HPE servers will ship in liquid-cooled chassis

Iceotope Technologies will offer HPE ProLiant servers in Iceotope’s self-contained liquid cooled chassis, which can run in enterprise data centers and is ruggedized to operate in extreme edge scenarios as well.The Ku:l chassis combines Iceotope's immersion liquid-cooling technology in Avnet racks and EcoStruxure management technology from Schneider Electric. It supports standard server boards in a 1U immersion cooling tray from Iceotope.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years In an enterprise data center, the Ku:l chassis can add function without without adding load to the existing cooling systems since it is entirely self-contained. At the same time it is rugged enough for extreme edge environments that might damage standard IT equipment. The chassis provides zero-touch operation with advanced out-of-band management for complete remote control of the entire system.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM builds ransomware protection into on-prem storage

With ransomware attacks growing in frequency and little being done to stop them, IBM is well-timed with its anti-ransomware Safeguarded Copy for its FlashSystems and on-premises storage-as-a-serivce offerings.Safeguarded Copy is part of the IBM FlashSystem family of all-flash storage arrays, and it automatically creates immutable snapshots of date and stores them securely—meaning they cannot be accessed or altered by unauthorized users, the company says. Read 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 Safeguarded Copy is based on technology from IBM’s DS8000 mainframe storage array, which does the same thing as described above: it creates immutable copies  of data that can be used to restore damaged original data volumes or build new and uncorrupted volumes.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM builds ransomware protection into on-prem storage

With ransomware attacks growing in frequency and little being done to stop them, IBM is well-timed with its anti-ransomware Safeguarded Copy for its FlashSystems and on-premises storage-as-a-serivce offerings.Safeguarded Copy is part of the IBM FlashSystem family of all-flash storage arrays, and it automatically creates immutable snapshots of date and stores them securely—meaning they cannot be accessed or altered by unauthorized users, the company says. Read 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 Safeguarded Copy is based on technology from IBM’s DS8000 mainframe storage array, which does the same thing as described above: it creates immutable copies  of data that can be used to restore damaged original data volumes or build new and uncorrupted volumes.To read this article in full, please click here

The TPM chip controversy for Windows 11 is a non-issue for Windows Server

By now you’ve heard about the kerfuffle surrounding Windows 11 and its requirement for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip, which is not standard on the majority of PCs and threatens to leave many newer Windows 10 PCs blocked from being upgraded.Normally the issues around a new version of Windows are system requirements, but here, the issue is the TPM chip. TPM is a specially designed chip that assists with security surrounding credentials. It ensures that boot code that’s loaded, such as firmware and OS components, haven’t been tampered with. It can also encrypt the drive contents to protect against theft. Microsoft is mandating that systems have TPM based on 2.0 specifications but few PCs do. Those that do ship with it have it turned off by default but it is easily activated.To read this article in full, please click here

The TPM chip controversy for Windows 11 is a non-issue for Windows Server

By now you’ve heard about the kerfuffle surrounding Windows 11 and its requirement for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip, which is not standard on the majority of PCs and threatens to leave many newer Windows 10 PCs blocked from being upgraded.Normally the issues around a new version of Windows are system requirements, but here, the issue is the TPM chip. TPM is a specially designed chip that assists with security surrounding credentials. It ensures that boot code that’s loaded, such as firmware and OS components, haven’t been tampered with. It can also encrypt the drive contents to protect against theft. Microsoft is mandating that systems have TPM based on 2.0 specifications but few PCs do. Those that do ship with it have it turned off by default but it is easily activated.To read this article in full, please click here

The chip shortage is real, but driven by more than COVID

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the complaining about computing parts shortages, particularly from gamers who can’t get modern GPU cards and from car makers, since new cars these days are a rolling data center.The problem is also affecting business IT but in a different way, and there are steps you can take to address the problem. The first step, though, is patience. This shortage isn’t due to staffing or fabs being out of commission, it’s that demand is so high that it’s leading to very long lead times.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years That delay can mean 36 weeks, according to Mario Morales, program vice president for the semiconductor and enabling technologies team at IDC, with the demand for components “seeing untempered demand.”To read this article in full, please click here

