Lightbits debuts SuperSSD, its ultra-high capacity, high performance SSD storage appliance to meet needs of AI, Machine Learning

Lightbits Labs introduced on Tuesday SuperSSD, its scalable, Ethernet-attached SSD solution that addresses data storage speed, capacity and reliability needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training systems. SuperSSD makes storage transparent, so applications like high-speed databases, high performance analytics and customer engagement applications can deliver optimal user experiences.

This solution from Lightbits is purpose-built for fast and massive parallel access to data. The appliance is designed to support the scale, performance and high-availability needs of enterprises undergoing resource intensive digital transformation. AI and ML are prime examples of applications that historically relied on locally-stored data on direct attached storage (DAS) with SSDs.

However, as their data sets scaled to a massive size on distributed resources, DAS solutions become ineffective, complex to manage, costly, and potentially at risk of being a single point of failure. These growing needs for scale, performance and distributed access require a new type of storage system designed for fast and massive parallel access to data.

As a plug-and-play appliance, SuperSSD offers a variety of benefits around simplicity, performance, fault tolerance and cost efficiencies. It is scalable from 64TB to 1PB usable capacity (field upgradeable) that can be shared across multiple compute nodes; supports up to 5 million 4K input/output operations per second (IOPs) and with a latency consistency of less than 200us with end-to-end NVMe; provides dual 100GbE wire-speed performance; with four times data reduction or greater at line rate, increasing usable storage capacity while enhancing SSD endurance and accelerating write-intensive applications.

The SSD also includes Elastic Erasure Coding (EC) that isolates SSD failures, ensuring data protection and no service interruption; fully offloads all the storage tasks from the application server; provides in-storage processing so that user-defined functions can run in the storage server to maximize storage bandwidth and improve application performance; uses standard TCP/IP network infrastructure for immediate shared storage supporting many applications and compute nodes; and includes 2U standard rack server with simple plug-and-play installation.

By virtualizing and managing a large pool of NVMe SSDs with a global flash translation layer (GFTL), SuperSSD ensures efficient storage utilization and wire-speed access to very large data sets. Deployed using existing network and compute infrastructures, SuperSSD is seamless to install, allowing data scientists to easily scale their storage reach and performance when and where they need it.

“Accessing massive amounts of data with low latency is a priority for deep learning, artificial intelligence and high performance analytics workloads,” said Roger Peene, vice president of product planning and strategy for Micron’s Storage Business Unit. “Solutions like Lightbits Labs’ SuperSSD can enable customers to access large data sets with rich data services in a low-latency, disaggregated infrastructure solution.”

“Solutions built around the speed and efficiency of NVMe over TCP offer frictionless disaggregation for companies needing scalable storage. Based on our deep familiarity with the founding team and their outstanding track record, Dell Technologies Capital is excited to be an investor supporting Lightbits Labs,” said Yair Snir, vice president and managing director, Dell Technologies Capital.

“We expect data-intensive applications such as AI and machine learning to drive increased use of high-performance storage to ingest and process the associated large data sets,” said Dennis Hahn, senior analyst, cloud and data center research practice at IHS Markit. “In our recent DC Storage Strategies Survey, respondents indicated they are seeking choices and options in the way they deploy their storage solutions. Clearly, enterprises see the need for high performance and low-latency storage that is scalable and easily accessible for applications, where storage is accessed without the need for server software additions.”

“Although it is rarely the center of the story, storage is a key infrastructure element that enables AI and machine learning,” said Avigdor Willenz, Founder and Chairman of the Lightbits Labs Board of Directors. “By making fast and massive access to data available everywhere and much simpler from start to finish, Lightbits’ SuperSSD enters the AI market as a true storage and data infrastructure game changer.”

“AI and machine learning are exceedingly resource intensive, involving access to distributed devices and massive amounts of data,” said Eran Kirzner, Lightbits Labs CEO and co-founder. “As the amount of data analyzed increases, DAS solutions become completely ineffective, complex to manage, costly and potentially a single point of failure. By ensuring zero downtime, SuperSSD is the only storage solution that can support continuous AI and machine learning processes, reliably, cost-effectively, and with high-performance and simplicity.”

The Lightbits Labs SuperSSD appliance is available for purchase now, along with the two NVMe/TCP solutions Lightbits introduced last month: LightOS software and the LightField storage acceleration card.

