Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center S3500 Series Gives Cloud Computing Major Boost

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center S3500 Series delivers next-generation performance to meet the growing storage needs of cloud computing.Deployment of Intel® SSDs in data centers increases multicore CPU utilization, reduces rack space, lowers power consumption and improves total cost of ownership.Based on Intel's industry-leading 20nm NAND flash memory, the new SSD offers fast, consistent performance and stress-free protection in a cost- and power-efficient design.

Intel® Solid-State Drive Data Center S3500 Series
CLOUD COMPUTING EXPO, New York, June 11, 2013 -- Intel Corporation today announced the Intel® Solid-State Drive DC S3500 Series, its latest solid-state drive (SSD) for data centers and cloud computing. Designed for read-intensive applications such as Web hosting, cloud computing and data center virtualization, the Intel DC S3500 Series is an ideal replacement for traditional hard disk drives (HDD), allowing data centers to save significant costs by moving toward an all-SSD storage model.
Intel SSDs, including the Intel SSD DC S3500 Series, enable transformational improvements in cloud infrastructure, fostering new and enriching Web experiences. End customers experience quicker Web page loads and improved response times as a result of dramatically improved data access times and reduced latency. IT managers and cloud developers are rewarded with improved total cost of ownership as a result of reduced power consumption, more consistent performance and smaller space requirements. More than half of U.S. businesses now employ cloud computing applications, and IDC predicts that worldwide spending on cloud services will reach $44.2 billion this year1. Data centers powering these cloud applications need to quickly, efficiently and reliably scale to handle the tremendous growth of connected users and data traffic.
"The Intel SSD DC S3500 Series breaks through barriers – like the need for high throughput/low latency storage with a low total cost of ownership – to deliver the storage solution that meets the needs of the cloud, and its demand for storage, which has exploded in recent years," said Rob Crooke, Intel corporate vice president and general manager for the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. "Intel's data center family of SSDs helps make cloud computing faster and more reliable, enabling more transactions and richer experiences."
In cloud computing and data center environments, fast and consistent performance, reduced power consumption, high multicore CPU utilization and stress-free data protection are important requirements. The Intel SSD DC S3500 Series offers enterprise IT and data center managers storage options that deliver increased IO performance, reliability and a lower total cost of ownership over traditional HDDs, ideal for cloud applications.
"Intel SSDs have enabled our chip designers to gain up to 27 percent performance throughput in our massive design distributed computing environment," said Kim Stevenson, chief information officer at Intel. "In fact, we are increasing our deployment of Intel SSDs in our data centers from 10,000 units to 40,000 by the end of this year to enable our global design team to help bring products to market faster."
By combining 20nm Intel® NAND Flash Memory technology with SATA 6 Gb/s interface support, the Intel SSD DC S3500 Series delivers sequential read speeds of up to 500 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 450 MB/s and a tight distribution of input/outputs per second with low maximum latencies. Random read performance can go up to 75,000 input-output operations per second.
The Intel SSD DC S3500 Series also includes data protection features to address IT and data center professional's concerns of data loss. Built-in capacitors provide a short period of backup power to the drive allowing it to finish operations in the event of power loss. The drives also use 256-bit AES encryption for data protection.
The new SSDs will be offered in capacities ranging from 80 gigabyte (GB) to 800GB and both 2.5 and 1.8 inch form factors. Available through Intel distributors and resellers, the Intel DC S3500 Series is offered at the suggested channel price of $115 for a 1.8-inch 80GB drive and $979 for a 2.5-inch 800GB drive. It is also accompanied by a 5-year warranty.
The new DC S3550 Series, as well as a previously released data center family (Intel SSD DC S3700 Series and 910 Series), are being showcased in Intel's booth (#519) at the Cloud Computing Expo. The event runs from June 10-13 at Jacob K. Javits Center in New York.
More information on Intel SSDs can be found at www.intel.com/go/ssd or by accessing the multimedia press kit at www.intel.com/newsroom/ssd. Follow Intel SSDs on Twitter: @intelssd, or communities.intel.com.
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.
Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.
* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
1 "Neovise Report, Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds – When, Why and How They are Really Used."
View the original article here

Read More

AMD Leads Data Center Innovation with the New AMD Opteron X-Series Processors

Today, we are excited to announce our highly anticipated Opteron X-Series processors, previously known as “Kyoto.” The AMD Opteron X-Series processors are a brand new family of low power server processors and are the industry’s highest density, most power-efficient small core x86 processors ever built. They’re ideally suited to dense server clusters, the latest in AMD’s portfolio of low power offerings.
What’s more, the new AMD Opteron X-Series processors come in both APU and CPU-only versions, making this the very first available server APU, integrating both CPU and GPU engines on a single die. The AMD Opteron X2150 consumes just 11 watts, while the AMD Opteron X1150 consumes as little as 9 watts and is a CPU-only version optimized for general scale-out workloads.

