Tag Archives: Datacenter

IBM To Fuel AI Digital Transformation In Malaysia!

IBM is offering IT infrastructure with a new level of security and reliability to fuel Malaysia’s AI digital transformation!

 

AI Digital Transformation In Malaysia Needs Better IT Infra!

Malaysia is at a pivotal point in its digital journey, with businesses future-proofing their organisations by leveraging AI and automation.

The digital economy is now a cornerstone of Malaysia’s economy, contributing 23.2% of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2021. The Malaysia Minister of Communications and Digital, Fahmi Fadzil, anticipates that this will increase to 25.5% by 2025, with a value of RM382 billion. The National Tech Association of Malaysia is even more optimistic, and believes that the digital economy will hit that economic contribution much earlier.

The increased urgency in adopting cutting-edge technologies like AI is driving demand for better IT infrastructure. Better not just in terms of performance and availability, but also security and reliability.

An IDC report forecasted that AI spending in the Asia Pacific region alone will skyrocket to US$78 billion by 2027. And these AI investments are predominantly being funnelled into infrastructure provisioning. That’s because ultimately, digital transformation in any nation is reliant on its IT infrastructure.

Recommended : IBM Expands Power10 Server Line With New Models!

 

IBM To Fuel AI Digital Transformation In Malaysia!

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI infrastructure. Organisations must provision the right infrastructure for the AI task at hand.

They have to not only look at the size and scale of the AI models and tasks, they also have to consider security and privacy issues, as well as regulatory compliance. A resilient infrastructure by design is also critical, with AI workloads becoming essential backbones to mission critical applications and workloads.

To that end, IBM Power Systems offer a secure and reliable platform for enterprises to perform inference, and run AI algorithms on their most sensitive data and transactions.

IBM Power Systems run on the Power10 core, which is designed for AI acceleration. Each Power10 core on the IBM Power S1022 can process up to 42% more batch queries per second than a comparable x86 server with a peak load of 40 concurrent users, while running large language AI models.

IBM Power10 systems also offers enterprise out-0f-the-box low-latency transactional capabilities and throughput, resiliency, continuous availability (99.999%) and concurrent replace and repair.

The IBM Power10 is also designed for greater efficiency. The Power E1080, for example, offers 3X the capacity with 52% lower power consumption for the same workload, compared to the Power E880C. It also offers 33% lower power consumption than the Power E980 for the same workload.

IBM claims that, in general, Power10 systems offer 6X more throughput per container cluster, and 40% to 50% lower cost than comparable x86 solutions.

On top of that, the IBM Power Systems are built to be secure by design, with a fully-integrated secured stack from processor chip to operating system, offering quantum-safe encryption and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

 

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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.

He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.

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Cloudflare Services Down For Almost 2 Days In Major Outage!

Cloudflare services have gone down in a major outage, due to a loss of power affecting its data centres! Find out what’s going on!

Updated @ 2023-11-04 : Added new information and updates
Updated @ 2023-11-03 : Added new information and updates

Originally posted @ 2023-11-02

 

Cloudflare Dashboard + Services Down In Major Outage!

At approximately 11:54 AM UTC on 2 November 2023, Cloudflare customers started experiencing problems with its APIs and Dashboard services. Any user logging into their accounts would only see this announcement:

The Cloudflare Dashboard is temporarily unavailable.

Please reload this page to try again. If the issue persists, please visit the Cloudflare Status page for up-to-date information regarding any ongoing issues.

Cloudflare Edge security features, and Cloudflare CDN caching services were not affected. But all other services relying on the Cloudflare API infrastructure went down – Alerts, Dashboard functionality, Zero Trust, WARP, Cloudflared, Waiting Room, Gateway, Stream, Magic WAN, API Shield, Pages, and Workers.

Recommended : WhatsApp Block Button Scam : What You Need To Know!

 

Cloudflare Services Down From Datacenter Power Loss!

Just over an hour later, Cloudflare reported that the outage was far worse than it initially reported, and they were still “actively investigating the problem”. They also provided a more detailed list of its services that have gone down:

The following products are currently impacted at the data plane / edge level, meaning that the full product functionality is either partially or fully affected: Logpush, WARP / Zero Trust device posture, Cloudflare dashboard, Cloudflare API, Stream API, Workers API, Alert Notification System.

These products are impacted at the control plane / core level, meaning that only the changes to the existing configuration are affected, but the product is functioning at the edge: Magic Transit, Argo Smart Routing, Workers KV, WAF, Rate Limiting, Rules, WARP / Zero Trust Registration, Waiting Room, Load Balancing and Healthchecks, Cloudflare Pages, Zero Trust Gateway, DNS Authoritative and Secondary, Cloudflare Tunnel, Workers KV namespace operations, Magic WAN.

At approximately 1:58 PM UTC, Cloudflare finally revealed that the outage was due to a loss of power at its datacenter, which caused services to fail simultaneously.

Cloudflare is assessing a loss of power impacting data centres while simultaneously failing over services.

We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.

Several hours later – at 5:08 PM UTC, power was partially restored to its core North American data centre, and some core services were transferred to a backup data centre. In three subsequent updates, Cloudflare reports that it was seeing “gradual improvement” to its affected services.

However, at almost 11 PM that day – almost half a day after the outage started, Cloudflare was still working to restore full functionality.

At 2:40 AM UTC on 3 November, Cloudflare released an updated list of what is now functioning, and what still remains down:

Data plane impact (i.e. full product functionality is either fully impacted or partially impacted):
* Cloudflare Dash: degraded availability but accessible
* Stream API: not available
* Healthchecks: not available
* Radar: Degraded

Control plane impact (i.e. product functionality is online however changes to configuration is impacted):
* Cloudflare Pages: restored
* Magic Transit: not available to make changes
* Magic WAN: not available to make changes
* Argo Smart Routing: configuration now working, smart updates and analytics are offline
* Waiting Room: configuration updates are propagating with delay
* ZT Gateway: degraded but online
* DNS Secondary: not available to make changes
* Billing API: Degraded
* Cloudflare API: degraded but accessible

Some six hours later, they appear to be making some progress, although it seem obvious that they are a long way from a full restoration of services.

Data plane impact (i.e. full product functionality is either fully impacted or partially impacted):
* Logpush: more jobs are being restored
* Cloudflare dashboard: degraded availability but accessible
* Stream API: not available
* Healthchecks: not available
* Radar: Degraded

Control plane impact (i.e. product functionality is online however changes to configuration is impacted):
* CDN API: potentially impacted
* Access API: Degraded
* Magic Transit: configuration plane is working internally (contact your account team to make any urgent changes)
* Magic WAN: configuration plane is working internally (contact your account team to make any urgent changes)
* SOC Proactive Alerts: not available
* Argo Smart Routing: configuration now working, smart updates and analytics are offline
* Billing API: Degraded
* Email Noticatifications: Emails updates from Cloudflare are being delayed or not sent
* Lists: List configurations are working, but there may be delays in list updates propagating throughout the cloudflare network

Almost a day later – at 10:59 AM UTC, Cloudflare said that it was still continuing to work on restoring service for the impacted applications. It is unknown if power has been restored to their North American datacenter in full… or if they are facing other problems

The good news is that – the Cloudflare Dashboard is now working, although certain services or features like Analytics are “temporarily unavailable”, and you may get error messages about certain API requests failing.

It was only at 6:42 AM UTC on November 4, 2023 – almost 2 days later, that Cloudflare finally reported that it restored all services to “operational status”.

Now, we wait to see whether it would reveal what actually happened in this exceptional downtime, for a company that prides itself on helping to keep its clients online and available…

 

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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.

He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.

 

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How NVIDIA A800 Bypasses US Chip Ban On China!

Find out how NVIDIA created the new A800 GPU to bypass the US ban on sale of advanced chips to China!

 

NVIDIA Offers A800 GPU To Bypass US Ban On China!

Two months after it was banned by the US government from selling high-performance AI chips to China, NVIDIA introduced a new A800 GPU designed to bypass those restrictions.

The new NVIDIA A800 is based on the same Ampere microarchitecture as the A100, which was used as the performance baseline by the US government.

Despite its numerically larger model number (the lucky number 8 was probably picked to appeal to the Chinese), this is a detuned part, with slightly reduced performance to meet export control limitations.

The NVIDIA A800 GPU, which went into production in Q3, is another alternative product to the NVIDIA A100 GPU for customers in China.

The A800 meets the U.S. government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

NVIDIA is probably hoping that the slightly slower NVIDIA A800 GPU will allow it to continue supplying China with A100-level chips that are used to power supercomputers and high-performance datacenters for artificial intelligence applications.

As I will show you in the next section, except in very high-end applications, there won’t be truly significant performance difference between the A800 and the A100. So NVIDIA customers who want or need the A100 will have no issue opting for the A800 instead.

However, this can only be a stopgap fix, as NVIDIA is stuck selling A100-level chips to China until and unless the US government changes its mind.

Read more : AMD, NVIDIA Banned From Selling AI Chips To China!

 

How Fast Is The NVIDIA A800 GPU?

The US government considers the NVIDIA A100 as the performance baseline for its export control restrictions on China.

Any chip equal or faster to that Ampere-based chip, which was launched on May 14, 2020, is forbidden to be sold or exported to China. But as they say, the devil is in the details.

The US government didn’t specify just how much slower chips must be, to qualify for export to China. So NVIDIA could technically get away by slightly detuning the A100, while offering almost the same performance level.

And that was what NVIDIA did with the A800 – it is basically the A100 with a 33% slower NVLink interconnect speed. NVIDIA also limited the maximum number of GPUs supported in a single server to 8.

That only slightly reduces the performance of A800 servers, compare to A100 servers, while offering the same amount of GPU compute performance. Most users will not notice the difference.

The only significant impediment is on the very high-end – Chinese companies are now restricted to a maximum of eight GPUs per server, instead of up to sixteen.

To show you what I mean, I dug into the A800 specifications, and compared them to the A100 below:

NVIDIA A100 vs A800 : 80GB PCIe Version

Specifications A100
80GB PCIe
A800
80GB PCIe
FP64 9.7 TFLOPS
FP64 Tensor Core 19.5 TFLOPS
FP32 19.5 TFLOPS
Tensor Float 32 156 TFLOPS
BFLOAT 16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
FP16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
INT8 Tensor Core 624 TOPS
GPU Memory 80 GB HBM2
GPU Memory Bandwifth 1,935 GB/s
TDP 300 W
Multi-Instance GPU Up to 7 MIGs @ 10 GB
Interconnect NVLink : 600 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
NVLink : 400 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
Server Options 1-8 GPUs

NVIDIA A100 vs A800 : 80GB SXM Version

Specifications A100
80GB SXM
A800
80GB SXM
FP64 9.7 TFLOPS
FP64 Tensor Core 19.5 TFLOPS
FP32 19.5 TFLOPS
Tensor Float 32 156 TFLOPS
BFLOAT 16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
FP16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
INT8 Tensor Core 624 TOPS
GPU Memory 80 GB HBM2
GPU Memory Bandwifth 2,039 GB/s
TDP 400 W
Multi-Instance GPU Up to 7 MIGs @ 10 GB
Interconnect NVLink : 600 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
NVLink : 400 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
Server Options 4/ 8 / 16 GPUs 4 / 8 GPUs

NVIDIA A100 vs A800 : 40GB PCIe Version

Specifications A100
40GB PCIe
A800
40GB PCIe
FP64 9.7 TFLOPS
FP64 Tensor Core 19.5 TFLOPS
FP32 19.5 TFLOPS
Tensor Float 32 156 TFLOPS
BFLOAT 16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
FP16 Tensor Core 312 TFLOPS
INT8 Tensor Core 624 TOPS
GPU Memory 40 GB HBM2
GPU Memory Bandwifth 1,555 GB/s
TDP 250 W
Multi-Instance GPU Up to 7 MIGs @ 10 GB
Interconnect NVLink : 600 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
NVLink : 400 GB/s
PCIe Gen4 : 64 GB/s
Server Options 1-8 GPUs

 

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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.

He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.

 

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TikTok Leak : China Repeatedly Accessed Private User Data!

Leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings show that private user data has been repeatedly accessed from China!

Here is what you need to know…

 

Privacy Promise By TikTok : Overseas Data Stored In US + Singapore

For many years now, TikTok has repeatedly assured users that all data collected from users outside of China, stays out of China and is thus, not accessible to anyone in China.

To ensure that the Chinese government has no access to the data, one of the measures they took was to store all data collected overseas in servers located in the United States, with backups in Singapore.

This was explicitly stated in their New Privacy Policy :

We store the information described in the What Information We Collect section in servers located in the United States and Singapore.

Most people may not realise this, but they also added a caveat right after that, stating that their Corporate Group (in China) may remotely access the data…

When entities in our Corporate Group need information to help us provide the Platform, they remotely access the information pursuant to authorised and secure access controls.

 

TikTok Leak : China Repeatedly Accessed Private User Data!

Buzzfeed News recently received audio recordings from more than eighty (80) internal TikTok meetings, in which employees admitted that engineers in China accessed private user data.

This was despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony at an October 2021 US Senate hearing at the same time period, that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to the private user data.

Instead, the leaked audio revealed that US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data. Rather, it was their colleagues in China who determined how and who accessed the private user data.

The leaked tapes ultimately show that TikTok may have misled lawmakers, users, and the public by downplaying the fact that their private data is readily accessible by employees in China, and potentially, the Chinese government.

Everything Is Seen In China

Eight different employees stated in nine statements that they had to refer to their colleagues in China to make those decisions.

Everything is seen in China“, said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting.

