IaaS digest: high performance, data storage and new technologies for data centers

Materials from our blog about IaaS and Tg channel about IT infrastructure.

Analytical notes

• How was the VMware EMPOWER 2019 conference This is a sammari about the trip of IT-GRAD specialists to Lisbon, where VMware held its annual thematic conference. We broadcast live from the place of events in our Telegram channel , and on Habré we published daily reports with notes on the presented innovations and the most discussed technologies: the first day (intelligent solutions, information security, the end of the NSX-V era), the second day (network solutions, IoT, MO), day three (virtualization of storage and data recovery). In addition, we summed up the results in the habrapost .

• How to overcome Moore's law - transistor technologies of the future We understand what are the new approaches to the production of semiconductors. From alternative materials - carbon nanotubes, molybdenum disulfide, hafnium dioxide and selenide - to completely different architectures. Regarding the latter - in our material we briefly talked about piezoelectric, spin and metal-air transistors.

• What are waferscale processors and a chip monitoring system In our microformat we explain how waferscal are produced, why they are needed, and what are the difficulties in their design. In the second post, we explain why integration of the analytical module directly into the chip was needed, what such a system does and where it can come in handy.

• Who influenced the development of the cloud We are talking about those who made a significant contribution to the development of the open source field, and therefore influenced the formation of a stack of cloud technologies. The heroes of this material are Guido Van Rossum, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Wall and Eric Raymond.

• Year in action: whom and for what were punished by GDPR A year has passed since the introduction of the GDPR, and dozens of companies have received fines. In this article we give an analytical overview of the situation and tell who was fined and for what.

What's new in the cloud

• What is a service-defined firewall and how does it work This is a compact post about developing VMware. We tell you what the vendor's firewall can do, how protection works at the application level, and where it will all be applied. In addition, we do not forget to say that we are ready to offer other solution providers of this type - Palo Alto Networks and Cisco.

• How are data centers doing - trends and new processors Here are three key trends - vCPU, SDN and MO - plus we’ll see what results the 14-nm and 7-nm process technologies brought.

• What new computing systems may appear in the data center As part of the “technological foresight minute,” we talk about how things are going with neuromorphic and DNA computing, and also with quantum machines. All these technologies have already reached the level of working prototypes and may appear in data centers within the next 10-15 years.

• What could hinder the development of quantum computers Another material on promising developments in the field of quantum computing. The main thing that can hinder their development is interruptions in the supply of necessary resources. For example, potential difficulties with the purchase of helium-3. We give an overview of the situation and explain why not everything is so bad.

• How to reduce the power consumption of SSDs in the data center With the increasing load on the data center, the amount of energy consumed also increases. To optimize it, many data centers are increasing the share of SSDs, but from the point of view of potential improvements in energy efficiency of storage racks, you can and should work. To advance in this direction, MIT proposed LightStore technology. We decided to talk about how it is arranged, and due to which it can reduce the cost of data center operators on electricity.

• How to create an open source data center and increase its energy efficiency Another "tweens" from our Telegram channel. This time we are talking about organizations and working groups that are designing standards for open source data centers - Open Compute Project, Open19 Foundation, Open Data Center Committee - and how to make data centers energy-efficient with DCIM solutions, virtualization and microclimate .

• Why vGPUs are not inferior in performance to hardware solutions We are talking about updating the ESXi hypervisor, whose capabilities are more than ever close to bare-metal solutions. We discuss its prospects, the scheme of work and competing vGPUs from AMD and Intel.

• Interview with the gene. Director of IT-GRAD Anton Zakharchenko, who heads our cloud plus 1cloud service and is the director of strategy #CloudMTS, explains why the Russian cloud market is gradually enlarging, how customer service is built, and what innovations to expect taking into account technological trends.

• Our cases A couple of recent projects for clients. This is REDWEB's help in creating a scalable environment for the development of digital solutions and providing a storage for personal data as part of cooperation with utilities .