Masimo secures FDA clearance for neonatal RD SET Pulse Oximetry sensors with improved accuracy specifications

Masimo announced that RD SET sensors with Masimo Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion SET pulse oximetry have received FDA clearance for improved oxygen saturation (SpO2) accuracy specifications for neonatal patients (< 3 kg). 

The updated RD SET sensors’ SpO2 accuracy specifications have improved significantly, from 3 percent to 1.5 percent ARMS (at 1 standard deviation), in conditions of motion and no motion, providing clinicians with even greater confidence when monitoring the oxygenation status of neonates. With this clearance, the improved performance specifications, which were incorporated into RD SET sensors for patients > 3 kg in 2018, are now available to all patient populations in the United States.

Masimo’s SET pulse oximetry has been shown in more than 100 independent and objective studies to outperform other pulse oximetry technologies – even before the revisions that achieved the improved accuracy specifications – providing clinicians with increased sensitivity and specificity to help them make critical patient care decisions. 

Crucially for newborn health, SET has been shown to help clinicians reduce severe retinopathy of prematurity in neonates3 and in multiple studies, including the largest critical congenital heart disease (CCHD) study to date, to improve CCHD screening in newborns.

In addition to offering improved accuracy, RD SET sensors are designed to enhance patient comfort, optimize clinician workflows, and help hospitals meet green initiatives. 

The sensors are lightweight and have a flat, soft cable with smooth edges, so that they lie comfortably on a patient’s hand or foot. In particular, RD SET NeoPt sensors with Velaid SofTouch use little to no adhesive, facilitating quick but gentle application and repositioning on the fragile skin of newborns and pre-term babies. 

RD SET sensors also feature an intuitive sensor-to-cable connection, while their lightweight design results in up to 84 percent less waste and their sleek, recyclable packaging reduces storage and shipping space.

“We’re delighted to announce the latest result of our continued innovation in our foundational SET pulse oximetry. We have long been dedicated to helping improve the lives of neonatal, infant, and pediatric patients, and this clearance significantly furthers that mission,” said Joe Kiani, founder and CEO of Masimo. “Thanks to the brilliance and dedication of our engineers and the continuing support of our customers, we’ve been able to once again raise the standard for pulse oximetry performance. Even though no one has been able to create pulse oximetry that outperforms SET, we have not allowed that to stop us from continuing our pursuit of perfecting pulse oximetry.”

Western Digital begins sampling of its 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR hard disk drives, to help scale data centers for zettabyte age

Western Digital announces that it has started shipping its high-capacity HDD samples to enterprise OEMs and hyperscale customers worldwide, so that users can efficiently scale their data centers for the zettabyte era.

The 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs, first previewed in June 2019, and announced in September 2019, feature its initial commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology on a nine-disk platform, enabling customers to more efficiently provision and scale their data center environments with improved total cost of ownership.

Optimized to deliver improved capacity and low TCO, the Ultrastar DC HC600 series provides unprecedented capacity capability by harnessing two core complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and host-managed SMR (HM-SMR). These field-proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficiency, quality and reliable performance required by cloud and hyperscale data centers. 

Unlike CMR drives, HM-SMR drives are not drop-in replacements for traditional drives and require system software modifications that take advantage of the new command sets to ensure data is written sequentially to the drive. This software investment helps yield cost-efficient storage solutions.

With zettabyte-scale data growth, the need for higher-capacity data storage across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads can be reliably met only with high capacity enterprise HDDs. 

The capacities of Western Digital’s Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HelioSeal HDDs enable customers to deploy up to 22 percent fewer racks and reduce their TCO by up to 11 percent, along with the corresponding reductions in power consumption, cooling costs, and data center infrastructure needs when compared with 14TB CMR HDDs.

Western Digital achieves high areal density performance in these drives through the innovative use of energy-assisted magnetic recording. Together with the company’s HelioSeal and SMR technologies, triple-stage micro actuation and 9-disk platform, the energy-assisted recording technology provides an integrated solution, resulting in the dramatic gain in drive capacities.