The chip shortage is real, but driven by more than COVID

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the complaining about computing parts shortages, particularly from gamers who can’t get modern GPU cards and from car makers, since new cars these days are a rolling data center.The problem is also affecting business IT but in a different way, and there are steps you can take to address the problem. The first step, though, is patience. This shortage isn’t due to staffing or fabs being out of commission, it’s that demand is so high that it’s leading to very long lead times.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years That delay can mean 36 weeks, according to Mario Morales, program vice president for the semiconductor and enabling technologies team at IDC, with the demand for components “seeing untempered demand.”To read this article in full, please click here

Intel stumbles in supercomputer rankings, delays next-gen CPU

This week the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomuters found that, once again, Fugaku is number one, benchmarking at 442 Pflop/sec, making it three times faster than the second place machine. Impressive, but also indicative that it might also be the first to break the exaflop barrier if it’s working on the right kind of problem.TOP500 pointed out that Fugaku’s score (and everyone else’s) is based on double-precision benchmarks, the most accurate floating point math calculation you can do. But much of AI and machine learning is single-precision, which can be less than half the compute power of double precision.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel stumbles in supercomputer rankings, delays next-gen CPU

This week the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomuters found that, once again, Fugaku is number one, benchmarking at 442 Pflop/sec, making it three times faster than the second place machine. Impressive, but also indicative that it might also be the first to break the exaflop barrier if it’s working on the right kind of problem.TOP500 pointed out that Fugaku’s score (and everyone else’s) is based on double-precision benchmarks, the most accurate floating point math calculation you can do. But much of AI and machine learning is single-precision, which can be less than half the compute power of double precision.To read this article in full, please click here

CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel

CEO Gelsinger shakes up Intel

A new CEO invariably means a reorganization around his/her vision of things and an attempt to address perceived problems in the company’s organizational structure. In hindsight, that’s another clue that Bob Swan wasn’t long for the CEO’s job at Intel, since he never did a reorg.Pat Gelsinger, who has been Intel’s CEO for just over four months, on the other hand, completely flipped the table with a major reorganization that creates two new business units, promoted several senior technologists to leadership roles, and saw the departure of a major Intel veteran.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" The two new units: one for software and the other on high performance computing and graphics. Greg Lavender will serve as Intel’s chief technology officer and lead the new Software and Advanced Technology Group. As CTO, he will head up research programs, including Intel Labs. Lavender comes to Intel from VMware, where he was also CTO, and has held positions Citigroup, Cisco, and Sun Microsystems.To read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric makes green play with super-efficient UPS

Data-center operators, perhaps stung by accusations that they're power hogs, are making a major push to be green. Both Microsoft and Google have promised their data centers will be carbon neutral by 2030, while AWS is targeting 2040.To read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric makes green play with super-efficient UPS

Data-center operators, perhaps stung by accusations that they're power hogs, are making a major push to be green. Both Microsoft and Google have promised their data centers will be carbon neutral by 2030, while AWS is targeting 2040.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE expands GreenLake services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced several expansions of its managed GreenLake services during its HPE Discover conference this week.GreenLake is HPE’s consumption model for hardware and services. Rather than make an outright purchase, customers determine the configuration they will need and HPE installs it, with a slight overprovisioning just in case. If the customer ends up needing more hardware capacity, it’s just turned on. Until then, it just sits there, unused, and at no charge.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE expands GreenLake services

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced several expansions of its managed GreenLake services during its HPE Discover conference this week.GreenLake is HPE’s consumption model for hardware and services. Rather than make an outright purchase, customers determine the configuration they will need and HPE installs it, with a slight overprovisioning just in case. If the customer ends up needing more hardware capacity, it’s just turned on. Until then, it just sits there, unused, and at no charge.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel unveils new type of network accelerator chip

