After teasing out details about the technology for a year and half under the code name Falcon Mesa, Intel has unveiled the Agilex family of FPGAs, aimed at data-center and network applications that are processing increasing amounts of data for AI, financial, database and IoT workloads.

The Agilex family, expected to start appearing in devices in the third quarter, is part of a new wave of more easily programmable FPGAs that is beginning to take an increasingly central place in computing as data centers are called on to handle an explosion of data.

FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are built around around a matrix of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) linked via programmable interconnects that can be programmed after manufacturing – and even reprogrammed after being deployed in devices – to run algorithms written for specific workloads. They can thus be more efficient on a performance-per-watt basis than general-purpose CPUs, even while driving higher performance.  

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HPE is offering new Edgeline Converged Edge System hardware and software designed to let enterprises not only control machines in their facilities, but also manage and analyze the sea of data generated by devices and sensors at the edge network.

The new software lets enterprise network managers and data-center administrators merge data from a variety of third-party applications and remotely manage as many as thousands of Edgeline hardware systems, which are capable of running unmodified enterprise applications, HPE said at its Discover Conference in Madrid Tuesday.

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Lenovo and NetApp's storage alliance, joint venture in China, and new series of all-flash and hybrid flash products announced at Lenovo's Transform event, put them both in a much stronger position in the data center against rivals Dell EMC and HPE.

The storage offerings include two familes, each subdivided into all-fash and hybrid -flash products, jointly developed by Lenovo and NetApp and available now worldwide. Several of the products support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), the extremely fast communications protocol and controller able to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe-bus standard. NVMe SSDs are designed to provide two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.

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Nvidia is raising its game in data centers, extending its reach across different types of AI workloads with the Tesla T4 GPU, based on its new Turing architecture and, along with related software, designed for blazing acceleration of applications for images, speech, translation and recommendation systems.

The T4 is the essential component in Nvidia's new TensorRT Hyperscale Inference Platform, a small-form accelerator card, expected to ship in data-center systems from major server makers in the fourth quarter.

The T4 features Turing Tensor Cores, which support different levels of compute precision for different AI applications, as well as the major software frameworks – including TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, Chainer, and Caffe2 – for so-called deep learning, machine learning involving multi-layered neural networks.

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To get up and running on a self-service, big-data analytics platform efficiently, many data-center and network managers these days would likely think about using a cloud service. But not so fast – there is some debate about whether the public cloud is the way to go for certain big-data analytics.

For some big-data applications, the public cloud may be more expensive in the long run, and because of latency issues, slower than on-site private cloud solutions. In addition, having data storage reside on premises often makes sense due to regulatory and security considerations.

With all this in mind, Dell EMC has teamed up with BlueData, the provider of a container-based software platform for AI and big-data workloads, to offer Ready Solutions for Big Data, a big data as a service (BDaaS) package for on-premises data centers. The offering brings together Dell EMC servers, storage, networking and services along with BlueData software, all optimized for big-data analytics.

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Network administrators, IT managers and security professionals face a never-ending battle, constantly checking on what exactly is running on their networks and the vulnerabilities that lurk within. While there is a wealth of monitoring utilities available for network mapping and security auditing, nothing beats Nmap's combination of versatility and usability, making it the widely acknowledged de facto standard.

What is Nmap?

Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool for vulnerability scanning and network discovery. Network administrators use Nmap to identify what devices are running on their systems, discovering hosts that are available and the services they offer, finding open ports and detecting security risks.

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CIOs, network administrators and data-center managers who see a need to run full-fledged, unmodified enterprise software at the edge of their networks, on factory floors and oil rigs, now have an opportunity to do so.

HPE is certifying complete enterprise software stacks for its EdgeLine converged infrastructure devices, allowing enterprises to run the exact same applications in the data center, in the cloud or at the network edge.

The certifications will cover software from vendors including Microsoft, SAP, PTC, SparkCognition and Citrix to run on its EdgeLine EL 1000 and EdgeLine EL4000 systems, the company said Wednesday at its Discover conference in Las Vegas.

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HPE's pledge to pump billions of dollars into developing edge systems shines a light on the company's ambition to be the leading end-to-end computing infrastructure provider.

CEO Antonio Neri made the investment announcement at the company's Discover conference Tuesday in Las Vegas, in his first appearance at the company's annual event as chief executive. He took over the CEO role from Meg Whitman in February.

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CIOs and data center managers who run large hybrid clouds worldwide have a good chance of hearing IBM knock on their doors in the next few months.

That's because IBM is opening 18 new "availability zones" for its public cloud across the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific. An availability zone is an isolated physical location within a cloud data center that has its own separate power, cooling and networking to maximize fault tolerance, according to IBM.

Along with uptime service level agreements and high-speed network connectivity, users have gotten used to accessing corporate databases wherever they reside, but proximity to cloud data centers is important. Distance to data centers can have an impact on network performance, resulting in slow uploads or downloads.

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Many if not most large enterprises run hybrid computing environments and are looking for management software flexible enough to run in and manage assets across private and public clouds.

Against this backdrop, BMC has rebuilt its venerable IT service-management product suite to run on a range of cloud platforms while incorporating machine learning to enhance predictive-analysis capabilities.

The BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that runs on Amazon Web Services as well as BMC's own cloud. It will be available for Azure in the fourth quarter and for Google Public Cloud at the end of the year or beginning of next year, BMC said.

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Nvidia is refining its pitch for data-center performance and efficiency with a new server platform, the HGX-2, designed to harness the power of 16 Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs to satisfy requirements for both AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Data-center server makers Lenovo, Supermicro, Wiwynn and QCT said they would ship HGX-2 systems by the end of the year. Some of the biggest customers for HGX-2 systems are likely to be hyperscale providers, so it's no surprise that Foxconn, Inventec, Quanta and Wistron are also expected to manufacture servers that use the new platform for cloud data centers.  

The HGX-2 is built using two GPU baseboards that link the Tesla GPUs via NVSwitch interconnect fabric. The HGX-2 baseboards handle 8 processors each, for a total of 16 GPUs. The HGX-1, announced a year ago, handled only 8 GPUs.

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HPE is rolling out the next generation of its Nimble Storage platform, overhauled to better meet the ever-increasing performance demands on data-center workloads, including real-time web analytics, business intelligence, and mission-critical enterprise resource applications.

The new HPE Nimble Storage All Flash arrays as well as Nimble Adaptive Flash arrays for hybrid implementations (mixing solid state drives and hard disk drives, for example), are generally available from May 7 and have both been engineered to support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), an extremely fast communications protocol and controller designed to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe bus standard. NVMe SSDs are expected to offer two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.

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