Items tagged with data-center
Typically, pouring liquid all over computer components is not the greatest of ideas considering the whole electricity thing. However, Microsoft employees are doing just that to cool down servers in its data centers. This two-phased immersion cooling system is rather impressive and could be the future of data centers everywhere. As computer hardware improves, air cooling is no longer the most efficient or best option for the data center. This is where Microsoft turns to liquid cooling with an interesting twist. While pouring water on computer hardware may be bad, Microsoft uses a specially engineered fluid from 3M, which is harmless to electronics and is "engineered to boil at 122 degrees...
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The best thing to ever happen to AMD was not the introduction of Zen or getting into discrete graphics. As great as those have both been to AMD, the company's best move was naming Dr. Lisa Su as president and CEO six years ago this month. If at this point anyone still needs more proof, they need only look at AMD's third quarter earnings report, which reflects yet another stellar quarter under Dr. Su's leadership. By singling out Dr. Su, I mean no disrespect to AMD's talented engineers, its marketing people, or anyone else. They have all played an important role in AMD's turnaround and continued success. But it starts with leadership, and Dr. Su has expertly navigated AMD into relevance and, more...
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VMWare and NVIDIA announced at VMWorld 2020 that the two companies are teaming up in the datacenter market and in the cloud. The duo is combining their strengths to provide AI software integrations with GPU-accelerated solutions suited for AI and machine learning in conjunction with VMWare's Project Monterey. VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger states that VMWare is “partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise.” The available AI software NVIDIA offers through the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) hub will be brought into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware Tanzu. This integration will make AI adoption, use, and deployment much easier for customers in any industry. All the...
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For over a decade, NVIDIA's bread and butter has been its gaming GPUs, and with another round of GeForce RTX graphics cards on the horizon rumored to bring massive improvements in both rasterized and ray-traced rendering, it did not seem like that would change. Well, it has. For the first time, NVIDIA's datacenter revenue is the company's top earning segment, ahead of its efforts in gaming. NVIDIA posted record datacenter revenue of $1.75 billion for its second quarter of fiscal 2021, which represents an impressive 167 percent jump from a year earlier, and a 54 percent sequential jump. That accounted for the lion's share of its $3.87 billion in overall revenue, which is also a record, and up...
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Peering into its crystal ball, Intel sees a future in which innovative storage products play a massive roll, both on the consumer side and especially within the enterprise and data center sectors. Related to that, Intel today outlined its Optane roadmap, including a new "Barlow Pass" Optane DC persistent memory for its Ice Lake and Cooper Lake CPUs. "The world is generating data at an accelerating rate, and businesses are increasingly becoming overwhelmed with how to efficiently process it. Harvesting value from all this data will be critical in separating the winners from losers. It will require cutting-edge innovation in the memory-and-storage hierarchy, which is what we are driving at Intel,"...
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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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It appears that Apple isn't the only company that is issuing revenue warnings for its most recent quarter; NVIDIA has added its name to the list as well. The company announced today that it has revised its revenue guidance for fiscal Q4 2019 from $2.7 billion down to $2.2 billion. The reason for the downward trajectory in revenue is twofold. For starters, NVIDIA says that its gaming business was impacted due to "macroeconomic conditions" in China. This was also one of the factors that Apple cited as a reason for its revenue shortfall. According to NVIDIA, demand for its gaming GPUs in particular took a hit. More importantly, demand in general was also soft for its brand-new Turing-based...
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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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Microsoft had issues with its datacenter near San Antonio, Texas yesterday -- some of which are still ongoing -- that led to some of the server and network infrastructure equipment operating in that facility to shut down, impacting multiple major cloud services for many of its customers. The cause was a lightning strike resulting from severe storms in the area that led to what Microsoft describes as a "power voltage increase that impacted cooling systems." With cooling systems being critical in a data center, the loss of cooling meant that Microsoft's automated data center procedures to keep data and hardware from being lost or damaged began a "structured power down process." By 11:40 AM Microsoft...
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Microsoft is doing something that sounds very strange at first glance; it has taken a fully functional data center and sunk it into the dark ocean depths. The data center is crammed inside a giant white cylinder that is waterproof and the tube can sit on the ocean floor for up to five years. An undersea cable serves the power the data center needs and transfers data from the data center to the internet on shore. Microsoft chose to place the data center in Europe off the shore of Orkney, a major center for renewable energy research, to try and determine if placing a data center under water could boost energy efficiency. It often costs huge amounts of money and consumes lots of power to keep a...
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Gigabyte today announced a couple of new 4U GPU servers for the datacenter, both packed with multiple NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to bring massive parallel computing capabilities to the sector. According to Gigabyte, its new G481-S80 and G481-HA0 offer some of the highest GPU density available in the 4U form factor—the former accommodates eight SXM2 form factor GPUs, such as NVIDIA's Volta-based Tesla V100 or Pascal-based Tesla P100, and the latter packs 10 GPUs. These new servers also feature NVIDIA's NVLink technology supporting bi-directional communication between GPUs, allowing for higher bandwidth data transfers, more links, and improved scalability. To give an example, a single Tesla V100 GPU...