Intel on Monday expanded its network processor roadmap with the announcement of the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Think of it as the next step in the SmartNIC market, because Intel does.The announcement was made at the Six Five Summit 2021, where Navin Shenoy, the head of Intel's Data Center Group, announced its intention to create the new processor family specifically for cloud workloads.There has been a move toward dedicated networking chips, called SmartNICs, that offload the work of network traffic processing from the CPU, thus freeing up the CPU to do its primary task. Mellanox released one in 2019 and was soon bought by Nvidia. Xilinx released one a year later and will soon be under the ownership of AMD.To read this article in full, please click here

NetApp makes big hybrid-cloud push

NetApp is making a major effort to support hybrid cloud with a batch of software announcements around storage products, converged infrastructure, and cloud-management services.The main news was the release of the latest version of its flagship ONTAP software, as well as updates to other products designed to help organizations build a better hybrid-cloud strategies.ONTAP is the operating system for NetApp’s FAS (hybrid flash-disk) and AFF (all-flash) storage arrays. The latest version, 9.9, adds automatic backup and tiering of on-premises data to NetApp’s StorageGRID object storage as well as to public clouds. It enhances multilevel file security and remote access management, supports continuous data availability for two-times larger MetroCluster configurations, and  more replication options for backup and disaster recovery for large data containers for NAS workloads. It can attain up to four times the performance for single LUN applications such as VMware datastores.To read this article in full, please click here

NetApp makes big hybrid-cloud push

NetApp is making a major effort to support hybrid cloud with a batch of software announcements around storage products, converged infrastructure, and cloud-management services.The main news was the release of the latest version of its flagship ONTAP software, as well as updates to other products designed to help organizations build a better hybrid-cloud strategies.ONTAP is the operating system for NetApp’s FAS (hybrid flash-disk) and AFF (all-flash) storage arrays. The latest version, 9.9, adds automatic backup and tiering of on-premises data to NetApp’s StorageGRID object storage as well as to public clouds. It enhances multilevel file security and remote access management, supports continuous data availability for two-times larger MetroCluster configurations, and  more replication options for backup and disaster recovery for large data containers for NAS workloads. It can attain up to four times the performance for single LUN applications such as VMware datastores.To read this article in full, please click here

Sunlight aims at more efficient virtualization

Virtualization software is dated and does not take full advantage of modern hardware, making it extremely power-inefficient and forcing data centers to overprovision hardware to avoid poor performance.That’s the pitch of Sunlight, a virtualization-software vendor whose products take advantage of technologies that didn’t exist when Xen, KVM, VMware and Hyper-V were first developed.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] “The cloud infrastructure or virtualization stacks have been designed and built 15 to 20 years ago,” said Kosten Metreweli, chief strategy officer of Sunlight. “So the big problem here is that back then, I/O, and particularly storage, was really slow. So fast forward, and we now have NVMe storage, which pushes millions of IOPS from a single device, which is orders of magnitude better than was possible just a few years ago.”To read this article in full, please click here

Sunlight aims at more efficient virtualization

Virtualization software is dated and does not take full advantage of modern hardware, making it extremely power-inefficient and forcing data centers to overprovision hardware to avoid poor performance.That’s the pitch of Sunlight, a virtualization-software vendor whose products take advantage of technologies that didn’t exist when Xen, KVM, VMware and Hyper-V were first developed.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] “The cloud infrastructure or virtualization stacks have been designed and built 15 to 20 years ago,” said Kosten Metreweli, chief strategy officer of Sunlight. “So the big problem here is that back then, I/O, and particularly storage, was really slow. So fast forward, and we now have NVMe storage, which pushes millions of IOPS from a single device, which is orders of magnitude better than was possible just a few years ago.”To read this article in full, please click here