Thursday, 3 October 2013
Intel Solid-State Storage Gets Smaller, More Powerful
SAN FRANCISCO—Compared with traditional hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs) are already impressive space savers. In most cases no bigger than a stack (not even a full deck) of playing cards, they made thinner and more energy-efficient computing possible in a way that even a decade ago was unthinkable. With an eye on how these qualities can affect the enterprise market, this week as part of its annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) Intel released the Solid-State Drive Pro 1500 Series of drives—some of which make even traditional SSDs look like hulking behemoths.
The usual 2.5-inch style of SSD is still available for the 1500 Series, which is based on 20nm MLC Intel NAND flash memory and boasts sequential read speeds of up to 540MBps and sequential write speeds of up to 490MBps (with random reads at 41,000 IOPS and random writes at 80,000 IOPS), as well as the hardware-level encryption that would seem to be a necessity for its intended enterprise or data center applications.
But the real news with respect to the 1500 Series is its utilization of the new 80mm M.2 form factor, which eschews the usual drive casing for a drive that offers almost as many capacities as the 2.5-inch model (both are available in 80GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB, and 360GB storage options, and the 2.5-inch drive adds 480GB), while consuming 55mW less power when active (140mW versus 195mW) and 70mW less power when idle (55mW compared with 125mW).
As potentially exciting as these developments are, they're not exactly new news—we covered the M.2 form factor at last year's IDF, back before it had its current name (then it was only being called NGFF, short for "next-generation form factor"). What is news is the adoption of the new name (our press contact said it happened just within the last few months) and its appearance in a major line of products.
Though M.2 is probably not yet within sight of unseating the 2.5-inch form factor, even in just the business space, its impressively superior power consumption and its forward-looking design (with PCI Express migration a real possibility) suggest M.2 could take over the segment still dominated by mSATA more quickly than most of us expected. And if it takes off, it won't be long before it's the order of the day in consumer products as well, which could lead to a drastic expansion of the storage potential of tablets, smartphones, and the kind of wearable tech Intel was so hot on at IDF this year. Storage as small as that using the M.2 form factor can already go almost anywhere, and in terms of sizes there's nowhere to go but down.
Intel Introduces 22nm 'Silvermont' Microserver Chips
Intel on Wednesday introduced new 64-bit Atom C2000 processors based on the company's 22-nanometer "Silvermont" microarchitecture for microserver, storage, and networking installations in the data center.
The new System-on-a-Chip (SoC) products include one line for microservers and cold storage platforms formerly code named Avoton, and a second group of SoCs known as Rangeley which are being positioned for entry networking platforms. Intel offered a peek at its latest lineup of back end-targeted Atom products at its Datacenter Day event in July.
Avoton and Rangeley, both featuring x86-64 instruction sets, are coming out just nine months after Intel introduced its first-ever Atom SoCs for data center operations, a move that has heated up the competition with other players pushing ARM-based chips for ultra low-power microservers like Calxeda.
Intel's traditional x86 rival Advanced Micro Devices has its foot in both camps at the moment, partnering with ARM to help develop the latter's own forthcoming 64-bit architecture for 2014 while continuing to sell Atom-based server and data center fabric products through its SeaMicro subsidiary.
Intel, meanwhile, is billing its latest SoC offerings and a software defined networking (SDN) platform matching the new Intel Ethernet Switch FM5224 chipset and the company's WindRiver Open Network Software suite as the go-to silicon for makers of systems supporting mobile and cloud services.
Also on Wednesday, Intel showed reporters and analysts at a San Francisco event what it called "the first operational Intel Rack Scale Architecture (RSA)-based rack with Intel Silicon Photonics Technology," a new data center fabric which utilizes a new MXC connector and Corning's Intel-certified ClearCurve optical fiber.
That set-up is capable of transferring data at speeds up to 1.6 terabits-per-second across distances of up to 300 meters, the company said.
Sergis Mushell, a principal analyst for Gartner, said Intel is at this point pretty far ahead of ARM on microservers but the race is closer in other data center product categories.
"The fact is that Intel invented the [microserver] category with Atom. Now ARM has been talking about this microserver category but the only company that has made headway there [with ARM-based products] has been Calxeda, which really hasn't shipped in volume yet," Mushell said. "And we really don't know where ARM's 64-bit architecture will be in terms of comparison with x86."
But ARM is in a better position with regards to developing storage and networking products, the analyst said.
"On the server side, Intel clearly has dominance, but when you look at the networking and storage categories, ARM has shown in can play in both 32-bit and 64-bit. Intel's issue here is that it can absolutely develop and build a few very successful products and manufacture them in mass quantities. That's what Intel does. But when you're talking about building specific, tailor-made products like the ones needed for these other types of equipment and tasks, that's a different world for Intel."
Intel Unveils 22nm Xeon E5 Product Family for the Data Center
Intel on Tuesday introduced the 22-nanometer Xeon E5 2600 v2 product family of processors for servers, storage, and networking infrastructure, promising up to a 50 percent uptick in performance and a 45 percent gain in energy efficiency compared with the preceding generation of Xeon E5 chips.
The next-generation processors have set 15 new dual-socket performance world records across benchmarking tests that measure computing performance in areas like running databases, enterprise computing, Web services, technical computing, virtualization, and energy efficiency, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.
"We have a broad range of solutions and thanks to our partners, we are able to ship products that are optimized for all those types of workloads," Bryant said on the first day of the Intel Developer Forum here, reiterating some of the major points she made at Intel's Datacenter Day earlier this year.
IT, she said, is no longer just a support structure for businesses, but "is the business" and a "path to delivering new results, new opportunities, and new revenue streams." Bryant said Intel's new Xeon E5 chips are shipping now and were designed to take on the two big trending technology challenges in the data center - cloud computing and big data management and analysis - as well as address three major segments of the data center—servers, storage, and networking.
In servers, Bryant emphasized the extent to which back-end computing resources go unutilized in today's data centers, promising that the Xeon E5 2600 v2 product line would make ramping up virtualization and automation that much easier to do and consequently increase asset utilization rates.
Intel partners making use of the new Xeon E5 server/workstation parts in assorted ways include supercomputer-maker Inspur and Apple, which is using Xeon E5 chips in its latest Mac Pro. IBM, meanwhile, has put the Xeon E5 line at the heart of its forthcoming NeXtScale architecture targeting public and private cloud computing. Compatible with standard racks, optimized for top-of-rack switching, and software defined network (SDN)-ready, NeXtScale will appear in systems shipping in October, with more servers to follow in November and throughout 2014, including microservers and systems using next-generation processors.
Intel's new Xeon E5 family also includes products aimed at the storage market. Partners taking advantage of new features in that lineup like in-line de-duplication include Dell, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, Huawei, DataDirect Networks, Nexsan, Oracle, NetApp, X-10, and Xyratex, Bryant said.
Finally, Intel is pushing Xeon E5 as a networking solution and at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, Bryant announced the formation of its Network Builders Program, which is modeled after the company's existing Cloud Builders Program.
Intel Network Builders includes nearly 30 member partners at the outset, including some familiar names like HP, VMware, Brocade, and others. Bryant said the program would focus on building out and innovating new technologies for SDNs and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), with Intel's objective to "bring Moore's Law to networks."