Sure, big iron like Arista's 7500E Data Center Switch, Broadcom's massively integrated Trident II switch chip, and EMC's high-performance and exceedingly scalable VMAX and VNX arrays still generate plenty of crowds and headlines, but the real focus of development resources, R&D dollars and executive attention is on software. If not eating the world, software is definitely encompassing a greater and greater share of it.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at EMC World, and nothing drove home the point with greater force and clarity than EMC CEO Joe Tucci's admission -- nay, proud affirmation -- of the fact that the storage goliath that rose to dominate its industry on the strength of its powerful and burly hardware now devotes the vast majority of its development resources on software. In response to a question at a media briefing on the effect of hardware commodification and the attendant proliferation of white box storage systems on the company's business, Tucci stated that at most, EMC has a mere 500 engineers developing hardware, out of 12,000 total. Indeed, Tucci claimed the company embraces commodity hardware wherever it can, citing as supporting evidence the fact that EMC makes only one custom ASIC. Chiming in, EMC COO David Goulden reinforced the point, saying, "Our value is in the integration and the packaging." Goulden left unsaid the implication that building a VNX array is easy; making it operate like a VNX array isn't.

"Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future," Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, 68, told local reporters -- through an interpreter -- while on a visit to New Zealand this week, according to news reports.

Since founding the company 26 years ago, Ren had previously refused to conduct media interviews. But during his visit this week to New Zealand, he agreed to meet with reporters from four of the country's news outlets.

In response to reporters' questions, Ren dismissed allegations that his employees might be colluding with state security services, instead likening the relationship between his company and the Chinese government to that between New Zealand companies and their government, reported Fairfax Media in New Zealand. Furthermore, he said he was confident that his employees would be free to refuse any request from a Chinese intelligence service to spy on a foreign entity.

In a keynote speech at Interop, Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed two years of progress at expanding the scope of the project, which now includes open designs for server racks and cold storage designs based on how Facebook handles your old photos.

These designs are geared for very high performance and scalability, but also for energy efficiency. The industry average is that a data center will consume about 1.9 times as much electrical power as actually makes it to a server delivering compute services because of waste in the process, including electrical conversions and air conditioning demands. By minimizing the need for conversions and eliminating air conditioning, Facebook has been able to reduce that factor to about 1.07, Frankovsky said, which translates into an operational cost savings of about 38 percent. The design also reduced the capital expense budget by 24 percent.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that this Ursa Major at Facebook is the founder of the Open Compute Project and has ended up as chairman of the Open Compute Foundation's board of directors. He's the de facto leader of the world's first open-source hardware project.

His official title at Facebook is VP of hardware design and supply chain operations, which means he's responsible for ensuring that Facebook has all the hardware it needs when it needs it. That's no small order, and over the last several years it has forced a rethinking of what data center builders were doing.

Anyone who has been to Facebook's data center complex in Prineville, Ore., can see the first phase of Frankovsky's work. Server motherboards sit on open sleds that slide in and out of the server rack for easier maintenance; components are arranged in channels that allow continuous air flow down the rack. Temperatures are a little higher than expected in the data center because Facebook servers are designed to run at 85 degrees and Facebook doesn't use giant air conditioner chillers to cool the air. The result of revamped server and data center design is a facility that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive than predecessor data centers, said Frankovsky in a recent interview at Facebook offices in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Enstratius Cloud Management Platform interfaces to 23 specific cloud infrastructure offerings, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, HP Cloud, AT&T Synaptic Cloud, IBM SmartCloud, VMware vCloud Suite and OpenStack. The most recent addition was CloudCentral's Cloud Platform hosted in Australian data centers; it was added to the list May 3.

The Enstratius platform provides cloud suppliers with an employee self-service catalogue and design and management tools to help users create workloads and deploy them into a cloud environment. The platform is noted for the major cloud suppliers that it supports. Unlike competitors, it reaches deep into the ranks of secondary suppliers as well, such as GoGrid, Bluelock, Joyent, CloudScaling, CloudSigma and the Apache Software Foundation's CloudStack.

That means Dell can start to realize more of its ambition to be the link to and management agent between many cloud users and their service supplier. Dell can also start to integrate more of its recently acquired cloud technologies with those service suppliers, as well as be a large, data center-oriented supplier of servers and network switches.

The workshops, classes and sessions provide the information and case studies that tech leaders need to move forward, while the exhibit floor showcases the new products and technologies available to help them accomplish their goals. We highlight a few of those products in this slideshow.

The invitation directed me to call an 800 number, to agree to Google's unprecedentedly restrictive terms of service, and to choose a color: Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton or Sky. For the fashion-challenged, that translates to black, orange, gray, white or light blue.

I opted for black because it goes with everything and it's less likely to attract attention, which appears to be difficult to avoid if you wear Glass in public.

The invitation asked me to choose between picking up Glass at a Google office in Mountain View, New York or Los Angeles, or having Glass shipped. As a resident of San Francisco, I opted to for the in-person pickup experience at Google's sprawling headquarters in Mountain View.

]]> On Friday, 10 months after signing up to join Google's Glass Explorer program at Google I/O 2012, I received my invitation to purchase and pick up Google Glass.

The invitation directed me to call an 800 number, to agree to Google's unprecedentedly restrictive terms of service, and to choose a color: Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton or Sky. For the fashion-challenged, that translates to black, orange, gray, white or light blue.

I opted for black because it goes with everything and it's less likely to attract attention, which appears to be difficult to avoid if you wear Glass in public.

The invitation asked me to choose between picking up Glass at a Google office in Mountain View, New York or Los Angeles, or having Glass shipped. As a resident of San Francisco, I opted to for the in-person pickup experience at Google's sprawling headquarters in Mountain View.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/google-glass-first-impressions/3190?wc=4 http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/google-glass-first-impressions/3190?wc=4 http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/cloud-computing?wc=4 Thu, 02 May 2013 09:19 EDT http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-generation-data-center/servers/brocade-announces-new-hardware-software/240154024 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-generation-data-center/servers/brocade-announces-new-hardware-software/240154024 http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-generation-data-center/servers Wed, 01 May 2013 16:50 EDT http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/arista-7500e-switch-puts-up-big-big-numb/240154007 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center/arista-7500e-switch-puts-up-big-big-numb/240154007 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center Wed, 01 May 2013 11:30 EDT