In another September 2021 meeting, a TikTok director referred to a Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything“.

There’s Some Backdoor To Access User Data…

Fourteen of the leaked audio recordings were with, or about, a team of Booz Allen Hamilton consultants that TikTok brought in to investigate how data flows through TikTok and ByteDance’s internal tools.

In September 2021, one Booz Allen Hamilton consultant told colleagues that the tools felt like they had backdoors to access user data :

I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them, which is exhausting.

Oracle Only Providing Storage For Project Texas

TikTok has been working on what they call Project Texas – securely storing overseas data in Oracle cloud servers to comply with CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States).

Project Texas is limited to protecting the private information of US users, like phone numbers and birthdays – details that are not publicly visible, or have been set to private.

Such data will be stored at an Oracle datacenter in Texas – hence the name, and would only be accessible to specific US-based TikTok employees.

However, TikTok’s head of global cyber and data defense made clear that Oracle was only providing the data storage space for Project Texas. Ultimately, TikTok would be setting up the servers, and controlling everything.

It’s almost incorrect to call it Oracle Cloud, because they’re just giving us bare metal, and then we’re building our VMs [virtual machines] on top of it.

Unique IDs Not Protected Information

In one of the leaked audio recordings from a January 2022 meeting, TikTok’s head of product and user operations announced with a laugh that the Unique ID (UID) will not be amongst the protected content under the CFIUS agreement.

The conversation continues to evolve. We recently found out that UIDs are things we can have access to, which changes the game a bit.

Other Data Not Stored On Oracle Servers

The problem with Project Texas is that it only addresses US users… and only a small subset of their data.

Everything else – including private user data from non-US countries – will stay in their US and Singapore servers that remain accessible to ByteDance’s Beijing offices.

 

Response By TikTok : 100% US Data Traffic Routed To Oracle

TikTok publicly announced on the same day – June 17, 2022, that it changed the “default storage location of US user data“, and that “100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure“.

Although they “expect” to fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US, they will continue to use their existing US and Singapore servers for backup, and delete US users’ private data over time.

While this may address some of the privacy concerns for US users, it does not address the other privacy concerns revealed in the leaked audio recordings… or the privacy concerns of non-US users.

 

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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.

He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.

 

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Malaysia Admits Losing Undersea Cable Due To Cabotage!

Malaysia finally admits losing the Apricot undersea cable due to its cabotage policy, in a stunning reply from the Communications and Multimedia Minister.

 

Malaysia Admits Losing Undersea Cable Due To Cabotage!

Malaysia Transport Minister Wee Ka Siong has stridently rejected claims that Malaysia was excluded from the Apricot undersea cable project due to the cabotage policy.

On 30 September 2021, he denied that his decision to revoke the exemption of cabotage on undersea cable repairs was the reason Malaysia was excluded from the Apricot undersea cable project.

However, Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim revealed that he received a Parliamentary reply from the Communications and Multimedia Minister that basically admits that the loss was due to the cabotage policy.

Here is the Bahasa Malaysia quote from the Communications and Multimedia Minister, followed by our English translation :

Pemilihan negara bagi menyertai rancangan pemasangan kabel Internet Apricot dasar laut (subsea cables) adalah keputusan syarikat Facebook dan Google. Malaysia tidak tersenarai (bypass) sebagai salah satu negara yang terlibat dalam pendaratan stesen kabel dasar laut tersebut memandangkan isu pengecualian Dasar Kabotaj yang masih belum selesai.”

The choice of country to participate in the Apricot undersea Internet cable (subsea cable) installation plan is decided by Facebook and Google. Malaysia was not listed (bypassed) as one of the countries involved in the landing of the submarine cable station due to the unresolved Cabotage Policy exemption issue.”

This reply by the Communications and Multimedia Minister directly contradicts the Transport Minister’s strident denials, and confirms what most people already know – Malaysia was bypassed in the Apricot undersea cable project because this government refused to exempt undersea cable repairs from the cabotage policy.

 

What Does Loss Of Apricot Undersea Cable Mean For Malaysia?

Backed by Google and Facebook, the Apricot undersea optic cable will connect South East Asia and North Asia and the US, with a whopping bandwidth of 190 terabits per second (Tbps) and very low latency.

Being bypassed means Malaysia has lost investments and high-speed connectivity worth US$300-400 billion (RM1.26 to RM1.68 billion), according to MIDF Research.

And to add salt to the wound, it comes after Malaysia already lost two earlier undersea cable investments by Google and Facebook called Bifrost and Echo.

This continued loss of subsea cable landings runs contrary to Malaysia’s MyDIGITAL Initiative, which aims to achieve the HIGHEST number of subsea cable landings in South East Asia by 2025.

Malaysia currently only has 23 subsea cables, including those under construction. This leaves it behind Indonesia and Singapore, which have 55 and 31 cables respectively. Even the Philippines is catching up with 19 cables so far.

Is the continued refusal to exempt subsea cable repairs from the cabotage policy worth the loss of billions of dollars of investments?

This government seems to think so, but many would strongly disagree with them.

 

Please Support My Work!

Support my work through a bank transfer /  PayPal / credit card!

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Dr. Adrian Wong has been writing about tech and science since 1997, even publishing a book with Prentice Hall called Breaking Through The BIOS Barrier (ISBN 978-0131455368) while in medical school.

He continues to devote countless hours every day writing about tech, medicine and science, in his pursuit of facts in a post-truth world.

 

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NTT Launches Fifth Data Center In Malaysia – Cyberjaya 5!

NTT Ltd just launched their fifth data centre in Malaysia – Cyberjaya 5 (CBJ5)!

Here is a quick look at what NTT Cyberjaya 5 offers!

 

NTT Launches Fifth Data Center In Malaysia – Cyberjaya 5

On 3 February 2021, NTT Ltd announced the launch of their fifth data center in Malaysia – Cyberjaya 5 (CBJ5).

Located within the NTT Cyberjaya Campus, this new 107,000 square feet data center is designed for hyperscalers and high-end enterprises in Malaysia’s growing digital economy.

CBJ5 supports 6.5 megawatts of flexible and scalable power, and boasts a Tier IV-ready, compact and modular design, with a cooling wall system that handles up to 15 kilowatts per rack.

NTT clients will have greater access to flexible, scalable and secure infrastructure in Malaysia – a regional data center hub.

“The demand for data storage and managed hosting services is expected to grow exponentially across Malaysia. This fifth data center will meet the expanding needs of organizations to reach their digital business objectives, in particular the FSI sector, as our data center complies with the Risk Management in Technology (RMiT) guideline set by Bank Negara Malaysia. We hope to play a key role in providing the vital data capacity at a high speed to keep Malaysia’s digital ecosystems and the digital economy ticking.” said Henrick Choo, CEO, NTT Ltd. in Malaysia.

 

NTT Cyberjaya 5 : Part Of Strategic ASEAN Hub

CBJ5 is connected to the existing Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) and Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) cable system, and will eventually be linked to the upcoming MIST cable system.

The MIST cable system will be available by end 2022 and it is a strategic joint venture for international submarine cables in South East Asia, with Orient Link Pte. Ltd.. It will enable NTT Ltd. to expand its offerings into India and beyond, while the ASE and APG cable systems provide global connectivity from Asia to United States.

This new expansion in Malaysia is part of NTT Global Data Centres division’s growth strategy. Malaysia is a prime data centre market in the ASEAN region, due to the abundant availability of resources, and favourable government policies.

“NTT places Asia Pacific as a tactical key region, and Malaysia – a strategic hub for the submarine cables operated by NTT such as the new MIST cable system, as well as the existing Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) and Asia Pacific Gateway (APG). Furthermore, CBJ5 will drive business opportunities in Asia through the upcoming MIST cable system which will link all our large-scale data centers in the region. Our continued commitment to Malaysia will help position NTT as a technologically innovative leader to address the industries of the future,” said Ryuichi Matsuo, Executive Vice President for NTT Ltd.’s Global Data Centers division.

“The pandemic also illustrated the importance of effective connectivity and reliable infrastructure to ensure business continuity. NTT’s global data center platform offers flexible, scalable and secure infrastructure along with a full-stack of customizable solutions that clients can utilize to support their digital transformation needs and maintain critical applications in a comprehensive, hybrid IT environment,” he concluded.

 

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PowerProtect Data Manager Nov 2020 Update: What’s New?

Dell Technologies just announced enhancements to PowerProtect Data Manager available globally in November 2020!

Find out what’s new in the latest Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager!

 

PowerProtect Data Manager : What Is It?

Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager provides software-defined data protection, automated discovery, and deduplication for physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Its software-defined architecture allows for greater operational agility, and faster IT transformation, while delivering next-generation data protection.

 

PowerProtect Data Manager November 2020 Update : What’s New?

In its November 2020 update, PowerProtect Data Manager offers these new enhancements :

  • In-cloud workloads in Microsoft Azure and AWS are now protected
  • VMware Tanzu portfolio is now supported
  • Native vCenter Storage Policy-Based Management integrated for VM protection
  • VMware-certified solution to protect VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure layer.
  • Protection for containerised apps with open source databases, including PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra, in Kubernetes environments.
  • Customers can now protect Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to back-up Kubernetes cluster-level resources.

 

PowerProtect Data Manager November 2020 Update : Availability

The November 2020 enhancements are available globally with immediate effect.

 

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2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP Series IDPA : What’s New?

Dell Technologies just announced the 2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP Series appliances!

Here is what you need to know about the next-generation integrated data protection appliances!

 

2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP Series : What Is It?

The 2020 PowerProtect DP series is the next-generation family of integrated data protection appliances (IDPA) from Dell Technologies.

They offer a complete solution for backup, recovery, replication, deduplication, cloud readiness with disaster recovery, and long-term rotation to the public cloud!

The 2020 Dell EMC DataProtect DP series are all-in-one data protection solutions that offer :

  • Storage capacities from 8 terabytes to 1 petabyte
  • Greater efficiency, with up to 65:1 data reduction
  • Up to 38% faster backups, and up to 45% faster restores, compared to previous generation.
  • Instant access and restore of up to 50% greater IOPS, compared to previous generation.
  • Consumes up to 23% less power than the previous generation
  • Cloud long-term retention, and cloud DR-ready
  • VMware integration

The 2020 Dell EMC DataProtect DP series is also guaranteed under the Future-Proof Program, and is part of the Dell Technologies on Demand program.

 

2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP Series : Models + Key Specifications

The 2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP series consists of four models – DP4400, DP5900, DP8400 and DP8900. Here are their key specifications.

Specifications DP4400 DP5900 DP8400 DP8900
Physical Capacity 8 TB to 96 TB 96 TB to 288 TB 192 TB to 768 TB 576 TB to 1 PB
Physical Capacity
with Cloud Tier
Up to 288 TB Up to 864 TB Up to 2.3 PB Up to 3 PB
Logical Capacity Up to 4.8 PB Up to 18.7 PB Up to 49.9 PB Up to 65 PB
Logical Capacity
with Cloud Tier
Up to 14.4 PB Up to 56.1 PB Up to 149.7 PB Up to 195 PB
Max Throughput Up to 9 TB/hr Up to 33 TB/hr Up to 57 TB/hr Up to 94 TB/hr
Drive Type SAS 12 TB SAS 4 TB SAS 8 TB SAS 8 TB
Networking 8 x RJ45, or
8 x SFP
4 x 40 GbE uplinks
Each Quad SFP port can be split into 4 x 10 GbE
Max. Power 475 VA 2,830 VA 5,480 VA 7,250 VA
Thermal Rating 1,620 BTU/hr 9,300 BTU/hr 17,800 BTU/hr 23,400 BTU/hr

 

2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect DP Series : Availability

The 2020 Dell EMC PowerProtect series appliances – DP4400, DP5900, DP8400 and DP8900 – will be available globally in December 2020.

 

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VMware vSphere 7 Now Supports AMD SEV-ES Encryption!

VMware just announced that vSphere 7 Update 1 will add support for AMD SEV-ES encryption!

Find out what this means for enterprise security, and the future of AMD EPYC processors!

 

AMD SEV-ES Encryption : What Is It?

SEV-ES, short for Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State, is a hardware-accelerated encryption capability in AMD EPYC processors.

Leveraging both the AMD Secure Processor and the AES-128 encryption engine built into every AMD EPYC processor, SEV-ES encrypts all CPU register contents when a virtual machine stops running.

This prevents the leakage of information from the CPU registers to components like the hypervisor. It can even detect malicious modifications to a CPU register state.

 

VMware vSphere 7 Now Supports AMD SEV-ES Encryption!

VMware vSphere 7 Update 1 adds support for both AMD SEV-ES and AMD EPYC processors.

The AMD Secure Processor in the first-generation EPYC processors can handle up to 15 encryption keys.

That increases to more than 500 encryption keys with the second-generation EPYC processors.

ESXi has many layers of isolation within its virtualised infrastructure, but all of that is implemented in software. They still require a level of trust in the hardware, which is where AMD SEV-ES comes in.

A guest operating system that supports SEV can ask the AMD Secure Processor to issue it an encryption key, for full in-memory, in-hardware encryption.

SEV-ES extends that protection to CPU registers, so that the data inside the CPU itself is encrypted. This protects the data from being read or modified when the virtual machine stops running.

Even a compromised hypervisor that accesses the register data cannot make use of it, because it is now encrypted.

Needless to say, adding support for AMD SEV-ES in vSphere 7 will spur the uptake of AMD EPYC processors in the datacenter.

 

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Hitachi Vantara : 2020 HCI Portfolio Updates Revealed!

