Data Center Insights
Cloud Stack. GPUs. Interconnects.
Available for purchase
The OrionX Deep Dive Industry Survey for Data Centers is now available for purchase.
See below for details.
Available for download
Many of OrionX Constellation(tm) research papers are available for download. No registration or payment is required.
Data Center blog
Insights and perspectives about infrastructure, cloud software, system architecture, CPUs, GPUs, interconnects and networking, storage, memory, from OrionX research analysts
Available for purchase
The survey results can help you:
- Gain a thorough understanding of the state of the Data Center market
- Set strategy
- Guide investments
- Validate assumptions based on industry pulse and customer sentiment
- Identify existing strengths of offerings, and areas of opportunity or concern
- Gain customer perspective to position future offerings
- Use credible and compelling content to fill gaps between product launches
This OrionX Research offering includes the slide presentation with tens of charts and a phone briefing for your team by OrionX analysts.
Our Research team is open to preparing special reports that drill down into specific aspects of this research, and the OrionX Customer Engagement team can work with you to create and execute campaigns.
Available for download
The Top-5 Technologies All Organizations Must Understand
Talk given at the Stanford HPC-AI Conference. We discuss the digital infrastructure of the future enterprise and the state of critical technology trends. OrionX works with clients on the impact of Digital Transformation on them, their customers, and their messages. Generally, they want to track, in one place, trends like IoT, 5G, AI, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing. And they want to know what these trends mean, how they affect each other, and when they demand action, and how to formulate and execute an effective plan. This talk is a somewhat technical summary of such discussions.
Digital Transformation
Constellation Summary
Report Type: Evolution
Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies – Why What When
Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts have emerged as unignorable technologies, with potentially far-reaching implications. The talk covered the essence of these technologies, focusing on what is real, what is a promise, impact on other key trends such as IoT, AI, and Quantum Computing, and why they might or might not deliver on their promises. Smart contracts and ICOs will be covered in a future presentation. Contact us if you’d like to request a speaker.
(This is the full slide deck supporting a keynote speech given at the Advanced Scale Forum conference in 2018.)
Digital Transformation
Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies
Report Type: Event
Critical Technologies of the Future
In this futuristic talk, we look at how information revolution is changing everything and provide a snapshot of some critical technologies that are currently driving that change: IoT, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, AI, Cybersecurity, 5G,… all resting on a foundation of Mobility, Cloud, and HPC.
This talk has evolved since 2011. Most recently, it was presented at the HPC-AI Advisory Council conference held at Stanford University in Feb-2018. A video of the talk is available on InsideHPC.com. Contact us if you’d like to request a speaker.
Digital Transformation
Critical Technologies of the Future
Report Type: Event
Case Study: The World Bank Performance Analysis
A rare look inside and a fascinating glimpse into how real world customers evaluate, test, and make decisions between different server technologies. We examine a major server refresh at the World Bank. We were fortunate to receive data directly from the bank concerning their needs, the server alternatives they evaluated, their evaluation criteria, the results of their analysis, and, of course, their final decision.
Data Center
Application Performance
Report type: Evaluation
The Cost of Data Loss and How to Avoid It
Almost every business is now data driven and many are realizing that their data is one of their most valuable assets. But how well are they protecting that data from IT problems that can cause data loss? In this report, we discuss the value of data and take a look at a readily available solution designed to protect against data loss.
Digital Transformation
Data Economy
Report type: Evolution
OrionX 2017 Data Center Predictions
The data center market is hot, especially now that we are getting a raft of new stuff, from promising non-Intel chips and system architectures to power and cooling optimizations to new applications in Analytics, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence.
Here is our Top-10 Data Center Predictions for 2017.
Data Center
Report type: Event
The Return of Vector Processing
Digital transformation, cloud computing and application elasticity, open source software, and new app areas like AI and IoT are driving a renaissance in system architecture. This is an area of interest and research for us at OrionX.
Vector processing was an interesting topic to re-emerge recently. First during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), and again in various announcements in implicit and explicit ways.