“The market outlook for capacity-optimized enterprise HDDs remains very positive as IDC expects petabytes shipped to hyperscale cloud data centers and for OEM storage systems and servers to grow at a combined compound annual growth rate of 28 percent through 2023,” said Ed Burns, Research Director, HDD and Storage Technologies at IDC. “Western Digital’s new 20TB and 18TB HDDs should make a compelling case for customers to transition to higher capacity points as they seek greater storage and energy efficiencies in the near-term while building more cost-effective and scalable infrastructures for the future.”

“Delivering samples of our Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HDDs marks a significant milestone for Western Digital—demonstrating our enduring commitment to the open SMR-based ecosystem, as well as our strong track record of innovation to provide great value for our customers,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s Data Center Business Unit. “These new HDDs deliver unsurpassed capacity and are our first to leverage energy-assisted magnetic recording technology, enabling new levels of data center efficiency and driving value creation from data at scale.”

Western Digital is now sampling the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD and the 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD, with qualification and volume shipments expected in the first half of next year.

Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

Infortrend incorporates DaVinci Resolve project server into its scale-out shared storage offering

Infortrend Technology releases on Tuesday its highly scalable shared storage EonStor CS that supports NLE software, such as DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro to facilitate collaborative editing of 4K and above ultra-high resolution videos. EonStor CS supports over 100 GB/s performance and 100 PB capacity, making it an ideal storage solution for large-scale post-production studios with more than ten workstations. 

In a traditional architecture, the database project server, which contains reels, edited files and timeline, is deployed on a dedicated workstation and connects to other workstations in a peer-to-peer network for editors, colorists, and animators to work together on the same project. Any single point of failure, however, will pose a threat to the project. 

In light of this issue, Infortrend integrates DaVinci Resolve Project Server into the shared media storage and provides RAID protection to guarantee high data availability. The simplified network architecture also makes deployment and management easier for video professionals to focus more on content production.

EonStor CS is a scale-out shared storage solution that allows enterprises to address the sheer volume of data via its scalable capacity and linear-increasing performance. The scalability through a scale-out expansion offers an easier and more cost-effective way of managing growing data in the agile enterprises while reducing consequent performance bottlenecks. 

EonStor CS also improves data utilization and simplifies data management by integrating data from all nodes into one cluster system. The superior performance and scalability make CS suitable for a wide range of data-intensive industries and applications such as media and entertainment (M&E), high-performance computing (HPC), video surveillance, file sharing and backup. 

With EonStor CS, enterprises gain speedy process for storage expansion and data migration. EonStor CS can keep up as the business grows, making it the optimized data storage and management solution.

Moreover, the shared media storage comes with user-friendly management software that is also designed to simplify the deployment. The EonOne software offers two accounts to separate different management roles. One account is for M&E User Administrator, who uses EonOne to set up user accounts and storage quota. The other account is for System Administrator, who is in charge of advanced configurations and maintenance.

In addition, Infortrend develops a client-based utility EonView, which is installed on Windows and macOS workstations to automatically detect the connected storage system and mount the assigned file folder according to the user credentials. This smart utility simplifies the complexities of storage system deployment and network setup, especially for video professionals who are not familiar with IT setting.  

“Infortrend offers comprehensive storage solutions for today’s M&E, no matter the business scale,” said Thomas Kao, senior director of Product Planning. “Besides its highly scalable performance and capacity for large workgroups to fulfill simultaneous workflows, CS supports high density 4U 60-bay form factor to deliver optimized size for massive data storage requirements. With the launch of CS, we aim to serve M&E customers with smarter, easier, and more flexible solutions,” 

VirtualWisdom 6.3 enhances infrastructure capacity planning to deepen visibility, simplify capacity management, control costs

Virtana introduced latest version of VirtualWisdom, its hybrid IT infrastructure management and AIOps platform for mission-critical workloads. VirtualWisdom 6.3 is the initial product launch since Virtana’s rebrand in October, and continues the company’s push into capacity management with global storage array analytics, an expanded range of integrations, and new portable reports and dashboards.

