Data Center And Small Office/Home Office Product Reviews And News
Data Centers for mission critical applications and cloud services require high-end, fault-tolerant hardware and software for servers, processors, storage, operating systems and more. Meanwhile, enterprise and small business road warriors alike need that same level of reliability on mobile devices and back at the office as well. If it connects people and systems, stores critical data or provides digital tools for business and professionals, you'll find our coverage here - from WiFi routers to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, High Performance Computing (HPC) and more, this channel means business.
Kingston has been a dedicated stalwart of the memory, storage, and peripheral markets for many years. The company’s products target virtually every type of user, from entry-level first-time PC builders to seasoned sysadmins. The products we’ll be showing you here today, the Kingston DC500R and DC500M solid state drives, target the latter type of user, in need of reliable, high-capacity SSD storage for enterprise and data center applications. At first glance – of both their physical design and specifications -- the Kingston DC500R and DC500M drives appear to be similar. The ‘R’ variant, however, is geared for read-heavy workloads, while the ‘M’ variant...
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When AMD announced its 7nm Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 processors at Computex, the enthusiast community stood up and took notice. Later, when AMD capped off the new processor family with the bodacious and powerful 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X, it absolutely rocked the desktop PC community. However, it appears computing enthusiasts weren’t the only ones that were impressed with AMD’s third-generation Ryzen and EPYC Zen 2-based products. Wall Street also took notice, and AMD's progress definitely got the attention of its primary rival competitor, Intel. Nowhere is Intel's renewed keen focus more evident than in an internal Intel memo that just leaked out to public...
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There is a fledgling wireless standard that effectively renders the vast majority of home networks out of date -- don't panic though, your stuff isn't necessarily obsolete. It is called Wi-Fi 6, if using the simplified nomenclature that the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced last year, or 802.11ax if you want to stick with the more technical (and potentially confusing for the average consumer) description. Either way, what we have is a bleeding-edge standard that router makers are just now starting to adopt, one that is better equipped to handle the growing number of wireless devices that are commonly found in our homes (PCs and laptops, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, smart speakers, and so forth)....
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Intel is launching its latest salvo of data-centric products today, targeting a wide range of workloads and applications. You may think that means a fresh batch of powerful Xeons are on the way – and you’d be correct but there's more. Today marks the official arrival of Intel’s Cascade Lake, many-core 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable Series Processors, but the company is also announcing or launching a plethora of adjacent products including new FPGAs, innovative network controllers, a new server chassis platform, and Optane DC Persistent memory. And along with those powerful Xeon Scalable Series Processors, more specialized Xeon-D series products, which are designed for all sorts...
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The hardware may still be in development, but Intel just landed a major design win nonetheless, one that will reportedly culminate in the world’s first Exascale Supercomputer powered partially by Intel’s upcoming Xe graphics technology. It was just announced that Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will deliver the first supercomputer capable of one exaFLOP of compute performance, or a “quintillion” floating point operations per second. The system, named “Aurora”, is being developed at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. It is being designed for High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence applications and will be used...
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There's no question that Intel has held a stranglehold on the enterprise CPU market with its family of Xeon processors. However, that all began to change last year with the introduction of AMD's first Zen-based EPYC processors which offered impressive performance at eyebrow-raising price points for potential customers. While AMD has gained some server market share thanks to EPYC, it is really looking to turn the tide with its second-generation EPYC products based on 7nm Zen 2 architecture. These new processors are part of the "Rome" family and are currently sampling to customers. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su says that the company is "betting big on 7nm" and the innovations that come with it. AMD claims...
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The brain is the most complex organ in the body and the most difficult to unravel. Scientists have developed a variety of ways to better understand the brain, including the use of supercomputers. The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday. The mammoth array of server cabinets boasts one million processor cores and is able to perform 200 trillion actions per second. SpiNNaker has been twenty years and ￡15 million (nearly 19.5 million USD) in the making. The project was originally supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), but has been most recently...
