmarketshare had XP at 13.57 per cent of the market in November but 18.26 per cent in December, and Windows 8.1 at 12.2 per cent in November and 9.49 per cent in December.
The results certainly seem odd given that lots of lovely new PCs will have been found under Christmas trees. But perhaps that likelihood also hints at another explanation: Windows XP is reputedly still most prevalent in Asia. The Christmas/New Year period sees plenty of people in the West take a break and probably spend less time using PCs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A new (computer) chess champion is crowned, and the continued demise of human Grandmasters
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/196554-a-new-computer-chess-champion-is-crowned-and-the-continued-demise-of-human-grandmasters
It’s almost 18 years since IBM’s Deep Blue famously beat Garry Kasparov at chess, becoming the first computer to defeat a human world champion. Since then, as you can probably imagine, computers have firmly cemented their lead over puny, fallible meatbags — Garry Kasparov is still considered by many to be the greatest chess player ever, while computers are only getting more and more powerful. Today, following the completion of TCEC Season 7, we have a new computer chess world champion. Called Komodo, the software can reach an Elo rating as high as 3304 — about 450 points higher than Kasparov, or indeed any human brain currently playing chess.
In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer lost to Garry Kasparov — then the top-rated chess player in the world. In the 1997 rematch, following some software tweaks (and ironically, perhaps thanks to a very fateful software bug), Deep Blue won.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s New Browser Will Make It Easier For You To Read Long Articles On Your Phone
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-spartan-browser-will-have-reading-mode-2015-1?r=US#ixzz3OEIqrmm0
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech More: BI London Salaries
Tech Pay Hits A Record: This Is What Software Engineers Earn BEFORE Their Bonuses
http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-salaries-have-hit-a-new-record-2014-10
The average base salary of a software engineer in the US is getting closer to $100,000. This year, the average is $97,098, up just a few dollars from the year before.
European engineers, however, earn a lot less. But they did get a big boost in base pay this year: Salaries in Europe average €43,536 ($55,329) before bonuses are paid, up 9% from €39,498 ($50,198) in 2013.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How We’ll Program 1000 Cores – and Get Linus Ranting, Again
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/02/024222/how-well-program-1000-cores—and-get-linus-ranting-again
For developers, 2015 got kick-started mentally by a Linus Torvald rant about parallel computing being a bunch of crock. Although Linus’ rants are deservedly famous for the political incorrectness and (often) for their insight, it may be that Linus has overlooked Gustafson’s Law.
Linus: The whole “parallel computing is the future” is a bunch of crock.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/12/31/linus-the-whole-parallel-computing-is-the-future-is-a-bunch.html
The contention:
The whole “let’s parallelize” thing is a huge waste of everybody’s time. There’s this huge body of “knowledge” that parallel is somehow more efficient, and that whole huge body is pure and utter garbage. Big caches are efficient. Parallel stupid small cores without caches are horrible unless you have a very specific load that is hugely regular (ie graphics).
Nobody is ever going to go backwards from where we are today. Those complex OoO [Out-of-order execution] cores aren’t going away. Scaling isn’t going to continue forever, and people want mobility, so the crazies talking about scaling to hundreds of cores are just that – crazy. Why give them an ounce of credibility?
Where the hell do you envision that those magical parallel algorithms would be used?
The only place where parallelism matters is in graphics or on the server side, where we already largely have it. Pushing it anywhere else is just pointless.
So give up on parallelism already. It’s not going to happen. End users are fine with roughly on the order of four cores, and you can’t fit any more anyway without using too much energy to be practical in that space. And nobody sane would make the cores smaller and weaker in order to fit more of them – the only reason to make them smaller and weaker is because you want to go even further down in power use, so you’d still not have lots of those weak cores.
Give it up. The whole “parallel computing is the future” is a bunch of crock.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Survey: Tech has FREED modern workers – to work longer hours
Internet, email make you more productive, more of the time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/31/pew_tech_and_work_survey/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Is Going To Happen
http://avc.com/2015/01/what-is-going-to-happen/
1/ The big companies that were started in the second half of the last decade, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc, will start going public. Investors will be glad to scoop up some of their shares.
