IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 18

Avago, a leading designer and developer of compound semiconductors, has announced their intention to purchase the smaller LSI for $6.6 Billion. Avago, with its market cap of 11.3 Billion, is much larger than LSI, with a cap of 4.32 Billion.

Stocks of both companies are skyrocketing in early trading, with LSI up 38% in the first 6 minutes of trading, and Avago is up 11.7% and climbing.

Avago turned to Silver Lake for partial funding for the venture. Silver Lake, a technology investor, is a common player in the storage space. Silver Lake actually owned, and sold, Avago last year. The Avago deal was the largest payoff for Silver Lake, they received a 5X return on their investment, and have a seat on Avago's board.

The future of memory storage took a big step recently with the announcement from Everspin Technologies and Buffalo Memory that an ST-MRAM cache layer has been incorporated into Buffalo's SS6 industrial SSD. This is the first commercially available SSD to utilize persistent MRAM as a cache layer.

MRAM (magenetoresistive random access memory) is a disruptive technology that looks to change the landscape of memory technology, with many predicting that MRAM will supplant other forms of memory in the near future. In fact, over 20 companies are currently working to develop MRAM products, and mass production from these companies is slated for the 2018 timeframe.

While the industry 'heavies' are 4 years from production, a frontrunner has emerged in Everspin Technologies. They actually have working MRAM in production already, products in the field, and a whopping 600 active patents in their portfolio.

The LSI Nytro display case at AIS continues to hold unannounced treasure for those with a quick eye. In previous years, other 'secret' products have appeared in the case, so we made sure to head directly to the Nytro display case before the doors were open to the public.

We had prior briefings on the Nytro 6000 Series, so we knew to expect working Nytro 6000 Series silicon, but the unannounced 7000 Series also just happened to be on display. Through some investigative journalism, and common sense, we were able to find some details on the 7000 Series. A word of caution, however, there are no official LSI specifications or information on these products. Time for some wild conjecture!

This card features an original take on heat sink design unlike any we have observed on a PCIe flash accelerator. The row of capacitors at the top of the PCB provide power fail protection, and the long heat sink to the bottom right likely hods the ROC that ties the four banks of NAND, hiding under the large black heat sinks, into one large volume. We can also likely expect the use of the same ROC's utilized in the new 12Gb/s MegaRAID products.

LSI has gained significant traction with their Nytro line of products, becoming one of the world's largest suppliers of PCIe flash cards in a very short time. In fact, they are already shipping into 6 of the top 10 Hyperscale companies. This success has given LSI a deep understanding of the market and the needs of their customers.

One of the fastest growing segments of the flash market are the value-oriented mainstream users. These users aren't in need of solutions with extreme performance specifications or ultimate endurance; they require a solution friendly to the bottom line.

Hyperscale deployments require the most value per dollar, low power usage, scalability and the ability to extract value from their data as quickly as possible. The Nytro XP 6209 and 6210 are designed to meet the needs of the mainstream user. These cards both feature proven LSI SandForce controllers in tandem with the LSI 2308 Falcon SAS I/O controller.

LSI has announced the release of their new 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID controllers and their revolutionary new DataBolt expanders at their annual AIS summit. AIS (Accelerating Innovation Summit) is LSI's yearly meeting that plays host to the brightest minds in storage technology.

The needs of the datacenter are constantly expanding, and the move to the 12Gb/s SAS specification is required to keep up with the ongoing flood of data. The ability to use faster interconnects, along with lower latency, helps to allow the acceleration of big data and cloud computing.

In a recent TPC-H test, LSI found they were able to sustain a 60% increase in performance and userload during the test. The speed hike also enabled a big reduction in job completion time and better resource utilization. This is just one of many applications the new 12Gb/s SAS controllers will excel in.

I don't know why it hasn't built its own yet, but The Pentagon has just dangled a carrot in front of hackers' eyes: offering up The Cyber Grand Challenge. The challenge will run for three years, with contestants needing to meet the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) requests.

DARPA would like to see a fully automated system that is capable of protecting itself from hackers, with the ability to respond to attacks within a matter of hours or seconds, versus a couple of days. The system, that I'm going to call Skynet, should be capable of updating its own cote on-the-fly and have decent reasoning abilities that are better than human experts based on vulnerability scanner signatures, intrusion detection signatures and security patches.

