Andy Patrizio, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Andy Patrizio

Author Archives: Andy Patrizio

Glassdoor: COVID-19 hits 1 in 5 IT job openings in a single month

In the space of one month, the number of available IT jobs dropped by 20% across the U.S., according to the recruiting site Glassdoor, about on par with the avarage loss across all job oppenings.The data came from Glassdoor’s economic research unit and was part of a broader analysis of all U.S. industries. All told, the number of job openings between March 9 and April 6 dropped to 4.8 million, a 20.5% decline.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Sixty percent of employers have reduced job openings since March 9, with almost one in four pulling all of their job postings.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD introduces high-performance EPYC processors

AMD has introduced three new processors in its second-generation EPYC 7Fx2 series, which is optimized for frequency and delivers what AMD claims is the fastest per-core performance in the x86 server market.In the server space, AMD is besting Intel when it comes to core count. AMD has the 64-core EPYC line. Intel, which currently tops out at 28 cores, has 38- and 48-core parts due later this year. But it's the individual core performances that matter, and in some benchmarks, Intel wins. READ MORE: How to dispose of IT hardware without hurting the environmentTo read this article in full, please click here

How to dispose of IT hardware without hurting the environment

Many enterprises don’t think much about where their obsolete IT gear winds up, but it’s possible to be green-minded, not bust the budget, and even benefit a little from proper disposal. Here is how.Go back to where you bought The first option to consider is returning the equipment the vendor or reseller you bought it from, says Susan Middleton, research director, financing strategies at IDC. “Every year we ask customers, ‘How do you handle end-of-lease?’ Overwhelmingly, they return to vendor or partner who are better equipped to handle recycling,” she says.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Vendors often give a fair-market buyout for the devices that can go toward new products, Middleton says. “The big players like IBM and HPE do a great job because they can clean them up and resell them, and the facilities to do that are pretty big,” she says.To read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric launches cooling for edge devices

Schneider Electric has introduced a system for cooling individual server racks in remote and edge locations that aren’t well suited for traditional data-center cooling schemes.Uniflair Rack Mounted Cooling is a split system consisting of the air conditioning unit that goes in the cabinet and a fan that vents hot air from the cabinet to the outside. The external unit can be up to 20 meters away and up to five meters above or below the cooling unit.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The 5U, Freon-based air-conditioner unit blows cool air up the front of the cabinet where it is sucked into the servers by their front fans and absorbs heat generated by the servers. The hot air is expelled out the back and drawn down, cooled, and recirculated upwards.To read this article in full, please click here

Lenovo intros an edge platform that runs Azure stack

Lenovo is boosting its ties to Microsoft with an edge-to-cloud platform that runs Microsoft’s Azure Stack in a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), putting HCI on the edge of the network rather than in a data center.The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 server analyzes data at the edge near where it is gathered, a change in direction for the usual edge strategy. In earlier edge schemes, data collected at an edge endpoint is merely sorted, and only the relevant data is sent up to the main data center where it is analyzed.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The ThinkAgile MX1021 platform is a ruggedized, half-width, short-depth, 1U compact server that can be installed almost anywhere: hung on a wall, stacked on a shelf, or mounted in a rack. For connectivity, it supports Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G.To read this article in full, please click here

Can Fujitsu beat Nvidia in the HPC race?

Arm processors on servers has gone from failed starts (Calxeda) to modest successes (ThunderX2) to real contenders (ThunderX3, Ampere). Now, details have emerged about Japanese IT giant Fujitsu’s Arm processor, which it claims will offer better HPC performance than Nvidia GPUs but at a lower power cost.Fujitsu is developing the A64FX, a 48-core Arm8 derivative specifically engineered for high-performance computing (HPC). Rather than design general-purpose compute cores, Fujitsu has added compute engines specific to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies specific to the needs of HPC.It will go in a new supercomputer called Fugaku, or Post-K. Post-K is a reference to the K supercomputer, at one time the fastest supercomputer in the world, that ran on custom Sparc chips before RIKEN Lab, where it was installed, pulled the plug.To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Most data centers don’t meet the needs of their users

A joint report released by Forbes Insights and Vertiv found that just 29% of data-center decision-makers say their current facilities are meeting their needs, and only 6% say their data centers are updated ahead of their needs.In yet another example of the disconnect between executives and people on the front lines, 11% of executives believe their data centers are updated ahead of current bandwidth needs, while just 1% of engineers feel the same way.Future data centers, the report says, will inevitably require adequate processing power – locally in the cloud and at the edge – to effectively manage new challenges around bandwidth, security and technologiesAI, advanced analytics, 5G, edge computing and more.To read this article in full, please click here

Tips for cleaning data-center gear in response to coronavirus

People are washing their hands, countertops, and nearly everything else in an effort to stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In a recent trip to the supermarket I found plenty of bread and milk, but the cleaning-aisle shelves were bare.While it's easy to keep your desk clean, what about your data center? People go in and out and touch things all the time. Rubber gloves are an option, but they can be a nuisance when working with gear or touch screens. READ MORE: COVID-19 best practices for data-center operatorsTo read this article in full, please click here

Mellanox, Inphi boost network feeds with new hardware

A growing number of vendors are looking to boost network throughput with smarter network controllers. Last week I wrote about Xilinx jumping on the SmartNIC bandwagon. This week, both Mellanox and Inphi announced new products.Mellanox has begun shipping its SN4000 Ethernet switches. The new switches are powered by the vendor's Spectrum-3 12.8 Tbps Ethernet switch ASIC, which is optimized for cloud, Ethernet storage fabric, and AI interconnect applications. SN4000 platforms come in flexible form-factors that support a combination of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE.To read this article in full, please click here

Data-center power consumption holds steady

A predicted explosion in power consumption by data centers has not manifested thanks to advances in power efficiency and, ironically enough, the move to the cloud, according to a new report.The study, published in the journal Science last week, notes that while there has been an increase in global data-center energy consumption over the past decade, this growth is negligible compared with the rise of workloads and deployed hardware during that time.Data centers accounted for about 205 terawatt-hours of electricity usage in 2018, which is roughly 1% of all electricity consumption worldwide, according to the report. (That's well below the often-cited stat that data centers consume 2% of the world's electricity). The 205 terawatt-hours represent a 6% increase in total power consumption since 2010, but global data center compute instances rose by 550% over that same time period.To read this article in full, please click here

Eight reasons to consider hyperconverged infrastructure for your data center

Demand for on-premises data center equipment is shrinking as organizations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that’s thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialized hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconvergence software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

8 reasons to consider hyperconverged infrastructure for your data center

IDC: Chinese server sales will take a hit due to coronavirus

With virtually all of China shutdown and under quarantine due to the coronavirus, the Chinese IT hardware market will suffer a temporary but significant impact in the first quarter due to demand not being met. While foreign impact is not certain, it does have the potential to spill over into other markets.IDC now predicts the total 2020 server growth rate will be reduced from original growth projections of 12.4% to 7.4%, and Q1 sales will drop 15% from the same time period last year instead of the original projection of 16.5% growth.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Storage 2020 growth rate will be reduced from 12.5% to 7.3% and Q1 will be down 20% instead of the original projection of 16.6% growth over Q1 2019. The 2020 networking growth rate has been reduced from the original 6.2% to 3.0%.To read this article in full, please click here

Japanese firm announces potential 80TB hard drives

Hard drive makers are staving off obsolescence to solid-state drives (SSDs) by offering capacities that are simply not feasible in an SSD. Seagate and Western Digital are both pushing to release 20TB hard disks in the next few years. A 20TB SSD might be doable but also cost more than a new car.But Showa Denko K.K. of Japan has gone one further with the announcement of its next-generation of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media for hard drives. The platters use all-new magnetic thin films to maximize their data density, with the goal of eventually enabling 70TB to 80TB hard drives in a 3.5-inch form factor.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Showa Denko is the world’s largest independent maker of platters for hard drives, selling them to basically anyone left making hard drives not named Seagate and Western Digital. Those two make their own platters and are working on their own next-generation drives for release in the coming years.While similar in concept, Seagate and Western Digital have chosen different solutions to the same problem. HAMR, championed by Seagate and Showa, works by temporarily heating the disk material during the write Continue reading

Japanese firm announces potential 80TB hard drives

IBM consolidates storage products under a single brand

IBM says it is consolidating its Storwize and the Flash Systems lines of storage products under a single family, the FlashSystem, that will span from entry level to advanced. It also announced a trio of all-flash storage products, spanning a range of use cases.Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels for IBM storage, made the announcing in a pair of blog posts here and here. He noted that different organizations have different requirements for storage, and that storage vendors have traditionally responded with unique storage platforms to meet themTo read this article in full, please click here

IBM consolidates storage products under a single brand

Server sales projected to decline 10% due to coronavirus

Global server sales had been projected to grow by 1.2% compared to the most recent quarter, but the chaos wrought by the coronavirus in China will cause sales to decline 9.8% sequentially, according to DigiTimes Research.DigiTimes is an IT publication based in Taiwan. Its proximity to Taiwanese and Chinese vendors gives it some good sources, but it can also be way off target. However, the signs are piling up that coronavirus is causing some real mayhem.For example, DigiTimes also reported that less than 20% of Chinese factory employees would return to work after an extended Lunar New Year break due to the coronavirus outbreak, and that many components plants in China have decided not to restart production until February 25.To read this article in full, please click here

Server sales projected to decline 10% due to coronavirus

Rising sales tide lifts Intel and AMD

The fourth quarter of the calendar year tends to be great for component makers like Intel and AMD because of holiday consumer sales, but this most recent Q4 period saw them both enjoy bang-up server sales, too.Q4 was “kind of a quirky quarter,” said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel gained share overall, while AMD gained share in server, desktop and notebook markets. How? Increased demand across the board, for starters, at a time when customers aren’t typically buying servers.“The only surprise was how strong the quarter was,” McCarron said. “It was a very strong fourth quarter, multiple records were set. The main ones that count were: server revenues were records for Intel and AMD, and total CPU record.”To read this article in full, please click here

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