Network Critical debuts SmartNA PortPlus packet broker line, delivering visibility to keep pace with modern dynamic networks

Network Critical launched Tuesday its new line of SmartNA PortPlus packet broker appliances, to provide scale-out visibility to make it easier to monitor and secure dynamic, growing networks.

Unlike competitive products that require complex management or expensive scale-up architectures, Network Critical’s PortPlus line is built from the ground up to scale rapidly as customer networks grow, bridging the gap between ultra-high-speed networks and existing management, monitoring and security tools. Using its distributed scale-out architecture, as IT teams and tools need visibility across more ports or faster networks, users can add additional PortPlus units that behave as a single, larger, faster appliance.

A high-density, high-performance packet broker solution, the PortPlus family can scale from 54 to 194 ports and handle 1/10/25/40/100G speeds – all through one flexible series of appliances. With exceptional throughput and ability to manage traffic at a range of speeds, it acts as a central hub that gathers and distributes the right packet data to the right network monitoring or security tools as needed.

PortPlus gives network tools and systems the packet-level access needed to monitor and protect critical, complex and ever-changing infrastructure, from hybrid or software-defined networking to virtualization and more.

Additional load balancing capabilities allow organizations to leverage aging network monitoring tools that may struggle to keep up with rapidly increasing network speeds. This is vital for optimizing tool performance and maintaining budget discipline in dynamic and growing infrastructures.

Network growth and the addition of new tools and systems inevitably requires more packet brokers to keep pace. PortPlus breaks this cycle, allowing companies to add ports or increase performance as needed while still maintaining easy management of the expanded system.

Customers can start with a single PortPlus 54-port appliance that provides a foundation for understanding what is happening on the network. To add scale and density, additional 48-port appliances can be added - to give up to 194 ports. Regardless of the number of PortPlus appliances involved in a given setup, the system functions as one large collection of ports, and is always configured and managed through a single-pane management interface.

This design delivers a scale-out visibility layer that’s cost-effective, easy to manage and flexible, eliminating the need for businesses to completely overhaul their systems and purchase new “scaled up” equipment every time they reach a growth point.

The PortPlus system is managed entirely through Network Critical’s patented Drag-n-Vu interface, which allows organizations to filter traffic based on IP addresses, protocols, ports and VLANs to provide improved network visibility. The intuitive Drag-n-Vu system allows for fast and error-free configurations and makes it easy to add complex filter rules and port mapping while minimizing configuration time and costly mistakes.

Designed around a next-generation network and server-ready PortPlus base unit with 48 x 1/10/25G ports and 6 x 40/100G ports, the line is able to handle 1/10/25/40/100G speeds and provide a future-proof, scale-out visibility layer with up to 194 ports, and features a programmable architecture built to support workload density, emerging protocols and new technologies. 

It is also managed entirely through the intelligent and intuitive Drag-n-Vu user interface for fast, error-free configuration of the entire system; features a 1.8 Tbps system throughput supports Maximum Line Rate on every interface, and comes enabled with Dual Hot swap power supplies and fans for greater resilience.

“There’s a reason companies are adopting modern scale-out infrastructure for things like cloud processing or data storage: lower cost, easier management and simple expansion. We think it’s high time they can grow their network visibility the same way,” said Alastair Hartrup, Global CEO of Network Critical.  “As networks become multi-vendor, multi-cloud, and multi-fabric, companies are struggling with the visibility needed to maintain tight control, hardened security and adequate service-level performance. PortPlus allows them to finally grow that layer of persistent visibility right along with changing demands.”

“Every business today needs granular insight across their entire network, and the new PortPlus family delivers that visibility in spades, without the need to constantly scale up to larger, more expensive packet broker technology,” said Hartrup. “The PortPlus family allows our customers to scale their networks in a cost-effective manner, accommodating legacy tools with lower-speed ports while quickly enabling the addition of newer tools with greater processes capabilities. Our disruptive design and superior technology allow organizations to send the right traffic to the right tools and maintain a scale-out visibility layer that supports critical management, monitoring and security functions as networks grow.”

Cadence joins with TSMC to boost 5nm FinFET innovation, enabling next-generation SoC production design

Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced Monday that it has collaborated with TSMC to enable customers’ production delivery of next-generation system-on-chip (SoC) designs for mobile, high-performance computing (HPC), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications on TSMC’s 5nm FinFET process technology.