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Intel has rolled out new SSD storage solutions that are specifically aimed at the data center market. The new SSDs fall into the Intel SSD DC P4510 Series and use 64-layer TLC 3D NAND. The construction of the SSDs allows end users to do more per server, support broader workloads and deliver more space-efficient capacity. Intel wrote, “The P4510 Series enables up to four times more terabytes per server and delivers up to 10 times better random read latency at 99.99 percent quality of service than previous generations. The drive can also deliver up to double the input-output operations per second (IOPS) per terabyte. The 1 and 2TB capacities have been shipping to cloud service providers (CSPs)...
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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 where the focus is on optimized latency, power, and performance. "Our customers require predictable...
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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 media in virtually every regard. Solid state drives boast significantly faster read and write speeds...
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Micron, the memory maker based out of Boise, Idaho, is introducing a new solid state drive family for enterprise clients that combines the typical fast performance SSDs are known for with atypical capacities culminating in 8 terabytes. The new Micron 5100 Series Enterprise SSDs are purportedly reliable too, delivering the storage trifecta that could have persuaded clients to kick their datacenter's hard disk drives to the curb. Source: Micron That is precisely the angle Micron is taking here. Looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO), Micron compared its 5100 Eco drives with 10,000 RPM hard drives to give an example of the kind of savings clients can achieve. In a typical 10K HDD deployment...
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AMD is adding a new family of Opterons to its enterprise processor line-up today called the Opteron A1100 series. Unlike AMD’s previous enterprise offerings, however, these new additions are packing ARM-based processor cores, not the X86 cores AMD has been producing for years. The Opteron A1100 series is designed for a variety of use cases and applications, including networking, storage, dense and power-efficient web serving, and 64-bit ARM software development.The Opteron A1100 System-on-Chip (SoC), was formerly codenamed “Seattle” and it represents the first 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57-based platform from AMD. The AMD Opteron A1100 utilizes off-the-shelf ARM Cortex-A57 processor cores, with integrated...
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Major players in the solid state storage business continue to innovate at a breakneck pace, especially now that the market has begun a shift away from the lowly SATA interface towards higher performing alternatives like PCI Express. For a while, manufacturers were bolting multiple SATA controllers together on single devices, in RAID configurations, to boost performance beyond what a single SATA-based drive could do. But with the advent of NVMe, that’s no longer necessary for most applications. Though, pairing up multiple NVMe devices can also be a means to increase performance, of course.Just to give a quick refresher, NVM Express or NVMe, is a low-latency, scalable host controller interface...
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Data security research player CrowdStrike is reporting a security flaw that could allow hackers to exploit and take over data centers from within. Given the nasty moniker "VENOM" (for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation"), the vulnerability CrowdStrike uncovered is present in a common component — a legacy floppy drive controller — that is widely used in virtualization platforms and appliances. The seriousness of the VENOM vulnerability rests on how it circumvents an essential barrier used by cloud service providers to segregate customer data. Thus, infiltrators who are able to gain access to one virtual environment can subsequently move from there into the cloud entity's...
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West Des Moines Mayor Steve Gaer has a plan for his city, and it involves attracting major technology companies to Central Iowa. So far so good: Microsoft is going to spend $1.13 billion on building a data center in West Des Moines to support its online services. Dubbed “Project Alluvion”, the data center will be phased in over a 4-5 year span and will create some 84 jobs and generate $8.2 million in annual property tax revenue for the city, schools, and county and represents a total investment in the area by Microsoft to nearly $2 billion. (Credit: State of Iowa) In conjunction with the data center construction, the surrounding area will see infrastructure upgrades including roads,...
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If there’s been a more resourceful use of assets to bring profitability back to a huge company like Sears, we’d like to hear about it, because the company is looking to completely reinvent itself as a data center provider as its retail locations close. Sears Holdings has created a new unit called Ubiquity Critical Environments whose task is to take the company’s vast real estate assets--which Data Center Knowledge has pegged at some 3,200 properties comprising 25 million square feet of space--and turn them into data centers, disaster recovery sites, and communications depots wherein wireless providers can lease rooftop space from the company. Closing Chicago Sears location Sears...
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Xi3’s modular computers are intriguing to say the least, and now the company is expanding to the data center with a unique take on drive clusters in the FreeForm dataCENT3R. The structure features two vertical steel support posts with seven horizontal curved steel bars perched atop a metal base that has wheels. Attached to the horizontal bars are up to 96 Xi3 modular computers or microSERV3RS. The whole schmeer measures about four to eight feet tall depending on how many drives are installed, and the structure is seven feet wide and two feet deep. “For decades, I.T. Administrators and Professionals have been handcuffed into a paradigm that says Data Centers have to be built a certain...
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Western Digital announced a new solution for legacy datacenter storage with the WD Xe, which consists of a 2.5-inch SAs hard drive mounted in a 3.5-inch WD “performance adapter”. The package is designed to offer low power consumption coupled with high performance for datacenters that need a way to migrate from 3.5-inch drive based systems without ditching their existing chassis. The 10,000 RPM SAS drives feature 6Gbps tranfser rates with sequential data rates of 204MBps with up to 50% higher capacity and 67% less power consumption of other 3.5-inch (15,000 RPM) solutions. The solution also offers easy upgradability, dual-port full duplex connectivity, and NoTouch ramp load technology....
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