2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world.
3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market.
4/ After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality will hit some headwinds.
5/ Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables. The Apple Watch will not be the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.
6/ Capital markets will be a mixed bag in 2015. Big tech names will continue to access capital easily
7/ The Republicans and Democrats will start jockeying for position in silicon valley for the next presidential election and tech issues will loom large.
8/ The horrible year that bitcoin had in 2014 will be a wakeup call for all stakeholders.
9/ the enterprise/saas sector will shine in 2015 with dozens of emerging important new companies taking advantage of the cloud and mobile to redefine what work and workflow looks like in the enterprise.
10/ cybersecurity budgets will explode in 2015 as every company, institution, and government attempts to avoid being Sony’d.
11/ the health care sector will start to feel the pressure of real patient centered healthcare brought on by the trifecta of the smartphone
What Just Happened?
http://avc.com/2014/12/what-just-happened/
Tomi Engdahl says:
New U.S. Stealth Jet Can’t Fire Its Gun Until 2019
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/31/new-u-s-stealth-jet-can-t-fire-its-gun-until-2019.html
America’s $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is slated to join fighter squadrons next year—but missing software will render its 25mm cannon useless.
The Pentagon’s newest stealth jet, the nearly $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, won’t be able to fire its gun during operational missions until 2019, three to four years after it becomes operational.
Even though the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is supposed to join frontline U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadrons next year and Air Force units in 2016, the jet’s software does not yet have the ability to shoot its 25mm cannon.
“To me, the more disturbing aspect of this delay is that it represents yet another clear indication that the program is in serious trouble.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Feels Unintended Consequences
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325215&
The Internet of Things will require more horsepower in datacenter servers and flexibility at end nodes for security — issues that play well to FPGAs.
As we look toward 2015, many of the dynamics that have supported the programmable logic industry in recent years remain in place. ASIC and ASSP design-costs spiral, uncertainties about functionality grow, and high-volume opportunities are rare
The concept behind the IoT is simple: If a device is controlled by electronics, you can simply connect the controller to the Internet to accept commands with a smartphone or cloud application. The end result is a device composed of sensors and actuators with network interfaces, all connecting across the Internet to control software.
We are already seeing this process at work. Smartphone services like Apple’s Siri execute in the cloud, not on the handset. In the networking space, network functions virtualization replaces entire boxes of specialized networking hardware with software running on servers in datacenters. The future of the IoT appears to be a universe of tiny, inexpensive sensors and actuators connected through the Internet to giant datacenters.
This view, however, is too simplistic. Trends in data acceleration and network enrichment — both favorable to FPGAs — are addressing needs for faster and predictable real-time performance, low-power WiFi, and Ethernet connections, and rapidly evolving device security.
In the datacenter, tasks historically performed in hardware are being transmuted into functions of software running on servers. Sometimes this conversion is easy. Sometimes it only works when you break the task into many threads and spread the threads over many servers. Sometimes, however, even multithreading doesn’t make the software fast enough, and hardware acceleration is needed to meet the real-time requirements of the task.
Developments from Web giants Microsoft Bing and Baidu — supported by Altera — show that with their flexibility and massive parallelism FPGAs can improve throughput, response time, and energy efficiency, working intimately with the server CPUs. A key part of this trend is to make the FPGA programmable and debuggable in languages already familiar to datacenter programmers. Altera’s SDK for OpenCL tool, for example, allows programmers to create and debug a complete CPU-interface-FPGA platform from a high-level language.
The other problem is that today’s Internet is not appropriate for the IoT for three major reasons:
First, the WiFi and Ethernet connections at the edge of the Internet require power-hungry, always-on interfaces, the opposite of what all those tiny sensors and actuators — the Things — can provide. So a myriad of short-range, low-power networks is springing up to connect the Things to hubs, which in turn connect to WiFi or Ethernet.
Second, some devices have tasks such as motor control that must have guaranteed maximum delay.
