According to Gartner, global public cloud services revenues are to total $186.4 billion in 2018-- a 21.4% increase over 2017 revenues worth $153.5 billion.
The fastest growing segment is IaaS, forecast to grow 35.9% in 2018 to reach $40.8bn. The analyst expects the top 10 public cloud providers to account for around 70% of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50% in 2016. Such dominance of hyperscale IaaS providers creates both "enormous" opportunities and challenges to market participants, since while it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organisations need to be careful of providers gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market. In addition, organisations should demand simpler ways to move workloads, applications and data across IaaS offerings without penalties.
“Cray’s leadership in supercomputing is well known and AMD is thrilled to be working with them on the CS500 cluster system,” AMD says. “Cray is the first system vendor to offer an optimised programming environment for AMD EPYC processors, which is a distinct advantage. Combining AMD Epyc processors with Cray’s supercomputing expertise opens new opportunities for both companies to grow.”
The company insists the unification is not a mere rebrand, since "significant technical work has gone into combining these platforms." For instance, the meetings come through a unified feature set, including roster, meeting controls and PSTN connectivity, and are joinable via either Meetings or Teams applications. Teams also supports a new kind of meeting dubbed a Webex team meeting providing a space both secure and easy to use.
Aimed primarily at video and media professionals working with large amounts of data, ThunderBlade devices are based on four Mercury M.2 SSDs (Silicon Motion SM2260, LDPC, 3D MLC NAND) working in concert. Connectivity comes through Thunderbolt 3 interface, allowing customers to daisychain up to x6 ThunderBlade drives for a maximum of 48TB of solid state storage.
