This week saw some very interesting news with LSI announcing new milestones, EMC and NetApp jumping into big data analytics, Intel announcing the Z68 chip set and 22nm Atom, and Gluster announcing a bare metal appliance.
EMC and NetApp do Hadoop!
EMC this week was very cloud heavy in its announcements. Shortly after NetApp announced the completion of its purchase of LSI’s Engenio business and an accompanying Hadoop solution, EMC announced its own Hadoop solution. For those wondering what Hadoop is, think of it as the clustered storage and analytics system that runs businesses with big data like Yahoo! and Facebook (Google published the original papers outlining the methods) and allows them to process the vast amounts of data they collect. It was very interesting to see the pair of announcements because Hadoop architectures are a lot different than traditional EMC and NetApp storage architectures. I think this pair of announcements could have profound impact a few years from now.
Intel Shows off the Z68 Chipset and the 22nm Atom
Intel finally unveiled its Z68 chipset this week for the LGA 1155 “Sandy Bridge” platform. The Z68 platform is a significant upgrade to the P67 and H67 platforms previously available because it allows a user to both overclock the CPU (like the P67) and use the integrated graphics with QuicSync (like the H67.) Although that combo is what the Sandy Bridge platform should have been launched with, Intel also announced a hybrid caching system whereby data stored on traditional spindle disks can be cached on an attached Solid State Drive. One can think of this as a rudimentary L2ARC from the ZFS world scaled down to consumers.
The other big preview this week was the 22nm Atom code named Silvermont. Intel is positioning the Atom as its answer to the onslaught of new ARM designs. This is big news for Intel and moving the Atom to 22nm 3D gate technology sooner rather than later is welcome as the Atom is clearly showing its age. The hope is also that Intel takes the opportunity to revamp the Atom’s performance. One of the biggest complaints today is that Atom devices running x86 code feel sluggish. A big part of this is that unlike customized ARM software and operating systems, the sluggishness tends to be on Windows 7 which was made for much faster CPUs. Intel is looking for a 2012/ 2013 release and for this architecture to be a strong entrant in the mobile space. Personally, I think Intel needs to launch something as revolutionary as it did when it launched the Atom because ARM is proving to be stiff competition and will have a substantial installed base in the mobile space by the time Silvermont arrives.
LSI Ships 750,000th 6.0gbps SAS RAID controller/ HBA
LSI announced this week that it shipped its 750,000th 6.0gbps SAS 2 RAID controller/ HBA. That is a fairly strong accomplishment for the company as LSI and 3ware parts are only a portion of its business. As we have seen on ServeTheHome (and will see again next week), LSI’s SAs2008 product is a nearly ubiquitous SAS 2 controller integrated into many motherboard designs.
Gluster Storage Software Appliance Released
Gluster recently announced the Gluster Storage Software Appliance which is a POSIX-compliant bare metal storage appliance aimed at on-premise clouds. Many IT organizations are moving to either an internal secure cloud or a hybrid cloud architecture. Gluster’s new Storage Software Appliance is built to take commodity hardware and turn it into clustered storage nodes deployed in a private cloud.
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