Third, hackers will certainly attack the IoT, as seen with the Stuxnet worm of 2010. As the IoT emerges, responsibility for authentication, encryption, and functional safety will fall upon the hubs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s developer diagnostic tool Cloud Trace enters beta
http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-developer-diagnostic-tool-cloud-trace-enters-beta/
Summary:Originally introduced last June during Google I/O conference, Cloud Trace helps app developers spot hiccups and performance issues by finding the traces for slow requests.
Isolating the root cause of poor app performance can be a headache for developers, explains Google product manager Pratul Dublish in a blog post. It’s also major hindrance on app success. On average, 25 percent of users abandon a web page if its load time is more than four seconds and 86 percent of users delete an app if it underperforms, Dublish wrote.
But with Cloud Trace, the difficulty is mitigated with the help of detailed reports on where time is spent within an app while requests are processed. Cloud Trace can also analyze a set of requests to show their latency distribution, and use sample traces to give a percentile latency of values.
Diagnose Service Performance Bottlenecks with Google Cloud Trace Beta
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fi/2015/01/Diagnose-Service-Performance-Bottlenecks-with-Google-Cloud-Trace-Beta.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s SUPER-speedy SSD is a real power-sipper
512GB drive draws a TINY 2mW: Yes, that’s two milliwatts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/08/samsungs_small_screamer/
Samsung’s latest small form factor PCIe flash drive shunts data at up to 2.15GB/sec, making it a right speedy little critter.
It’s also much more power-efficient, using its “L1.2 low power standby mode (which allows all high-speed circuits to be turned off when a PC is on sleeping or in hibernation) as defined by PCI-SIG (the PCIe standards body),” according to the marketing blurb.
Because of this its power consumption reduced to under 2mW, a near 97 per cent decrease from the 50mW consumed using a L1 state, according to Samsung.
Samsung also says: “With a PCIe 3.0 interface, the drive achieves substantially higher energy efficiency, requiring only about 450MB/s per watt for sequential reading and 250MB/s per watt for sequential writing, which translates into a more than 50 per cent of improvement in performance per watt over that of the XP941 SSD.”
As the drive is targeted at ultra-thin notebooks as well as PCs, this should help battery life.
As before, it has 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacity options.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BOOM! Seagate attacks storage array hardware market
‘DEHHINO’ tech titans must go all-flash to survive
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/09/seagate_plans_takeover_of_hardware_storage_array_business/
Remember Dot Hill, LSI/Engenio, and Xyratex when they were all independent? They made storage array hardware for the storage system suppliers such as Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp, Sun and others. Yes, it was that long ago.
The business was hard because storage system suppliers could use contract manufacturers to make their own gear. Moreover, they preferred to sell arrays that weren’t too different, hardware-wise, from their competitors.
Seagate’s purchase of Xyratex was followed by it buying the LSI storage controller chip business from Avago in June 2014.
What Seagate is doing is vertically integrating upwards, adding a storage array hardware business layered on top of its disk drive and nascent (exaggerating a little) SSD and PCIe flash business. It’s moving from components to systems. Why?
First off, it has been in storage systems for a while, as has fellow disk maker WD. Both make low-end filers: 2-, 4- and 8-bay NAS systems with basic software for small businesses. Such systems are sold cheap and don’t compete with Seagate and WD’s main system customers for disk drives – the mainstream enterprise storage system suppliers such as Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, and Oracle/Sun (DEHHINO).
Secondly, Xyratex was moving away from selling storage array components to DEHHINO customers to selling complete ClusterStor high-capacity, high-performance arrays to the niche but growing HPC market, and a new set of OEMs such as Cray.
Thirdly, hyperscale storage needs existed in the monster cloud-based service companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, eBay, and others. They were into Big Data in effect before the term was even invented, and they each had their individual needs, but also a commonality of needing hundreds of thousands of disk drives a year connected into systems with architectures that were unique to them – but not satisfied by VMAX, ONTAP or DS8000 arrays. No sir, not at all.
