Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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IBM intros new generation of IBM Power servers
IBM is keeping the faith for Unix just like it is for mainframes. It has announced a new Unix-based server, the IBM Power E1080, the first in a family that is based on the POWER10 processor.IBM announced the POWER10 processor last year. Designed on a 7nm process, it is expected to deliver up to a three-fold improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM POWER9.It features a new technology called Memory Inception that supports multi-petabyte memory clusters for massive memory-intensive workloads along with end-to-end memory encryption with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines per core compared to IBM POWER9.To read this article in full, please click here
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AWS, NetApp team up for a cloud-native file system
Amazon Web Services and NetApp have teamed up to tie NetApp’s on-prem storage and its proprietary OS for storage-disk arrays to AWS’s managed file-storage service, FSx.Called Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, the service provides things like capacity scaling, maintenance, and updates so on-prem staff doesn’t have to. Performance management with automatic tiering between local storage and fully elastic AWS storage is provided by AWS as well. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space This is not a new area for AWS, which offers two similar services for Windows File Server and the Lustre HPC file-storage system. FSx for Windows File Server is a native Windows file system that offers Windows file storage in the cloud, while FSx for Lustre offers scalable, high-performance storage for HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here
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AWS, NetApp team up for a cloud-native file system
Amazon Web Services and NetApp have teamed up to tie NetApp’s on-prem storage and its proprietary OS for storage-disk arrays to AWS’s managed file-storage service, FSx.Called Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, the service provides things like capacity scaling, maintenance, and updates so on-prem staff doesn’t have to. Performance management with automatic tiering between local storage and fully elastic AWS storage is provided by AWS as well. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space This is not a new area for AWS, which offers two similar services for Windows File Server and the Lustre HPC file-storage system. FSx for Windows File Server is a native Windows file system that offers Windows file storage in the cloud, while FSx for Lustre offers scalable, high-performance storage for HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here
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Western Digital announces a hybrid hard drive
Western Digital has announced a new disk drive architecture that combines flash memory with high-density hard-disk drives plus a small CPU to manage everything.If this sounds familiar, it is. Several years ago there was an effort by WD and other hard-disk drive (HDD) makers to build hybrid hard drives, with small flash drives acting as a cache for the hard disk, but those efforts failed, said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of HDD product management and marketing at WD.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency “There was a huge pitfall in those [drives],” he told me. The drives didn’t know what kind of data they had, so they didn’t know that hot data was frequently accessed and should be written on to the flash drive, while warm or cold that wasn’t accessed as much should be written to the disk.To read this article in full, please click here
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Western Digital announces a hybrid hard drive
Western Digital has announced a new disk drive architecture that combines flash memory with high-density hard-disk drives plus a small CPU to manage everything.If this sounds familiar, it is. Several years ago there was an effort by WD and other hard-disk drive (HDD) makers to build hybrid hard drives, with small flash drives acting as a cache for the hard disk, but those efforts failed, said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of HDD product management and marketing at WD.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency “There was a huge pitfall in those [drives],” he told me. The drives didn’t know what kind of data they had, so they didn’t know that hot data was frequently accessed and should be written on to the flash drive, while warm or cold that wasn’t accessed as much should be written to the disk.To read this article in full, please click here
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Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?
As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here
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Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?