As part of the collaboration, the Cadence digital, signoff and custom/analog tools have been certified for Design Rule Manual (DRM) and SPICE v1.0, and Cadence IP has been enabled for the TSMC 5nm process.

The corresponding process design kits (PDKs) featuring integrated tools, flows and methodologies are now available for traditional and cloud-based environments. Additionally, mutual customers have already completed several tapeouts using Cadence tools, flows and IP for full production development on the TSMC 5nm process technology.

Cadence delivered a fully integrated digital implementation and signoff tool flow, which has been certified on TSMC’s industry-leading 5nm process that has the benefits of process simplification provided by extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

The Cadence full-flow includes the Innovus Implementation System, Liberate Characterization Portfolio, Quantus Extraction Solution, Tempus Timing Signoff Solution, Voltus IC Power Integrity Solution and Pegasus Verification System.

The Cadence digital and signoff tools that have been optimized for TSMC’s 5nm process technology provide EUV support at key layers and associated new design rules, which enable mutual customers to reduce iterations and achieve performance, area and power (PPA) improvements.

Some of the newest enhancements for the 5nm process include predictive via-pillar-aware synthesis structuring with the Genus Synthesis Solution as well as a pin-access control routing method for cell electromigration (EM) handling in the Innovus Implementation System and Tempus ECO and also statistical EM budgeting analysis support in the Voltus IC Power Integrity Solution. The newly certified Pegasus Verification System supports 5nm rule decks for all TSMC physical verification flows including DRC, LVS and metal fill.

The Cadence custom/analog tools certified on TSMC’s industry-leading 5nm process technology include the Spectre Accelerated Parallel Simulator (APS), Spectre eXtensive Partitioning Simulator (XPS), Spectre RF Option, Spectre Circuit Simulator, Voltus-Fi Custom Power Integrity Solution, Pegasus Verification System as well as the Virtuoso custom IC design platform, which includes the Virtuoso Layout Suite EXL, Virtuoso Schematic Editor and Virtuoso ADE Product Suite.

The Virtuoso R&D team has an ongoing and rich collaboration with the Cadence IP Group, developing 5nm mixed-signal IP using a state-of-the-art custom design methodology built on the latest Virtuoso design platform.

By continually enhancing the design methodologies and capabilities included with the Virtuoso Advanced-Node and Methodology Platform for TSMC’s advanced-node processes, including the 5nm process, customers can achieve better custom physical design throughput versus traditional non-structured design methodologies.

The Virtuoso Advanced-Node and Methodology Platform (ICADVM 18.1) consists of features and functionality required for creating 5nm designs, which include an accelerated, row-based custom placement and routing methodology that enables users to improve productivity and better manage complex design rules.

Cadence introduced several new features that support the 5nm process including stacked gate support, universal poly grid snapping, area-based rule support, asymmetric coloring and voltage-dependent rule support, analog cell support and support for various new devices and design constraints that are part of TSMC’s 5nm technology offering.

Cadence is developing a differentiated advanced-node IP portfolio to support TSMC’s 5nm process, which includes a high-performance memory subsystem, very high-speed SerDes and high-performance analog to meet the demands of HPC, machine learning (ML) and 5G base stations. With the release of TSMC’s 5nm design infrastructure, Cadence and TSMC are actively engaged with customers and enabling next-generation SoC development by addressing the latest IP requirements for evolving application areas.

“TSMC’s 5nm technology offers our customers the industry’s most advanced technology to address the growing demand for computing power driven by AI and 5G,” said Suk Lee, TSMC senior director, Design Infrastructure Management Division. “By collaborating closely with Cadence, we’re enabling customers to effectively differentiate themselves and deliver designs to market faster using our latest technologies.”

“We’re continuing to broaden our collaboration with TSMC to facilitate 5nm FinFET adoption, giving customers access to the latest tools and IP for advanced process design creation,” said Dr. Chin-Chi Teng, senior vice president and general manager of the Digital & Signoff Group at Cadence. “Our R&D team has focused heavily on developing new features and performance improvements so that our digital and signoff and custom/analog tools and IP can be used with complete confidence, enabling customers to achieve first-pass silicon success and deliver end products within aggressive time-to-market schedules.”

Symantec now part of U.S. Department of Defense’s defense industrial base cybersecurity program

Cybersecurity vendor Symantec announced that it has become a member of the United States’ Department of Defense’s (DOD) Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cybersecurity (CS) program.