Now it’s out in the open. Barron’s reports from CES in Las Vegas that Seagate CEO and chairman Steve Luczo now sees that Seagate (and WD) could take over the hardware storage array business from the DEHHINO group, with them changing into software-focussed businesses.
The ClusterStor business is growing, with Luczo commenting that: “I think that business will be on a billion-dollar run rate in a year from now.”
For the DEHHINO suppliers the invasion of their hardware business turf by Seagate and WD/HGST is not good news. This is massively disruptive. It is unlikely, highly unlikely we think, that billions of dollars of array hardware revenues can be transferred to software, meaning they face their core businesses becoming smaller businesses.
One option could be to go all-flash, buying in flash componentry from non-system suppliers such as Intel, Micron, Samsung and SanDisk. That means massive software rewrites, except for HDS and HP, but it does keep them in the hardware business with its associated cashflow.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM ushers in BIGGEST EVER re-org for the cloud era, say insiders
CEO Ginny Rometty making her mark…(it has been 3+ years)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/09/ibm_biggest_ever_reorg/
IBM CEO Ginny Rometty is instigating the biggest global re-org in the history of the corporation in a bid to carve out a clearer future in a cloudy world.
Multiple sources told us senior managers were this week informed about the changes that will see IBM try to shed the dusty hardware, software and services silo structure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LICK THAT ATM: Diebold and Corning debug displays
Antimicrobial touch screens come to cash machines
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/09/lick_that_atm_diebold_and_corning_debug_displays/
Ponder, for a moment, whether the person ahead of you in the queue to use an automatic teller machine (ATM) washed their hands after their last visit to the bathroom.
What’s that you say? You’ll use your card instead? Can’t blame you: the prospect of mashing your hands on touch-screens or buttons used by who-knows-how-many fellow members of the great unwashed can sound unappealing.
Enter glass-maker Corning and ATM-maker Diebold, who at CES 2015 announced a collaboration to fit the antimicrobial version of Gorilla Glass to cash machines.
Never mind it’s bollocks, the antimicrobial screen can be retrofitted to old ATMs or slotted into Diebold’s current models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What an ACE-HOLE! This super-software will whip you at poker, hands down
Don’t challenge it to strip poker – you’ll never see its circuits
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/09/canny_canadians_build_computer_system_thats_unbeatable_at_poker/
Researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada, think they’ve made the perfect poker-playing program – and are inviting people to try their hand against it.
The software, dubbed Cepheus, is a machine-learning system that has been taught to play a variant of Texas Hold ‘em called heads-up limit, where players can only bet fixed amounts and do so a fixed number of times.
“It was trained against itself, playing the equivalent of more than a billion billion hands of poker,” said Michael Bowling, a professor in the university’s faculty of science.
“With each hand it improved its play, refining itself closer and closer to the perfect solution. The program was trained for two months using more than 4,000 CPUs each considering over six billion hands every second. This is more poker than has been played by the entire human race.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Latest NORKS Linux and Android distros leak
They’ve gone TOO FAR this time with Mac OS and Angry Birds ripoffs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/09/rooting_red_star_latest_nork_os_leaks/
The latest copy of North Korea’s in-house Red Star Linux has leaked to the internet and it looks a lot like OS X, computer science graduate Will Scott says.
An unnamed source contacted Scott ahead of his talk on Red Star and North Korea computing at the Chaos Communications Congress last month and shortly after published the distro online.
Scott said the distribution (downloadable ISO and instructions) was not widely used outside of the utilities sector with Windows XP being the most common among individuals.
“I didn’t really see anyone using Red Star, my gut feeling is that it is mainly used by industrial companies,” Scott said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all
Enough of the stand-up meetings please, just WRITE SOME CODE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/08/erik_meijer_agile_is_a_cancer_we_have_to_eliminate_from_the_industry/
A couple of months back, Dutch computer scientist Erik Meijer gave an outspoken and distinctly anti-Agile talk at the Reaktor Dev Day in Finland.
“Agile is a cancer that we have to eliminate from the industry,” said Meijer; harsh words for a methodology that started in the nineties as a lightweight alternative to bureaucratic and inflexible approaches to software development.
