“Faster, higher, stronger”: New data-cent technologies
Today, the Olympic motto “faster, higher, stronger” is quite applicable to the computer technology industry - in order to remain competitive, many market participants are trying to “work out” the technique and become better. Especially when it comes to new technologies - attempts to increase performance, memory capacity and data transfer rate do not stop.
/ photo Arthur Caranta CC
To process large amounts of data, companies are forced to build geographically distributed data centers. The reasons for this are the lack of power and limited space. But for the effective work of the data center in modern conditions it is necessary not only to provide communication between them, but also to guarantee high speed and reliability of data transfer.
One of the potential trends could be a long-distance technology, which will allow companies of all sizes to abandon the network of unrelated data centers in favor of a single mega-data center. Long-distance communications meet all the requirements of the IT industry: speed, reliability of disaster recovery systems, the availability of remote storage systems and distance-independent computer infrastructure. Long-distance technologies will enable companies to maximize the use of existing data centers instead of building new ones.
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For example, Purdue University in the United States, engaged in research on climate change, molecular biology, and the space industry, uses Mellanox long-distance communications to unite remote computers within a 6 km radius into a single cluster. This allows the university to maintain the latest generation supercomputer without increasing the cost of designing and upgrading and reducing performance. Real-time research is vital for research organizations, as they are processing a large amount of data.
The Mellanox long-distance technology allows unifying all systems and provides high-speed access, which is necessary for researchers, regardless of the physical location of the server. In addition, the use of long-distance technology can improve the performance of supercomputers. Mellanox recently offered a solution for a large US federal research center with hundreds of thousands of processors in different data centers within a radius of several kilometers. With the help of long-distance communications, all the machines were combined into one mega-data-center, which improved throughput, reduced latency and allowed saving on capital expenditures by reducing the number of machines required for providing communications.
Ensuring data transfer between computers in the same room is not such a global task, but no less important when it comes to increasing productivity. One of the most famous developments in this area is remote direct memory access (RDMA). Used with InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols, RDMA technology has a high bandwidth, low signal latency and reduces the load on the central processor, since it eliminates the redundancy of data copying between the application and operating system buffers by directly transferring information from one machine to another.
An even greater increase in speed promises innovative technology from Intel. The company began to produce silicon chips with embedded nanolasers, which will replace the copper cables used in data centers with fiber-optic ones. Today, fiber-optic communication lines are used only for long-distance connections, such as telecommunications networks. The reason for this - the high cost of equipment. Intel technology will achieve a speed of 100 GB / s through a single optical fiber with a thickness of a few millimeters.
In late August, in San Francisco, Intel introduced two new technologies for storing and transferring data, which can reverse the concept of computer manufacturing. The new solutions are aimed at use in large data centers where mobile applications are hosted, websites and works with artificial intelligence are underway.
One of the innovations introduced by Intel is a form of data storage that is faster than flash memory used in notebooks and data centers today. It is based on 3D Xpoint technology (where X reads as “cross”), developed in conjunction with the manufacturer of memory chips Micron. 3D Xpoint was announced back in July 2015 and is a fundamentally new type of memory storage architecture. Drives with such a memory will be supplied to the market under the brand Optane.
In 2016, Intel plans to launch sales of Optane SSDs, and in 2017, memory modules for RAM slots. In August of this year, at the annual conference for developers, technical project manager Frank Handy (Frank Hady) demonstrated a computer with a prototype disk Optane, which processed database records three times faster than a computer with flash memory. Large Internet companies, such as Facebook, will gladly pay for the opportunity to optimize the costs of expensive data centers by increasing their efficiency.
If Optane drives become available for PCs, they will significantly improve their performance. Ethan Miller, director of the University of California's Santa Cruz storage systems research center, believes that Intel and Micron's development will affect the computer industry more than flash memory has affected if researchers and other companies start experimenting with this technology. .
At the Intel 2016 Developer Forum in China, the demonstration of Optane’s work was given by Rob Voc (Rob Crooke), senior vice president of non-volatile memory at Intel. During the demonstration, the data transfer rate on the Optane reached 1.94 GB / s, while on a machine with NAND it was only 287 MB / s.
Crook is confident that with Optane, copying 26 GB of data from an internal to an external disk will take only 15 seconds. It is emphasized that this is only a prototype, so in the final version the speed can be even higher. In addition, Optane will be able to instantly save the current state of the system when it is turned off, unlike RAM. This will allow data centers to recover faster after power outages and other problems.
So far, Intel has not disclosed the way in which 3D Xpoint works, but according to one of the assumptions, the technology may be based on the effect of a reversible change in the phase state of a substance (a PRAM memory). However, after the presentation in San Francisco, Intel representatives announced that they did not use materials with a phase transition. An overview of several other technologies that can be used in Xpoint can be found here .
Companies around the world can be said to be obsessed with finding new technologies that will increase the productivity and reliability of the IT infrastructure. Business always seeks to reduce costs and increase revenues - no one wants to lose money due to downtime and IT system failures. This means that the trends described above will continue to gain momentum, develop and change our understanding of the infrastructure of data centers.
