Western Digital introduced new high-capacity and high-performance products this week during its What’s Next event in San Francisco.First up, WD announced it is sampling conventional 22TB and shingled 26TB hard disk drives to cloud service providers, with widescale availability expected this summer. The drives, named Ultrastar DC HC570 for the 22TB version and DC HC670 for the 26TB version, are what WD calls UltraSMR disk drives. It's a means of packing greater amounts of data onto a disk platter. Western Digital
WD’s previous high-end drive was the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC560. It packed 2.2TB per platter and came with nine platters. The two new drives managed to pack a tenth platter into a 3.5 drive form factor. All of these drives are helium-filled to reduce friction of the spinning platters and feature Western Digital’s triple-stage actuator (TSA) with multiple independent read/write heads.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco is urging customers to replace flawed memory sticks in some of its Unified Computing System (UCS) servers before they fail.The problem is caused by a manufacturing error in 24 dual in-line memory modules (DIMM) that exhibit persistent correctable memory errors that if left in place could knock the servers offline. The problem is found in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB memory DIMMs.
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Cisco describes the flaws as manufacturing deviations that affect memory modules used to make up the DIMMs. All of the problem parts were manufactured during the middle-to-end of 2020, according to a Cisco alert.To read this article in full, please click here
Red Hat, one of the open source software world's biggest players, rolled out a raft of new features for its flagship enterprise Linux distribution — several of which were focused on edge computing — this week at its annual Summit gathering,The Red Hat Edge initiative is a project designed to streamline the processes of deploying and managing edge infrastructure, and, under its banner, the company announced several new features like automation technology via Ansible and advanced cluster management for Kubernetes, among others.To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprise networking has never been so prominent for Juniper Networks as it is right now.For the first time in Juniper’s history, its enterprise networking business was the largest of its three core divisions – cloud, service provider and enterprise – in the first quarter of 2022. Enterprise networking revenue grew 18% year-over-year in Q1 to $433 million, while Q1 cloud and service provider revenue came in at $307 million and $428 million, respectively.A variety of things came together to make that happen – everything from pent-up demand and pandemic-delayed network refresh cycles to enterprise digital transformation and an influx of spending to support hybrid workers, said Manoj Leelanivas, Juniper Networks' chief operating officer, in an interview ahead of the company’s Global Summit event this week. To read this article in full, please click here
AMD is looking to quickly integrate Xilinx technology into its CPU business, but perhaps more significantly it’s developing software to enable a broad portfolio of applications for its hardware.On a recent earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company sees opportunities to deliver stronger products as a result of technology it gained when it merged with Xilinx in February.
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“As one example, we are integrating Xilinx’s differentiated AI engine across our CPU product portfolio to enable industry-leading inference capabilities, with the first products expected in 2023,” Su said.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has grand plans for its quantum-computing systems but acknowledges much work needs to be done.IBM announced its goal to build a 4,000 qubit system by 2025 at its Think! event this week saying it wanted to build practical quantum-computing systems that feature an intelligent software orchestration layer to efficiently distribute workloads and remove infrastructure challenges.
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“We think by next year, we’ll begin prototyping quantum software applications for specific use cases,” IBM stated. “We’ll begin to define these services with our first test case—machine learning—working with partners to accelerate the path toward useful quantum software applications.”To read this article in full, please click here
Intel is betting that future data-center operations will depend on increasingly powerful servers running ASIC-based, programable CPUs, and its wager rides on the development of infrastructure processing units (IPU), which are Intel’s programmable networking devices designed to reduce overhead and free up performance for CPUs.
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If you want to try using a Linux terminal and aren’t sitting anywhere near a Linux system, don’t despair. There are some services that will allow you to run a Linux terminal inside a browser. This post examines some of these and should give you a feel for what you can do and the performance you might experience.The Linux terminal sessions described here were all run on a Windows system using a Chrome browser. While you could as easily run a Linux terminal in a browser on a Linux system, you’d likely be less motivated to do so.JSLinux
JSLinux is essentially a computer that’s implemented in JavaScript. So, all you need to do is open a browser and type the right URL to get started.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expects chip shortages will continue into 2024 due to a lack of manufacturing equipment and tools to make the chips. Gelsinger made the comments during an interview with CNBC's TechCheck about Intel’s first quarter earnings. While the company did well in Q1, the outlook for Q2 is not as positive, and Intel stock took a hit for it.Semiconductor manufacturers have faced a number of challenges to meet demand, most notably production shutdowns due to the Covid pandemic. However, Gelsinger specifically linked the shortages to a lack of manufacturing equipment and difficulty building new semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs.To read this article in full, please click here
The modern graphics processing unit (GPU) started out as an accelerator for Windows video games, but over the last 20 years has morphed into an enterprise server processor for high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence applications.Now GPUs are at the tip of the performance spear used in supercomputing, AI training and inference, drug research, financial modeling, and medical imaging. They have also been applied to more mainstream tasks for situations when CPUs just aren’t fast enough, as in GPU-powered relational databases.
