Saturday, February 24, 2018

Processor News from Arm, Ampere and Tachyum

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting - semiconductor edition:

  • Arm launches Trillium to bring ML to edge devices.  Arm announced Project Trillium, a suite of Arm intellectual property including new highly scalable processors that will deliver enhanced machine learning (ML) and neural network functionality. With a focus on scalability Trillium will cover mobile processors and Arm ML products for sensors, mobile, entertainment and beyond. Built from the ground-up for ML, the Arm ML processor delivers 4.6 trillion operations per second and over three trillion operations per second per watt (TOPs/W). THe Arm OD processor is designed to efficiently identify people and other objects with virtually unlimited objects per frame. Arm NN software is optimized for neural networks, and bridges the gap between NN frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, and Android NN and the full range of Arm Cortex CPUs, Arm Mali GPUs, and ML processors. 
  • Chip Startup Ampere Launches. Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere emerged from stealth last week, led by former Intel president Renee James. As the company states, its chips born in and built for the cloud with a modern architecture, featuring 64-bit Arm server processors geared for high memory performance and substantially lower power and total cost of ownership. "We have an opportunity with cloud computing to take a fresh approach with products that are built to address the new software ecosystem,” said James. “The workloads moving to the cloud require more memory, and at the same time, customers have stringent requirements for power, size and costs. The software that runs the cloud enables Ampere to design with a different point of view. The Ampere team’s approach and architecture meets the expectation on performance and power and gives customers the freedom to accelerate the delivery of the most memory-intensive applications and workloads such as AI, big data, storage and database in their next-generation data centers." 
  • Tachyum nets investment from IPM.  After emerging from stealth last year chip company Tachyum announced it has received an outside investment from IPM Growth, the venture capital division of InfraPartners Management. Tachyum looks to deliver a product family of "Cloud Chips" that offer "unprecedented power savings, performance and value to help overcome the energy demands of exponential growth in data center capacity." Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak holds over 100 granted patents, and notes that the investment from IPN gives the company a "significant boost in our ability to bring our Cloud Chip to life and to address the sea change in semiconductor development threatening to topple industries that depend on processing performance and density."

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

OneNeck Receives Patent for Roaming Robotic Sensor

OneNeck IT Solutions announced a U.S. Patent for a "Temperature-Humidity Monitoring Assembly for Closed Server Cabinet".  Attaching on the inside of a data center cabinet door the patented sensor is fully controlled from outside of the cabinet and a motor and belt-driven rail assmbly unit incrementally raises the sensor until it reaches the top of the cabinet.  After the process is completed a color coded heat-map is generated for the scanned cabinet.

“With pinpoint accuracy, the heat-map reveals any and all hot spots,” said Koch. “Equipped with this information, our facilities technicians can quickly and efficiently make the necessary adjustments to improve overall air flow. Bottom-line, this unique monitoring device can aid our clients in managing their internal rack, cable placement and airflows, thus preventing overheating, early burn-out or, even worse, downtime.”

With input and assistance from parent company Telephone and Data Systems, OneNeck was provided the resources to pursue its first patent, which was issued on December 12, 2017.

OneNeck also announced that it was named to the CRN 2018 Managed Service Provide (MSP) 500 Elite 150 list. The Elite 150 list recognizes large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premises and off-premises services.

OneNeck operates top-tier data centers around the U.S. and provides a range of hybrid IT, colocation, enterprise application management, managed and cloud services.

Monday, February 05, 2018

Data Center Links: February 05, 2018

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

  • Intel's Industrial-Scale data center. Seeking Alpha has a really interesting article on how Intel has revealed a lot of patent applications recently - around its data center vision: with persistent memory and 'sled architectures'. "The architecture is centered on disaggregated processor, memory and storage, all connected by photonics."
  • I knew there would be some increased M&A activity in 2018, but wow....
    • Cisco acquires BroadSoft.  Cisco announced it is acquiring BroadSoft for $1.9 billion.  With approvals from the board at each company Cisco will add the Broadsoft collaboration solutions to its Unified Communications Technology group, under VP and General manager Tom Puorro. 
    • Red Hat acquires CoreOS. Red Hat announced it has acquired CoreOS for $250 million. CoreOS is also known for helping to drive many of the open source innovations that are at the heart of containerized applications, including Kubernetes, Container Linux and etcd, the distributed data store for Kubernetes.
    • SAP acquires CallidusCloud. SAP announced it will acquire CallidusCloud for $2.4 billion. CallidusCloud offers a full suite of sales performance management (SPM) and configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions.
    • INAP to acquire SingleHop.  INAP announced it is acquiring managed hosting and IaaS provider SingleHop for $132 million. Single Hop's cofounder and CEO Zak Boca noted "SingleHop’s innovative approach to IaaS and the delivery of managed services combined with INAP’s global data center and network presence will give clients a one-stop shop for their IT needs. This is a strong combination that I’m very excited to be a part of. I look forward to transitioning to become the Chief Marketing Officer of INAP.
    • Apptio acquires Digital Fuel.  SaaS based Technology Business Management company Apptio announced it is acquiring Digital Fuel for $42.5 million. Digital Fuel was owned by Skyview Capital, who bought the company from VMware.