The Agile Manifesto is a statement from a number of development gurus espousing four principles:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
What is wrong with Agile? Meijer’s thesis is that “we talk too much about code, we don’t write enough code.”
Stand-up meetings in Scrum (a common Agile approach) are an annoying interruption at best, or at worst one of the mechanisms of “subtle control”, where managers drive a team while giving the illusion of shared leadership. “We should end Scrum and Agile,” he says. “We are developers. We write code.”
Even test driven development, where developers write tests to subsequently verify the behaviour of their code, comes in for a beating. “This is so ridiculous. Do you think you can model the real failures that happen in production? No,” says Meijer.
He advocates instead a “move fast and break things” model, where software is deployed and errors fixed as they are discovered.
However, not all of Meijer’s arguments stand up.
“It’s not Agile that sucks, and dragging programmers down. It’s the inability of programmers and business people to understand each other,”
Like Meijer though, Ferrier is no fan of Scrum. “Sprints are utterly ridiculous ways to produce software,” he says, referring to the short-term targets which form part of Scrum methodology.
Meijer quotes “pragmatic programmer” Dave Thomas, another Manifesto signatory:
“The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES 2015: Asus top announcements
Transformer Book T300 Chi and Zenfone 2 make Las Vegas debut
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2389382/ces-2015-asus-top-announcements
ASUS was one of the few firms to showcase new mobile devices at CES 2015, seemingly making the most of the lack of announcements from the likes of Sony and Samsung.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell’s new laptop works 15 hours on a single charge
Dell has launched a new 13-inch laptop, which utilizes Intel’s recent fifth-generation Core processors. The new processor is particularly evident in battery mode, because one of the charging XPS 13 will be able to operate 15 hours.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2262:dellin-uutuus-toimii-15-tuntia-yhdella-latauksella&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel introduced 14-nanometer circuits Broadwell Las Vegas CES exhibition below. Previous 22nm Haswell circuits compared to the new Broadwell is impressive. For example, the video conversion is successful 50 percent better power and 3D graphics drawn 22 percent more efficient.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2262:dellin-uutuus-toimii-15-tuntia-yhdella-latauksella&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Plays Carrizo Games in Vegas
Next-gen x86/GPU shown in game notebook
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325230&
Advanced Micro Devices is still playing its cards close to the chest when it comes to Carrizo, the company’s next generation integrated x86 processor. While specs were scarce at International CES, officials trumped the single, scalable architecture and video processing capabilities of Carrizo and Carrizo-L.
As with prior reports, the Carrizo puts an ARM CPU, GPU, and south bridge on one die. AMD did not provide a die size. Higher-end Carrizo chips will be based on a new x86 core, codenamed Excavator — probably four of them — and AMD’s Volcanic Islands GPU core. The lower cost Carrizo-L will run on the Puma x86 core currently used in Beema and Mullins chips.
“Carrizo will have the entire range [of device capabilities] with one board infrastructure. It is definitely an unprecedented level of scalability,” AMD Marketing Manager David McAfee told EE Times. “We’ve been working for many years on heterogeneous architecture systems; this is the first product with that.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computer chaos feared over 2015′s leap second
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/01/08/computer-chaos-feares/21433363/
The year 2015 will have an extra second — which could wreak havoc on the infrastructure powering the Internet.
At 11:59 p.m. on June 30, clocks will count up all the way to 60 seconds. That will allow the Earth’s spin to catch up with atomic time.
The Earth’s spin is gradually slowing down, by about two thousandths of a second per day, but atomic clocks are constant. That means that occasionally years have to be lengthened slightly, to allow the slowing Earth to catch up with the constant clock.
But last time it happened, in 2012, it took down much of the Internet. Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp and LinkedIn all reported problems, and so did the Linux operating system and programs using Java.