Hitachi Vantara just unveiled their 2020 HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) portfolio, with updates to the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP). Here are the details…

 

Hitachi Vantara : 2020 HCI Portfolio Updates

Hitachi Vantara today unveiled their 2020 HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) portfolio, featuring updates to Hitachi UCP HC and Hitachi UCP RS.

  • Faster provisioning with new Hitachi UCP Advisor
  • Certified support for SAP HANA workloads
  • New Intel Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processors for increased performance
  • Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for non-disruptive upgrades

The updated 2020 Hitachi Vantara HCI solutions unify cloud infrastructure management with interoperability across their customer’s environments, whether they are using traditional storage, HCI-powered hybrid clouds or public clouds.

These new HCI offerings include a scalable and simplified foundation for hybrid clouds, allowing customers to rapidly scale-out, when increased datacenter resources are required.

Unified Cloud Management

Customers have the flexibility to build a cloud infrastructure with seamless workload and data mobility across on-premises and public cloud environments.

Hitachi UCP Advisor accelerates provisioning up to 80% faster compared to previous HCI management tools and reduces management complexity across the environment.

Scalable Performance

Greater performance, scale and density support IT departments’ ability to rapidly scale data center resources for business-critical applications and lower operational overhead for better TCO.

The updated HCI platforms provide certified support for SAP HANA workloads on HCI. Intel Cascade Lake Refresh Xeon processors increase performance for workload consolidation while avoiding resource contention issues.

Hitachi HCI solutions help reduce CapEx and OpEx overhead with advanced automation and data efficiency technologies.

Simplified Consumption

Everflex from Hitachi Vantara provides simple, elastic and comprehensive acquisition choices for the entire Hitachi Vantara portfolio, including the UCP Family, with consumption-based pricing models that align IT spend with business use and help lower costs by up to 20% with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Customers can also accelerate time to production with pre-validated and optimized bundles and starter packs, including solutions enabling remote work.

 

2020 Hitachi Vantara HCI Portfolio : Availability

The 2020 Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC and Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS are available from Hitachi Vantara and their global network of business partners, with immediate effect.

 

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AMD EPYC : Four Supercomputers In Top 50, Ten In Top 500!

AMD is on the roll, announcing more supercomputing wins for their 2nd Gen EPYC processors, including four supercomputers in the top 50 list, and ten in the top 500!

 

2nd Gen AMD EPYC : A Quick Primer

The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC family of server processors are based on the AMD Zen 2 microarchitecture and fabricated on the latest 7 nm process technology.

According to AMD, they offer up to 90% better integer performance and up to 79% better floating-point performance, than the competing Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor. For more details :

Here is a quick 7.5 minute summary of the 2nd Gen EPYC product presentations by Dr. Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster and Forrest Norrod!

 

AMD EPYC : Four Supercomputers In Top 50, Ten In Top 500!

Thanks to the greatly improved performance of their 2nd Gen EPYC processors, they now power four supercomputers in the top 50 list :

Top 50 Rank Supercomputer Processor
7 Selene
NVIDIA DGX A100 SuperPOD
AMD EPYC 7742
30 Belenos
Atos BullSequana XH2000
AMD EPYC 7H12
34 Joilot-Curie
Atos BullSequana XH2000
AMD EPYC 7H12
48 Mahti
Atos BullSequana XH2000
AMD EPYC 7H12

On top of those four supercomputers, there are another six other supercomputers in the Top 500 ranking, powered by AMD EPYC.

In addition to powering supercomputers, AMD EPYC 7742 processors will soon power Gigabyte servers selected by CERN to handle data from their Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

 

3rd Gen AMD EPYC Supercomputers

AMD also announced that two universities will deploy Dell EMC PowerEdge servers powered by the upcoming 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.

Indiana University

Indiana University will deploy Jetstream 2 – an eight-petaflop distributed cloud computing system, powered by the upcoming 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.

Jetstream 2 will be used by researchers in a variety of fields like AI, social sciences and COVID-19 research.

Purdue University

Purdue University will deploy Anvil – a supercomputer powered by the upcoming 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, for use in a wide range of computational and data-intensive research.

AMD EPYC will also power Purdue University’s community cluster “Bell”, scheduled for deployment in the fall.

 

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Dell EMC PowerStore 9000 | 5000 | 1000 : A Quick Primer!

Dell EMC just launched PowerStore – their new storage appliance, built around a unified data-centric architecture.

Here is a quick primer on the Dell EMC PowerStore 9000, PowerStore 5000 and PowerStore 1000 storage appliances!

 

Dell EMC PowerStore : What Is It?

Dell EMC PowerStore is a new mid-range storage appliance, with a flexible, container-based architecture, and end-to-end NVMe design.

It promises to offer 7X better performance with 3X lower latency than previous mid-range storage appliances, as well as the ability to scale up to 2.8 petabytes per appliance, and up to 11.3 petabytes per cluster.

 

Dell EMC PowerStore : Advantages

Dell EMC promises that PowerStore will offer these advantages to organisations looking to transform their data center operations :

Designed For Any Workload

Dell EMC PowerStore will support any workload, whether traditional or modern workloads.

Its PowerStoreOS container-based software architecture offers portability, standardisation, as well as rapid deployment.

It also supports AppsON, which allows organisations to run applications directly on the appliance.

High Performance, Massive Storage

Thanks to its end-to-end NVMe design, and support for dual-ported Intel Optane Storage Class Memory (SCM) SSDs, it is seven times faster with three times lower latency than its predecessor, Unity XT.

Each appliance can offer up to 898 TB of storage, which can be scaled up using expansion enclosures to 2.8 petabytes. It can also be scaled out to eight nodes, offering 11.3 petabytes of storage in the cluster.

It also automatically dedupes and compresses the data, offering a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction.

Autonomous Appliance

When scaled out, Dell EMC PowerStore are loosely coupled, allowing a machine learning engine to intelligently place data to rebalance storage volumes.

The machine learning engine is continuously and autonomously monitoring resources of each appliances and data requests, for maximum efficiency.

Cloud-Ready

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services can directly connect PowerStore to all major public clouds. It can be deployed as a storage option within Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure.

 

Dell EMC PowerStore : Models + Specifications

At launch, Dell EMC is offering three PowerStore appliances, with these specifications :

Specifications
Per Appliance
PowerStore
1000
PowerStore
5000
PowerStore
9000
Base Enclosure 2U, 2-node enclosure with twenty-five 2.5-inch NVMe drive slots
Expansion Enclosure 2U enclosure attached to PowerStore base enclosure
with twenty-five 2.5-inch SAS drive slots
Maximum 3 per appliance
Power Supplies 2 dedundant power suppliers per enclosure
Max Drives 96 96 96
NVRAM 2 4 4
RAID Options RAID 5 (4+1 or 8+1)
CPUs 4 x Intel CPUs
32 cores (1.8 GHz)
4 x Intel CPUs
64 cores (2.1 GHz)
4 x Intel CPUs
112 cores (2.1 GHz)
System Memory + Cache 384 GB 1,152 GB 2,560 GB
Mezzanine Cards 2 2 2
IO Modules 4 4 4
Embedded SAS IO Ports 4 x 4 lane 12Gb/s SAS ports for back-end connection
Front End Ports 24 24 24
16/32Gb FC End Ports 16 16 16
10 Gbase-T / iSCSI Ports 24 24 24
10/25 GbE / iSCSI Ports 24 24 24
Max Raw Capacity 898.56 TB 898.56 TB 898.56 TB
Power Consumption 1597 W max 1758 W max 2047 W max
Heat Dissipation 5,449 Btu/hr 5,995 Btu/hr 6,985 Btu/hr

 

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AMD Datacenter Leadership In 2020 & Beyond!

AMD Senior VP and General Manager Forrest Norrod just shared AMD’s datacenter leadership with EPYC and Radeon Instinct, and AMD’s datacenter roadmap beyond 2020!

 

Forrest Norrod : Senior VP + GM, AMD Datacenter + Embedded Solutions Business Group

Forrest Norrod is senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group at AMD.

He is responsible for managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering and sales for AMD datacenter and embedded products.

Norrod has more than 25 years of technology industry experience across a number of engineering and business management roles at both the chip and system level.

 

AMD Datacenter Leadership In 2020 & Beyond!

During AMD Financial Analyst Day 2020, Forrest Norrod shared AMD’s datacenter leadership with EPYC and Radeon Instinct, and AMD’s datancenter roadmap in this presentation.

Here are the key points from Forrest Norrod’s presentation :

  • AMD won the contract to power the recently announced El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs.
  • Expected to come online in 2023, El Capitan is expected to deliver more than 2 exaFLOPs of double-precision performance, making it more powerful than today’s 200 fastest supercomputers combined.

  • AMD is continuing to gain traction with its 2nd Generation AMD EPYC processors in enterprise, cloud and HPC markets based on delivering performance leadership and TCO advantages across the most important enterprise and cloud workloads.
  • AMD EPYC is enabling Nokia to double the performance of their 5G Cloud Packet Core.
  • In 2020 AMD expects more than 150 AMD EPYC processor-powered cloud instances and 140 server platforms to be available.

  • AMD is introducing new technologies including AMD CDNA architecture, 3rd Generation Infinity Architecture and the ROCm 4.0 software platform, all of which will support the AMD-powered Frontier and El Capitan supercomputers.
  • AMD plans to ship the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC “Milan” processor in Late 2020, and it will provide 100% coverage of enterprise requirements – whether it’s for the cloud, HPC or enterprise IT.
  • Milan will remain on the 7 nm process, but the next-generation Genda core (Zen 4) will use the 5 nm process technology.

  • The AMD CDNA architecture will allow for better scalability, with accelerators fully interconnected with 2nd Gen Infinity Architecture.
  • But the next-generation AMD CDNA 2 architecture will allow for Unified Data, with CPU + GPU coherency with 3rd Gen Infinity Architecture – allowing for easier programming and improved performance.

 

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NTT To Build 5th Data Centre In Cyberjaya, Malaysia!

NTT Limited just announced that they will construct their 5th data centre at the NTT Cyberjaya Campus in Malaysia!

Here are the details…

 

NTT To Build 5th Data Centre In Cyberjaya, Malaysia

As part of their expansion plans, NTT will build their fifth data centre at their Cyberjaya campus in Malaysia. This Tier-4 ready, compact and modular data centre, called CBJ5, is scheduled to be complete in 2020.

Once it comes online, NTT says that it will provide their clients with “a flexible and scalable power and cooling solution coupled with an industry leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) that is the first of its kind in Malaysia.

This announcement comes after Malaysia’s Budget 2020 was tabled, with a focus on driving economic growth through digital transformation. There will be additional grants and incentives for organisations to digitally transform their businesses.

As such, NTT believes there will be increased demand for their services, which CBJ5 will be ready to fulfil.

“CBJ5 is designed to meet the requirements of hyperscalers and high-end enterprises, especially those that require solid power management capabilities. CBJ5 is able to accommodate progressive power increments and cooling of up to 10kW/rack. This is revolutionary as it will allow our clients to maximize the power resources in their chosen data center,” said Henrick Choo, CEO, Malaysia for NTT Ltd.

 

NTT Data Centre Capabilities

With CBJ5, NTT aims to become the leading Digital Infrastructure Provider in Malaysia, attracting both domestic and global traffic into its carrier-neutral data centre campus that also includes NTT’s global Tier-1 IP network, Multi-Cloud Connect platform and domestic Internet Exchange.

The NTT Cyberjaya Campus  features a high-density fibre network facilitating inter-connection among our clients to create a digital supply chain ecosystem.

Bank Negara Malaysia recently announced a set of guidelines defining Risk Management in Technology (RMiT) for financial institutions, meaning security becomes a crucial consideration as they are now responsible for the safety of the bank’s information infrastructure, systems and data.

NTT will address these new requirements by working together with financial institutions, so they are able to comply to BNM’s guideline. Henrick also stated that security will be heightened as the company grows.

“NTT’s physical data center access control will be increased to safeguard all data center blocks within the NTT Cyberjaya Campus. We will also be introducing smart security technology integrating Visitor Management Systems with facial recognition technology. Essentially, we will double our security cover with the two combined,” he added.

NTT clients are able to choose from multiple architectures from on-premise, to cloud and even multi-cloud. All solutions will come with managed security solutions to offer data protection while minimising business disruptions.

 

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Intel oneAPI Unified Programming Model Overview!

At Supercomputing 2019, Intel unveiled their oneAPI initiative for heterogenous computing, promising to deliver a unified programming experience for developers.

Here is an overview of the Intel oneAPI unified programming model, and what it means for programmers!

 

The Need For Intel oneAPI

The modern computing environment is now a lot less CPU-centric, with the greater adoption of GPUs, FGPAs and custom-built accelerators (like the Alibaba Hanguang 800).

Their different scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures require different APIs and code bases, which complicates attempts to utilise a mix of those capabilities.

 

Intel oneAPI For Heterogenous Computing

Intel oneAPI promises to change all that, offering a unified programming model for those different architectures.

It allows developers to create workloads and applications for multiple architectures on their platform of choice, without the need to develop and maintain separate code bases, tools and workflow.

Intel oneAPI comprises of two components – the open industry initiative, and the Intel oneAPI beta toolkit :

oneAPI Initiative

This is a cross-architecture development model based on industry standards, and an open specification, to encourage broader adoption.

Intel oneAPI Beta Toolkit

This beta toolkit offers the Intel oneAPI specification components with direct programming (Data Parallel C++), API-based programming with performance libraries, advanced analysis and debug tools.

Developers can test code and workloads in the Intel DevCloud for oneAPI on multiple Intel architectures.

 

What Processors + Accelerators Are Supported By Intel oneAPI?