With twice the performance and less power usage than the top-performing Intel Atom processor, the new X1150 and X2150 processors beat the Intel Atom processor based on several performance benchmarks. They also have twice the cores and L2 cache with a more advanced pipeline architecture, provide higher integration, and support up to 32 GB of DRAM – that’s four times more than the Intel Atom processor!
In addition, the AMD Opteron X-Series processors are ideal for next-generation scale-out web and cloud applications, ranging from big data analytics to image processing, multimedia content delivery and hosting.
It’s only natural that one of the first systems to use the AMD Opteron X-series chips will be HP’s Moonshot servers, which utilize extreme low-energy server technologies. The AMD Opteron X-series processors are a critical part of the Moonshot ecosystem offering both performance and power.
The AMD Opteron X2150 APU and X1150 CPU are generally available now for $99 and $64 respectively, in 1K quantities.
John Williams is vice president of Marketing, Server Business Unit, AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
View the original article here

Read More

EMC World 2013: Google storage coming to your data center

LAS VEGAS -- When planning your next data center, EMC Corp. wants you to think along the lines of what Google, Amazon and Facebook have done with theirs. That was a key message from the vendor at EMC World 2013, where EMC offered its ViPR software-defined storage platform as the first major step in the direction of a Google storage model.

"You can build a Web-scale data center without hiring 1,000 Ph.D.s or rocket scientists," said Jeremy Burton, EMC's executive vice president of product operations and marketing. "The Googles, Facebooks and Amazons have built a data center for one -- just for their environment. We're building a data center for everyone."

"We built it for people who want to run their data center like Google, but [who] don't want to write and maintain their own custom environment," EMC president Dave Goulden said of ViPR.

Building Google storage requires Hadoop or similar frameworks that Google, Facebook and Amazon use. EMC promises ViPR will manage data as a pool across any type of storage and handle Hadoop workloads. It has also given its Isilon clustered network-attached storage platform tight support for the Hadoop Distributed File System.

But EMC's message about a new data center goes beyond storage. EMC-owned VMware and Pivotal played big roles at EMC World this year, trumpeting their roles in the software-defined everything world.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci spoke of a transition from a PC and server-centric data center to one of mobile devices, the cloud, big data and social networks. He said the new data center will require software-defined compute, networking and storage. "The new buzzwords are abstract, pool and automate," he said. "This is what the software-defined data center is about at the highest level."

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz also used the Google storage model in his example of what the new data center should look like. "The consumer Internet giants have much larger information stores," he said. "When Google set out to index all the information on the Internet, it had to innovate and build a new architecture." And the key to that architecture -- the Google File System -- is a form of object storage, he said.

Juergen Urbanski, vice president of big data and cloud architectures for T-Systems, the $13 billion IT services division of Deutsche Telekom, is building that type of data center. Urbanski said his data center has more than 20 PB of data and "right now we see a very dramatic disruption happening in storage, primarily driven by Hadoop."

He said the difference between what he is doing and what the Internet giants do is that his workloads are far more diverse because his clients come from a wide range of industries.

Urbanski said his data center relies heavily on Hadoop because: "We don't like vendor lock-in and Hadoop is open source. That makes it able to run on industry-standard hardware and cheaper storage."

Urbanski said T-Systems is a large VMware customer, but doesn't use much EMC storage. He said the telecom has traditionally been a NetApp shop, although it has "storage from all kinds of vendors." However, he does use Isilon to run some of his customers' workloads because of its Hadoop capabilities.

"Our firm belief is that by 2015 … 80% of new data that comes in will land first in Hadoop," he said. "What we don't know is what the physical infrastructure underneath will be -- is it DAS, is it Isilon? We don't know. But at the data management layer and the distributed file system, it's Hadoop."

One thing he is trying to determine now is whether enterprise storage adds enough value to Hadoop clusters to make it worthwhile to run on more expensive storage rather than commodity white boxes.

For example, Isilon brings better data protection and performance while adding multi-tenancy that is missing with Hadoop on commodity storage.

"Multi-tenancy is important for us," he said. "Does Daimler want to have its data on the same cluster with BMW? Probably not. But they're both customers. So multi-tenancy is a core design point for us to offer. Today, Hadoop by itself does not support that. So what's the right tradeoff between open source -- commodity if you will -- and something that arguably has higher Capex and vendor lock-in, but brings other benefits?"

He said those tradeoffs will also be an issue with ViPR, which EMC claims will fully support commodity and third-party storage as well as its own arrays.

"With ViPR we can have one control plane and that helps us manage storage across pools," Urbanski said. "That part I buy. The $64,000 question is, 'How much of that pool will be white box stuff?' For EMC, that boils down to a fairly big business model issue. If you're a sales guy with a $20 million quota, how do you make up your quota based on what's probably a few hundred thousand dollar deals just for software? That's a big disruption in the industry, and that's the thing staring people in the face."

View the original article here

Read More