Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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New NVMe spec brings new support for hard drives
The new NVM Express 2.0 has been released and with it a surprise: The non-volatile memory express protocol—best known for handling SSD speeds—is now offering full-blown support for traditional hard-disk drives.This is quite unexpected because SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The first flash-based SSDs used SATA/SAS physical interfaces borrowed from existing hard drive-based enterprise server/ storage systems. However, none of these interfaces and protocols were designed for high-speed storage media and the SATA/SAS bus became a bottleneck for the much faster SSD.To read this article in full, please click here
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New NVMe spec brings new support for hard drives
The new NVM Express 2.0 has been released and with it a surprise: The non-volatile memory express protocol—best known for handling SSD speeds—is now offering full-blown support for traditional hard-disk drives.This is quite unexpected because SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] The first flash-based SSDs used SATA/SAS physical interfaces borrowed from existing hard drive-based enterprise server/ storage systems. However, none of these interfaces and protocols were designed for high-speed storage media and the SATA/SAS bus became a bottleneck for the much faster SSD.To read this article in full, please click here
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New Cisco servers embrace hybrid cloud
Cisco has added a new class of servers to its Unified Computing System that are more flexible and outfitted with management software geared to hybrid cloud.The UCS X-Series is the first major redisign since UCS hit the market in 2009. The company says the modular hardware architecture is future-proofed because it can accomodate new generations of processors, storage, nonvolatile memory, accelerators, and interconnects as they come along. Prior UCS chassis were either blade systems for power efficiency or rack systems for expandability, but the UCS X-Series combines both in the same chassis.This means the single server type is able to support a broader range of tasks, from virtualized workloads, traditional enterprise applications, and databases to private cloud and cloud-native applications. The individual modules are interconnected into a fabric that can support IP networking, Fibre Channel SAN, and management connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
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New Cisco servers embrace hybrid cloud
Cisco has added a new class of servers to its Unified Computing System that are more flexible and outfitted with management software geared to hybrid cloud.The UCS X-Series is the first major redisign since UCS hit the market in 2009. The company says the modular hardware architecture is future-proofed because it can accomodate new generations of processors, storage, nonvolatile memory, accelerators, and interconnects as they come along. Prior UCS chassis were either blade systems for power efficiency or rack systems for expandability, but the UCS X-Series combines both in the same chassis.This means the single server type is able to support a broader range of tasks, from virtualized workloads, traditional enterprise applications, and databases to private cloud and cloud-native applications. The individual modules are interconnected into a fabric that can support IP networking, Fibre Channel SAN, and management connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
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Supermicro launches liquid cooling initiative
Super Micro Computer, a.k.a. Supermicro, is adding a range of liquid cooling solutions to its server products. Working with customers, Supermicro will design, implement and test the latest liquid cooling technologies at the rack level. Customers who implement liquid cooling can improve data center PUE (power usage effectiveness) and TCO by more than 40% by cutting power costs, the company says.The cooling is for new systems coming to market. Like most OEMs that support liquid cooling, Supermicro isn’t recommending retrofits to existing installations. It cites two reasons: One, it would be expensive, as you’d have to drill into the rack and server chassis to make room for the cooling piping. And two, the entire rack or cluster would have to be inactive while the retrofit was being done, and most firms won’t tolerate that.To read this article in full, please click here
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Supermicro launches liquid cooling initiative
Super Micro Computer, a.k.a. Supermicro, is adding a range of liquid cooling solutions to its server products. Working with customers, Supermicro will design, implement and test the latest liquid cooling technologies at the rack level. Customers who implement liquid cooling can improve data center PUE (power usage effectiveness) and TCO by more than 40% by cutting power costs, the company says.The cooling is for new systems coming to market. Like most OEMs that support liquid cooling, Supermicro isn’t recommending retrofits to existing installations. It cites two reasons: One, it would be expensive, as you’d have to drill into the rack and server chassis to make room for the cooling piping. And two, the entire rack or cluster would have to be inactive while the retrofit was being done, and most firms won’t tolerate that.To read this article in full, please click here
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Oracle commits to Arm in the cloud
Oracle is not the first name in cloud computing, but never let it be said Larry and company don’t try. It is making a big push with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) by offering Arm processor instances and new initiatives with the open-source community.The new instances are powered by Altra, Ampere’s 64-bit Arm processor, and are priced at 1 cent per core hour, which Oracle claims is the lowest price/performance available when compared to any x86 instance on a per-core basis.To read this article in full, please click here
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Oracle commits to Arm in the cloud
Oracle is not the first name in cloud computing, but never let it be said Larry and company don’t try. It is making a big push with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) by offering Arm processor instances and new initiatives with the open-source community.The new instances are powered by Altra, Ampere’s 64-bit Arm processor, and are priced at 1 cent per core hour, which Oracle claims is the lowest price/performance available when compared to any x86 instance on a per-core basis.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ampere updates server chip roadmap with focus on cloud computing
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ampere updates server chip roadmap with focus on cloud computing
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ampere points server chip roadmap toward cloud computing
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ampere points server chip roadmap toward cloud computing
Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here
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Mythic AI gets funding to mass-produce edge chips