The beta Intel oneAPI reference implementation currently supports these Intel platforms :

  • Intel Xeon Scalable processors
  • Intel Core and Atom processors
  • Intel processor graphics (as a proxy for future Intel discrete data centre GPUs)
  • Intel FPGAs (Intel Arria, Stratix)

The oneAPI specification is designed to support a broad range of CPUs and accelerators from multiple vendors. However, it is up to those vendors to create their own oneAPI implementations and optimise them for their own hardware.

 

Are oneAPI Elements Open-Sourced?

Many oneAPI libraries and components are already, or will soon be open sourced.

 

What Companies Are Participating In The oneAPI Initiative?

According to Intel, more than 30 vendors and research organisations support the oneAPI initiative, including CERN openlab, SAP and the University of Cambridge.

Companies that create their own implementation of oneAPI and complete a self-certification process will be allowed to use the oneAPI initiative brand and logo.

 

Available Intel oneAPI Toolkits

At the time of its launch (17 November 2019), here are the toolkits that Intel has made available for developers to download and use :

Intel oneAPI Base Toolkit (Beta)

This foundational kit enables developers of all types to build, test, and deploy performance-driven, data-centric applications across CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Comes with :

[adrotate group=”2″]
  • Intel oneAPI Data Parallel C++ Compiler
  • Intel Distribution for Python
  • Multiple optimized libraries
  • Advanced analysis and debugging tools

Domain Specific oneAPI Toolkits for Specialised Workloads :

  • oneAPI HPC Toolkit (beta) : Deliver fast C++, Fortran, OpenMP, and MPI applications that scale.
  • oneAPI DL Framework Developer Toolkit (beta) : Build deep learning frameworks or customize existing ones.
  • oneAPI IoT Toolkit (beta) : Build high-performing, efficient, reliable solutions that run at the network’s edge.
  • oneAPI Rendering Toolkit (beta) : Create high-performance, high-fidelity visualization applications.

Additional Toolkits, Powered by oneAPI

  • Intel AI Analytics Toolkit (beta) : Speed AI development with tools for DL training, inference, and data analytics.
  • Intel Distribution of OpenVINO Toolkit : Deploy high-performance inference applications from device to cloud.
  • Intel System Bring-Up Toolkit (beta) : Debug and tune systems for power and performance.

You can download all of those toolkits here.

 

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NVIDIA Wins MLPerf Inference Benchmarks For DC + Edge!

The MLPerf Inference 0.5 benchmarks are officially released today, with NVIDIA declaring that they aced them for both datacenter and edge computing workloads.

Find out how well NVIDIA did, and why it matters!

 

The MLPerf Inference Benchmarks

MLPerf Inference 0.5 is the industry’s first independent suite of five AI inference benchmarks.

Applied across a range of form factors and four inference scenarios, the new MLPerf Inference Benchmarks test the performance of established AI applications like image classification, object detection and translation.

 

NVIDIA Wins MLPerf Inference Benchmarks For Datacenter + Edge

Thanks to the programmability of its computing platforms to cater to diverse AI workloads, NVIDIA was the only company to submit results for all five MLPerf Inference Benchmarks.

According to NVIDIA, their Turing GPUs topped all five benchmarks for both datacenter scenarios (server and offline) among commercially-available processors.

Meanwhile, their Jetson Xavier scored highest among commercially-available edge and mobile SoCs under both edge-focused scenarios – single stream and multi-stream.

The new NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX that was announced today is a low-power version of the Xavier SoC that won the MLPerf Inference 0.5 benchmarks.

All of NVIDIA’s MLPerf Inference Benchmark results were achieved using NVIDIA TensorRT 6 deep learning inference software.

 

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Dell PowerMax Updates : Storage Class Memory + NVMe-oF!

Dell Technologies just announced a slew of major updates to Dell EMC PowerMax, including Storage Class Memory (SCM) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF)!

Find out what Dell EMC has just announced for their PowerMax data storage family!

 

Industry First : Dell PowerMax With Storage Class Memory + NVMe over Fabrics!

Dell EMC PowerMax is the first-to-market with Storage Class Memory (SCM) as persistent storage. Specifically, they are offering the new dual-port Intel Optane SSDs that they co-developed with Intel.

Dell Technologies also announced that NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is now available for all PowerMax arrays, delivering true end-to-end NVMe for better performance and lower latency.

The new end-to-end NVMe on PowerMax capability is made possible by :

  • newly-qualified PowerMax 32Gb FC I/O modules,
  • 32Gb Connectrix switches, directors and NVMe host adaptors
  • Dell EMC PowerPath multipathing software

Dell EMC PowerPath is the first enterprise-class SAN multipathing software with full support for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).

According to Dell Technologies, this combination of Dell EMC PowerMax and Storage Class Memory will deliver these performance improvements :

  • Up to 15 million IOPS
  • Up to 350 GB/s bandwidth
  • Up to 50% better response time
  • Sub 100 µs (microseconds) read response time

In addition, PowerMax has a built-in machine learning engine that leverages predictive analytics and pattern recognition to automatically place data on the correct media type – SCM or Flash, based on its IO profile.

 

Dell PowerMax Now Supports Automation, Management + Containerised Workloads

Dell EMC PowerMax now allows for automated infrastructure operations and DevOps workflows, including containerised workloads, through these new features :

  • VMware vRealise Orchestrator (vRO) plug-in, available in the VMware Solutions Exchange, allows customers to develop end-to-end automation routines including provisioning, data protection and host operations.
  • Pre-built Ansible modules, available on Github, allow customers to create Playbooks for storage provisioning, snapshots and data management workflows for automated operations.
  • New Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for PowerMax, available on Github, allows customers to provision and manage storage for containerised workloads running on Kubernetes.

 

Dell PowerMax Now Offers Cloud Flexibility

Customers can now incorporate Dell EMC PowerMax into their multi-cloud strategies in a variety of ways.

The newly-released Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Design for Dell EMC PowerMax lets organisations build their own hybrid cloud infrastructure with deployment flexibility for unique workloads, independent capacity scaling and integrated data protection.

Both PowerMax and Unity XT are the first to be validated by VMware Cloud Foundation with Fibre Channel as primary storage, in addition to existing support through Network File System (NFS) protocol.

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services delivers Dell EMC Storage as a public cloud service for Disaster Recovery across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

 

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Kingston DC500 SSDs Are Now Certified VMware Ready!

Kingston Technology just announced that their DC500 enterprise-grade SSDs are now certified VMware Ready. Find out what this means!

 

Kingston DC500 SSDs Are Now Certified VMware Ready!

After the VMware Ready validation process, the Kingston DC500 family of enterprise SSDs are now certified for VMware vSAN and vSphere in production environments.

The Kingston DC500 family of enterprise SSDs had earlier been validated by NAS providers like QNAP and Synology, but this is their first enterprise-class validation.

This gives their enterprise clients assurance that the Kingston DC500 SSDs can be deployed in production environments without worry.

The Kingston DC500 drives have been tuned using comprehensive QoS test scripts developed in-house that measure IO and latency patterns at varying block sizes and queue depths. This allows them to deliver low latency out to six 9s (99.9999 percent) of consistency while delivering high throughput and predictable IO.

The VMware Ready program is a co-branding benefit of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program that makes it easy for customers to identify partner products certified to work with VMware cloud infrastructure.

 

The Kingston DC500 SSD Family

The Kingston DC500 SSD family consists of two models – DC500R and DC500M that are tuned for different use cases :

Kingston DC500R : Read-Centric SSD

The Kingston DC500R is highly optimised for read-centric workloads, delivering high I/O speeds and response times at lower price points than write-intensive SSDs.

Kingston DC500M : Mixed-Use SSD

The Kingston DC500M, on the other hand, is tuned for mixed-use workloads which demand a mix of read and write operations. It offers greater write endurance with strict performance consistency for datacenters.

Kingston DC500 Common Features

Both Kingston DC500R and DC500M SSDs incorporate end-to-end data path protection, which guarantee that all data will be written to the SSD and is protected against transient errors.

They also include on-board Power-Loss Protection (PLP) using tantalum capacitors. This ensures that data-in-flight is written to the flash memory in the event of unexpected power loss. The PLP also ensures that the drives’ mapping table (FTL) is updated before the drive powers down.

These safeguards reduce the risk of data loss, and ensure that the drive will initialise properly when the server powers up again.

 

Kingston DC500 SSD Family Specifications

For your convenience, we compare both DC500R and DC500M models in this table :

Specifications Kingston DC500R Kingston DC500M
Form Factor 2.5-inch
Interface SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps)
Storage Capacities 480 GB / 960 GB / 1.92 TB / 3.84 TB
NAND Flash Type 3D TLC NAND
Built-In Encryption 256-bit AES Encryption
Power Loss Protection Tantalum capacitors
QoS Read Latency < 500 µs
QoS Write Latency < 2 ms
Sequential Read Speed 480 GB : 555 MB/s
960 GB : 555 MB/s
1.92 TB : 555 MB/s
3.84 TB : 555 MB/s
480 GB : 555 MB/s
960 GB : 555 MB/s
1.92 TB : 555 MB/s
3.84 TB : 555 MB/s
Sequential Write Speed 480 GB : 500 MB/s
960 GB : 525 MB/s
1.92 TB : 525 MB/s
3.84 TB : 520 MB/s
480 GB : 520 MB/s
960 GB : 520 MB/s
1.92 TB : 520 MB/s
3.84 TB : 520 MB/s
Steady-State Random Read 480 GB : 98,000 IOPS
960 GB : 98,000 IOPS
1.92 TB : 98,000 IOPS
3.84 TB : 98,000 IOPS
480 GB : 98,000 IOPS
960 GB : 98,000 IOPS
1.92 TB : 98,000 IOPS
3.84 TB : 98,000 IOPS
Steady-State Random Write 480 GB : 12,000 IOPS
960 GB : 20,000 IOPS
1.92 TB : 24,000 IOPS
3.84 TB : 28,000 IOPS
480 GB : 58,000 IOPS
960 GB : 70,000 IOPS
1.92 TB : 75,000 IOPS
3.84 TB : 75,000 IOPS
Endurance 480 GB : 438 TBW
960 GB : 876 TBW
1.92 TB : 1752 TBW
3.84 TB : 3504 TBW
480 GB : 1139 TBW
960 GB : 2278 TBW
1.92 TB : 4555 TBW
3.84 TB : 9110 TBW
Power Consumption Idle : 1.56 W
Average : 1.6 W
Max. Read : 1.8 W
Max. Write : 4.86 W
Vibration (Non-Operating) 20 G peak (10-2000 Hz)
Vibration (Operating) 2.17 G peak (7-800 Hz)
Storage Temperature -40°C ~ 85°C
Operating Temperature 0°C ~ 70°C
Dimensions 69.9 mm x 100 mm x 7 mm
Weight 92.34 g
Warranty 5 Years

 

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3rd Gen X-Dragon Architecture by Alibaba Cloud Explained!

At the Apsara Conference 2019, Alibaba Cloud announced that they will be introducing the 3rd Gen X-Dragon Architecture for their cloud servers!

Here is a quick PRIMER on the new 3rd Gen X-Dragon Architecture!

 

What Is X-Dragon?

X-DragonShenlong in Chinese – is a proprietary bare metal server architecture developed by Alibaba Cloud for their cloud computing requirements.

Built around a custom X-Dragon MOC card, it delivers what Alibaba Cloud calls Elastic Compute Service (ECS) capability in a bare metal server.

The ECS bare metal instances it offers combine the benefits of bare metal servers, and virtual machines.

For example, it offers direct access to CPU and RAM resources without virtualisation overheads that bare metal servers offer, with the instant deployment and image migration capabilities of virtual machines.

The downsides? ECS bare metal instances, once deployed, cannot be upgraded or downgraded. In addition, if there is a hardware failure, a failover occurs and the data remains stored in the instance’s storage drives.

 

What’s New In The 3rd Gen X-Dragon Architecture?

Basically – SPEED.

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According to Alibaba Cloud, the 3rd Gen X-Dragon architecture is able to increase Queries Per Second (QPS) by 30% and decrease latency by 60% in e-commerce scenarios.

In tandem, they also announced the 6th Gen ECS instance, which delivers a 20% boost in computing power, a 30% reduction in memory latency, and a 70% reduction in storage IO latency.

Not new, but also important is the fact that because it is cloud-native by design, it eliminates power wastage from idle bare metal servers. Alibaba Cloud claims that alone reduces the unit computing cost by 50%.

 

3rd Gen X-Dragon Architecture Availability

Alibaba Cloud will start rolling out the 3rd Gen X-Dragon architecture upgrade to millions of their cloud servers around the world from 2020 onwards.

 

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AMD EPYC 7002 Series Price + Specifications Compared!

AMD just introduced nineteen EPYC 7002 series processors, with 8 to 64 cores and up to 256 MB of L3 cache!

To make it easier for you to differentiate them, we compared their key specifications and prices.

 

AMD EPYC 7002 Series

Based on the AMD Zen 2 microarchitecture, the AMD EPYC 7002 series is the 2nd Gen EPYC family of server processors.

Built on the latest 7 nm process technology, AMD claims they will offer up to 90% better integer performance and up to 79% better floating-point performance, than the competing Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor.

On top of significantly better performance per socket, they also come with hardware memory encryption, and a dedicated security processor.

For more information, read our article – 2nd Gen EPYC – Everything You Need To Know Summarised!

 

AMD EPYC 7002 Series Is Already Changing The Industry

AMD appeared to have shipped the EPYC 7002 series processors early to Google, where they were deployed in production servers for their internal datacenter infrastructure.

