Xilinx has launched a new FPGA card, the Alveo U50, that it claims can match the performance of a GPU in areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.The company claims the card is the industry’s first low-profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support, which offers double the throughput over PCIe Gen3. It was finalized in 2017, but cards and motherboards to support it have been slow to come to market.The Alveo U50 provides customers with a programmable low-profile and low-power accelerator platform built for scale-out architectures and domain-specific acceleration of any server deployment, on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel and Lenovo this week announced a new partnership aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) products by bringing together their respective technologies.The collaboration will integrate Lenovo's TruScale Infrastructure and Lenovo Neptune liquid cooling technology with a variety of Intel technologies, including its Optane DC persistent memory, Intel oneAPI programming framework, and current and future generations of its Xeon Scalable processors.
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TruScale is a consumption-based offering that allows customers to use on-premises data center hardware and services without having to purchase the equipment outright; enterprises pay for the use, and Lenovo monitors their activity. It's a model all of the major OEMs have adopted in response to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware customers can now migrate non-vSphere as well as incresed amounts of on-premises application workloads to a variety of cloud services with a new release of the company’s Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) application-mobility software.Introduced in 2017, VMware HCX lets vSphere customers tie together on-premises systems and applications with a variety of cloud services. vSphere VMware's flagship virtualization platform.
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HCX includes services such as routing and WAN optimization and can utilize other VMware products and services such as the firm’s core networking software, NSX. NSX is targeted at organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments and the growing hybrid and multicloud worlds. HCX is also included in other VMware packages such as its VMware Cloud on AWS.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware customers can now migrate non-vSphere, as well as increased amounts of on-premises application workloads, to a variety of cloud services with a new release of the company’s Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) application-mobility software.Introduced in 2017, VMware HCX lets vSphere customers tie together on-premises systems and applications with a variety of cloud services. vSphere VMware's flagship virtualization platform.
More 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
HCX includes services such as routing and WAN optimization and can utilize other VMware products and services such as the firm’s core networking software, NSX. NSX is targeted at organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments and the growing hybrid and multicloud worlds. HCX is also included in other VMware packages such as its VMware Cloud on AWS.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel’s battle to gain ground in the high-performance computing (HPC) market isn’t going so well. The Omni-Path Architecture it had pinned its hopes on has been scrapped after one generation.An Intel spokesman confirmed to me that the company will no longer offer Intel OmniPath Architecture 200 (OPA200) products to customers, but it will continue to encourage customers, OEMs, and partners to use OPA100 in new designs. “We are continuing to sell, maintain, and support OPA100. We actually announced some new features for OPA100 back at International Supercomputing in June,” the spokesperson said via email.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ]
Intel said it continues to invest in connectivity solutions for its customers and that the recent acquisition of Barefoot Networks is an example of Intel’s strategy of supporting end-to-end cloud networking and infrastructure. It would not say if Barefoot’s technology would be the replacement for OPA.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco this week celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of SD-WAN vendor Viptela and reiterated its expectation that 2019 will see the technology change enterprise networks in major ways.In a blog outlining trends in the SD-WAN world, Anand Oswal, Cisco senior vice president, engineering, in the company’s Enterprise Networking Business described how SD-WAN technology has changed the network for one of its customers, test and measurement systems vendor National Instruments. To read this article in full, please click here
We explain what hyperconvergence is and how the latest breakthroughs in hyperconverged infrastructure make it a flexible IT framework for small and large enterprises alike.
As the push for sustainability across all businesses intensifies, so too will the push for greener IT infrastructure. Data centers are notorious for giving off thermal energy and being somewhat energy inefficient. Researchers at Rice University are looking for solutions to turn this heat into something a little more useful. In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses the push for green IT and how data centers could become much more energy efficient.
Just days after AT&T hooked up with IBM and Microsoft for cloud service connectivity, Verizon announced a software-defined interconnect (SDI) service to help the carrier's customers connect Equinix colocation data centers.These two companies have a history. In 2017, Equinix acquired 29 Verizon data centers in the U.S and Latin America for $3.6 billion. So like AT&T, Verizon left data centers to the experts and focused on building connections to them. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data center network ]
As more enterprises move workloads into colocation facilities run by providers like Equinix, fast, secure connections between the enterprise and the colocation become a must. Verizon's SDI service is designed to provide fast, reliable connectivity between customer and the colocation data center.To read this article in full, please click here
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Companies are racing to a new technological paradigm but are using yesterday’s tech to do it.I know. Shocking.A survey of more than 300 storage professionals by storage vendor NGD Systems found only 11% of the companies they talked to would give themselves an “A” grade for their compute and storage capabilities.Why? The chief reason given is that while enterprises are rapidly deploying technologies for edge networks, real-time analytics, machine learning, and internet of things (IoT) projects, they are still using legacy storage solutions that are not designed for such data-intensive workloads. More than half — 54% — said their processing of edge applications is a bottleneck, and they want faster and more intelligent storage solutions.To read this article in full, please click here
Most companies like to keep their specialty software to themselves, but IBM is making a move to expand its Spectrum Discover metadata management software to support competitive storage products.Spectrum Discover is modern metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale unstructured storage. It was designed for IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale, a clustered file system, to rapidly ingest, consolidate and index metadata for billions of files and objects.Its metadata layer enables storage administrators, data stewards and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data while helping to mitigate risk and accelerate large-scale analytics.To read this article in full, please click here
Waste heat is the scurge of computing. In fact, much of the cost of powering a computer is from creating unwanted heat. That’s because the inefficiencies in electronic circuits, caused by resistance in the materials, generates that heat. The processors, without computing anything, are essentially converting expensively produced electrical energy into waste energy.
