IT/Datacenter & Super Computing - Page 10

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."

It isn't often that I find myself still thinking about a display at a trade show a week later, but the marriage of SMART Storage Systems' Guardian Technology and Diablo's Memory Channel Storage (MCS) displayed at Flash Memory Summit 2013 has the potential to be a game changer that can alter the very shape of the datacenter.

We are very familiar with this display of SMART Storage Systems products; we have actually posted product evaluations for all of the SSDs, and are waiting in tense anticipation for the opportunity to test the new UltraDIMM which resides at the top of the SMART product family in this display.

A close-up of the UltraDIMM reveals that the underlying MCS technology allows NAND to be addressed as a storage volume, but with the unique placement of the NAND into the ultra-fast memory slots. Each DIMM has two SMART controllers to manage two banks of NAND, and a Diablo Technologies controller to aggregate the NAND pools and present them to the memory bus as a single device.

The introduction of newer, smaller flash geometries will require sophisticated error correction ability to maximize endurance of the NAND. As NAND matures, it almost seems counter-intuitive that we will lose endurance as NAND shrinks, but economics have a hand in the smaller NAND geometries. In order to provide a more economical and accessible product through shrinks, endurance suffers as a trade-off.

One of LSI's core competencies has always been strong ECC techniques, which originated with their extensive hard drive controller experience. The addition of these new LSI SHIELD error correction technologies shows a sign of some of the mutual benefits from the LSI/SandForce acquisition.

Enabling advanced Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) allows LSI SandForce to create a stable solution that will mesh well with not only lower endurance MLC and TLC, but will also wring extra endurance out of current generation NAND as well. This is accomplished through a variety of techniques, including an adaptive method of adjusting the level of ECC during the life of the SSD.

At the Flash Memory Summit 2013, LSI SandForce gave us a teaser of one of the new features that will be featured on the next generation of SandForce flash storage processors.

One of the most exciting new developments is the ability to reclaim some of the extra capacity provided from LSI SandForce's DuraWrite engine. With their compression engine, LSI SandForce's flash storage processors actually write less data down to the NAND than what was sent from the host. In current products this delivers excellent increases in both endurance and performance, with the controller effectively utilizing the extra space as bonus overprovisioning.

LSI SandForce has decided to hand some of that excess capacity back to the customer by allowing users to use this 'hidden' extra spare area on the SSD. The new DuraWrite Virtual Capacity (DVC) feature dynamically adjusts the amount of extra capacity available to the user determined by the amount of data compression.

Seagate announced today that the Enterprise Turbo SSHD, a drive which has been in use with IBM in their Series X servers for over a year. This SSHD has 32GB of flash onboard that allows the SSHD's, in capacities up to 600GB, to produce twice the IOPS performance from its 10,000 RPM's than a 15,000 RPM HDD. The SSHD provides up to 900 IOPS in random performance and comes with a standard five year warranty.

The massive speed increases are due to the tiered caching at the I/O level, accelerating 'hot data' via the flash layer inside the SSHD. This boost in performance will provide gains in performance with fewer devices, lowering the overall TCO of the storage solution. The Enterprise Turbo SSHD will provide radical acceleration in mission-critical applications such as big data analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure, and database and transaction processing. Key features of the SSHD include:

Tiered infrastructure, with SSDs serving as cache for large banks of HDDs, are becoming increasingly popular in the datacenter. The Enterprise Turbo SSHD bridges the gap between HDD and SSD, allowing for a one-drive solution in an environment where there is usually a requirement for multiple types of drives to perform caching duties.

In an expansive investor call yesterday Micron inadvertently revealed a new SSD and controller combo that will sport the NVMe interface during the question and answer session. This is important news, as Micron has previously relied upon third party controllers and a jointly-developed controller with IDT for the P320h. When asked about the possibility of utilizing NVMe in future products, Edward Donner replied:

The 520 will be able to saturate the PCIe 3.0 interface, and might come in the traditional PCIe SSD HHHL form factor and possibly even a 2.5" drive as we have seen with the P320h. The importance of the development of a Micron controller is significant. The SSD market is beginning to consolidate, and those who own a fab or controller IP enjoy a significant advantage. Having both the NAND and controller will provide Micron with even more of an advantage against their competitors. Naturally, our next question would be whether this new controller will migrate to other products, such as the wildly popular consumer offerings from Crucial (the consumer arm of Micron). Luckily, this question was answered in a roundabout fashion during the Q&A session (emphasis added):

A team of artificial and natural knowledge researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have IQ-tested one of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in the world to see how smart it is.