Google also plans to use the EPYC 7002 processors in new general-purpose machines that are part of the Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Twitter has also announced that they are already using the EPYC 7002 processors to reduce their datacenter TCO (total cost of ownership) by 25%.

For those who are looking to switch, HPE and Lenovo announced that they can provide datacenter solutions based on the EPYC 7002 processors.

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AMD EPYC 7002 Specifications + Price Compared!

For your convenience, we compared the specifications and prices of the AMD EPYC 7002 models!

64-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7742 64 / 128 2.25 GHz 3.4 GHz 256 MB 225 W $6,950
EPYC 7702 64 / 128 2.0 GHz 3.35 GHz 256 MB 200 W $6,450
EPYC 7702P 64 / 128 2.0 GHz 3.35 GHz 256 MB 200 W $4,425
48-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7642 48 / 96 2.3 GHz 3.3 GHz 256 MB 225 W $4,775
EPYC 7552 48 / 96 2.2 GHz 3.3 GHz 192 MB 200 W $4,025
32-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7542 32 / 64 2.9 GHz 3.4 GHz 128 MB 225 W $3,400
EPYC 7502 32 / 64 2.5 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $2,600
EPYC 7502P 32 / 64 2.5 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $2,300
EPYC 7452 32 / 64 2.35 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 155 W $2,205
24-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7402 24 / 48 2.8 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $1,783
EPYC 7402P 24 / 48 2.8 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $1,250
EPYC 7352 24 / 48 2.3 GHz 3.2 GHz 128 MB 155 W $1,350
16-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7302 16 / 32 3.0 GHz 3.3 GHz 128 MB 155 W $978
EPYC 7302P 16 / 32 3.0 GHz 3.3 GHz 128 MB 155 W $825
EPYC 7282 16 / 32 2.8 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $650
12-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7272 12 / 24 2.9 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $625
12-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7262 8 / 16 3.2 GHz 3.4 GHz 128 MB 155 W $575
EPYC 7252 8 / 16 3.1 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $475
EPYC 7232P 8 / 16 3.1 GHz 3.2 GHz 32 MB 120 W $450

 

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2nd Gen EPYC – Everything You Need To Know Summarised!

Leveraging their new Zen 2 microarchitecture and 7 nm process technology, AMD just introduced their 2nd Gen EPYC processors.

Designed to challenge Intel Xeon in the enterprise, cloud and HPC markets, the 2nd Gen EPYC processors promise to deliver “record-setting performance“, while reducing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by up to 50%.

Here is everything you need to know about the new 2nd Gen EPYC processors… summarised!

 

The Official 2nd Gen EPYC Product Presentation Summary

Let’s start with a quick 7.5 minute summary of the 2nd Gen EPYC product presentations by Dr. Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster and Forrest Norrod!

Now, let’s take a look at its key features and specifications!

AMD Infinity Architecture Explained

The AMD Infinity Architecture is a fancy name for their new modular chiplet-based design. It allows them to combine up to eight processor dies with a single I/O die on the same package, faster and at lower cost.

The processor dies are fabricated with the industry-leading 7 nm process technology for best performance at lowest power consumption, and thermal output.

The I/O die, on the other hand, can be fabricated on the much cheaper 14 nm process technology, with a much higher yield.

2nd Gen EPYC Is Built On 7nm

The 2nd Gen EPYC processor cores are fabricated on the 7nm process technology. This allows AMD to fit more transistors into a smaller space.

By doubling the transistor density, coupled with microarchitectural optimisations, the 2nd Gen EPYC delivers 4X the floating point performance of the 1st Gen EPYC processors.

The smaller process also increases energy efficiency, reducing both power consumption and heat output. According to AMD, 2nd Gen EPYC will use half the power consumption as the 1st Gen EPYC at the same performance level.

Industry-Leading Performance

AMD claims they will offer up to 90% better integer performance and up to 79% better floating-point performance, than the competing Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor.

On top of significantly better performance per socket, they also come with hardware memory encryption, and a dedicated security processor.

Baked-In Security On Multiple Levels

The 2nd Gen EPYC processors are built-in with multiple levels of security features, to harden it against cyberattacks.

  • They have a secure root of trust designed to validate the initial BIOS boot without corruption.
    In virtualised environments, you can use it to cryptographically check that your entire software stack is booted without corruption.
  • They have memory encryption engines built into their memory channels to hardware-encrypt data in the memory, preventing cold boot attacks.
  • In the 2nd Gen EPYC, every virtual machine is now encrypted with one of up to 509 unique encryption keys known only to the processor.
    This protects your data even if a malicious VM finds its way into your virtual machine memory, or if a compromised hypervisor gains access into a guest VM.

2nd Gen EPYC Is PCI Express Gen 4 Ready!

Like the 3rd Gen Ryzen processors, the 2nd Gen EPYC is PCI Express Gen 4 ready.

PCIe 4.0 doubles the bandwidth over PCIe 3.0, and every EPYC processor has 128 lanes to tie together HPC clusters, or connect to GPU accelerators and NVMe drives.

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2nd Gen EPYC Model, Specifications + Price Summary

For your convenience, we summarised the specifications and prices of the 2nd Gen EPYC models!

64-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7742 64 / 128 2.25 GHz 3.4 GHz 256 MB 225 W $6,950
EPYC 7702 64 / 128 2.0 GHz 3.35 GHz 256 MB 200 W $6,450
EPYC 7702P 64 / 128 2.0 GHz 3.35 GHz 256 MB 200 W $4,425
48-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7642 48 / 96 2.3 GHz 3.3 GHz 256 MB 225 W $4,775
EPYC 7552 48 / 96 2.2 GHz 3.3 GHz 192 MB 200 W $4,025
32-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7542 32 / 64 2.9 GHz 3.4 GHz 128 MB 225 W $3,400
EPYC 7502 32 / 64 2.5 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $2,600
EPYC 7502P 32 / 64 2.5 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $2,300
EPYC 7452 32 / 64 2.35 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 155 W $2,205
24-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7402 24 / 48 2.8 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $1,783
EPYC 7402P 24 / 48 2.8 GHz 3.35 GHz 128 MB 180 W $1,250
EPYC 7352 24 / 48 2.3 GHz 3.2 GHz 128 MB 155 W $1,350
16-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7302 16 / 32 3.0 GHz 3.3 GHz 128 MB 155 W $978
EPYC 7302P 16 / 32 3.0 GHz 3.3 GHz 128 MB 155 W $825
EPYC 7282 16 / 32 2.8 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $650
12-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7272 12 / 24 2.9 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $625
12-Core Models Cores /
Threads
Base Clock Boost Clock L3 Cache TDP 1K Price
EPYC 7262 8 / 16 3.2 GHz 3.4 GHz 128 MB 155 W $575
EPYC 7252 8 / 16 3.1 GHz 3.2 GHz 64 MB 120 W $475
EPYC 7232P 8 / 16 3.1 GHz 3.2 GHz 32 MB 120 W $450

 

2nd Gen EPYC Is Already Changing The Industry

AMD appeared to have shipped the 2nd Gen EPYC processors early to Google, where they were deployed in production servers for their internal datacenter infrastructure.

Google also plans to use the 2nd Gen EPYC processors in new general-purpose machines that are part of the Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Twitter has also announced that they are already using the 2nd Gen EPYC processors to reduce their datacenter TCO (total cost of ownership) by 25%.

 

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The 2019 Dell EMC Unity XT + PowerProtect Primer!

One of big stories out of Dell Technologies World 2019 was about new Dell storage and data management solutions, like Unity XT and PowerProtect.

Here is our primer on the new Dell EMC Unity XT unified storage solutions, the Dell EMC PowerProtect data management platform, as well as updates on Isilon and more!

 

The 2019 Dell Storage + Data Management Solutions Revealed!

In the following 30-minute long video, we have top guns from Dell EMC to showcase the 2019 Dell storage and data management solutions :

  • Jeff Clarke (Vice Chairman, Dell Technologies),
  • John Roese (Dell Technologies President & Dell EMC Chief Technology Officer),
  • Craig Bernero (Senior Vice President, Dell EMC Midrange & Entry Storage),
  • Beth Phalen (President & General Manager of Dell EMC Data Protection), and
  • Chad Dunn (Vice President of Product Management, Dell EMC Hyperconverged Infrastructure)

 

The 2019 Dell EMC Unity XT

The next-generation Dell EMC Unity XT midrange storage system is up to 2X faster than its predecessor, and 67% faster than its nearest competitor.

Optimised for greater data efficiency with up to 5:1 data reduction and 85% system efficiency, the Unity XT is built for a multi-cloud world.

The new Unity XT can run in a public cloud, seamlessly move data to the cloud, and is available as a service through the new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services. It can also be used as a building block for Dell Technologies Cloud, as part of a validated design.

Unity XT storage arrays use an active-active architecture, and is NVMe-ready. They are designed to simultaneously run applications, process file and block inline data reduction, while delivering operational data services.

 

Dell EMC Isilon Update

Dell EMC also announced a new Isilon release with greatly improved scalability, as well as enhanced cloud integration and security.

The new Isilon OneFS 8.2 provides up to 75% greater cluster scalabilityup to 252 nodes, 58 PB of storage, and 945 GB/s of aggregate throughput per cluster!

 

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services

To support enterprises looking to extend their on-premise infrastructure to public cloud, Dell Technologies is introducing the Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services.

The new Cloud Storage Services uses Dell EMC storage directly connected to the public cloud through a managed service provider, to give customers multi-cloud agility.

Furthermore, VMware customers can also leverage the automated disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) in VMware Cloud on AWS.

 

Dell EMC PowerProtect

Dell EMC also introduced their PowerProtect Software platform, and the Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 multi-dimensional appliance.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect Software platform delivers data protection, replication and reuse, as well as SaaS-based management and self-service capabilities. The data owner now has the autonomy to control backup and recovery operations.

VMware customers will benefit from a simple data management solution for their vSphere environments, with automated policy-based backup and recovery, as well as integration with vRealize Automation.

Available as a hybrid, or all-flash data management appliance, the Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 can scale-up with grow-in-place capacity expansion, and scale-out compute power and capacity.

It is also the first Dell EMC data management solution to leverage machine learning for intelligent load balancing.

 

Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance

For small- and medium-sized businesses looking for improved data protection in an integrated appliance, Dell EMC is offering the Dell EMC DP4400 Integrated Data Protection Appliance with 8 to 24 TB of storage.

The lower storage capacity version of IDPA DP4400 makes it ideal for smaller organisations. yet, it has the ability to grow-in-place up to 96 TB, with the purchase of licence keys and an upgrade kit.

 

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The Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 Server Updates Revealed!

Dell has just announced details of the Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 server updates. Here is a quick primer on the newly-refreshed Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and OpenManage systems management.

 

The Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 Server Updates

The Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 servers will come with new features like Openmanage FlexSelect Manage, and OpenManage FlexSelect Secure.

Both these features will provide greater flexibility in managing and securing the PowerEdge 2019 servers.

Greater Control

FlexSelect Manage offers customers new flexibility in selecting OpenManage Enterprise capabilities to streamline management efficiency.

Enhancements to the Redfish-compliant Dell EMC RESTful API and OpenManage Mobile also gives customers greater control of their server operations and devices.

Customers can reduce time by using fewer steps to maintain server health by 28%, compared to manually retrieving server logs.

Enhanced Security

OpenManage Secure Enterprise Key Manager Scale provides data protection and streamlines the management of self-encrypting drives.

Customers can centrally manage keys for self-encrypting drives to better secure data at both the drive and server level.

Improved Performance and Scalability

The Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 servers are powered by the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, increasing their performance by up to 40% for core business applications.

 

Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 Server Availability

These new Dell EMC PowerEdge 2019 servers and systems will be available beginning Q2 2019 :

  • Dell EMC OpenManage
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge R940, R740, R740xd, R740xd2, R640, and C6420 servers (with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors)
  • Other Dell EMC PowerEdge servers like PowerEdge MX
  • Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC with Intel Deep Learning Boost

Also available in Q2 2019 is the Intel Optane DC persistent memory hands-on trials through a Dell EMC customer proof of concept program and Dell Technologies Customer Solution Centers.

 

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14th Generation PowerEdge Servers @ Dell EMC Forum 2017

Dell EMC just announced the worldwide availability of the 14th Generation PowerEdge servers, as well as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) advancements, at the Dell EMC Forum 2017 here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Join us for the media briefing on these two new developments at the Dell EMC Forum 2017, with KT Ong and William Tan from Dell EMC Malaysia!

 

The Dell EMC Business Update For 2H 2017

The media briefing kicked off with a business update on Dell EMC by KT Ong, Country Manager of Dell EMC Malaysia. He also briefed us on the maturity of the industry’s digital transformation process.

Some key points from his presentation :

  • Dell EMC is the market leader in Converged Infrastructure.
  • They recorded 17 consecutive quarters of gain in the PC market.
  • Their PowerEdge server business continues to deliver double-digit growth.
  • Their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) business is growing in triple digits, and they expected to be the market leader by the next quarter.
  • Only 5% of organisations that responded to the Dell EMC survey had fully completed their digital transformation, with 12% of organisations still stuck with legacy IT.
  • Transformed organisations are more than twice as likely to report exceeding their FY2016 revenue goals than those still stuck with legacy IT.

 

The 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers

The bedrock of the modern data center, and Dell EMC’s infrastructure solution strategy is their PowerEdge servers. In this video, William Tan, Director of Compute & Marketing, Dell EMC Malaysia, details their server strategy and how the new 14th Generation PowerEdge servers fit into it all.