It’s a fundamental problem, and one that hasn’t been going away. But what if you could convert the unwanted heat back into electricity—recycle the heat back into its original energy form? The data center heat, instead of simply disgorging into the atmosphere to be gotten rid of with dubious eco-effects, could actually run more machines. Plus, your cooling costs would be taken care of—there’s nothing to cool because you’ve already grabbed the hot air.To read this article in full, please click here
Intel has unveiled a new packaging innovation for creating 3D chip packages and multiple chip connections ahead of the Semicon West conference in San Francisco this week.The company is detailing its Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technologies and Foveros 3D chip packages. This may sound like very inside baseball and best suited for the propellerhead crowd, but hear me out.[ Also read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ]
Chip packaging has always played a critical role in semiconductors, and it’s getting more important as chipmakers such as Intel and AMD strain against the limits of Moore’s Law. The chip’s package is how the chip’s electrical signals and power are routed.To read this article in full, please click here
A supercomputer deployed in 2012 is going into retirement after seven years of hard work, but the task of decommissioning it is not trivial.The Cray XK7 “Titan” supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is scheduled to be decommissioned on August 1 and disassembled for recycling.At 27 petaflops, or 27 quadrillion calculations per second, Titan was at one point the fastest supercomputer in the world at its debut in 2012 and remained in the top 10 worldwide until June 2019.[ Also read: 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ]
But time marches on. This beast is positively ancient by computing standards. It uses 16-core AMD Opteron CPUs and Nvidia Kepler generation processors. You can buy a gaming PC with better than that today.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to bulk-up its optical systems portfolio, Cisco says it intends to buy Acacia Communications for approximately $2.6 billion. The deal is Cisco’s largest since it laid out $3.7B for AppDynamics in 2017.Acacia develops, manufactures and sells high-speed coherent optical interconnect products that are designed to transform networks linking data centers, cloud and service providers. Cisco is familiar with Acacia as it has been a “significant” customer of the optical firm for about five years, Cisco said.To read this article in full, please click here
Data center workloads are moving but not only to the cloud. Increasingly, they are shifting to colocation facilities as an alternative to privately owned data centers.What is colocation?
A colocation facility or colo is a data center in which a business can rent space for servers and other computing hardware that they purchase but that the colo provider manages.Read about IPv6 and cloud-access security brokers
The colo company provides the building, cooling, power, bandwidth and physical security. Space is leased by the rack, cabinet, cage or room. Many colos started out as managed services and continue to offer those specialized services.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco issued three “critical” security warnings for its DNA Center users – two having a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.8 out of 10.The two worst problems involve Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM). Cisco DNA Center controls access through policies using Software-Defined Access, automatically provision through Cisco DNA Automation, virtualize devices through Cisco Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and lower security risks through segmentation and Encrypted Traffic Analysis.
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In one advisory Cisco said a vulnerability in the web-based management interface of DCNM could let an attacker obtain a valid session cookie without knowing the administrative user password by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to a specific web servlet that is available on affected devices. The vulnerability is due to improper session management on affected DCNM software.To read this article in full, please click here
Data storage software vendor Cloudian has teamed up with Seagate Technology to offer a private cloud storage platform aimed at artificial intelligence (AI) and network-edge workloads. The two companies said they plan to deliver exabyte-scale private cloud storage on-premises while still compatible with Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage.The new product is a mouthful and one only lawyers could have come up with: Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme, Powered by Seagate. Cloudian specializes in object storage platforms, which are already compatible with AWS S3, and Seagate is a major provider of hard disk technology along with Western Digital. In announcing the deal, Seagate said S3 was the motivator for making the alliance.To read this article in full, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has multiple enterprise-class storage choices, offering products under the Nimble, 3PAR, and ProLiant brands, plus the enterprise storage software of InfoSight, developed by Nimble. You can add Primera to that list, a new high-end storage array that’s billed as a self-managing platform that uses AI techniques to deliver 100% reliability guaranteed.The Primera offering borrows some technology from the company’s existing products, including the InfoSight AI capabilities developed by Nimble and the underlying distributed storage architecture of 3PAR.[ Read also: What is NVMe, and how is it changing enterprise storage | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ]
Primera was announced last week at HPE’s Discover event in Las Vegas. Phil Davis, chief sales officer for HPE, said in the announcement keynote, “If you think about traditional storage, it’s full of compromises and complexity. Do I want fast or reliable? Do I want agility or simplicity? But not any more. We’re going to combine the simplicity of Nimble with the intelligence of Infosight and mission-critical heritage of 3Par and we’ve created a new class of storage that eliminates the traditional compromises and truly redefines what is possible with storage.”To read Continue reading
The rapidly growing hyperconverged infrastructure industry – IDC says converged-systems revenue grew 14.8 percent year-over-year in the last quarter of 2018 – is starting to consolidate, with tech giants HPE, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Red Hat all buying promising HCI startups.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)