As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here
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Western Digital, Kioxia could be talking merger
Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
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Western Digital, Kioxia could be talking merger
Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM updates its mainframe processor to help AI
IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM updates its mainframe processor to help AI
IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here
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Comcast grabs SD-WAN specialist Masergy
Comcast is certainly serious about boosting its corporate networking business. Or the cord cutters are really causing some damage. Maybe both. Either way, Comcast Business just announced plans to acquire privately-held Masergy Communications, an SD-WAN and cloud-based security specialist.Comcast is a public company, but Masergy is not, so terms of the deal were not disclosed. Masergy was acquired by private equity firm Berkshire Partners in 2016.To read this article in full, please click here
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A closer look at two newly announced Intel chips
Our initial look at Intel’s Architecture Day focused on the new Xeons and IPU processors. Now we’ll get into the fine details, as well as look at other upcoming technologies.Sapphire Rapids Intel’s upcoming next-generation Xeon is codenamed Sapphire Rapids and promises a radical new design and gains in performance. One of its key differentiators is its modular SoC design. The chip has multiple tiles that appears to the system as a monolithic CPU and all of the tiles communicate with each other, so every thread has full access to all resources on all tiles.To read this article in full, please click here
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A closer look at two newly announced Intel chips
Our initial look at Intel’s Architecture Day focused on the new Xeons and IPU processors. Now we’ll get into the fine details, as well as look at other upcoming technologies.Sapphire Rapids Intel’s upcoming next-generation Xeon is codenamed Sapphire Rapids and promises a radical new design and gains in performance. One of its key differentiators is its modular SoC design. The chip has multiple tiles that appears to the system as a monolithic CPU and all of the tiles communicate with each other, so every thread has full access to all resources on all tiles.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel shifts to multiarchitecture model
There was a time when Intel was all-x86, all the time, everywhere.Not anymore.Last week Intel held its annual Architecture Day with previews of multiple major upcoming architectures beyond x86. For once, it’s not hyperbole when they say these are some of the “biggest shifts in a generation.”CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel And it’s not just architectures or just more and faster cores, it’s new designs, whole new ways of doing things. Instead of just packing more cores onto a smaller die, Intel is switching to a new hybrid architecture that adds low-energy-draw cores, similar to what some ARM chip makers have been doing for years on mobile devices.To read this article in full, please click here
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Intel shifts to multiarchitecture model
There was a time when Intel was all-x86, all the time, everywhere.Not anymore.Last week Intel held its annual Architecture Day with previews of multiple major upcoming architectures beyond x86. For once, it’s not hyperbole when they say these are some of the “biggest shifts in a generation.”CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel And it’s not just architectures or just more and faster cores, it’s new designs, whole new ways of doing things. Instead of just packing more cores onto a smaller die, Intel is switching to a new hybrid architecture that adds low-energy-draw cores, similar to what some ARM chip makers have been doing for years on mobile devices.To read this article in full, please click here
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Schneider Electric joins the hardware-as-a-service movement
German data center hardware giant Schneider Electric is the latest OEM to jump on the on-demand leasing program hardware, in this case the company’s American Power Conversion line of uninterruptable power supplies (UPS).The primary beneficiaries are channel partners, but the user comes out ahead as well. This is similar to the on-premises leasing model used by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Cisco, and more. Rather than make a massive up-front purchase, you lease the gear and pay monthly for actual use.The deal is for channel partners to pair APC Smart-UPS solutions with its monitoring and dispatch services to create their own service offering. Schneider says this partnership will allow channel partners to offer more visibility and front-end maintenance across their customers’ dispersed UPS systems.To read this article in full, please click here
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Schneider Electric joins the hardware-as-a-service movement
German data center hardware giant Schneider Electric is the latest OEM to jump on the on-demand leasing program hardware, in this case the company’s American Power Conversion line of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).The primary beneficiaries are channel partners, but the user comes out ahead as well. This is similar to the on-premises leasing model used by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Cisco, and more. Rather than make a massive up-front purchase, you lease the gear and pay monthly for actual use.The deal is for channel partners to pair APC Smart-UPS solutions with its monitoring and dispatch services to create their own service offering. Schneider says this partnership will allow channel partners to offer more visibility and front-end maintenance across their customers’ dispersed UPS systems.To read this article in full, please click here
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Attack that defeats AMD chip security possible, unlikely
AMD likes to crow about how its Epyc server processors can encrypt the content of virtal machines while they’re in operation so they are secure and isolated, preventing other VMs on the processor from accessing the encrypted contents.Well, researchers from the Technical University of Berlin have found a weakness in that feature, known as Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and published a theoretical attack that defeats the protection.The paper ”One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization” details how the researchers succeeded in mounting a voltage fault-injection attack.To read this article in full, please click here
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Attack that defeats AMD chip security possible, unlikely
AMD likes to crow about how its Epyc server processors can encrypt the content of virtal machines while they’re in operation so they are secure and isolated, preventing other VMs on the processor from accessing the encrypted contents.Well, researchers from the Technical University of Berlin have found a weakness in that feature, known as Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and published a theoretical attack that defeats the protection.The paper ”One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization” details how the researchers succeeded in mounting a voltage fault-injection attack.To read this article in full, please click here