A few months ago, I started doing a quarterly update on STH. You can see that in our STH Q1 2019 Update A Letter from the Editor piece. This quarter’s letter is going to be a bit shorter. We are fully into the vendor show cycle which means a lot more travel in Q2.
Grading Q1 2019 Goals
One of the new features of these letters is going to be grading how we did the previous quarter. In Q1, I set goals a bit too aggressively. When I go back and look at how many pieces we were planning, and how many publishing spots we had left we were at only two open spots to the end of the quarter.
Something that happens every quarter is the “unexpected.” Our big miss of Q1 was that we pushed our hard drive series. There were two reasons for this. Perhaps the biggest was that we unexpectedly started our AMD EPYC 3000 reviews of both CPUs and platforms. There were also a number of breaking pieces that we had the opportunity to cover.
Looking back on our Intel Xeon E-2100 series coverage, to date we have done 28 pieces including sixteen hands-on reviews of CPUs, servers, and motherboards. Our GPU compute series has been extremely successful culminating in this week’s Dual NVIDIA Titan RTX Review Compute with NVLink Performance.
Perhaps the biggest goal of Q1 was getting our tempo up to four reviews per week from two reviews per week in 2018. That goal we managed to meet and will continue to do so outside of major vendor product launches.
Overall, I think Q1 was more successful than I thought it would be but overly optimistically planned.
Outlook for STH Q2 2019 Goals
Q2 2019 started with our 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launch Details and Analysis. We have also traveled to China to cover Inspur Partner Forum 2019. Next week is Dell Technologies World followed by Lenovo Accelerate in mid-May. In late May we will have Computex 2019 and in June will follow with Cisco Live, ISC, and HPE Discover.
We are allocating more coverage time for trade shows, and are attending more than we have previously.
Our server review pipeline is very full. John’s 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable series is going to continue as is William’s GPU pipeline. We hope to also pick up the hard drive series this quarter. We are also adding new capabilities to enhance our CPU and GPU reviews.
We are also going to branch out a bit more. We are going to start looking at some more niche server hardware. The technology industry is fascinating as a highly competitive market where continual experiments are market tested. Expect a test series looking at some of these more intriguing designs. There will be a few more interviews as well as a look at how robots build servers. You will also start to see STH in a few other contexts such as when I did a short segment for Supermicro’s 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable launch:
Our review cadence is going to be impacted by all of the shows, however, we have a very strong pipeline of reviews we need to get published.
Big STH Q2 2019 News
Perhaps the biggest piece of news for Q2 is going to happen in early June 2019. June 8, 2019 will mark STH’s 10-year anniversary. We are going to be between travel for shows, but we have been planning a few interesting bits to mark the occasion.
Stay tuned for a busy quarter at STH.
Looking forward to the niche hardware reviews, to me it’s far more interesting than reading about yet another CPU SKU from the same lineup ;)
Agree with Nils, SKU are not useful other than sales planning. Covering the mainstream products, and some none mainstream / niche innovation would be of great value to me.
Thank you for the high quality reporting!
Well done Patrick! A great web site by a real server’s hardware fan – very hard to find these days..