New, significantly improved Raspberry Pi 3 has been released this month. Improvements include a quad-core 64-bit ARM processor, an upgraded graphic processor, and a built-in wireless adapter. In order to meet the storage needs Western Digital has issued a new specialized low-profile hard drive called PiDrive.
At the end of March, an event little known outside of a small community of vendors, will happen: World Backup Day. Expect a flurry of blogs and tweets and posts and all of the other stuff that goes along with such marketing events. Then, expect the discussion to go silent for another year…unless a newsworthy data disaster occurs.
Seagate has announced the release of so-called “the world’s fastest SSD” with the significant performance differential between it and the next closest competitive device. The new SSD is compatible with the Open Compute Project specification, employs NVMe protocol, and is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots, which is 4GB/sec faster than the next fast competing solution.
The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance market (HCIA) is growing fast and hardware competitors are using Dell, HP, SuperMicro and other servers and not Cisco’s UCS hardware. EMC only covers a portion of the market so Cisco should address the rest in order to both preserve its current UCS market share and grow it further.
During 2015 Backblaze data centre has expanded from 39’690 hard drives in 882 Backblaze Storage Pods to 56’224 drives in 1’249 Pods, which makes about 65 Petabytes of additional space.
Hyper-converged infrastructure, when we started to hear about it last year, was simply an “appliantization” of the architecture and technology of software-defined storage (SDS) technology running in concert with server virtualization technology. Appliantization means that the gear peddler was doing the heavy lift of pre-integrating server and storage hardware with hypervisor and SDS hardware so that the resulting kit would be pretty much plug-and-play.
New Integrity MC990 X is the first server in a line conforming to the new naming convention, with ‘MC’ standing for ‘mission critical’ and ‘X’ standing for ‘Xeon’.It replaces the Proliant DL980 (‘DL’ – ‘density line’). The name changes are implemented in order to meet specific customer needs, e.g., high performance and cloud computing. HP will keep the Proliant name for low-end and mid-range servers, and also keep the BL (blade) designation.
It used to be that, when you bought a server with a NIC card and some internal or direct attached storage, it was simply called a server. If it had some tiered storage – different media with different performance characteristics and different capacities – and some intelligence for moving data across “tiers,” we called it an “enterprise server”. If the server and storage kit were clustered, we called it a high availability enterprise server. Over the past year, though, we have gone through a collective terminology refresh.
The post describes the history of RAID 5 and how it became obsolete at some point in time, just because HDD capacity grew at an enormous rate. It happened due to the chance of failure that grew to literal imminence when spinning disks reached TB scale, because the reading speed still had the same physical limits. Basically, creating a RAID 5 even with 1 TB disks would mean certain failure of the whole array and quite soon. The array technology was “saved” by an unlikely ally – the SSD. Being faster than hard disk drives in everything, they almost nullify the chance of the abovementioned failures. The post is written for everyday reader, not just engineers, and is quite comprehensive even without special knowledge and skills.