Just six months after unveiling its first AI inferencing processor, Mythic AI has announced a new round of funding for $70 million in Series C investment to begin mass production of its chips and to develop its next generation of hardware and software products.In November, the company announced the M1108 Analog Matrix Processor (AMP) aimed at edge AI deployments across a wide range of applications, including manufacturing, video surveillance, smart cities, smart homes, AR/VR, and drones.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" For a company that is nine years old and has zero sales, it’s got some heavy hitters behind it. The new investment round was led by led by venture fund giant BlackRock and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Other investors include Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.To read this article in full, please click here
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Mythic AI gets funding to mass-produce edge chips
Just six months after unveiling its first AI inferencing processor, Mythic AI has announced a new round of funding for $70 million in Series C investment to begin mass production of its chips and to develop its next generation of hardware and software products.In November, the company announced the M1108 Analog Matrix Processor (AMP) aimed at edge AI deployments across a wide range of applications, including manufacturing, video surveillance, smart cities, smart homes, AR/VR, and drones.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" For a company that is nine years old and has zero sales, it’s got some heavy hitters behind it. The new investment round was led by led by venture fund giant BlackRock and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Other investors include Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.To read this article in full, please click here
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Pure Storage inches toward a cloud business model
Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software. 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 This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.To read this article in full, please click here
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Pure Storage inches toward a cloud business model
Pure Storage is upgrading to its Portworx Enterprise software that improves the scale of Kubernetes while simplifying the process of supporting multiple platforms.Portworx Enterprise 2.8 features new integrations across Pure’s line of products and services and with VMware Tanzu, VMware’s container-orchestration software. It comes with dynamic storage provisioning on Pure’s FlashArray and FlashBlade hardware and offers unified visibility and support via Pure1, Pure’s AI-drive operations software. 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 This allows volumes and file systems to be provisioned using Kubernetes without the need to directly interface with the backing storage arrays. That means containerized workloads can run seamlessly across the cloud, bare metal infrastructure, Pure Storage arrays, and even storage solutions from other vendors.To read this article in full, please click here
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AMD chips keep claiming more of the server market
AMD saw another quarter of outstanding growth in sales of its server chips, giving the company its highest single-quarter gain for server CPUs since 2006 and eating into Intel’s most valuable market segment, according to the latest market report from Mercury Research.We’ll get to the desktop segment later, but AMD’s server CPU share grew 1.8 percentage points from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021, from 7.1% to 8.9%. That is astonishing as server numbers just don’t move like that so quickly. In the same single-quarter period, Intel slipped 1.8 percentage points, from 92.9% to 91.1%.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] There is seasonality in the server market, where it is normal for sales to go down in Q1, Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, told me. Cloud-server companies like AWS and Google go through a build/burn cycle where they buy a lot, then take time to deploy it all. Right now we are at the very bottom of build cycle where they buy the least amount, so if they are putting up these kinds of numbers during a low point, it will be even better when they Continue reading
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AMD chips keep claiming more of the server market
AMD saw another quarter of outstanding growth in sales of its server chips, giving the company its highest single-quarter gain for server CPUs since 2006 and eating into Intel’s most valuable market segment, according to the latest market report from Mercury Research.We’ll get to the desktop segment later, but AMD’s server CPU share grew 1.8 percentage points from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021, from 7.1% to 8.9%. That is astonishing as server numbers just don’t move like that so quickly. In the same single-quarter period, Intel slipped 1.8 percentage points, from 92.9% to 91.1%.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] There is seasonality in the server market, where it is normal for sales to go down in Q1, Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, told me. Cloud-server companies like AWS and Google go through a build/burn cycle where they buy a lot, then take time to deploy it all. Right now we are at the very bottom of build cycle where they buy the least amount, so if they are putting up these kinds of numbers during a low point, it will be even better when they Continue reading
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Tech industry remains on a hiring spree
Overall U.S. employment figures for April may have been dismal but not in the tech sector, which has grown steadily all year, adding 16,000 new jobs in April for a total of 60,900 so far this year.That’s according to CompTIA‘s analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) latest Employment Situation Summary. The overall jobs numbers, which came out last week, were dismal. The U.S. created just 266,000 new jobs in April when economists surveyed by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal had estimated 1 million new jobs.Network training 2021: Businesses grow their own expertise However, there are signs of tech hiring slowing. Employers across all sectors of the economy reduced their hiring of IT workers by an estimated 234,000 positions. This was the first decline after four consecutive months of employment gains. For the year, IT hires have increased by 72,000 positions.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM leapfrogs everyone with its 2nm chips
As TSMC charges to 5nm transistor designs and Intel struggles for 7nm, IBM has topped them all with the world’s first 2-nanometer node chip.OK, it won’t come to market for four years, according to IBM, and they might not be the first name that comes to mind when you think of processor design, but they are the quiet power in the semiconductor world.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] As far as commercial chips go, IBM makes two: the Power series for its Power line of Unix and Linux servers, and zArchitecture that is used in the z Series of mainframes. But IBM has its IBM Joint Development Alliance which is partnered with just about every semiconductor vendor out there—Intel, AMD, Nvidia, TSMC, Samsung, you name it.To read this article in full, please click here