The reset has happened 25 times since they were introduced in 1972, but the computer problems are getting more serious as increasing numbers of computers sync up with atomic clocks. Those computers and servers are then shown the same second twice in a row — throwing them into a panic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Griffin shows off $30 Lightning cable with reversible USB plug, coming in March
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/07/griffin-shows-off-30-lightning-cable-with-reversible-usb-plug-coming-in-march
By Lester Victor Marks
Wednesday, January 07, 2015, 01:03 pm PT (04:03 pm ET)
At CES this week, Griffin Technology took the wraps off a new USB-to-Lightning cable with a twist — the USB Type A plug can be inserted in either orientation, just like Apple’s own Lightning connector.
Griffin’s forthcoming Lightning cables with reversible USB plug will be officially licensed Made for iPhone accessories.
It’s unclear whether the product will be able to be marketed as an official USB cable, however, as the USB Compliance Committee has not authorized reversible Type A USB plugs. No USB consortium logos were visible with the product on the show floor on Wednesday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Tracker 2015: Everything we know Google is working on for the new year
2014 included major expansions in home automation and medicine, so what’s next?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/7/#h1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quentin Hardy / New York Times:
Following Microsoft’s new Skype Translator, Google to announce major update to Translate app, add automatic transcription for popular languages — Language Translation Tech Starts to Deliver on Its Promise — The tech industry is doing its best to topple the Tower of Babel.
Language Translation Tech Starts to Deliver on Its Promise
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/language-translation-tech-starting-to-deliver-on-its-promise/?_r=0
The tech industry is doing its best to topple the Tower of Babel.
Last month, Skype, Microsoft’s video calling service, initiated simultaneous translation between English and Spanish speakers. Not to be outdone, Google will soon announce updates to its translation app for phones. Google Translate now offers written translation of 90 languages and the ability to hear spoken translations of a few popular languages. In the update, the app will automatically recognize if someone is speaking a popular language and automatically turn it into written text.
Certainly, the technology of turning one tongue to another can still be downright terrible – or “downright herbal,” as I purportedly said on a test of Skype. The service also required a headset and worked best if a speaker paused to hear what the other person had said. The experience was a little as if two telemarketers were using walkie-talkies.
But those complaints are churlish compared with what also seemed like a fundamental miracle: Within minutes, I was used to the process and talking freely with a Colombian man about his wife, children and life in Medellín (or “Made A,” as Skype first heard it, but it later got it correctly). The single biggest thing that separates us — our language — had started to disappear.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud security now considered ‘a board-level issue’
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/cloud-security/4748/cloud-security-now-considered-a-board-level-issue
How cyber breaches and shadow IT are making firms more cautious of cloud
Shadow IT and cyber breaches are propelling data security into a board-level concern, it is claimed.
Nearly two-thirds of companies say their executives get involved in security discussions, while 41 per cent are cautious over adopting cloud services, according to joint research between the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Skyhigh Networks.
Cyber attacks, like last November’s hack of Sony Pictures, have prompted businesses to focus on external threats, with 63 per cent most concerned about malware attacks.
Fears over data security have also led 72 per cent of companies to demand greater visibility into shadow IT deployments, the research revealed.
“What companies have got to do is provide an alternative. If they just start blocking services, they often achieve the opposite effect they want to.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robert McMillan / Wired:
Another leap second will arrive in June, threatening the stability of UNIX and Linux systems
The Leap Second Is About to Rattle the Internet. But There’s a Plot to Kill It
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/leap-second-rattle-internet-theres-plot-kill/
Back in 1972, they decided to insert the occasional leap-second into Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the standard most of the world uses to set wristwatches.
The trouble is that even as they use the leap second, UNIX and Linux define a day as something that is unvarying in length. “If a leap second happens, the operating system must somehow prevent the applications from knowing that it’s going on while still handling all the business of an operating system,” says Steve Allen, a programmer with California’s Lick Observatory.
The Linux kernel folks aren’t expecting any major issues when July 1 comes around, but the situation is unpredictable. Back in 2012, Linux creator Linus Torvalds told us: “Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something.”
And this time around, there will be problems again. Torvalds doesn’t think they’ll be as widespread as they were three years ago, but they’re largely unavoidable. The “reason problems happen in this space is because it’s obviously rare and special, and testing for it in one circumstance then might miss some other situation,” he says.
