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.
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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Yesterday, Qualcomm announced that its Centriq 2400 Series processors are now shipping to its customers, nearly a year after it began sampling the chips. Available in 40-, 46- and 48-core versions, the Qualcomm is positioning Centriq 2400 as a worthy competitor to Intel's Xeon processors in the data center server market. Up until this point, Qualcomm has contended that the 48-core Centriq 2460 offers a 4x improvement in performance-per-dollars versus the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180. While those figures are much appreciated, we wanted to see some real world benchmark data so that we can make our own...
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Today, Qualcomm officially announced that it has begun shipping its Centriq 2400 server processors to its OEM partners. This marks a big step for Qualcomm, which is no stranger to the mobile market with its Snapdragon processors, but is a lesser known quantity in the server market. Intel's Xeon processors have already seen a credible challenge in the form of AMD's Zen-based EPYC family, and Centriq promises to be a low-power, high-density alternative that can run with the big dogs in the cloud infrastructure market. Qualcomm first began talking up its Centriq family around this time last year....
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As part of AMD's comeback tour into the high-end market sector, it released new CPU and GPU architectures, Zen and Vega respectively. And with Zen, AMD has been focused on attacking every market sector, including mainstream desktops (Ryzen 3/5/7), high-end desktops (Threadripper), mobile (Ryzen 5 Mobile, or Raven Ridge), and server (EPYC). Building upon that latter segment, AMD is readying a new Snowy Owl platform for embedded system-on-chip (SoC) applications.Snowy Owl is the codename for Epyc 3251, an Epyc 3000 series chip that will be AMD's first Zen-based SoC. It will sit in an embedded SoC...
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The need for more bulk storage isn't slowing down, and in fact continues to grow at an incredible rate. At one point, a 4TB hard drive seemed like it offered a ton of digital breathing room. Today, that's not so much the case. As we capture our photos and videos at higher resolutions (8K is right around the corner), many users will reach a point where they feel they simply can't have enough storage. And that's to say nothing of the insatiable appetite for storage in the enterprise and data center. Earlier this year, HGST blew our minds when it began shipping its first 12TB hard drive, the...
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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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