Cisco Flips consumer unit out with trash Selling digital gadgets to consumers and breaking into the server racket, all the while alienating some of the server-makers who were pushing Cisco Systems networking gear, has been tough on Cisco's profits in recent quarters. And the restructuring that the networking giant has announced is an admission that things are not going …
With the proliferation of high-res mobile devices, the marriage of the flip functions and allure are over. Case in point, I had a flip and it had a great run - until I got my DroidX with already has an 8MB camera and 720p video.
Why carry my flip around? And frankly, why would a giant networking company get in bed with video camera's? It was a dumb move from the start.
Years ago, the big players realised they couldn't stay in their niches and carry on creaming off the same profits. IBM's biggest diversification was into services, and very successful it was too. Hp went into many pies - cameras, printers, storage, networking - and made it work. EMC realised being the biggest player in storage wasn't a longterm survival strategy when so many other players were getting into the act. Even Oracle realised they needed an option with other software makers starting to encroach on their database heartland. Ironicly, TPM's example of Sun is the best example of a big player's failure to diversify in time, followed closely by CISCO. CISCO realised their networking gravytrain was under threat and have tried to diversify into other areas. UCS is struggling and their other endeavours are dropping like flies. Unlike Sun, CISCO has the cash to diversify, but - like Sun - it just doesn't seem to have a coherent plan.
"We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,"
This is the kind of verbal rubbish-speak that companies need to stop.
But it seems CEO's amd senior managers sprout this garbage and applaud each other for it.
"We failed and are trying to work out what to do next" would be a good alternative
when you cut away the BS, it comes out more like "we're going back to our core network business" rather than "we don't know what to do next".
"We are making key, targeted moves" = "We are"
"as we align operations in support" = "axing some business divisions"
"of our network-centric platform strategy" = "that aren't core-network related".
The issue is not what they are doing (killing a brand that is not a strategic fit), the issue is they were stupid enough to buy it in the first place, which resulted in a half billion dollars being written off.
Anyone with an Smartphone could have told them that since they already had a high-res video camera in their pockets, why would they buy a separate pocket one?
This looks like some idiot CEO bought a shiny new Flip toy then thought like Victor Kiam - 'I liked it so much I bought the company'
FAIL.
I had a chance to play with one of the UCS systems about three months ago. Don't get me wrong, it's very shiny kit. Unfortunately, it just didn't make sense for my company from a price/performance ratio, and the provisioning UI was very confusing on top of it. It also didn't help that we would have had to buy the fibre-channel SAN fabric regardless of going with the UCS kit or not.
For the price we were quoted for the minimum UCS package and six blades, we were able to build out an 8 node cluster using commodity server hardware, with the fibre-channel and storage portions of the package remaining identical, with a bit of money left over.
China-based server maker Inspur has joined the Arm server ecosystem, unveiling a rackmount system using Arm-based chips.
It said it has achieved Arm SystemReady SR certification, a compliance scheme run by the chip designer and based on a set of hardware and firmware standards that are designed to give buyers confidence that operating systems and applications will work on Arm-based systems.
Inspur may not be a familiar name to many, but the company is a big supplier to the hyperscale and cloud companies, and was listed by IDC as the third largest server vendor in the world by market share as recently as last year.
The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.
Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.
The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.
As the world continues to grapple with unrelenting inflation for many products and services, the trend of rising prices is expected to have the opposite impact on memory chips for PCs, servers, smartphones, graphics processors, and other devices.
Taiwanese research firm TrendForce said Monday that DRAM pricing for commercial buyers is forecast to drop around three to eight percent across those markets in the third quarter compared to the previous three months. Even prices for DDR5 modules in the PC market could drop as much as five percent from July to September.
This could result in DRAM buyers, such as system vendors and distributors, reducing prices for end users if they hope to stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned. We suppose they could try to profit on the decreased memory prices, but with many people tightening their budgets, we hope this won't be the case.