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IBM will launch the first major update to its i operating system for Power CPU-based servers in three years. The enhancements are largely hardware-oriented, supporting both the older Power9 and the newer Power10, which has been available since last September.IBM's i OS 7.5, not to be confused with iOS from Apple or IOS from Cisco, will be the first upgrade since version 7.4 appeared in April 2019. Power Systems, formerly known as the mid-range system AS/400, also have the option of running IBM’s own UNIX variant, called AIX, as well as Red Hat Linux.
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Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Cisco's Enterprise NFV Infrastructure Software (NFVIS). The worst of the vulnerabilities could let an attacker escape from the guest virtual machine (VM) to the host machine, Cisco disclosed. The other two problems involve letting a bad actor inject commands that execute at the root level and allowing a remote attacker to leak system data from the host to the VM.NFVIS is Linux-based infrastructure software designed to help enterprises and service providers to deploy virtualized network functions, such as a virtual router, firewall and WAN acceleration, Cisco stated.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell is offering an expanded ecosystem of multicloud data management tools for its customers with a focus on data recovery services, adding recovery vault support for on-premises as well as public cloud assets."Our customers want help reducing complexity and are seeking solutions that use a common approach to managing data wherever it lives — from public clouds, to the data center, to the edge," said Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer, Dell Technologies, in a statement. "We are building a portfolio of software and services that simplifies on-premises and multicloud environments and offers." To read this article in full, please click here
Both strace and ltrace are powerful command-line tools for debugging and troubleshooting programs on Linux: Strace captures and records all system calls made by a process as well as the signals received, while ltrace does the same for library calls.If a program acts differently than you expect, you can use these tools to see “behind the curtain” and maybe get some clues as to what is going on.
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Be forewarned, though. When you use either of these commands, you will end up with a lot of output to look through. Still, that can tell you quite a bit about how a process is working and sometimes give you important insights.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell will implement an array of new features for its storage platforms aimed at “cloud-ifying” its systems and improving support for hybrid environments, the company announced this week at its annual Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas.Dell touted more than 500 software advancements in three key platforms: PowerStore storage appliances, PowerMax mission-critical storage and PowerFlex software-defined storage framework. The main updates for PowerStore are improved support for native file replication and third-party file monitoring and ransomware protection, along with improved networking speeds, NVMe support, and deeper integration for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) virtualized SAN/NAS arrays and disaster recovery.To read this article in full, please click here
It comes as a big surprise to many people when their restores are slower than their backups, but it should be no surprise at all. In fact, everyone should plan for this disparity and build into their backup design.There are a number of reasons why restore speeds are typically slower than backup, and here is an explanation of five of them.
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The RAID write penalty
Most modern disk arrays are built using parity-based redundant array of independent disks (RAID)—RAID levels 3 to 6. Others are built using erasure coding, which has a similar challenge as parity-based RAID.To read this article in full, please click here
Wordle—the online game that gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word—has gone viral recently, and while it’s fun, it can also be pretty hard. So, as a bash-scripting enthusiast, I figured I'd see if I could come up with a script that would help me cheat.The game itself is fairly simple. After you enter a five-letter guess, the game indicates which of its letters are not in the mystery word by setting them off on a gray background, which ones are in the word but in the wrong location (orange background), and which ones are in the word and located in the right place (green background). Each guess must be a known English word, no capitals, no punctuation.To read this article in full, please click here
A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated, high-speed network that provides access to block-level storage. SANs were adopted to improve application availability and performance by segregating storage traffic from the rest of the LAN. SANs enable enterprises to more easily allocate and manage storage resources, achieving better efficiency. “Instead of having isolated storage capacities across different servers, you can share a pool of capacity across a bunch of different workloads and carve it up as you need. It’s easier to protect, it’s easier to manage,” says Scott Sinclair, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell will offer new "validated" designs — a term used for edge devices that have been tested for compatibility in a range of important capabilities in a particular field — for retail edge computing deployments and the manufacturing sector later this year, according to an announcement issued today.The idea behind both the retail and manufacturing validated designs is to provide a central infrastructure stack for the numerous individual applications that might be in use in any given location. For retail, that can range from inventory tracking systems and smart labels on shelves, to connected point-of-sale terminals, all the way up through numerous smart vision capabilities.To read this article in full, please click here