The new 14th Generation PowerEdge servers are now optimised for NVMe storage, software-defined storage and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), promising :

  • Accelerated database performance and lower latency – up to 12X more database IOPS, and up to 98% less database latency in a VMware vSAN cluster
  • Faster and seamless live migration of virtual machines – up to 58% faster migrations, with up to 75% less CPU usage when using 25 GbE with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).
  • Faster storage performance – with up to 6X more NVMe drives, and up to 5X more flash storage, 30% more I/O slots and 25% increase in density.
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The 14th Generation PowerEdge Line-Up

The 14th Generation PowerEdge servers are powered by the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. With 27% more CPU cores and 50% more memory bandwidth, they will offer more compute performance than ever before. Here is the current line-up as announced at the Dell EMC Forum 2017 :

  • Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 – ideal for dense scale-out datacenter computing and storage in a 1U / 2-socket platform.
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 – workhorse 2U / 2-socket  platform with 50% more VDI users per server, and up to 50% more GPU accelerator support for Hadoop analytics.
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge R740XD – this 2U / 2S platform has best-in-class storage performance and density for software-defined storage.
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 – this 3U / 4S platform handles extremely demanding, mission-critical workloads like ERP, e-commerce and very large databases. The PowerEdge R940 can save up to US$600,000 in Oracle licensing fees, and performs up to 44% faster in an SAP SD Sybase Environment.
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge M640 & FC640 – these are modular servers with best-in-class storage density in a blade / modular platform.
  • Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 – ideal for high-performance computing, with maximum density, scalability and energy-efficiency in a 2U / 8S modular platforms.

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Dell EMC Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Advancements

Dell EMC just announced the worldwide availability of the 14th Generation PowerEdge servers, as well as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) advancements, at the Dell EMC Forum 2017 here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Join us for the media briefing on these two new developments at the Dell EMC Forum 2017, with KT Ong and William Tan from Dell EMC Malaysia!

 

Dell EMC Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Advancements

At the Dell EMC Forum 2017, Dell EMC announced that they will be integrating their Dell EMC PowerEdge servers into the Dell EMC VxRail Appliances Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI).

VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge servers deliver 40% more CPU performance for the same price, increased flexibility and scalability with more configurations, all-flash nodes equipped with double the storage capacity and a new 3-node entry point that is more than 25% less expensive.

This allows Dell EMC to address new workloads or use cases like :

  • Storage heavy workloads including Big Data Analytics and Microsoft Exchange can take advantage of VxRail Appliances based on the PowerEdge R730xd platform that has highly dense storage nodes coupled with the latest Intel processors to provide high-performance processing.
  • Graphics-heavy client virtualisation workloads that require increasing levels of performance found in the latest operating systems including Microsoft Windows 10, as well as productivity applications and graphics-intensive CAD/CAM, research and development applications based on the PowerEdge R730.
  • Remote Office/Branch Office environments can leverage the low-end 3-node entry option based on the PowerEdge R630 with a starting priced as low as US $25,000 for a three-node cluster, allowing customers to cost-effectively deploy HCI to simplify IT management at multiple remote sites.

In addition, Dell EMC announced the availability of Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 that delivers these new enterprise features :

  • Enhanced enterprise deployment features – Streamlined installation and implementation experience designed to help enterprise customers manage VxRail Appliances at scale. The VxRail Appliance deployment experience, which is optimised to deploy a single appliance in only 20 minutes, now can be applied to larger cluster sizes, allowing customers to add and manage 10 or more appliances as easily as a single appliance.
  • Additional hardware flexibility lowers total cost of ownership – New single processor options, reduce the cost of deploying processor-based licensed software for scaling up to 64 nodes. New network options, including up to 12 additional ports, allow VxRail Appliances to be deployed in environments requiring physical network segmentation of workloads.
  • Support for the latest VMware technologies – New VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware vSAN 6.6 support adds optimised data service algorithms to accelerate flash performance, software-defined data-at-rest encryption to protect against unwanted access to data, and enhanced protection for stretched clusters.
  • Improved interoperability with Dell EMC technologies – Customers deploying VxRail Appliances now can leverage a centralised Dell EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS) gateway to provide a single point of secure, two-way remote support for their entire Dell EMC infrastructure.
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Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge Availability

  • VxRail Appliances powered by PowerEdge servers is now available for order in Singapore, India, and Korea starting 14 August 2017.
  • VxRail Appliances powered by PowerEdge servers have planned available in October 2017 in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, Guam, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Samoa, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

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The 8TB WD Gold Datacenter Drive (WD8002FRYZ) Review

WD Gold Datacenter Drives

On April 20, 2016, Western Digital launched the new WD Gold family of hard disk drives. These hard disk drives are designed for maximum performance and reliability in the highly demanding conditions of a datacenter. In fact, they are rated to handle workloads of up to 550 TB per year (1.5 TB per day), with a MTBF rating of up to 2.5 million hours!

Today, we are going to take a look at the 8TB Western Digital Gold hard disk drive. This is one of the two helium-filled WD Gold models to feature a hermetically-sealed chassis with an internal helium environment. That’s not what’s different though. For your convenience, we created a specification comparison of the WD Gold family of datacenter drives :

Specifications10TB WD Gold8TB WD Gold6TB WD Gold4TB WD Gold
ModelWD101KRYZWD8002FRYZWD6002FRYZWD4002FYYZ
HelioSeal TechnologyYesYesNoNo
Advanced Format TechnologyYes (512-byte emulation)Yes (512-byte emulation)Yes (512-byte emulation)No
Spindle Speed7200 RPM7200 RPM7200 RPM7200 RPM
Cache256 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM
Maximum Read / Write Speed249 MB/s205 MB/s226 MB/s201 MB/s
Sequential Read / Write Power Consumption7.1 W / 6.7 W7.2 W / 7.0 W9.3 W / 8.9 W9.0 W / 8.7 W
Random Read / Write Power Consumption6.8 W / 5.0 W7.4 W / 5.1 W9.1 W / 7.1 W8.8 W / 7.0 W
Acoustics (Seek / Idle)36 dBA / 20 dBA36 dBA / 20 dBA36 dBA / 29 dBA36 dBA / 29 dBA
MTBF (hours)2.5 million2.5 million2 million2 million
Warranty5 Years5 Years5 Years5 Years

Now, let’s check out the 8TB WD Gold datacenter hard disk drive!

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Unboxing The 8TB WD Gold Drive

The 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) hard disk drive came in a sealed antistatic plastic pack. Notably, it lacked the usual sachet of desiccants. That’s because the drive is hermetically-sealed in the factory, and filled with helium. Also notable is their use of two gold-coloured screws to lock the PCB in place.

To remove the drive, just tear off the top or cut it open, and slide out the drive. Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located on the lower underside of the drive.

Next Page > The 8TB WD Gold, HelioSeal & Media Caching Technologies

 

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The 8TB WD Gold Datacenter Drive

Despite featuring a hermetically-sealed chassis, the 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) datacenter drive looks deceptively like any other 3.5″ desktop hard disk drive. In fact, it has the same label on the top plate, with an uncovered PCB on the underside.

The label has a lot of important information, like the hard drive model, storage capacity as well as its date and place of manufacture. This particular drive was manufactured in Thailand on the 26th of March, 2016. You can also see that the drive uses the Advanced Format Technology to achieve its high storage density.

 

HelioSeal Technology

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is one of the few hard disk drives in the market to feature the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology. It is hermetically sealed at the factory, and filled with helium. The hole, which normally serves as the breather hole in a normal “air-filled” hard disk drive, is likely the port through which the air is extracted and replaced with helium.

Because helium is only 1/7th the density of “regular air”, it allows for less friction conferring the following benefits :

  • The lower friction reduces the amount of power required to spin the platters, reducing both energy costs and thermal output.
  • Internal turbulence is greatly reduced, which makes tracking more precise and reliable. This indirectly allows for greater areal density.
  • The lower power requirement and internal turbulence allow more platters and heads to be added in the same volume of space.
  • The completely sealed environment eliminates reliability issues that can occur if breather filters get clogged up with dirt.

The only things stopping helium-filled drives from becoming mainstream are the relatively high cost of helium, and the difficulty in sealing the drive.

 

Media Caching Technology

This feature was mentioned only perfunctorily in the Western Digital press release, which led many writers to assume that they added a NAND flash cache, like the ones used in SSHDs (examples : 4TB WD Blue SSHD, 1TB WD Blue SSHD). Unfortunately, that’s not true.

The media caching technology used in the WD Gold datacenter drives are also a HGST technology, like HelioSeal. It doesn’t use any additional components, just the existing SDRAM cache and the hard disk drive platters. This is how it works :

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  • Small media cache areas are created in regular intervals across the platters. These are only visible to the drive controller, and are hidden to the computer and operating system.
  • Data written to the SDRAM cache are combined and regularly written down to the nearest media cache areas at a higher internal queue depth.
  • These dispersed media cache areas boost write performance by greatly reducing head movements as data is written to the drive.
  • The write data is simultaneously de-staged, which eliminates burst activity and their impact on reads from the platters.
  • In the event of a sudden power-off event, the media cache areas is used to quickly restore the SDRAM cache.

Generally, the media caching technology increases random write performance with a slight boost in read performance.

Next Page > SATA 6 Gb/s, What’s Under The PCB?

 

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SATA 6 Gb/s

This is a Serial ATA drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers.

The SATA 6 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 205 MB/s, and a large and fast DDR3 SDRAM cache.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to the server, computer or NAS while it’s still running.

 

What’s Under The PCB?

Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB – to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. The PCB is protected by a thin foam cutout on the chassis side, with a thermal pad to help transfer heat from the HDD controller to the hard disk drive chassis.

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive uses the LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller, and the ST Microelectronics L7229 motor drive controller, which features their proprietary Smooth Drive pseudo-sinusoidal digital drive technology.

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The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive boasts a large 128 MB SDRAM cache, courtesy of a Samsung K4B1G1646G-BCK0 chip. This is a DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip with 8 memory banks and timings of 11-11-11. This gives it a peak transfer rate of 400 MB/s.

Finally, the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive has two shock sensors that allow it to better detect shock and vibration events, and dynamically adjust the flying height of the read/write heads to avoid head crashes.

Next Page > Testing The Drive, Usable Capacity, Platter Profile, Temperature

 

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Testing The WD Gold 8TB Datacenter Drive

Processors Intel Core i7-2600K
Motherboard Intel DP67BG
Memory Four Kingmax 2 GB DDR3-1333 modules
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
Hard Disk Drives 8 TB Western Digital Gold
6 TB Western Digital Black
6 TB Western Digital Red
6 TB Western Digital Green

4 TB Western Digital Red Pro
4 TB Western Digital Re
4 TB Western Digital Black Gen. 2

4 TB Western Digital Red

3 TB Western Digital Red

3 TB Western Digital Caviar Green
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit
Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit

 

Testing Methodology

 

Usable Capacity

The WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive has an official formatted capacity of 8,001,563,222,016 bytes. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Microsoft Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 8,001,427,599,360 bytes, which is about 136 MB lower than the official storage capacity. With about 338 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity remained slightly above 8 TB.

 

Platter Profile

As expected from a premium, datacenter-grade hard disk drive, the platter profile of the WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive was phenomenal. There were absolutely zero dips in throughput that would signify a significant use of replacement sectors. Lots of them would be evidence of poor platter quality.

We also compared its platter profile to that of the 6TB WD Black – Western Digital’s top-of-the-line desktop hard disk drive. We can see that the denser platters allow the 6TB WD Black to achieve a higher throughput initially, but the 8TB WD Gold equalised it at around the 3.5TB point.

Thereafter, the 8TB WD Gold was faster. In fact, at the 6TB point, the 8TB WD Gold was about 36% faster than the 6TB WD Black.

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Maximum Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of seven hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

Despite packing 2 additional platters than the 6TB WD Black, the 8TB WD Gold drive was significantly cooler at full load. In fact, it ran cooler than the 4 TB WD Black Gen. 2, and the 4 TB WD Red Pro drives!

This reduced thermal output (and power consumption) is a key advantage of helium-filled hard disk drives like the 8TB WD Gold drive. When deployed in the hundreds or thousands in a datacenter, the lower energy costs of running them, and keeping them cool, will be very significant.

Next Page > Transfer Rate Range, Disk WinMark Results

 

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Transfer Rate Range

This chart shows you the range of platter-to-buffer transfer rates from the innermost track to the outermost track. In other words, it shows you the range of disk transfer rates of the hard disk drives (from minimum to maximum).

The 8TB WD Gold drive has an official peak throughput of 205 MB/s, which was confirmed by our tests. In fact, it actually peaked at 209 MB/s. While that puts it ahead of most of the competition, it was still slower than the 6TB WD Black.

This is because the 8TB WD Gold uses platters with slightly lower areal density (about 1,142 GB per platter) than the 6TB WD Black, which boasts 1,200 GB per platter.

 

Business Disk WinBench 99

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is not optimised for desktop applications, so it’s no wonder that it isn’t the fastest drive in this test. Even so, the 8TB Gold datacenter drive did reasonably well, coming within 12% of the 6TB WD Black.

Hard Disk Drive Model Capacity Business Disk
WinMark 99
Difference Useful Links
Western Digital Black 6 TB 26.1 MB/s + 12.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Green 6 TB 25.6 MB/s + 9.9% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Black 4 TB 24.0 MB/s + 3.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red Pro 4 TB 23.4 MB/s + 0.4% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Gold 8 TB 23.3 MB/s Baseline Lowest $
Western Digital Re 4 TB 20.4 MB/s – 12.4% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 6 TB 19.4 MB/s – 16.7% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 4 TB 17.5 MB/s – 24.9% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB 16.3 MB/s – 30.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 3 TB 16.1 MB/s – 30.9% Review Lowest $
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High-End Disk WinBench 99

Again, the 8TB WD Gold was fast, but it was not exceptionally fast because it’s not optimised for desktop applications.