The results? It is about as smart as the average four-year-old child. The UIC team will report their findings in detail at the US Artificial Intelligence Conference in Bellevue, Washington, tomorrow. The UIC team put an artificial intelligence system developed at MIT called 'ConceptNet4' through the verbal parts of the Weschsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence Test, which is a standard IQ assessment for young children.

They found that ConceptNet4 had the IQ of a four-year-old child, but unlike most children, the machine's scores were quite uneven throughout most of the test. Robert Sloan, Professor and head of Computer Science at UIC and lead author of the study said: "If a child had scores that varied this much, it might be a symptom that something was wrong."

The current NAND shortage, first reported by Chris Ramseyer, continues to punish SSD manufacturers who are reliant upon other companies for their supply of NAND flash. OCZ announced their preliminary first quarter revenue at $50-$55 million compared to the markets estimation of $81 million. This is significantly off-target, and resulted in OCZ shares falling 8.4% in the premarket.

The NAND shortage is just another in a long list of OCZ's woes, but the timing could not be worse for OCZ. OCZ has not released financial results for a full three quarters due to accounting inaccuracies from the previous CEO's team and is in the midst of a restructuring to save the company. The tight NAND market has left OCZ with an estimated $23 million in shippable backlog in Q1. Unfortunately, the NAND flash shortage is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

The loss of revenue from the NAND shortage has also hurt OCZ's cash reserves, which fell to $6-$7 million dollars. This has left OCZ strapped for cash and searching for a new source of capital. The previous loans taken by OCZ during the restructuring carried high interest rates, and with the NAND shortage continuing we expect more of the same from whomever loans OCZ the cash to keep in operation.

Sandisk continues their string of SSD-related acquisitions today with the purchase of SMART Storage Systems for $307 Million. This purchase comes after there was tremendous speculation that Sandisk was looking to acquire OCZ over the last several months. SMART Storage Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SMART Worldwide Holdings, is a leading provider of current and next-generation enterprise solid state drive (SSD) products and technology.

SMART Storage Systems makes more sense as an acquisition for Sandisk due to their patent portfolio that includes such revolutionary technologies as the Guardian Technology Suite. SMART also has much deeper penetration into the enterprise market than OCZ, and Sandisk has traditionally focused on enterprise-centric acquisitions in the SSD market. Recent acquisitions of Pliant and FlashSoft have created significant value for Sandisk over the last several years as they increase their presence in the enterprise market.

"We are delighted that a global technology innovator and manufacturer of the caliber of Sandisk supports our belief in SMART Storage's team and portfolio of next-generation enterprise SSDs," said Iain MacKenzie, President and CEO of SMART Worldwide Holdings.

LSI Corporation announced news of the latest version of the Nytro WarpDrive and the new Nytro MegaRAID software features. LSI Nytro products provide ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth performance required for Big Data applications, hyperscale web and cloud datacenters, financial services, virtual desktops and server workloads. These flash solutions provide significant reductions in TCO through lower power consumption, less floor space and frugal IOPS-to-Watts requirements.

The flash segment has proven to be a big winner for LSI, with the delivery of over 50,000 PCIe flash cards having propelled LSI into the #2 position for the worldwide flash adapter market. The expansion of the Nytro product line includes enhanced hardware capabilities and new Nytro MegaRAID features.

Nytro Boot provides the flexibility to partition onboard flash capacity's as a boot volume. This allows the Nytro MegaRAID card to provide the essential boot-up functions, removing the need for HDDs as boot volumes. This provides a more reliable system with less downtime, power consumption, and initial hardware acquisition costs.

Computex Taipei 2013 - Supermicro had a beast of a SuperStorage Server on display at Computex 2013, with support for up to 24 x 2.5" drives, which could either be the latest and greatest 10 and 15K HDDs, or SSDs, including the new breed of 12Gb/s SSDs on the market.

From the top, we can see the three 12Gb/s controllers for the HDD bays. We typically expect rebranded HBA's and RAID controllers for large OEM suppliers, but the origin of these controllers is unclear.

Supermicro was not forthcoming with many details, including the ROC utilized in these builds. These controllers look to be a custom design with large capacitors to the end of the board.

Computex Taipei 2013 - At Computex 2013, Supermicro displayed their newest line of Haswell servers, with the SuperServer 5038ML-H12TRF on display.

The power efficiency of the new Haswell architecture provides the possibility for enhanced density in server solutions. Here we can observe a 1U rack with a single processor server.

Here we see the 12-node version of the Supermicro SuperServer 5038ML-H12TRF on display. These hotpluggable racks pull out for easy service and each hold 2 drives for storage.