August 2nd, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Red Hat Releases OpenShift Container Storage 3.10
This week Red Hat announced the latest version of its popular enterprise Kubernetes platform Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 3.10 (formerly known as Red Hat Container-Native Storage). Just to point out this is a follow up to OpenShift Container Storage 3.9 and should be thought of as three-point-ten not three-point-one-o. This update adds several features such as arbiter volume support for replication for increased container-based data protection and full production support for block-based workloads.
August 2nd, 2018 by Brian Beeler
Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Review
Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X series was launched back in March of 2017 with the promise of bringing a new storage class memory (SCM) media called 3D XPoint (Intel branded as Optane) to market. The P4800X launched as both a traditional 2.5" NVMe drive (U.2) as well as a PCIe add-in card. Initial capacities started out at 375GB with plans to get to 1.5TB by the end of 2017. That capacity goal didn't come to fruition, but Intel did launch 750GB Optane models in November. Regardless of capacity, the P4800X has one job and that is to deliver the highest-speed storage possible to latency-sensitive applications in the data center.
August 1st, 2018 by Lyle Smith
GIGABYTE Adds New Single-Socket GPU & Storage Servers To AMD EPYC Line
GIGABYTE has added three new single-socket GPU and storage servers their AMD EPYC line. The new 2U G291-Z20 and G221-Z30 GPU servers and the 4U S451-Z30 storage server leverage the EPYC’s compute and I/O resources of 32 cores, 64 threads, more than 2TB of memory capacity and 128 PCIe lanes per socket. The G291-Z20 and the G221-Z30 are fully compatible with AMD’s new Radeon Instinct MI25 GPU, which is quoted to boast upwards of an impressive 24.6 TFLOPS of FP16 and 12.3 TFLOPS of FP32 peak performance. The MI25 also features large BAR (Base Address Register) support for multi-GPU peer to peer communication.
August 1st, 2018 by Brian Beeler
Amazon EC2 i3.metal Review
There's little doubt that Amazon is the leader when it comes to a variety of cloud services offered through their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) web service. With a relatively simple provisioning process and the ability to easily scale instances and storage needs up or down, EC2 aims to deliver all the promise of the cloud at cost-effective price points. For some, though, the cloud isn't just about flexibility and ease of deployment; it's about performance. The business benefits of being able to spin powerful environments up or down for critical applications like analytics can often vastly outweigh the expense of doing so through OPEX instead of the long-term investment of CAPEX. To that end, in May Amazon GA'd the i3 bare metal instance family that provides direct access to CPU and memory resources of the underlying server.
July 31st, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Toshiba Announces New 12TB & 14TB MN07 HDDs
Today Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) announced the launch of a new series of HDDs for NAS Platform OEMs, the MN07 Series. This new series of HDDs are 3.5” form factor and come in capacities of 12TB and 14TB. The new drives leverage Toshiba’s 9-disk helium-sealed technology that results in a 55% improvement in power efficiency.
July 30th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Seagate Releases 4Q18 & Fiscal Year Earnings
Today Seagate Technology announced both its fourth quarter financial results (quarter ended June 29, 2018) and its year-end financial results. The company saw some pretty good numbers in both the quarter and full year. Seagate also announced the resignation of its CFO, David H. Morton, Jr., as he has taken a role at another company.
July 27th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Microsemi Expands Its Storage Adapter Solutions
Microsemi announced that it was expanding its Adaptec Smart Storage 12Gbps SAS/SATA adapters family with two new additions, the SmartRAID 3162-8i and SmartRAID 3162-8i /e. The SmartRAID 3162-8i offers support for write cache data protection by putting a super capacitor on the adapter. The SmartRAID 3162-8i /e is purported to be the industry’s first raid adapter with maxCrypto, controller based encryption.
July 27th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
Western Digital Reports 4Q18 & Fiscal Year Earnings
Western Digital Corporation (WDC) reported its fourth quarter earnings as well as its year-end fiscal earnings for 2018 that ended June 29, 2018. Overall the numbers are good for the quarter and the report was able to beat expectations. The stock is down slightly today and down roughly 20 points from this time last year.
July 26th, 2018 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 Review
The PowerEdge R640 is a scalable 1U rack server designed for computing and storage via a 2-socket platform. Described as a balance between performance, cost and density, the R640 is built to handle workloads from a range of different data center use cases--particularly dense software-defined storage, service providers, application tier, dense private cloud, virtualization and High Performance Computing (HPC). Moreover, Dell has built the PowerEdge R640 as an easily deployable server and that can seamlessly scale from 3 to 1000+ nodes for software-defined storage using Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes.
July 26th, 2018 by Adam Armstrong
AWS Announces Availability of z1d & R5 EC2 Instances
Last week Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new instances on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This week, AWS is announcing that the new high frequency instance, z1d, and the two new memory optimized instances, R5 and R5d, are now generally available. These new instances are designed for users that need massive performance and better price-per-GB in memory intensive applications.