PS A few materials about the development of our IaaS-provider:
/ photo Arthur Caranta CC
Distance is not a barrier
To process large amounts of data, companies are forced to build geographically distributed data centers. The reasons for this are the lack of power and limited space. But for the effective work of the data center in modern conditions it is necessary not only to provide communication between them, but also to guarantee high speed and reliability of data transfer.
One of the potential trends could be a long-distance technology, which will allow companies of all sizes to abandon the network of unrelated data centers in favor of a single mega-data center. Long-distance communications meet all the requirements of the IT industry: speed, reliability of disaster recovery systems, the availability of remote storage systems and distance-independent computer infrastructure. Long-distance technologies will enable companies to maximize the use of existing data centers instead of building new ones.
')
For example, Purdue University in the United States, engaged in research on climate change, molecular biology, and the space industry, uses Mellanox long-distance communications to unite remote computers within a 6 km radius into a single cluster. This allows the university to maintain the latest generation supercomputer without increasing the cost of designing and upgrading and reducing performance. Real-time research is vital for research organizations, as they are processing a large amount of data.
The Mellanox long-distance technology allows unifying all systems and provides high-speed access, which is necessary for researchers, regardless of the physical location of the server. In addition, the use of long-distance technology can improve the performance of supercomputers. Mellanox recently offered a solution for a large US federal research center with hundreds of thousands of processors in different data centers within a radius of several kilometers. With the help of long-distance communications, all the machines were combined into one mega-data-center, which improved throughput, reduced latency and allowed saving on capital expenditures by reducing the number of machines required for providing communications.
Data delivery
Ensuring data transfer between computers in the same room is not such a global task, but no less important when it comes to increasing productivity. One of the most famous developments in this area is remote direct memory access (RDMA). Used with InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols, RDMA technology has a high bandwidth, low signal latency and reduces the load on the central processor, since it eliminates the redundancy of data copying between the application and operating system buffers by directly transferring information from one machine to another.
An even greater increase in speed promises innovative technology from Intel. The company began to produce silicon chips with embedded nanolasers, which will replace the copper cables used in data centers with fiber-optic ones. Today, fiber-optic communication lines are used only for long-distance connections, such as telecommunications networks. The reason for this - the high cost of equipment. Intel technology will achieve a speed of 100 GB / s through a single optical fiber with a thickness of a few millimeters.
A thousand times faster
In late August, in San Francisco, Intel introduced two new technologies for storing and transferring data, which can reverse the concept of computer manufacturing. The new solutions are aimed at use in large data centers where mobile applications are hosted, websites and works with artificial intelligence are underway.
One of the innovations introduced by Intel is a form of data storage that is faster than flash memory used in notebooks and data centers today. It is based on 3D Xpoint technology (where X reads as “cross”), developed in conjunction with the manufacturer of memory chips Micron. 3D Xpoint was announced back in July 2015 and is a fundamentally new type of memory storage architecture. Drives with such a memory will be supplied to the market under the brand Optane.
In 2016, Intel plans to launch sales of Optane SSDs, and in 2017, memory modules for RAM slots. In August of this year, at the annual conference for developers, technical project manager Frank Handy (Frank Hady) demonstrated a computer with a prototype disk Optane, which processed database records three times faster than a computer with flash memory. Large Internet companies, such as Facebook, will gladly pay for the opportunity to optimize the costs of expensive data centers by increasing their efficiency.
If Optane drives become available for PCs, they will significantly improve their performance. Ethan Miller, director of the University of California's Santa Cruz storage systems research center, believes that Intel and Micron's development will affect the computer industry more than flash memory has affected if researchers and other companies start experimenting with this technology. .
At the Intel 2016 Developer Forum in China, the demonstration of Optane’s work was given by Rob Voc (Rob Crooke), senior vice president of non-volatile memory at Intel. During the demonstration, the data transfer rate on the Optane reached 1.94 GB / s, while on a machine with NAND it was only 287 MB / s.
Crook is confident that with Optane, copying 26 GB of data from an internal to an external disk will take only 15 seconds. It is emphasized that this is only a prototype, so in the final version the speed can be even higher. In addition, Optane will be able to instantly save the current state of the system when it is turned off, unlike RAM. This will allow data centers to recover faster after power outages and other problems.
So far, Intel has not disclosed the way in which 3D Xpoint works, but according to one of the assumptions, the technology may be based on the effect of a reversible change in the phase state of a substance (a PRAM memory). However, after the presentation in San Francisco, Intel representatives announced that they did not use materials with a phase transition. An overview of several other technologies that can be used in Xpoint can be found here .
Companies around the world can be said to be obsessed with finding new technologies that will increase the productivity and reliability of the IT infrastructure. Business always seeks to reduce costs and increase revenues - no one wants to lose money due to downtime and IT system failures. This means that the trends described above will continue to gain momentum, develop and change our understanding of the infrastructure of data centers.
PS A few materials about the development of our IaaS-provider:
- Customer focus as the basis of business
- Cloud Technology Myths
- How to choose a direction for the development of an IT project
- What you need to know about IaaS-provider before starting work
- How to create a virtual infrastructure provider
- A bit about VPN: A brief overview of software implementations
- How to secure a Linux system: 10 tips
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/312118/
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