As a result, some insiders are trying to abolish the leap second, in favor of more reliable system. But they may or may not succeed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux’s Creator Wants Us All to Chill Out About the Leap Second
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/torvalds_leapsecond/
The leap second is the rare and obscure practice of occasionally adding a second to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system that most of us use to set our watches. It’s necessary, but not exactly computer friendly. In 2012 it crashed websites such as Reddit and Yelp and snarled up airline departures in Australia, so you’d think most computer experts would really hate them. After all, we have perfectly accurate timekeeping systems, such as the one used by GPS, that don’t futz with leap seconds.
But it turns out many computer folks are OK with the leap second, including Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds.
We’re going to get another leap second at the end of June, and Torvalds doesn’t anticipate any major glitches this time around. A lot of software has been patched since the 2012 disaster. “Last time it happened, people spent some effort making sure it was fine afterwards. Hopefully that all stuck,”
Torvalds went on to pontificate about whether the creators of the POSIX standard, used by Linux and Unix operating systems, made a tragic mistake defining a day as exactly 86,400 seconds while, apparently contradicting themselves by simultaneously forcing computers to use the leap-second friendly UTC. Here’s his rationale for keeping computers from switching away from UTC. It’s classic Torvalds: Technical, opinionated, and pretty damned funny.
Linus Torvalds: It would just cause other problems instead. Many worse problems. Things like just timezones are already a absolutely horrid mess, and everybody actually tracking the leap second would in many ways be much much worse.
The POSIX way of basically making leap seconds disappear except for when the actual leap second itself happens kind of minimizes the impact for most common timekeeping situations. Yes, it causes some problems for when the leap second comes around, and yes, people who actually need to care about long-term time differences end up having to know about leap seconds, but 99.9% of all software (and certainly 99.9% of all users) will never need or want to care.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SanDisk’s flash chip nightmare: How I’d escape black hole if I was in charge
Reg man Mellor weighs into tech rights battle
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/13/sandisk_finds_itself_in_a_flashdimm_hole/
Apparently let down by a component supplier allegedly shipping technology it has no rights to, SanDisk now finds itself facing a FlashDIMM sales shutdown – just as the server world realizes that DIMM flash is much faster to access than PCIe flash and wants more of it.
As detailed here, Netlist has won an injunction preventing Diablo Technologies supplying MCS Rush and Bolt chips to SanDisk, thus preventing SanDisk from supplying ULLtraDIMM products to its server-building customers.
Well, now. SanDisk may well feel let down by its MCS component supplier Diablo. It faces a two-month shipping shutdown to Lenovo, Huawei and Supermicro, which will not be pleased at having no product to sell after ULLtraDIMM stocks run out. They will tell SanDisk, surely, to do right by them and get it sorted. Its supply problems are its supply problems, not theirs. The immediate remedy is obvious; SanDisk should talk to Netlist about a technology licensing deal to settle the matter out of court.
As a new supplier in the enterprise flash market and one energetically growing its presence, SanDisk, in our view, has no option if it wants to avoid a disastrous weakening of its reputation as a reliable and trustworthy supplier to enterprise server OEMs.
Lenovo, Huawei could face SanDisk FlashDIMM dam – analysts
Preliminary injunction mandated ‘in part’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/12/sandisk_flashdimms_running_into_the_buffers/
SanDisk could be stopped from shipping its FlashDIMMs for Lenovo, Huawei and Supermicro servers if analysts’ interpretations of a Netlist court-awarded injunction are correct.
SanDisk’s acquired SMART business unit supplies ULLtraDIMMs, flash dies fitted to DIMM sockets – flashDIMMs – which are based on MCS (Memory Channel Storage) products from Canada’s Diablo Technologies. Earlier on in the development of this technology, Diablo worked with California company Netlist.
NetList has its own HyperCloud-based NVault non-volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) technology which is used in customised form by Nimble Storage. Diablo is being sued by Netlist*, which alleges that MCS uses Netlist’s patented NVDIMM technology unlawfully.