Data Center/SMB
There is a big push for solid state drive (SSDs) to transform the data center storage market, and Intel is banking on a new form-factor to help spur that transition. The company has announced its new “Ruler” SSD form-factor, which completely ditches legacy 2.5- and 3.5-inch formats. These “long and skinny” SSDs are optimized to maximize storage capacity in targeted servers, while outperforming legacy form-factors in both cooling and power requirements. Using the Ruler form-factor, Intel says that it can infuse 1U servers with up to 1PB of storage, which would be enough to hold 300,000 HD movies....
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Adjustable sit-stand desks are all the rage these days, after some smart person in the healthcare field put two and two together to figure out that planting your backside in an office chair all day long is really not good for you, and in more ways than one. Adjustable height desks come generally in two variants, stand-alone models like the Autonomous Smart Desk 2 you see above and desktop risers that essentially convert a standard desk to sit-stand positioning capability. Pricing for the various model types out there range from the cheesy $149 versions, to north of $500 or so for premium, motorized...
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Dell as a company has been around for more than three decades and shows no signs of slowing down. But it was 20 years ago that Dell began selling Precision workstations to professionals. To celebrate two decades of Precision workstations, Dell skipped the cake and streamers, and instead announced a few new and updated additions to its workstation portfolio, including a special anniversary edition of its Precision 5520 mobile workstation. The Precision 5520 is the thinnest, lightest, and overall smallest mobile workstation in Dell's stable. For the anniversary model, Dell blinged things out with...
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It goes without saying that we love solid state drives here at HotHardware. Their ultra-fast speeds and favorable price/GB ratio is make them a must-have for enthusiasts, attractive upgrades for regular consumers, and desirable performance upgrades for enterprise customers. Viking Technology has that last segment of customers in mind with its new Ultra-High-Capacity (UHC) Silo SSD series, which will be available in capacities up to an astonishing 50TB. Given that the UHC Silo SSD series is aimed at the enterprise market, it features a 3.5-inch form-factor and a 6Gbps SAS interface. Viking is confident...
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Intel announced its Xeon Scalable processor family based Skylake-SP a few weeks back, but today marks the official launch of the platform. These new processors feature a new microarchitecture versus previous-generation Xeons and Intel has revamped the naming convention and arrangement of the product stack as well. Whereas previous-generation Xeon processors carried version, class, and model number designations – for example, Xeon E5-2697 v4 – the Xeon Scalable processor family is now designated by Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories, with a single model number.The new naming convention...
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AMD has been on a tear lately. After all of the hype and anticipation, AMD's Zen architecture has proven to be the real deal, and not just on the desktop. Last week saw the launch of AMD's EPYC 7000 series processors for data center servers, and now the chip designer is formally introducing its Ryzen PRO lineup. In case it its not clear at this point, Zen is a multi-headed threat that is intent on competing with Intel in virtually every market segment. In this case, AMD's Rzyen PRO desktop chips are tweaked versions of the company's consumer-based Ryzen processors, with the PRO parts taking aim...
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There might not be a storage medium that's definitively indestructible, or perfectly reliable, but solid-state storage would rank near the top. A hard drive, for example, might be able to house a large amount of data, but if it's dropped to the ground, or its host PC is bumped hard enough, all of that data could effectively be ruined in the blink of an eye. Solid-state storage is a bit different. If it's jostled during operation, it won't be affected, and the same goes for experiencing a fall to the ground. But, despite its durability, it's still not indestructible or entirely reliable, and new...
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AMD’s Financial Analyst Day is currently taking place, and one of the biggest announcements that has come out so far is the marketing name for the company’s Naples datacenter chip. AMD CEO Lisa Su announced that the new chips are branded EPYC, and she held one of the massive chips in her hands for all to see. AMD is going for the jugular when it comes to comparisons with Intel’s Xeon family, providing up to 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which Su says “allows you to connect more GPUs directly to the CPU than any other solution in the industry." As we’ve previously reported, EPYC scales to 32 cores/64...
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Soon after unveiling the Tesla V100 data center GPU based on its next-generation Volta architecture at GTC 2017, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang announced an updated, Volta-infused DGX-1 server appliance for deep learning data center deployment, along with a totally new product, the NVIDIA DGX Station, that’s being dubbed a ‘Personal AI Supercomputer’.The new NVIDIA DGX-1 is similar to the previous generation offering based on Pascal, but is powered by eight Tesla V100s GPUs, linked together via next-gen NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology that ups the bandwidth per GPU to 300GB/s. The rest of the...
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AMD is looking to make a big impact on the enterprise market with its upcoming Naples platform. Naples will bring tons of memory bandwidth and up to 32 cores, so many have been wondering what Intel has up its sleeves to counter it. Overall, the blue team still has the fastest IPC and single-threaded performance, so it doesn't have much to fear for now, but if Naples can deliver close to what is being promised, it is going to give the enterprise market a long overdue shakeup. As we now learn, part of Intel's disruption versus their competition will be underscored with a rebranding, as...
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Though encryption and enterprise products often go hand-in-hand, that is not always the case. There are some instances where encryption is not needed, and so Toshiba answered the call with a line of non-encrypted solid state drives optimized for data centers. Those drives are now starting to ship in select NetApp SolidFire all-flash array (AFA) models, enabling NetApp customers to reach new markets. Specifically, Toshiba's non-encrypted SATA 6Gbps HK4 series SSDs are shipping in NetApp SolidFire SF4805, SF9605, and SF19210 products. Toshiba is the first to ship non-encrypted SSDs on SolidFire AFAs...
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As modern datacenters grow, so too do their demands. The processor race is heating up with both ARM and AMD vying to unseat Intel from its throne. Banks of RAM are beginning to become augmented by Intel’s Optane memory and other products leveraging 3D XPoint technology. However, some of the most interesting changes in the industry are happening where all this data is eventually stored. Traditional hard drives have served the computing world well for more than half a century. In recent years, however, solid state storage has become increasingly attractive as it offers improvements over spinning...
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Modern video surveillance systems with video recording capabilities can an be an expensive proposition, especially if you contract out installation and service. However, the combination of a high-capacity storage device, like a Synology DiskStation NAS (Networked Attached Storage) and IP surveillance cameras is a great alternative way to add a layer of security to monitor your home or business without dropping major dough. The DiskStation, like any Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device, can be used in a variety of ways ranging from simple network storage to a media server. Today, however,...
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It takes some serious hardware to do the things that Facebook is able to do. In an effort to stay ahead of the technological curve, the social networking site announced today at the 2017 Open Compute Project (OCP) summit in Santa Clara a next-generation GPU server called Big Basin. It's the successor to the Big Sur GPU server announced in 2015 and it will help Facebook to continue leveraging artificial intelligence to power service like speech and text translations, photo classifiers, and real-time video classification. Big Basin was built in collaboration with Quanta Clout Technology (QCT), Facebook's...
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