Infrastructure

Forget networking, the data center of the future is software defined too

Software defined networking made a big splash last week at the Interop show in Las Vegas with a variety of vendors pitching their vision of how abstracting out networking from the physical hardware will change the overall way IT services are implemented. But the most disruptive element of the entire software defined networking trend is that it enables the next era of IT, the software defined data center, a concept Steve Herrod the CTO of VMware introduced at the show. Subscribe now or sign in to view this Weekly Update »

Data Highlights

From PaaS proliferates

$1B

Amount of money the PaaS market raked in, worldwide, in 2011

From Public, private or hybrid?

59%

Percent of companies moving some work to a public cloud that cite cost savings as a primary motivator, per a GigaOM Pro study

About This Topic Page

The Infrastructure vertical is curated by Jo Maitland, who focuses on cloud computing, enterprise IT and the disruptive technologies at play shaping the future of infrastructure. Prior to joining GigaOM Pro, Jo was an executive editor at TechTarget and cut her teeth as an analyst at Forrester Research and The 451. This page is your home for Research, Long Views and all things Infrastructure, from cloud computing to data centers to networks and software.

Today in

Infrastructure

Microsoft breaks big data sorting record

May 21, 2012

It’s rare to hear Microsoft breaking any kind of record these days, which is why I thought this one in the big data arena was worth noting. The Redmond software behemoth just beat the MinuteSort benchmark, or the amount of data that can be sorted in 60 seconds or less. The Microsoft team sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines versus 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009. Microsoft expects to use the research to power its bing search engine, but says its breakthrough technology and approach to the sorting challenge would be applicable to any big data application that required high performance.

— Jo Maitland
Infrastructure Curator