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Given all the hubbub concerning solid state drives (SSDs) these days, it's easy to forget that there's still a rather large market for traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Western Digital clearly hasn't forgotten about the market, and is now claiming storage leadership with its new Ultrastar DC HC620. The Ultrastar DC HC620 is available in capacities of up to 15TB, which is just 1TB greater than the previous high watermark for currently shipping HDDs. The Ultrastar DC HC620 makes use of a 3.5-inch form-factor (SAS and SATA interface are available) and leverages second-generation shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. In addition, Western Digital says that the storage...
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Samsung has become somewhat of a household name in the consumer solid state drive market—between its Pro and Evo drives, the company offers some of the fastest and best bang-for-buck options out there. Its newest SSDs, however, are aimed at data center customers and consist of several new models aimed at reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). The new Data Center SSD solutions consist of the 860 DCT, 883 DCT, 983 DCT, and 983 ZET, each one "engineered to meet the evolving needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs)," which essentially entails faster sustained performance, higher capacities, and of course enterprise-grade reliability and security. "Samsung’s Data Center SSD portfolio...
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Mesh networking is starting to take a foothold in the home market, but the technology has actually been around for quite sometime. In fact, you have most likely been connected to a mesh network at some point in time without even realizing it. Hotels, universities, and malls have been using the tech for years to keep their students and customers seamlessly connected to the internet over large areas. The cost of setting up and maintaining a large, mesh network is worthwhile for the enterprise and major institutions, but for the rest of us -- until recently -- mesh networks have simply been out of reach. This has kept the technology out of the hands of the average consumer, but over the last couple...
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Western Digital (WD) has pulled the wraps off a new high capacity storage drive that is aimed directly at cloud and enterprise data centers. The new Ultrastar DC HC530 has 14TB of storage capacity, which WD says is the highest capacity conventional magnetic recording hard drive on the market today. The HC530 uses fifth-generation HelioSeal technology and is meant to be perfect for environments where storage density, watt/TB and $/TB are critical. The drive will allow enterprise users to build petabyte-scale infrastructures. WD says that the new HC530 is a follow-on to the 14TB shielded magnetic recording drive, the Ultrastar Hs14. Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices, Western...
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Of the over 28,000 attendees at NVIDIA’s GTC 2018 GPU Technology Conference, many converged on the San Jose Convention Center this week to learn about advancements in AI and Machine Learning that the company would bring to the table for developers, researchers and service providers in the field. Today, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage to unveil a number of GPU-powered innovations for Machine Learning, including a new AI super computer and an updated version of the company’s powerful Tesla V100 GPU that now sports a hefty 32 Gigabytes of on-board HBM2 memory. NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU with 32GB of onboard HBM2 A follow-on to last year’s DGX-1 AI supercomputer, the new NVIDIA...
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Most of us have had a love-hate relationship with wireless networking. It’s a wonderful technology when all your devices remain connected and perform well in every room of your house, but that’s not always the case. When your devices intermittently drop off or can't find a strong enough signal strength for reliable web browsing, or even if you're suffering through endless video buffering, there isn’t much you can do in that moment, but accept you’re at the mercy of your wireless router. Networking companies sought to fix that with wireless network extenders, but most of those early devices were a messy affair that required separate network names and manually selecting...
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A few weeks back, Seagate launched an array of 12TB hard drives targeted a variety of market segments, from desktops to workstations and high-performance Network-Attached Servers. The Seagate Barracuda Pro, IronWolf, and IronWolf Pro are fundamentally similar, but each drive is tuned for specific applications. The Barracuda Pro is designed for HEDT and creative professional platforms. The IronWolf targets Network-Attached Servers (NAS) with one to eight bays. And the IronWolf Pro is designed for the same segment, but with servers with up to 18 bays. We’ve had the Barracuda Pro and standard IronWolf NAS drive in-house for a little while and have some thoughts on their performance and features...
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