October 2015 – Oracle Open World in SF featured several opening keynotes lead off by CEO Mark Hurd. Joining Mark, were CTO Larry Ellison and one of their strategic partner’s CEO, Brian Krzanich of Intel. The theme of the keynotes was the transformation of the data center and the resulting data expansion that accompanies the…
February 2015 – The cost of developing new process nodes and validating the libraries is getting prohibitive. As a result, the processor groups are slowing down Moore’s law by holding on the same node as last year and now moving to design and layout optimization to improve power and performance characteristics. This theme was repeated…
September 15, 2014, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Jim Williams from Oracle, presented the efforts to increase storage intelligence. Smart storage exchanges information between the app and physical storage layers to optimize resource use. Unfortunately, storage abstraction and layering makes exchanging performance hints difficult, since they are not defined by any standards. The issue is…
November 12, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Nandini Ramani from the Java group at Oracle described the role of Java in the world of mixed computing. The original premise of Java to write once, use anywhere fits into the paradigm of heterogeneous computing. Java has evolved into a secure, mature platform with millions of…
January 29, 2013, SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Garret Swart from Oracle identified the potential benefits for applications with the new storage architectures. The different memory structures and performance levels calls for new programming styles. With the advent of DRAM-compatible NVM technologies, the choices for NVM, connectivity, and form factors allows for greater diversity…
March 15, 2012 – The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (http://www.vlab.org/) held their latest event on the topic of Big Data and NoSQL which is the growing trend for data storage in public and private clouds. The crowd of nearly 600 packed the campus auditorium to hear several different approaches to the data collection and query issue…
May 9, 2012 – San Francisco, CA – At the All About the Cloud Conference, Chris Baker from Oracle spoke about ISVs and applications being in the cloud for the enterprise. Their surveys show that 37% of companies have a private cloud in place and 21% ae using public clouds. The main observation was that,…
February 20, 2012 – The theme of the microprocessor session at ISSCC was no longer raw speed and performance, rather it was data processing throughput per watt of power. Low power and reduced stages for data processing were the key. The session opened with Intel presenting the 22nm introduction of their new ivybridge processor which…
August 10, 2011, Flash Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Bill Nesheim from the hardware group at Oracle made comments on the use of flash in enterprise applications. Not everything is faster with flash, and enterprises may have other overriding requirements. In the enterprise, flash can optimize the performance of databases and storage platforms. Last year, companies…