IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 16

This morning, Seagate Technology announced that it has begun shipping the world's fastest 6TB capacity 3.5-inch hard drive. The new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V4 features the fastest performance available for a "nearline" HDD, thanks to Seagate's utilization of an eighth-generation platform that allows the new HDD to deliver up to 25-percent more performance than competing 6TB drives.

"Unstructured data growth is doubling exponentially and will propel the digital universe to reach 16 Zettabytes of data by as early as 2017. This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering operational costs," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the fastest 6TB enterprise capacity HDD based on our proven, reliable platform meeting this never-ending demand in both private and public cloud data centers."

Seagate says that they have designed this new drive with the enterprise storage market in mind, and it is ideal for 24X7 bulk data storage. The drive features a 12Gb/s SAS interface, or in a SATA 6Gb/s interface. The new 6TB drive also features multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance, and robust 7200-RPM performance, ramp load technology alongside a humidity sensor to allow it to deliver optimum performance even in the harshest environments. Seagate has purpose-built the drive for enterprise environments, and utilized it to the T10 and T13-compliant power management standards enabling customers to adjust systems for optimal energy usage resulting in up to 90 percent more energy savings.

Supermicro announced the first server, a 2U 2-Node UltraTwin featuring hot-swappable 1U nodes, to be released in the new Ultra Architecture SuperServer series. The new server is built on dual Intel Xeon E7-2880 v2 processors that now support NMVe SSD's.

With the ability to support a high number of cores, large memory capacity, and high performance storage techonology, Supermicro is targeting this server for virtualization applications, datacenters, cloud computing, and HPC. According to Shannon Poulin, vice president of Enterprise IT for Intel's Data Center Group, these servers are built "to handle increasingly complex data intensive workloads in mission critical, highly virtualized environments."

And according to Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro, there will be several more additions to this Intel based series - "UltraTwin is the first in a line of upcoming servers to take full advantage of this groundbreaking architecture and expands our MP solution range with support for Intel Xeon E7 v2 series processors and peripheral technologies."

Supermicro announced their entry to the software defined network market at Interop Las Vegas 2014 this week by demonstrating its new SDN SuperSwitch and MicroBlade microserver solutions. The new 1U SDN switch platform is based on the Intel Open Network Platform using Intel switches and processors combined with Intel Open Network Software (ONS). The MicroBlade also incorporates Intel switch modules featuring SDN functionality and an Intel Atom C2000 control plane processor.

Leveraging Intel's technology, the new Supermicro SDN solutions offer flexibility, agility, security and dynamic manageability. According to Rose Schooler, vice president of Intel's Data Center Group and general manger of the Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group, "The new Supermicro SuperSwitch, developed from the Intel ONP Switch Reference Design, delivers a high performance, easy to deploy and cost effective network switch that offers management and control functionality."

While there are most likely cost benefits for enterprises that deploy SDN, it is this improved flexibility in management of the network that makes this technology so appealing. According to Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro, the "new SDN enabled SuperSwitch and MicroBlade switches provides Data Center, Cloud and Enterprise environments the greatest flexibility to dynamically allocate networked resources as data demands shift." With datacenter workloads constantly shifting and blending, this ability to dynamically allocate network resources to hungry workloads is paramount.

The so-called "Internet of Things" will disrupt the technology world, with 26 billion units supported by 2020, shaking up the data center, according to the Gartner research group.

IT services will help monetize the market further, with IoT product and service suppliers queuing up to join a quickly growing market.

"The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network, as real-time business processes are at stake," said Joe Skorupa, VP at Gartner, in a press statement. "Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT."

SolidFire, the Boulder, Colorado based manufacturer of all-flash storage systems has announced Q2 2014 availability of Carbon, Version 6 of its Element OS. Included in this upcoming release is a whole new set of enterprise class features such as real-time replication and integrated backup & restore.

SolidFire is providing this upgrade for free to existing customers including all the new enhancements. The new features included are:

One of the greatest benefits for Toshiba when they purchased OCZ was their access to PCIe technology. Toshiba has a strong stable of enterprise SSDs, but they did lack the PCIe component. The release of the new OCZ Storage Solutions Z-Drive 4500 is a good example of the benefits of the acquisition in action. The access to Toshiba flash will also allow for more competitive pricing and a solid product supply for OCZ.

The Z-Drive 4500 features 8 SF-2582 processors in conjunction with Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND and the VCA (Virtualized Controller Architecture) technology to deliver some impressive specifications. The drive delivers maximum read bandwidth of up to 2,900 MB/s, maximum write bandwidth of up to 2,200 MB/s, random 4K block read throughput of up to 252,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and random 4K block write throughput of up to 76,000 IOPS.

Capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB deliver endurance ratings of 680, 1300, and 2500 TBW, respectively. The drive features power capacitors for data protection and a new full height-half length design. A new casing is designed to cool components, and the addition of thermal throttling protects the SSD from overheating. Support for VXL Virtualization Software is baked in, and this is all wrapped up with a five-year warranty.

In a series of news releases this week, IBM is sending a message to the market that it is serious about being a major player in cloud services. Building upon its acquisition of Softlayer last year, IBM announced that it has invested over $1B in bringing a suite of development tools to the cloud to deliver a PaaS (platform as a service). In addition to this investment, they also announced the acquisition of Cloudant, a DBaaS (batabase as a service) provider.

These new services are geared towards application developers and providing them on-demand infrastructure that can be scaled up or down as requirements change. As part of the announcement, they have launched a beta version of their DevOps in the cloud solution codenamed BlueMix. BlueMix includes services to store and manage code, a built-in Web integrated development environment, and Eclipse and Visual Studio integrations to let developers use whichever environment they prefer. The platform enables agile planning, tracking, and collaboration across team members during the development cycle. Plus, there is application deployment automation to streamline delivery. Combined, the PaaS and DBaaS enable application DevOps teams to start projects faster and complete them more efficiently.

IBM is being very proactive in changing its model to address the reality facing them. Traditionally, developers would make a change request to have resources allocated to them which in turn would drive the storage or server team to purchase more equipment from IBM. With the proliferation of cloud services, developers can now simply go grab resources on demand from any of the cloud providers; thus, speeding up their time to get the resources and reducing the need for more IBM hardware. Realizing that the model has shifted, IBM is now empowering development teams to not just get resources, but is adding value around those resources to make their solution much more compelling than run of the mill cloud service providers.

The move to 12Gb/s SAS is beginning in the datacenter, and as per usual the bleeding-edge devices lead the way. 12Gb/s SAS3 SSDs were first, with three industry heavyweights leading the 12Gb/s charge. We have evaluated the HGST SSD800MM, the Toshiba PX02SMF080, and the Seagate 1200. Surprisingly, a few of these SSDs actually beat compatible RAID adapters and HBA's to market, but we are finally seeing the right pieces of the architecture all fall into place.

Of course the next logical step is to begin applying the benefits of 12Gb/s technology to the platter realm. The fastest HDDs are the first to get the 12Gb/s treatment, and today HGST beat the competition with the announcement of their new C15K600 family.

This 15K RPM HDD also brings a few new features. HGST is utilizing their media caching technology to provide significantly enhanced write performance over solutions with limited NAND or flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC). The result is two times better random write performance than current generation 2.5-inch 15K drives, and two and a half times better performance than 3.5-inch 15K drives. We are reaching out for details from HGST on this new technology, which apparently leverages a much larger 128MB cache buffer to achieve this spectacular performance.

Nexenta has quietly accumulated a significant customer base of more than 5,000 users and nearly one exabyte of storage installed. Continuing upon that success, Nexenta announced today the upcoming release of NexentaStor 4.0 in Q2 2014 that will bring enhancements to failover time and overall reduced latencies. In addition to improved performance, Nexenta has put forth an effort into improving its out of box experience by simplifying installation and management with wizards and advanced monitoring tools.

While solutions around "software defined" networks, storage, and data centers are relatively nascent, Nexenta is staking its claim early on by partnering with industry leading system integrators. As an existing premier reseller partner for Nexenta, Eva Cherry, CEO and President of Silicon Mechanics says,

"Silicon Mechanics' strong partnership with Nexenta has been instrumental in helping customers realize the benefits of Software Defined Storage with an innovative product that improves performance and reliability...we are excited about how the enhancements in NexentaStor 4.0 will continue to help customers address the challenges inherent in big storage."

San Diego based Astute Networks released an update to their ViSX family of performance storage appliances, the ViSX G4 OS version 5. This latest release is an all solid state flash performance appliance that Astute claims is the industry's lowest cost-per-GB with the highest IOPS per dollar solution in the market. It is available in capacities up to 45.6TB in a 2U platform, with add-on flash modules available in sizes up to 1900GB.

Astute adds to their iSCSI offering the additional support for NFS (v2, v3, and v4). Designed for both virtual and physical infrastructure, ViSX is compatible with 1GbE or 10GbE infrastructure and does not require a forklift install. According to Deni Connor, founder and senior analyst, SSG-NOW. "Astute's Networked Flash appliance removes all storage and network I/O constraints to dramatically accelerate virtual machine and application performance - while co-existing with an organizations existing infrastructure."

The Astute Network appliances aim to speed performance for intense enterprise application workloads. Astute claims 5 to 10 times performance boost for enterprise applications such as VDI, SQL Server, MySQl, Oracle, and Sharepoint. With their latest release of ViSX, they also provide solutions for cloud service providers with support for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds.