In late 2010 I noted that startup SeaMicro had introduced an ultra-dense server using Intel Atom chips in an innovative fabric-based architecture that allowed them to factor out much of the power overhead from a large multi-CPU server ( http://blogs.forrester.com/richard_fichera/10-09-21-little_servers_big_applications_intel_developer_forum). Along with many observers, I noted that the original SeaMicro server was well-suited to many light-weight edge processing tasks, but that the system would not support more traditional compute-intensive tasks due to the performance of the Atom core. I was, however, quite taken with the basic architecture, which uses a proprietary high-speed (1.28 Tb/s) 3D mesh interconnect to allow the CPU cores to share network, BIOS and disk resources that are normally replicated on a per-server in conventional designs, with commensurate reductions in power and an increase in density.

18 months later SeaMicro, again with support from Intel, has extended this architecture to the Xeon CPU, and has introduced the SM1000-EX, based on the Intel Xeon E3-1260L, a 45W quad-core design targeted at low power single socket servers, currently widely deployed in HPC environments. The resulting system can be configured with up to 64 CPUs, for a total of 256 cores in 10U. While impressive, this is not actually leading-edge density – there are other dense-pack servers that can deliver equal or higher core density with Xeon CPUs. What is significant is the power consumption – SeaMicro manages to do this on an aggregate power budget that comes out to a claimed 55W per core, only 10W over the power required for the core itself. In contrast, a conventional server design today would require at least 2 – 3X the power of the core itself, giving the New SeaMicro design a substantial edge in energy efficiency.

OK, it’s time to stretch the 2012 writing muscles, and what better way to do it than with the time honored “retrospective” format. But rather than try and itemize all the news and come up with a list of maybe a dozen or more interesting things, I decided instead to pick the best and the worst – events and developments that show the amazing range of the technology business, its potentials and its daily frustrations. So, drum roll, please. My personal nomination for the best and worst of the year (along with a special extra bonus category) are:

The Best – IBM Watson stomps the world’s best human players in Jeopardy. In early 2011, IBM put its latest deep computing project, Watson, up against some of the best players in the world in a game of Jeopardy. Watson, consisting of hundreds of IBM Power CPUs, gazillions of bytes of memory and storage, and arguably the most sophisticated rules engine and natural language recognition capability ever developed, won hands down. If you haven’t seen the videos of this event, you should – seeing the IBM system fluidly answer very tricky questions is amazing. There is no sense that it is parsing the question and then sorting through 200 – 300 million pages of data per second in the background as it assembles its answers. This is truly the computer industry at its best. IBM lived up to its brand image as the oldest and strongest technology company and showed us a potential for integrating computers into untapped new potential solutions. Since the Jeopardy event, IBM has been working on commercializing Watson with an eye toward delivering domain-specific expert advisors. I recently listened to a presentation by a doctor participating in the trials of a Watson medical assistant, and the results were startling in terms of the potential to assist medical professionals in diagnostic procedures.

I've blogged and published research before about the emerging Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) standard. The SCIM group has just approved Version 1.0. No, it's not your imagination: important standards around loosely coupled identity management really are being developed, tested, and deployed at a faster rate than ever before.

What does this new pace mean for security pros? New identity protocols can be disruptive to large enterprises that have already deployed older solutions, but these new solutions will enable IT organizations to reduce costs and improve agility in managing access to/from smaller partners and customers that don't have the means to deploy the heavy stuff. That makes access control easier to achieve in a Zero Trust world. (Andras Cser and I touch on the theme of "leaner and cleaner" identity protocols in our just-published Identity And Access Management: 2012 Budget And Planning Guide, and I do a deeper dive, assessing the future of SAML and the business value of newer federation protocols, in OpenID Connect Heralds The "Identity Singularity".)

2012 Is The Year The Cloud Becomes Mature

Based on the very high interest in this blog and its cloud predictions we are planning to host a Forrester Teleconference entiteled "2012 — The Year The Cloud Matures: A Deeper Dive Into 10 Cloud Predictions For The Upcoming Year" on February 28th, 1-2pm EST/6-7pm UK time, where we will highlight and go through the 10 below predictions one by one. For more details and registration please follow the link to the: teleconference web page.

1. Multicloud becomes the norm

As companies quickly adopt a variety of cloud resources, they’ll increasingly have to address working with several different cloud solutions, often from different providers. By the end of 2012, cloud customers will already be using more than 10 different cloud apps on average. Cloud orchestration will become a big topic and an opportunity for service providers.

2. The Wild West of cloud procurement is over

While 2011 still witnessed different stakeholders within a company brokering (sometimes unsanctioned by IT) a lot of cloud deals, most companies will have established their formal cloud strategy by the end 2012, including the business models between IT and lines of business for their own, private cloud resources.

3. Cloud commoditization is creeping up the stack