RSA Conference Intel has released a reference design for a plug-in security card aimed at delivering improved network and security processing without requiring the additional rackspace a discrete appliance would need.
The NetSec Accelerator Reference Design [PDF] is effectively a fully functional x86 compute node delivered as a PCIe card that can be fitted into an existing server. It combines an Intel Atom processor, Intel Ethernet E810 network interface, and up to 32GB of memory to offload network security functions.
According to Intel, the new reference design is intended to enable a secure access service edge (SASE) model, a combination of software-defined security and wide-area network (WAN) functions implemented as a cloud-native service.
Interview After two years of claiming that its Arm-powered server processors provide better performance and efficiency for cloud applications than Intel or AMD's, Ampere Computing said real deployments by cloud providers and businesses are proving its chips are the real deal.
The Silicon Valley startup held its Annual Strategy and Product Roadmap Update last week to ostensibly give a product roadmap update. But the only update was the news that Ampere's 5nm processor due later this year is called Ampere One, it's sampling that with customers, and it will support PCIe Gen 5 connectivity and DDR5 memory.
Immersion cooling has long been the domain of larger datacenter operators but with increasing density and therefore smaller datacenter facilities, there is a need for shops of all sizes to get around heavy-duty AC and air cooling.
This is the target for German server maker RNT Rausch, which has teamed up with cooling specialist Submer to provide immersion cooling for RNT's server and storage systems
The partnership means businesses of any size can deploy liquid cooling in their datacenter. A relatively small space is required for this as it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers, or for expensive and sophisticated fire extinguisher systems, the companies said.
Arm-based servers continue to gain momentum with Gigabyte Technology introducing a system based on Ampere's Altra processors paired with Nvidia A100 GPUs, aimed at demanding workloads such as AI training and high-performance compute (HPC) applications.
The G492-PD0 runs either an Ampere Altra or Altra Max processor, the latter delivering 128 64-bit cores that are compatible with the Armv8.2 architecture.
It supports 16 DDR4 DIMM slots, which would be enough space for up to 4TB of memory if all slots were filled with 256GB memory modules. The chassis also has space for no fewer than eight Nvidia A100 GPUs, which would make for a costly but very powerful system for those workloads that benefit from GPU acceleration.
Amazon Web Services has allowed a third-party hardware offering into its universe, with a Lenovo server dedicated to video analytics scoring the gig.
To understand why AWS has endorsed third-party hardware we need to revisit the 2020 re:invent conference, at which it introduced the Panorama Appliance – a sealed box that stores video from CCTV rigs that lack native analytics capabilities. The Panorama Appliance ingests video and then applies machine vision models, so that users of old-school CCTV can enjoy an upgrade without having to replace their entire video systems.
AWS strongly suggests its SageMaker AI/ML platform as a very fine source of models to run on the Panorama Appliance.
Apple is finally killing off the venerable macOS Server, directing users still clinging to Profile Manager toward Mobile Device Management solutions.
The move is arguably long overdue. Much of what made macOS Server a server was deprecated in 2018 as the company announced plans to stop the likes of DHCP and DNS in its product and directed users to handy open-source alternatives.
Apple Open Directory and Profile Manager lingered on, with the latter being used for configuration management for Apple devices in an organization. Now, however, that last stub of functionality is deemed obsolete and Apple has warned that while many bits of macOS Server will live on macOS, Profile Manager will not. So the time for dodging Mobile Device Management (MDM) is up.
Comment AMD’s plans to integrate AI functionality from its Xilinx FPGAs with its Epyc server microprocessors presents several tantalizing opportunities for systems builders and datacenter operators alike, Glenn O’Donnell, research director at Forrester, told The Register.
A former semiconductor engineer, O’Donnell leads Forrester’s datacenter and networking studies. He sees several benefits to the kind of tight integration at the die or package level promised by AMD’s future CPUs.
“The more you can put on the same die or on the same package, the better,” he said.
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