Archive for August, 2015

Adaptec HBA and RAID Compatibility Reports add HGST Helium HDDs

Author: Jeremiah TusseyPMC Adaptec 8805 RAID Adapter

Drive vendors continue to innovate, and one interesting new concept is the Helium hard disc drive, announced by HGST, a Western Digital Company. The important thing to note about Helium drive technology is that the drives are filled with Helium, allowing denser and more efficient drive designs. Helium is much lighter than air, so it imposes less drag on spinning disks, allowing disk platters to be stacked closer together. For enterprise applications, this allows more capacity without adding a more complex implementation via Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). This provides an advantage of increased capacity that can be added into an enterprise ecosystem without any extra work or driver support. Additionally, this advancement will lead to even more capacity with the upcoming integration of SMR.

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Flash Memory Summit 2015 Special – NVM Express + RDMA = AWESOME!

Author: Stephen Bates (@stepbates)

Introduction

In previous blog posts I have discussed Project Donard, which implements PCIe peer-to-peer transfers between NVM Express (NVMe) SSDs and GPUs, as wells as NVMe SSDs and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) NICs. I am super-excited to announce that at Flash Memory Summit 2015 (FMS) we have been working with Mellanox, a pioneer of RDMA, to take this work to the next level! This blog post will dig a little deeper into what we are demoing at FMS, August 11-13, and how NVM Express + RDMA = AWESOME!

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Why Management is Critical for Data Center Lifecycle Management

Author: Dave BerryPMC Data Centers

A key tenant of cloud computing is that it’s an easy-to-deploy and manage infrastructure. Automating the management lowers costs and complexity when new infrastructure is deployed or changes need to take place.  Historically, the industry has deployed armies of administrators across the deployment lifecycle to make that happen, but that’s no longer practical or even necessary.

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