The DIB CS program is a voluntary cyber threat information-sharing initiative established by the DOD to enhance and supplement DIB participants’ capabilities to mitigate cyber attacks. The program features a collaborative information-sharing environment where members voluntarily report cyber threats as well as information on how to prevent/mitigate those threats.

Symantec is supporting the mission of the DOD against cyber adversaries by working collaboratively to enhance the security posture of the United States. DIB CS industry partners can benefit from Symantec’s array of cyber security capabilities to enable compliance with the mandates of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SP 800-171. 

NIST SP 800-171 establishes a set of security requirements for protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) stored in nonfederal systems and organizations.

Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network is one of the world’s largest threat intelligence networks, composed of threat data from 175 million protected endpoints and 123 million attack sensors worldwide collecting billions of cyber threat telemetry vectors daily.

“This is a prime example of an effective government-industry collaborative partnership. Symantec is proud to work in conjunction with the DOD and its partners to deliver a stronger cyber environment,” said Chris Townsend, Symantec vice president of federal. “The DIB CS program provides an important platform to share threat information and best practices, helping to improve the overall cyber awareness and security posture of all members. Symantec is proud to become a member of this important community.”

OPAQ releases hyperscale security-as-a-service networking offering to simplify digital transformation

Network security cloud company OPAQ announced Monday a new set of offerings that provide up to 15 Gbps of hyperscale security-as-a-service networking to support digital transformation initiatives.

The OPAQ Cloud provides direct Gigabit connectivity to ISP exchanges and comprehensive network security for organizations that require carrier-grade network performance and security for hybrid and multi-cloud environments that span on-premises, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) resources.

OPAQ’s cloud platform enables partners to deliver Fortune 100-grade security-as-a-service on infrastructure purpose-built for security and performance.

With OPAQ, service providers are equipped with a simplified ability to centrally monitor security performance and compliance maturity, generate reports, manage security infrastructure, and enforce policies – all through a single interface. This empowers OPAQ partners to grow revenue and margins, eliminate complexity and costs, and establish a competitive advantage that helps them attract and retain customers.

Based in Northern Virginia, OPAQ is privately held and is funded by Greenspring Associates, Columbia Capital, Harmony Partners and Zero-G Inc.

Virtually every organization faces three interconnected challenges: regulatory compliance, security and network bandwidth/latency. For businesses these days, monthly cloud workloads can reach 20-30 terabytes due to big data processing requirements, which demands peak throughput performance in excess of 2 Gbps.

OPAQ’s hyperscale networking fabric scales from 50 Mbps to 15 Gbps, while providing advanced next-generation firewall-as-a-service and endpoint protection-as-a-service that is fully integrated into the OPAQ Cloud. This enables service providers to meet security, compliance and bandwidth requirements of small and large organizations that are increasingly moving business processes and workloads to cloud environments.

“Companies of all sizes are integrating on-premises data centers with cloud workloads and SaaS applications to accelerate digital transformation projects,” said Ken Ammon, Chief Strategy Officer for OPAQ. “These hybrid or multi-cloud environments create network performance and security challenges which are too complex and expensive to address using traditional on-prem security architectures. The OPAQ Cloud integrates patented hyperscale networking with enterprise-grade security features to provide a secure fabric that seamlessly supports these distributed infrastructure processing requirements.”

Dynatrace delivers end-to-end visibility and AI-powered answers from cloud to mainframe with new Software Intelligence Platform

Dynatrace announced that it has extended its AI-powered platform to include IBM Z support for CICS, IMS and middleware. This gives customers precise information about the performance of digital services across hybrid environments; from modern cloud applications to the mainframe.

Mainframes power 30 billion transactions a day and are used by 71 percent of Fortune 500 companies. However, for many organizations, back-end technology layers create blind spots in their current approach to monitoring. 

This makes it hard to identify, analyze and resolve performance problems, which can endanger key business transactions and impact users. A lack of visibility can also result in runaway MIPS usage costs that can reach into hundreds of thousands of dollars due to inefficiencies and errors that go unseen.

Dynatrace provides software intelligence that helps simplify enterprise cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. With AI and complete automation, the company’s all-in-one platform provides answers, not just data, about the performance of applications, the underlying infrastructure and the experience of all users.