Hard Disk Drive Model Capacity High-End Disk
WinMark 99
Difference Useful Links
Western Digital Black 6 TB 143.0 MB/s + 7.5% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Green 6 TB 140.0 MB/s + 5.3% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Black 4 TB 138.0 MB/s + 3.8% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red Pro 4 TB 137.0 MB/s + 3.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Gold 8 TB 133.0 MB/s Baseline Lowest $
Western Digital Re 4 TB 121.0 MB/s – 9.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 6 TB 121.0 MB/s – 9.0% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 4 TB 118.0 MB/s – 11.3% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB 114.0 MB/s – 14.3% Review Lowest $
Western Digital Red 3 TB 107.0 MB/s – 19.5% Review Lowest $

Next Page > IO Meter – Random Access Performance

 

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IO Meter (Random Accesses)

We compared the 8 TB Western Digital Gold to the 6 TB Western Digital Black – the fastest desktop-grade hard disk drive in Western Digital’s arsenal. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

 

Random Throughput

Test  WD Gold
(8 TB) 
 WD Black
(6 TB) 
Difference
512 KB Read 31.86 MB/s 31.97 MB/s – 0.3%
512 KB Write 31.34 MB/s 28.54 MB/s + 9.8%
4 KB Read 0.32 MB/s 0.32 MB/s
4 KB Write 0.74 MB/s 0.39 MB/s + 89.7%

Check out the incredible boost in the random write speed, especially for small random writes. The 8TB WD Gold delivered almost double the performance of the 6TB WD Black drive in small random writes, and a 10% boost in performance in large random writes.

This is the key advantage of the HGST media caching technology that Western Digital included into the 8TB WD Gold. This is a tremendous performance advantage in file storage servers that serve hundreds or thousands of users.

 

Random Access Time

Test  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
512 KB Read 16.45 ms 16.39 ms + 0.3%
512 KB Write 16.73 ms 18.36 ms – 8.9%
4 KB Read 12.81 ms 12.79 ms + 0.1%
4 KB Write 5.54 ms 10.50 ms – 47.3%

As you can see, the HGST media caching technology truly has a significant effect on performance. It cut down the random access time, even though that’s a limitation imposed by physics.

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Random CPU Utilization

Test  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
512 KB Read 0.56 % 0.60 % – 6.7%
512 KB Write 0.57 % 0.62 % – 8.1%
4 KB Read 0.35 % 0.43 % – 18.6%
4 KB Write 0.53 % 0.37 % + 43.2%

The LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is definitely more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black. The extra processing power was certainly useful in handling the extra media caching duty.

Next Page > IOMeter – Sequential Access Performance

 

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IO Meter (Sequential Accesses)

We compared the 8 TB Western Digital Gold to the 6 TB Western Digital Black – the fastest desktop-grade hard disk drive in Western Digital’s arsenal. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

 

Sequential Throughput

Test  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
512 KB Read 209.29 MB/s 225.60 MB/s – 7.2%
512 KB Write 209.89 MB/s 228.38 MB/s – 8.5%
4 KB Read 90.87 MB/s 94.82 MB/s – 4.2%
4 KB Write 53.91 MB/s 84.54 MB/s – 36.2%

The WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive uses less dense platters, so its sequential throughput is understandably lower than that of the 6TB Western Digital Black. That would account for about a 5% deficit in performance, with the rest due to the drive being optimised for random writes.

In fact, we can see here that the HGST media caching technology actually results in a large drop in small sequential write performance.

 

Sequential Access Time

Test  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
512 KB Read 2.50 ms 2.32 ms + 7.8%
512 KB Write 2.51 ms 2.29 ms + 9.4%
4 KB Read 0.04 ms 0.04 ms + 4.2%
4 KB Write 0.08 ms 0.05 ms + 56.4%

No surprises here. The 8TB WD Gold is optimised for small random writes, not small sequential writes.

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Sequential CPU Utilization

Test  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
512 KB Read 1.25 % 1.33% – 6.0%
512 KB Write 1.41 % 1.50% – 6.0%
4 KB Read 8.66 % 8.95% – 3.2%
4 KB Write 8.59 % 9.23% – 6.9%

Again, we can see that the LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black.

Next Page > IOPS Random Scaling Performance

 

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IOPS Scaling (Random)

In these tests, we tested the drive’s ability to tackle multiple input/output operations. We compared the 8 TB Western Digital Gold to the 6 TB Western Digital Black – the fastest desktop-grade hard disk drive in Western Digital’s arsenal. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

The LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is definitely faster than the LSI TT07143 controller use in the 6TB WD Black. However, you can see that Western Digital optimised it for random write performance. Together with the HGST Media Caching Technology, it trades some random read performance, for a big boost in random write performance, particularly in small, random writes.

 

4 KB Random Read

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 78 IOPS 78 IOPS – 0.1%
8 125 IOPS 132 IOPS – 5.6%
32 172 IOPS 190 IOPS – 9.5%

 

4 KB Random Write

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 181 IOPS 95 IOPS + 89.7%
8 195 IOPS 95 IOPS + 104.2%
32 196 IOPS 96 IOPS + 104.3%
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512 KB Random Read

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 61 IOPS 61 IOPS – 0.3%
8 89 IOPS 95 IOPS – 6.7%
32 98 IOPS 108 IOPS – 9.0%

 

512 KB Random Write

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 60 IOPS 54 IOPS + 9.8%
8 60 IOPS 54 IOPS + 10.1%
32 62 IOPS 54 IOPS + 13.3%

Next Page > IOPS Sequential Scaling Performance

 

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IOPS Scaling (Sequential)

In these tests, we tested the drive’s ability to tackle multiple input/output operations. Again, we compared the 8 TB Western Digital Gold to the 6 TB Western Digital Black – the fastest desktop-grade hard disk drive in Western Digital’s arsenal. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

It is obvious that the “price” for almost doubling the small random write performance is poorer sequential read and write performance.

 

4 KB Sequential Read

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 22,185 IOPS 23,150 IOPS – 4.2%
8 44,074 IOPS 51,435 IOPS – 14.3%
32 42,976 IOPS 51,861 IOPS – 17.1%

 

4 KB Sequential Write

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 13,162 IOPS 20,639 IOPS – 36.2%
8 45,863 IOPS 46,924 IOPS – 2.3%
32 47,559 IOPS 55,433 IOPS – 14.2%
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512 KB Sequential Read

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 399 IOPS 430 IOPS – 7.2%
8 400 IOPS 430 IOPS – 7.0%
32 399 IOPS 431 IOPS – 7.5%

 

512 KB Sequential Write

Outstanding I/Os  WD Gold (8 TB)   WD Black (6 TB)  Difference
1 398 IOPS 436 IOPS – 8.5%
8 395 IOPS 430 IOPS – 8.2%
32 399 IOPS 435 IOPS – 8.4%

Next Page > Our Verdict & Award, Lowest Prices, Specifications

 

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Our Verdict & Award

This is our first review of a helium-filled hard disk drive, and we are very impressed. Even from its specifications alone, we can already see a significant reduction in power consumption and noise levels. These are not minor either.

The helium-filled 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) datacenter drive boasts 22% lower power consumption, and is half as loud as the air-filled WD Gold models when they are not seeking. We confirmed these claims during our tests, noting how quiet it was, and how it ran almost as cool as 5400 RPM hard disk drives despite packing 3-4 additional platters than the drives we compared it to!

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive achieves its tremendous storage capacity, not by increasing areal density, but by packing 2 additional platters. This is only made possible by filling it with helium, reducing turbulence and friction.

While this allows Western Digital to quickly increase storage capacity, it doesn’t help with its performance. That’s why it was slightly slower than top-of-the-line desktop drives like the 6TB Western Digital Black. That doesn’t meant that the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is a slow drive. Far from it. It is a fast drive, but not in the way we expect.

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is optimised for datacenter applications. Hence, it features the HGST media caching technology which trades sequential write performance for a big boost in its small random write performance. This is not a very useful trade-off for desktop users, but a big boon to servers that handle hundreds or thousands of users.

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive would be overkill for home or office users, even for NAS applications. But there is no doubt that it would offer a big boost in performance and a tremendous reduction in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), considering its significantly lower power consumption and thermal output per TB of storage. In light of that, we think the WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive deserves no less than our Reviewer’s Choice Award! Congratulations, Western Digital!

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The 8TB WD Gold Specifications

SpecificationsWD Gold 8TB Datacenter Hard Disk Drive
ModelWD8002FRYZ
Form Factor3.5 inch
Platter And Head Count7 Platters with 14 Read/Write Heads
Advanced Format TechnologyYes (512-byte emulation)
Available Sectors15,628,053,168 (512-byte emulation) sectors
1,953,506,646 (4,096-byte physical) sectors
Formatted Capacity8,001,563,222,016 bytes
Native Command QueuingYes
InterfaceSATA 6 Gb/s
Spindle Speed7200 RPM
Sustained read / write performance205 MB/s (maximum)
Cache128 MB DDR3-1600 SDRAM
Average Power ConsumptionSequential read : 7.2 W
Sequential write : 7.0 W
Random read / write : 7.4 W
Idle : 5.1 W
Temperature Rating5 to 60 °C (Operating)
-40 to 70 °C (Non-Operating)
Shock RatingOperating : 70 G (half-sine wave, 2 ms)
Non-Operating : 300 G (half-sine wave, 1 ms) / 150 G (half-sine wave, 11 ms)
AcousticsSeek : 36 dBA (average)
Idle : 20 dBA
Load / Unload Cycles600,000
Non-Recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read<1 in 1015
MTBF (Maximum Time Before Failure)2,500,000 hours
AFR (Average Failure Rate)0.35%
Warranty5 Years
Physical Dimensions101.6 mm (4.0") wide x 147.0 mm (5.787") long x 26.1 mm (1.028") high
Weight650 g (1.43 lbs)

 

Lowest Prices


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The AMD EPYC 7000 Series Processor Tech Report

AMD just launched the AMD EPYC 7000 series processors. Formerly known as AMD Naples, it boasts up to 32 AMD Zen processor cores, and challenges the Intel Xeon’s dominance in the datacenter. After a sneak peek at their Computex 2017 press conference, AMD finally revealed the EPYC 7000 series processors. Let’s take a look!

 

The AMD EPYC 7000 Series Processor

Like Ryzen, the EPYC processor is based on their new Zen microarchitecture. Designed for servers, the EPYC processor offers up to 32 processor cores, an integrated high-speed DDR4 memory controller and a new high-speed coherent interconnect. AMD now reveals that it also comes with an embedded security subsystem.

Here is a summary of the EPYC processor’s key features :

  • Supports up to 32 AMD Zen cores., each capable of handling 2 simultaneous threads.
  • [adrotate group=”2″]Integrated DDR4 memory controller with 8 memory channels, each supporting two DIMMs. That’s a total of 16 DIMMs per processor socket, allowing for up to 2 TB of memory. A 2-socket server will support up to 32 DIMMs, with a total memory capacity of 4 TB.
  • The EPYC processor is fully integrated with high-speed I/O including 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
  • Because the EPYC is a complete SoC, there is no need for a separate chipset, reducing cost and power consumption.
  • In a 2-socket system, two EPYC processors communicate with each other via the AMD Infinity Fabric coherent interconnect. Even though each EPYC processor has 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes, it is limited to 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes in a 2-socket design.  The 2P EPYC system will have a total of 128 PCI 3.0 lanes, not 256.

In addition, AMD revealed the first EPYC family of processors – the EPYC 7000 Series, with nine processors divided into four segments. They also introduced three EPYC processor variants designed for single socket servers.

  • EPYC 7601, 7551, 7551P and 7501 processors have 32 cores and a peak TDP of 170-180 W.
  • EPYC 7451, 7401 and 7401P processors have 24 cores and a peak TDP of 170-180 W.
  • EPYC 7351, 7351P, 7301 and 7281 processors have 16 cores and a peak TDP of 170 W.
  • EPYC 7251 processor has 8 cores and a peak TDP of 120 W.

 

The AMD EPYC 7000 Series Presentation

If you have the time, check out this 103-minute presentation on the EPYC 7000 Series processors by Dr. Lisa Su and Forrest Norrod from AMD, as well as their partners. Dr. Lisa also comes out at the end to reveal the AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator, that we revealed several months earlier.

Next Page >  EPYC 7000 Series Performance & Key Advantages

 

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EPYC 7000 Series Processor Performance

AMD also revealed their internal benchmarks for the EPYC 7000 series processors :[adrotate group=”2″]

Single Socket AMD EPYC 7601 Server

  • SPECiut_rate2006 : 1200
  • SPECfp_rate2006 : 943

Two Socket AMD EPYC 7601 Server

  • SPECiut_rate2006 : 1390
  • SPECfp_rate2006 : 1330

AMD compared the two processor performance of the EPYC 7601, showing that it beat the Intel Xeon E5-2699A v4 in integer compute by 47%, and floating point compute by 75%.

 

Price Performance Advantage

AMD also took pains to point out that the price performance advantage the EPYC 7000 Series processors have over their Intel Xeon rivals, in both the 2-socket and single-socket segments.

 

Data Security Advantage

Other than raw computing performance and support for a truckload of memory, EPYC processors also offer an integrated hardware security subsystem. This allows the EPYC processors to deliver full memory encryption and secure multi-tenancy for data domain with no application impact.