There are three prizes on offer by the government, the first is the grand prize of $2 million, with second and third places seeing a nice $1 million and $750,000 respectively. With all of the power, technology and secrecy, it's truly mind boggling that DARPA can't just build Skynet on its own.

It looks like the NSA's latest data center based in Utah is having all sorts of issues, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that it has seen 10 meltdowns happen in the last 13 months alone thanks to electrical surges.

This means that the NSA is using so much power trying to keep track on every human being on Earth that it is killing its data centers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in hardware has been killed, not to count the amount of man hours that would be pumped into the data center to try and fix things.

The WSJ somehow got its hands on a project documents that detail the issues the NSA is facing at its Utah data center, with arc fault failures being the core issues. An official who spoke with the WSJ described it as "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box" that caused huge explosions, melting metal and outright destroying circuits inside the data center.

Percona is set to launch its latest Percona Server tomorrow morning at 8AM. The new Percona Server 5.6 is based off of MySQL 5.6 and offers all of the improvements featured in MySQL 5.6. Making things even better, Percona Server 5.6 features many of the exciting new features found in the enterprise edition of MySQL 5.6, for free!

Percona has built Percona Server 5.6 off of the MySQL 5.6 community edition and has taken the liberty of creating its own solutions for scalability, availability, backup, and security features that are only found in MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition which requires an expensive support contract with Oracle to access.

"Percona Server 5.6 is the best free MySQL variant for demanding applications. It includes many features, which are only available to MySQL 5.6 Enterprise Edition users. We also built upon the traditional strength of Percona Server to provide Percona Server 5.6 users with the best available performance for demanding workloads," said Vadim Tkachenko, Co-founder and CTO for Percona. "The powerful features and high performance of Percona Server 5.6 plus its full drop-in compatibility with MySQL 5.6 Community Edition are all important reasons why Percona Server has been downloaded over 700,000 times since its launch."

In the server market Supermicro is beginning to pick up market share with its new line of server and storage solutions supporting Intel's new Xeon Processor's E5-2600 v2 & 1600 v2 family of CPU's.

"Intel's Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 v2 families push performance and efficiency to new levels with greater density and feature integration thanks to Intel's 22nm Tri-gate transistor technology," said Shannon Poulin, vice president and general manager of Intel Datacenter Marketing Group. "Intel works closely with partners such as Supermicro to ensure their latest computing solutions offer increased performance with higher frequency and core counts, lower power consumption and more features such as security and PCI-E acceleration. With Supermicro's rapidly expanding product lines and worldwide presence, our combined technology innovations can get to market quickly and contribute to a greener, more secure computing environment."

"Once again, Supermicro leads the industry with the best and most innovative green computing solutions supporting Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors," said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. "Our architecture advancements in FatTwin, TwinPro² and SAS3 12Gb/s solutions deliver the highest computing performance and energy efficiency with maximized PCI-E, memory and storage I/O bandwidth for unrivaled performance per watt, per dollar, per square foot. Our new server, storage and workstation solutions, combined with full integration and support services worldwide, help organizations minimize TCO and maximize ROI as they scale their business."

With the launch of their latest Adaptec Series 8, PMC delivers >700,000 4K random read RAID I/O/s unleashing the potential of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs. The Series 8 family is spread across five models based on PMC's 12Gb SAS RoC controller in a low profile form factor. Configurations include 16-port adapters that connect twice the drives of competing solutions, providing the flexibility to create hybrid storage arrays with any combination of SSDs and HDDs.

The fourth generation caching solution from Adaptec now includes tiering technology allowing customers to maximize their investment. maxCache Plus with Series 8 offers additional flexibility to configure all storage devices in a server environment, not just devices connected to PMC hardware enabling admins the ability to leverage their storage assets according to their performance capabilities.

"Enterprise datacenters and cloud environments have a need to accelerate application performance while coping with massive data growth cost effectively," said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for solid state storage at IDC. "12Gb SAS architectures and tiering technologies are poised to overcome these challenges and help unlock the potential of SSDs, which is one of the key reasons IDC expects shipments of SAS SSDs to grow at a 75% CAGR from 2012 to 2017."