Data Center
HPC
Report type: Event
The Emergence of High Performance Interconnects
Multi-processor architectures have been used to improve application performance since the 1960s which has significant impacts upon system and software design as well as the orchestration required to coordinate communication between processors, memory, storage, networks and any other component that affects workload performance.
The larger or more complex the workload the more important it is that the components of the system are well balanced and do not create a choke point that impairs expected performance.
Data Center
High Perf. Interconnects
Report type: Evolution
The High Performance Interconnects Market Landscape
One of the most important components of a high performance computing solution is the interconnect that ties the resources together. In fact, interconnect speeds have advanced at a rate of 30% annually over the past four decades. This compares well with Moore’s Law, which indicates 41% annual improvement. Thus the increase in interconnect performance has had, and will continue to have, a large impact on the performance of high performance systems.
Major vendors in this market include Mellanox, vendors with an exclusive focus on Ethernet such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, HPE, Brocade, et. al., and Cray, SGI, and Intel.
Data Center
High Perf. Interconnects
Report type: Environment
Customer Evaluation Criteria for High Performance Interconnects
With increasing adoption of scale-out architecture, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and extreme-scale processing, High Performance Interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. Today, they represent their own market segment.
In this research report, we examine key evaluation criteria for HPI technologies. How do customers select a technology and a vendor? What are the key issues and tradeoffs? How does one match a given workload to an appropriate interconnect and topology?
Data Center
High Perf. Interconnects
Report type: Evaluation
Assessment and Ranking of Major Interconnect Vendor Offerings
From a market share perspective, the HPI market is currently led by: InfiniBand and Ethernet, followed by proprietary offerings from HPC vendors such as Cray and SGI, and the newly introduced Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) from Intel.
As a proxy for the HPI market segment, the TOP500 list of the most powerful systems in the world provides a glimpse of market dynamics at the very high-end: over 40% are based on InfiniBand, 44% use Ethernet, and 15% are built with proprietary interconnects. However it is worthwhile to note that only five of the TOP100 systems are Ethernet-based, and the highest is ranked in the 74th position.
Data Center
High Perf. Interconnects
Report type: Excellence
DriveScale Launches Scale-out Solution
DriveScale’s solution for scale-out computing is a significant advance in system design and deserves serious consideration by enterprises and cloud service providers alike, especially for Big Data workloads.
The DriveScale team’s record of innovation and execution, together with the quality of the company’s early customers (AppNexus, ClearSense, and DST Systems) and partners (Foxconn), and the level of funding it has received ($15m Series A) position it well for the market.
Data Center
Composable Infrastructure
Report type: Event
OrionX 2016 Data Center Issues and Predictions
Here at OrionX.net, we are fortunate to work with tech leaders across several industries and geographies, serving markets in Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data (including Analytics, Cognitive Computing, IoT, Machine Learning, Semantic Web, etc.), and focused on pretty much every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps and everything in between. Doing this for several years has given us a privileged perspective. In this report, we capture some of the trends in Data Center technologies.
Data Center
Report type: Event
Data Center/Cloud Computing Blog
The Top-5 Technologies All Organizations Must Understand
30 minutes to cover the basics and high level issues related to the technologies that will drive the digital infrastructure of the future enterprise. These include IoT, 5G, HPC, AI, Blockchain (including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts), and Quantum Computing.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML)
Special guest Dr. Max Henderson of Rigetti Computing joins the OrionX analyst team to discuss the short- and mid-term outlook for the intersection of AI and quantum computing and how it may affect businesses.
Digital Transformation (DX): Opportunity or Threat?
Digital Transformation (DX) is not just another slogan or IT upgrade, but a profound shift in what your customers want or will want, and what you have to do to deliver. It is a shift in your business model. Read about the many dimensions of DX and how OrionX can help you make it actionable.
State of the Market: Crypto/Blockchain, Quantum Computing
The OrionX Research team is back with Stephen, Shahin, and Dan going over the state of the market in Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing.
HPC and AI on Wall Street: Panel Discussion on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies
HPC and AI on Wall Street Conference At the recent HPC and AI on Wall Street conference, I moderated a panel on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. Panelists included Ryan Quick of Providentia Worldwide, Asha Dakshi of AlphaPoint, Eric Simone of ClearBlade, and Dan Simerman of the IOTA Foundation. Thanks to Jem Pagan of BluSky Consulting who […]
Top 50 of Crypto Mining – June 2019
Today, June 14, 2019, we released the second biannual list of Top 50 cryptocurrency mining pools. We do this in conjunction with the Top 500 supercomputing list that is released twice a year, in June and November. That list has been a matter of national pride for the US, Japan, China, and many other countries. […]
SC17 A Postview of the Supercomputing-17 Conference
Shahin and Dan review some of the most important technology advances out there, as seen at the SC17 conference. They discuss changes to the TOP500, New server chips (POWER and ARM), Liquid Cooling, and Quantum Computing. Also discussed: Y2Q, Quantum Supremacy, and Quantum-Safe cryptography.
Artificial Intelligence Customer Sentiment – OrionX Industry Survey
Co-hosts Dan Olds and Shahin Khan review the results of a recent “Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning” survey that OrionX conducted with over 300 high tech, industrial and commercial companies. See the data and find out how these trends may impact organizations’ AI strategies.
Secure IoT is the superset trend in tech, the ultimate hashtag soup, here’s why
There are more Things than anything else! And they’re going online in droves, adding capability but also vulnerability, and making the Secure Internet of Things (IoT), the super set of the technology trends. Secure IoT is the place with the most interdisciplinary, and therefore, the most difficult challenges. If you believe, as you should, that […]
Data Loss, A Big Problem in Digital Transformation
Data loss is a subject whose time has come! Digital Transformation is upon us and with it the beginnings of a vibrant data economy. Extracting, manipulating, and making sense of the information content from physical assets and business processes is the essence of this new era. With it, come two growing problems: downtime, and data […]
What is new in the High Performance Interconnect (HPI) market?
Dan and Shahin revisit the high end of the networking market, discuss what’s new, how HPI technologies stack up, and unveil the OrionX rankings of key technologies based on market, customer, and product attributes. Four OrionX research papers on this topic are available here.
Does Oracle have the right Cloud Strategy?
David Simmons of Oracle and Peter ffoulkes of OrionX are Dan’s guests as they discuss Oracle’s strategy for Cloud in Enterprise IT. Dan Olds and Peter ffoulkes discuss the OrionX blog that instigated this episode.
For Enterprise Cloud, Oracle is the Only Choice Grounded in Reality
Snapshot of Cloud Computing for Enterprise IT There is a loudly expressed opinion that ‘the cloud’ is the future of computing and that companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will dominate the market, replacing established hardware and software vendors such as IBM, Dell, HPE, and Oracle. In some ways, this is true especially for […]
New podcast for big ideas in tech
Here at OrionX.net, our research agenda is driven by the latest developments in technology. We are also fortunate to work with many tech leaders in nearly every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps, who are driving the development of such technologies. In recent years, we have had projects in Cryptocurrencies, IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, […]
Enterprise-HPC Industry Survey
In this inaugural podcast, co-hosts Dan Olds and Shahin Khan review the results of a recent “Enterprise HPC” data center survey that OrionX conducted with over 150 high tech, industrial and commercial companies. See the data and find out how these trends may impact organizations’ data center strategies.
The rise of AI marks an end to CPU dominated computing
Just as Intel, the king of CPUs and the very bloodstream of computing announced that it is ending its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) annual event, this week in San Jose, NVIDIA, the king of GPUs and the fuel of Artificial Intelligence is holding its biggest GPU Technology Conference (GTC) annual event yet. Coincidence? Hardly. With […]
Top-10 Data Center Predictions for 2017
A variation of this article was originally published in The Register, “Wow, what an incredible 12 months: 2017’s data center year in review”, Feb 6, 2017. The data center market is hot, especially now that we are getting a raft of new stuff, from promising non-Intel chips and system architectures to power and cooling optimizations […]
Deep Learning & Pieces of Eight
What does a Spanish silver dollar have to do with Deep Learning? It’s a question of standards and required precision.The widely used Spanish coin was introduced at the end of the 16th century as Spain exploited the vast riches of New World silver. It was denominated as 8 Reales. Because of its standard characteristics it […]
The Return of Vector Processing
Vector processing was an unexpected topic to emerge from the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC)held last week. On the Monday of the conference, a new leader on the TOP500 list was announced. The Sunway TaihuLight system uses a new processor architecture that is Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) with a pipeline that can do eight 64-bit floating-point calculations per […]
Research from OrionX
Today, we are announcing the OrionX Constellation™ research framework as part of our strategy services. Paraphrasing what I wrote in my last blog when we launched 8 packaged solutions: One way to see OrionX is as a partner that can help you with content, context, and dissemination. OrionX Strategy can create the right content because […]
What is the use of quantum computing without pictures or conversations?