 

Compatibility & Support

Finally, AMD wants everyone to know that the EPYC is an x86 processor and readily supports all x86 applications in the market. They have also performed extensive tests with industry partners like Microsoft, VMware and Red Hat.

They have also lined up considerable support from their server partners to deliver AMD EPYC solutions to customers worldwide.

Next Page > The Official Series Press Release & Slides

 

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AMD EPYC 7000 Series Processor Press Release

AUSTIN, Texas — June 20, 2017 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), and a global ecosystem of server partners, today marked a new era in the datacenter with the launch of AMD EPYC 7000 series high-performance datacenter processors. AMD was joined by multiple customers and partners at the global launch event in presenting a wide array of systems, performance demonstrations, and customer testimonials. The innovative, record-setting EPYC design, with up to 32 high-performance “Zen” cores and an unparalleled feature set, delivers greater performance than the competition across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.

“With our EPYC family of processors, AMD is delivering industry-leading performance on critical enterprise, cloud, and machine intelligence workloads,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “EPYC processors offer uncompromising performance for single-socket systems while scaling dual-socket server performance to new heights, outperforming the competition at every price point. We are proud to bring choice and innovation back to the datacenter with the strong support of our global ecosystem partners.”

The world’s largest server manufacturers introduced products based on EPYC 7000-series processors at today’s launch, including HPE, Dell, ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron. Primary hypervisor and server operating system providers Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware showcased optimized support for EPYC, while key server hardware ecosystem partners Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, and Xilinx were also featured in EPYC-optimized platforms.

Cloud Datacenter and Enterprise Customers

Datacenter and cloud service providers also welcomed EPYC to the market today. Members of the “Super 7” datacenter services providers, including Baidu and Microsoft Azure, as well as 1&1, Bloomberg, Dropbox and LexisNexis, all voiced their support at launch.

Record-Setting EPYC Performance

The excitement around EPYC is driven by multiple record-setting server benchmarks achieved by EPYC-powered one-socket and two-socket systems.

AMD EPYC processors set several performance records, including:

  • Two-Socket Server
    • EPYC 7601-based system scored 2360 on SPECint_rate2006, higher than any other two-socket system score
  • One-Socket Server
    • EPYC 7601-based system scored 1200 on SPECint_rate2006, higher than any other mainstream one-socket x86-based system score
    • EPYC 7601-based system scored 943 on SPECfp_rate2006, higher than any other one-socket system score

All EPYC processors combine innovative security features, enterprise class reliability, and support a full feature-set. An EPYC 7601 CPU-based one-socket system shifts expectations for single socket server performance, helping lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), providing up to 20% CapEx savings compared to the Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4-based two-socket system. At every targeted price point for two-socket processors, EPYC outperforms the competition, with up to 70% more performance in the eight hundred dollar price band and up to 47% more performance at the high-end of the market of four thousand dollars or more.

EPYC Product Overview

  • A highly scalable System on Chip (SoC) design ranging from 8-core to 32-core, supporting two high-performance threads per core.
  • Industry-leading memory bandwidth across the line-up, with 8 channels of memory on every EPYC device. In a two-socket server, support for up to 32 DIMMS of DDR4 on 16 memory channels, delivering up to 4 terabytes of total memory capacity.
  • Unprecedented support for integrated, high-speed I/O with 128 lanes of PCIe 3 on every product
  • A highly-optimized cache structure for high-performance, energy efficient compute
  • AMD Infinity Fabric coherent interconnect linking EPYC CPUs in a two-socket system
  • Dedicated security hardware
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The Official Presentation Slides

Suggested Reading

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Mellanox Technologies Expands Presence In Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, April 12, 2017 – Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) today unveiled its expansion plans for Malaysia. The announcement, which is in line with the country’s ambitions of becoming the leading Big Data Analytics (BDA) solutions hub in South East Asia, reiterated Mellanox’s commitment to Malaysia through its strategic investment roadmap.

 

Mellanox Technologies Expands Presence In Malaysia

“Malaysia’s investment in Big Data, data centers and the Cloud is impressive,” said Charlie Foo, Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific Japan, Mellanox Technologies. “With a year-over-year growth of more than 20 percent in the last five years, the field of digital data management is maturing rapidly. Mellanox’s investment in Malaysia looks to complement Malaysia’s advancing digital economy by providing intelligent 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100Gb/s interconnect solutions that serve today’s and future needs in Malaysia. This will enable organizations to be less concerned about today’s technological demands while concentrating on running their business, resulting in unparalleled operating efficiency for these organizations.”

Mellanox’s investment into Malaysia’s digital economy comes at a time when the country is ramping up its efforts to see its ICT roadmap to fruition. The country’s ICT custodian, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), noted that MSC Malaysia — a national initiative designed to attract world-class technology companies to the country — reported a U.S. $3.88 billion in export sales in 2015, representing an 18 percent increase over 2014.

Today, the MSC Malaysia footprint has expanded to include 42 locations across the country, hosting more than 3,800 companies from more than 40 countries, employing more than 150,000 high-income knowledge workers, 85 percent which are Malaysians. This has propelled Malaysia to a top three ranking in AT Kearney’s Global Services Location Index since 2005, with only China and India ahead of Malaysia.

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Mellanox’s Open Ethernet switch family delivers the highest performance and port density with a complete chassis and fabric management solution, enabling converged data centers to operate at any scale while reducing operational costs and infrastructure complexity.

Mellanox InfiniBand solutions have already been chosen to accelerate large High Performance Computing (HPC) customers in Malaysia. HPC customers use super computers and parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems and performing research activities through computer modeling, simulation and analysis. These HPC customers span various industries including education, bioscience, governments, finance, media and entertainment, oil and gas, pharmaceutical and manufacturing.

The company is actively seeking partnerships and collaboration opportunities to support customers from different industries, primarily within Big Data, data centers and the Cloud.

 

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WD Gold – The Gold Standard In HDD Technology

Hard disk drives have evolved into many distinct families to cater to different requirements – performance, low cost storageNAS, surveillance, etc. They often emphasise one attribute over others, to meet the requirements of their target market, while keeping costs low. But what if you wanted nothing but the best in hard disk drive technology? That’s where datacenter-grade hard disk drives like WD Gold come in.

Qualified for nearline storage use in datacenters, datacenter hard disk drives like WD Gold (Lowest Price) are designed to offer high storage capacities at maximum performance and reliability while operating continuously 24 hours a day. Virtually no expense is spared in making these drives the gold standard in HDD technology. That is likely why Western Digital gave their datacenter drives the WD Gold moniker.

Let’s take a quick look at why the WD Gold drives are the best hard disk drives in the industry.

 

Industry-Leading Storage Capacity

The WD Gold (lowest price on Amazon) is available in storage capacities from just 1 TB, all the way to the industry-leading storage capacity of 10 TB.

 

Constant Peak Performance

Unlike desktop-grade performance hard disk drives, the WD Gold (Lowest Price) is designed for peak performance at all times. While they may be classified as datacenter hard disk drives, the WD Gold drives can certainly be used in any desktop or consumer system.

On top of a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, the WD Gold also boasts a large (128 MB or 256 MB) SDRAM cache, and the HGST Media Caching Technology. They both help to sustain a high read and write throughput from the WD Gold drives.

 

Less Noise & Vibration, Lower Power Consumption

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The WD Gold (Lowest Price) is built around the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology, which seals the drive and fills it with helium. Because it is only 1/7th the density of “regular air”, helium imparts the following advantages to the WD Gold drives :

  • less friction for the spinning platters, reducing power consumption and thermal output
  • less internal turbulence, allowing for more reliable head-to-platter tracking
  • more capacity because more platters and drive heads can be fitted in the same volume of space
  • the completely sealed environment eliminates reliability issues from outside contaminants

 

24×7 Reliability

The WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives are designed to handle high workloads (up to 550 TB per year) continuously for years. They boast a phenomenal mean time before failure (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours. That is partly due to vibration control technologies like the Enhanced RAFF (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) technology, and extensive testing.

To ensure the best possible 24×7 reliability, the WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives undergo rigorous tests in the factory before they are certified for use. They are also extensively tested with a wide variety of systems, controllers and adapters to ensure maximum compatibility and ease-of-installation into any storage system.

 

Our Choice

The WD Gold (lowest price on Amazon) is designed for the most arduous and demanding conditions in the datacenter, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use it in a less-demanding desktop environment. In fact, tech enthusiasts who want nothing but the best hard disk drive and can afford to pay for the bespoke quality, can buy and use the WD Gold in their desktops or even NAS systems!

We tested the WD Gold extensively in our 10-page review, and came away very impressed with its performance. It was not just fast, it was also quiet and it ran really cool. That is why we awarded it our Reviewer’s Choice Award.

Now, the lower cost of ownership may not matter much for a desktop user with a couple of WD Gold drives, but it matters a great deal if you are running a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers. The WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives will not just reduce downtime from drive failures, they will greatly reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

For more information, you can take a look at our in-depth review, or visit the official WD Gold product page.

 

Disclosure

This post was sponsored by Western Digital.

 

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Kingston DC400 Datacenter SSD Released

Hsinchu, Taiwan, 6 Sep 2016 – Cloud-based storage has become essential nowadays, driving enterprise and corporations exploring solutions to build up better storage infrastructure. Kingston today announced the Kingston DC400 Datacenter SSD, the latest solid-state drive to its range of enterprise solutions.

 

Kingston DC400 SSD

The Kingston DC400 SSD is an entry-level enterprise drive designed for server use in data centers especially for customers who deploy a rip-and-replace strategy. It is ideal for read-intensive applications such as boot, web servers and lower data rate operational databases and analytics – especially in data center mixed workload environments where endurance and reliability are important.

The Kingston DC400 SSD offers superior quality of service for data center customers whose workload environment calls for sustained IOPS and consistent low latency. An expanded on-board DRAM acceleration cache enables high, sustained IOPS to increase performance over a wide range of read/write workloads. Standard as well as user-adjustable over-provisioning improves random IOPS performance and endurance while enterprise firmware improves latency and delivers consistently low data access times under steady-state workloads.

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Additionally, the Kingston DC400 SSD features enterprise-class reliability with end-to-end data path protection and firmware-implemented power-loss protection (“pFAIL”).

“Kingston is proud to offer our next generation entry-level enterprise SATA SSD to our data center and corporate customers looking for consistent application performance, stringent quality of service requirements and all-around reliability,” said Nathan Su, Flash Memory Sales Director, APAC Region, Kingston. “DC400 SSD’s combination of high IOPS, low latency and advanced data protection gives server IT managers and decision makers the perfect front-loading server storage option that they can deploy with confidence.”

The Kingston DC400 SSD is available in 400GB, 480GB, 800GB, 960GB, 1.6TB and 1.8TB capacities. The 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB capacities are performance optimized with greater IOPs for faster application performance and reduced storage latency. The 1.8TB capacity read-intensive optimized model is factory-tuned for read-intensive workloads.

To further help companies and organizations out, Kingston offers industry-leading sales support through its Ask an Expert program. It also offers the Kingston SSD Manager, a free, downloadable toolbox to monitor drive health, status and disk usage.

The Kingston DC400 is backed by a limited five-year warranty and free technical support and legendary Kingston reliability.

 

Kingston DC400 Features & Specifications

  • Form factor: 2.5″
  • Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s)
  • Capacities: 400 GB, 480 GB, 800 GB, 960 GB, 1.6 TB, 1.8 TB
  • Sequential Read/Write:
    • 400 GB – up to 555/535MB/s
    • 480 GB – up to 555/535MB/s
    • 800 GB – up to 555/530MB/s
    • 960 GB – up to 555/520MB/s
    • 1600 GB – up to 555/510MB/s
    • 1800 GB – up to 555/500MB/s
  • Maximum Random 4k Read/Write:
    • 400 GB – up to 99,000/90,000 IOPS
    • 480 GB – up to 99,000/90,000 IOPS
    • 800 GB – up to 99,000/89,000 IOPS
    • 960 GB – up to 99,000/88,000 IOPS
    • 1600 GB – up to 100,000/88,000 IOPS
    • 1800 GB – up to 99,000/86,000 IOPS
  • Steady-State 4k Read/Write:
    • 400 GB – up to 85,000/35,000 IOPS
    • 480 GB – up to 85,000/11,000 IOPS
    • 800 GB – up to 78,000/32,000 IOPS
    • 960 GB – up to 78,000/11,000 IOPS
    • 1600 GB – up to 78,000/32,000 IOPS
    • 1800 GB – up to 67,000/18,000 IOPS
  • Quality of Service (Latency): Read/Write: <400µs
  • Hot-Plug Capable
  • Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling
  • Enterprise SMART Tools: reliability tracking, usage statistics, life remaining, wear leveling, temperature
    Endurance:
    • 480 GB: 257 TB (0.30 DWPD)
    • 960 GB: 564 TB (0.32 DWPD)
    • 400 GB: 422 TB (0.57 DWPD)
    • 800 GB: 860 TB (0.58 DWPD)
    • 1600 GB: 1678 TB (0.57 DWPD)
    • 1800 GB: 1432 TB (0.43 DWPD)
  • Power Consumption:
    • Idle: 1.56 W
    • Average: 1.6 W
    • Max Read: 1.8 W
    • Max Write: 4.86 W
  • Storage temperature: -40 °C ~ 85 °C
  • Operating temperature: 0 °C ~ 70 °C
  • Dimensions: 69.9 mm x 100 mm x 7.0 mm
  • Weight: 92.34 g
  • Vibration operating: 2.17 G Peak (7–800Hz)
  • Vibration non-operating: 20 G Peak (10–2000Hz)
  • MTBF: 2 million hours

Warranty/support: Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

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