Enterprise, Workstation, Data Center, Cloud, Networking, Software News And Reviews
In-depth product reviews and news of enterprise, workstation, networking, cloud, SMB, data center and software products and services.
Enterprise-class solid state drives used to be rare beasts that commanded heavy price premiums over their more common, consumer-oriented counterparts. As leading SSD and flash memory manufacturers have evolved their processes and technologies, however, availability and pricing for many enterprise-class solid state storage solutions have dropped dramatically. Whereas enterprise SSDs that target mission-critical workstations or data centers used to cost many times that of a consumer SSD, that is no longer the case for some products. Samsung's 883 and 983 DCT drives we’ll be showing you here, for example, are available in relatively large capacities and surprisingly won’t break...
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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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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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Back in late 2017, Seagate gave us a taste of what's to come with its multi-actuator technology for modern hard drives. Whereas today's hard drives use a single actuator to sweep across the spinning platters, Seagate actually uses two actuators that move independently around a single pivot point, potentially doubling drive performance. While all of this sounds great in theory, Seagate is actually putting its money where its mouth is and says that prototype drives featuring this tech are already delivering on its promises. In addition, Seagate's multi-actuator tech has been given a fancy marketing name: MACH.2. A single MACH.2-based hard drive was able to set a new speed record, delivering up...
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We took part in an interesting demo this week that was both eye-opening and somewhat alarming. We met with representatives from Synaptics to discuss what we thought would be its latest sensor technology or HCI device, but were treated to a real-world hacking display that would leave most people slack-jawed. Why, you ask? Because in only a few minutes, an image of my fingerprint had been stolen and duplicated, and it was used to gain access to my smartphone (and a demo notebook), but it could have just as easily been a personal / corporate laptop or any other device with a fingerprint sensor.It turns out, Synaptics was in the area to promote its SentryPoint technology, which offers end-to-end...
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Take a look at your printer. Give it a good stare. Do you trust it? Probably not, considering it jammed the last time you had to print an important paper right up against a deadline. However, what if we told you that your printer just has to sit there on your network to be a very serious security problem? HP Inc. recently hosted a tech field day for us, and several other security-focused journalists, at their headquarters in Palo Alto. We will speak to some of the panels we listened in on as we go, but the goal for HP at this event was to raise awareness around security - particularly where printers are concerned - and it's an important topic regardless of the brand of printing device you're...
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You might think that storage makers are 100 percent focused on solid state drives these days, but that isn't the case. Mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) still offer the best price-per-gigabyte ratio for bulk storage duties, and to keep things going, Seagate today announced its Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 in 300GB, 600GB, and 900GB capacity options. This is the 6th generation of Seagate's Enterprise Performance HDD line and not only is it the fastest and best performing to date, Seagate claims you can't buy a faster HDD from any manufacturer. That translates into a sustained transfer rate of up to 315MB/s. Using an enhanced caching feature, Seagate says buyers can expect up to a 27 percent...
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If you thought that Samsung’s monstrous 15.3TB PM1633a SAS solid-state drive (SSD) was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Seagate strutted into the Flash Memory Summit this week touting a new SAS SSD that offers four times the storage capacity of the PM1633a — that’s right, this new enterprise-class SSD has a 60TB capacity. This 60TB SSD prioritizes maximum capacity over outright speed, and uses a dual-port 12 Gbps SAS interface. Inside the 3.5-inch form-factor SSD you’ll find Micron 3D TLC NAND, a single SSD controller and ONFi bridge chips. Read/write speeds (128KB) are nothing to write home about, at 1,500 MB/s and 1,000 MB/s respectively. Random read IOPS (4KB QD32) are rated at 150,000....
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Any way you look at it, today's storage technologies are impressive. We can hold a tiny memory card no larger than our finger nails that can fit thousands of images, songs, and documents, and potentially hundreds of videos. We even just wrote about a new consumer hard drive from Seagate that packs 10 terabytes inside of its frame. Today, as consumers, finding enough storage isn't really a major issue, but that could change in the future. Given some breakthrough technologies we've heard about in recent months, though, that could definitely change in the future. Just earlier this month, we reported on Microsoft accomplishing placing 200MB on a single strand of DNA, and if that wasn't impressive...
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There are two things that Samsung really wants: to be one of the first to deploy a city-wide IoT infrastructure, as well as make sure that IoT infrastructure is on its home turf, in South Korea. That will soon be happening, and it's sure to be one of the first of what will become many such roll-outs over time. For its first deployment, Samsung is going to be using a LoRaWAN-based network (Long-range Wide Area Network), which will utilize a 900MHz band. The first city to be affected by this will be Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city. While many reading this probably thought the first city would be Seoul (which has a population five-fold that of Daegu), it's likely Samsung's goal to start...
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You read the headline correctly – this is not a review of a Synology NAS, but instead a wireless router. If this sounds unusual to you, you are not alone. Synology is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) company, or at least it used to be, as it's now taking all its networking expertise and jumping into the router market, and the black beauty you see below is its maiden attempt. Plainly named, the Synology RT1900ac Router, the company’s fledgling entry into this crowded market, is a dual-band AC unit. As you might have guessed, it’s capable of 1,900Mb/s of bandwidth across its 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, offering up to 600Mb/s on the 2.4GHz spectrum, 1,300Mb/s on the 5GHz spectrum and is 802.11ac compatible...
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If you have an older system that is still chugging along with a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), the easiest and most cost-effective way to speed up the machine in many standard uses is to drop in a solid state drive (SSD). This not only true for consumer and small businesses, but especially for enterprise market where fast IO response times in servers and workstations are critical. Seagate has just unveiled what it is calling "the world’s fastest SSD," and the performance differential between it and the next closest competitive offering is significant, if their claims are true. The SSD, which Seagate today announced is in "production-ready" form, is fully compliant with the Open Compute Project...
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Solid State Storage continues to come down in cost and scale higher in speed and density. Though spinning hard disk media will likely have a place at least in the data center perhaps for generations to come, SSDs are making great strides, driving toward cost parity with HDDs with each new generation of product, while offering orders of magnitude performance gains and even higher reliability in many applications. One of the biggest names in Flash storage is Samsung, from their consumer grade SSD 950 Pro and 850 EVO lines to the squarely enterprise-targeted product the company has announced for volume availability today. Laying to rest the short-lived claim Fixstar made on "the world's largest...
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Synaptics was been working on a comprehensive, yet simple to use, fingerprint authentication technology that the company hopes will make a big splash with gamers and corporate users alike. Although it’s had a couple of names over the last year or so, Synaptics’ upcoming IronVeil technology -- as it is now known -- is just about ready for prime time. We’ve had the chance to play with a pre-production Ttesports Black V2 mouse featuring IronVeil for a couple of weeks and definitely think the technology has merit, for a few reasons.IronVeil is really a combination of hardware and software. The IronVeil fingerprint sensor is designed to be integrated into the body of a mouse, located where a user’s...
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