The world of quantum computing frequently seems as bizarre as the alternate realities created in Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a well-respected mathematician and logician in addition to being a photographer and enigmatic author. Has quantum computing’s time actually come or are we just […]
Dan Olds Joins OrionX
Dan Olds, who founded Gabriel Consulting Group more than a decade ago, has joined OrionX. An important part of the OrionX magic is the ability to understand technologies, the competitive landscape, and customer needs. We put a lot of effort into that. That is what clients need to connect products to customers, and to meet […]
IoT: The Ultimate Convergence
The Internet of Things (IoT) marketplace is expected to run into the trillions of dollars during the next 5 years. Gartner estimates 6.4 billion devices will be part of the Internet of Things this year. And they project $3 trillion of endpoint spending by the year 2020. In our 2016 predictions blog, we said “If you […]
OrionX 2016 Technology Issues and Predictions
Here at OrionX.net, we are fortunate to work with tech leaders across several industries and geographies, serving markets in Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data (including Analytics, Cognitive Computing, IoT, Machine Learning, Semantic Web, etc.), and focused on pretty much every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps and everything in between. Doing this […]
BigRules of BigData
Data is good. Big Data is bigger, but what does it take to make it better? All else being equal, it’s better to have data and dismiss it than not have it and miss out. No data, and you’re driving blind. But too much data, and you might as well be driving blind. Sensory overload! […]
Benchmarks, Schmenchmarks: Big Iron Data and the November 2015 TOP500
There has been much discussion in recent years as to the continued relevance of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark as a valid measure of the performance of the world’s most capable machines, with some supercomputing sites opting out of the TOP500 completely such as National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois […]
Big Data and HPC: Convergence? (Part 2 of 2)
Last week, in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we looked at trends in Big Data and analytics, and started to touch on the relationship with HPC (High Performance Computing). In this week’s blog we take a look at the usage of Big Data in HPC and what commercial and HPC Big Data environments have in […]
Big Data meets HPC: Convergence? (Part 1 of 2)
Data volumes, velocity, and variety are increasing as consumer devices become more powerful. PCs, smart phones and tablets are the instrumentation, along with the business applications that continually capture user input, usage patterns and transactions. As devices become more powerful each year (each few months!) the generated volumes of data and the speed of data […]
OpenStack Cloud: “And then there were five!”
The IT industry is arguably going through its biggest transformation since the introduction of the IBM PC in the early 1980s, and a cloud service based approach is the likely destination for most enterprise workloads. On August 26th and 27th Mirantis hosted the “second annual” OpenStack Silicon Valley event at the Computer History Museum in […]
Peter ffoulkes Joins OrionX
Today, OrionX is celebrating another great milestone as we welcome a new partner to our team! Peter ffoulkes, who was most recently Research Director at 451 Research is joining OrionX. Thanks to the support of all of you, our clients, our colleagues, our community, OrionX is poised to continue to raise the bar for Strategy, […]
Long-Term Planning: The Next Hundred Years!
Long-term planning is an art. But it might take a real scientist to tackle a hundred-year planning horizon! Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics, awarded for his work in quantum chromodynamics (quarks, to you and me). He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at M.I.T. Professor Wilczek was invited […]
Is In-Memory Computing the Holy Grail for Big Data Analytics?
The industry is awash with articles on big data. Big data news is not confined to the technical webpages anymore. You can read about big data on Forbes and The Economist for example. Each week the technical media reports on break through, startups, funding and customer use cases. No matter your source for information on […]