Unlike other solutions that attempt to connect disparate tools, to stitch together a business transaction, Dynatrace provides end-to-end visibility by automatically discovering and mapping every transaction with a single AI-powered solution. This real time visibility, from cloud to the mainframe, gives enterprises a huge competitive advantage – they can eliminate inefficiencies and consequently, innovate at a faster rate.

“While enterprises are moving applications to modern cloud stacks for agility and competitive advantage, these applications often still depend on critical transactions and ‘crown jewels’ customer data residing on IBM Z mainframes. This puts pressure on these resources to perform tasks that were not envisioned when the mainframes were launched,” said Steve Tack, SVP of products at Dynatrace. “Because Dynatrace provides end-to-end hybrid visibility, customers can optimize new services, catch performance degradations before user impact, and understand exactly who has been impacted by an incident. This enables customers to confidently innovate applications that leverage data from mainframes to increase revenue, build brand loyalty, and create competitive advantage.”

Mercury Systems to provide Intel Select Solution for hardened security with Lockheed Martin

Mercury Systems announced that it will offer an Intel Select Solution for Hardened Security with Lockheed Martin. Designed to help defense and aerospace customers secure mission-critical data, the solution will provide hardened, full stack security that delivers ideal performance which sets new standards of affordability for secure and rugged tactical edge computing.

The U.S.-designed solution will be manufactured and tested in Mercury’s Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA)-accredited facilities and is expected to be delivered to the market in mid-2019.

“Mercury has over thirty years of expertise in building secure rackmount, embedded and custom Intel commercial off-the-shelf solutions for deployment into ground, surface, subsurface and airborne environments,” said Scott Orton, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury’s Trusted Mission Solutions group. “Our long-standing partnership with Intel enables us to provide high-performance, sophisticated platforms that meet or exceed the mission requirements of Department of Defense end-customers and industry-leading prime contractors, such as Lockheed Martin.”

Mercury also announced the EnsembleSeries HDS6605 blade server, the embedded computing powerful, general-purpose processing 6U OpenVPX blade server with hardware-enabled support for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Powered by second generation Intel Xeon scalable processors, HDS6605 blade servers feature the same cooling, packaging and 100 Gbps in-system switch fabric interconnect technologies found in earlier proven generations of Mercury blades based on Intel Xeon processors. These open systems-compliant technologies have a technology readiness level of nine (TRL-9), making HDS6605 blades well-suited to rugged defense applications and upgrades that require the utmost in processing capability.

HDS6605 blade servers are highly optimized for AI and other extreme compute-intensive general processing workloads typically associated with sensor fusion, complex C4I and deep-learning applications.

Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature Intel Deep Learning Boost, which extends Intel Advanced Vector Extensions-512 (Intel AVX-512) to accelerate inference applications like speech recognition, image recognition, language translation, object detection, and more.

Its new set of embedded accelerators (Vector Neural Network Instructions, or VNNIs) speed up dense computations characteristic of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and deep neural networks (DNNs), delivering up to a 14 times improvement in inference performance compared to the first-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor launched in July 2017. Along with increased scalability via ultrapath interconnect (UPI) , each blade provides up to 22 cores from a single 1.9GHz device, delivering an industry-topping 2.6 TFLOPS of general-purpose processing power.

Mercury also announced the start of customer engagements for its second generation of the TRRUST-Stor VPX RT line of radiation-tolerant solid state drives (SSD) featuring up to 940GB user capacity in a 6U SpaceVPX form factor.

The new device delivers enhanced versatility with improved error correction code (ECC) and both Serial RapidIO and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) host interfaces. As the first space-qualified storage devices leveraging the SpaceVPX standard for agile interoperability, the TRRUST-Stor VPX RT family enables accelerated system design directly addressing the growing demand for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and mission critical systems operating in radiation-intense environments.

In terrestrial environments, the NAND flash memory devices used in a traditional SSD device are prone to data corruption without the use of ECC. In radiation-exposed environments, data corruption is vastly accelerated due to the occurrence of single-event effects (SEE) and total ionizing dose (TID) degradation which negatively impact the functionality of the NAND flash memory used in the device.

To counter these damaging effects, Mercury has improved the ECC performance of the original 3U TRRUST-Stor VPX RT device. With 30 percent more error corrections built-in, the company’s new 6U device integrates high-reliability defect mitigation thereby enabling normal read and write operations in the presence of harmful ionizing radiation. Additionally, the new SSD features redundant NAND flash to further improve long-term reliability and data integrity.