Mission-critical hybrid applications combine resources in public clouds, with physical or virtual resources residing in private data centers. For these crucially important workloads, operating at web-scale, managing cost, performance, and capacity has never been more complex or important. 

To gain the insights and operational control that deliver efficient, cost-effective operation, organizations need real-time visibility, automated discovery, AI-powered analytics, and immediate access to best-practice solutions that proactively solve infrastructure-related performance and capacity issues for critical applications.

The VirtualWisdom release features the new Capacity Auditor, a global storage array analytic that offers a unique approach to global capacity management designed to provide app-centric insights and intelligence across hybrid infrastructure and multi-vendor data storage environments. With Capacity Auditor, organizations have a broad view of storage usage and trends across all storage arrays, applications, locations, physical storage assets, and effective capacity.

The VirtualWisdom 6.3 release includes support for Oracle’s Solaris, Red Hat KVM, and Pure Storage solutions that provide all the power of the VirtualWisdom platform to applications using infrastructure within these environments, and management of infrastructure elements that live within them. It also enhances VirtualWisdom’s continuous real-time infrastructure discovery with simple, intuitive dashboards and reports for servers, storage, and networks. Enabling immediate insights into critical relationships between infrastructure elements, visibility into vital statistics, and the capability to automatically apply customizable information sets for identification and cost.

The offering empowers users to share collective insights, dashboards and reports across the VirtualWisdom community. Customers and partners can easily exchange best-practice monitoring reports and visualizations unique to specific environments and applications. Its hybrid, real-time application views make it easy to visualize hybrid applications that cross multiple technology boundaries in one view – including applications that span multiple clouds (AWS, Azure), virtual environments (VMware, KVM, HyperV, PowerVM) as well as physical systems.

VirtualWisdom provides real-time, data-driven lifecycle recommendations to assure performance, speed problem resolution, automate workload optimization, free-up capacity, and ensure resource availability. AI-powered capacity forecasting helps organizations avoid capacity-driven problems before they can happen, and AI-powered workload optimization keeps applications operating within SLAs.

“To provide organizations with a competitive advantage, IT needs to use and manage their resources efficiently. IT professionals need tools to enable them to quickly resolve problems, even as the infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex. They also need to automate as many of the mundane IT tasks as possible,” said George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. “Powered by AI/ML capabilities, VirtualWisdom offers recommendations and automated problem resolution, providing customers with deep infrastructure visibility.”

“The Virtana VirtualWisdom platform has been a fundamental enabler of our mission-critical manufacturing technology solutions and services for many years now,” said Todd Weeks, Plex Systems Global VP of Cloud Operations. “Our ability to offer our customers nearly 100% business continuity in a highly efficient cloud infrastructure relies on the real-time infrastructure visibility and AI-powered analytics that are unique to the VirtualWisdom platform.”

“Digital transformation is driving exponential data growth as today’s enterprises must have global visibility into all storage resources to continuously meet these ever-growing demands. Point solutions to managing data sets across multiple vendor storage environments result in highly fragmented, manual and wasteful practices and resources – and can put entire applications at risk,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of Products at Virtana. “With application aware, predictive insight into the underlying digital infrastructure, VirtualWisdom offers the industry’s first and only global infrastructure capacity auditor and forecaster that can providing real-time visibility into mission-critical digital workload infrastructure.”

Toshiba advances next generation ADAS that uses Cypress Semper fail-safe storage

Cypress Semiconductor announced Wednesday that Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation has selected Cypress’ Semper NOR Flash for its next-generation Visconti line of automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). 

Architected with an embedded Arm Cortex-M0 processing core, the Semper family is purpose-built for demanding automotive environments where high-density and functional safety compliance are required. The Toshiba Visconti ADAS SoC is specifically targeted for key automobile makers working toward Autonomous Driving level 2.

The Cypress Semper NOR Flash family leads the industry in Functional Safety compliance and was the first flash to be designed specifically to meet the ISO26262 automotive functional safety standard, reaching ASIL-B compliancy. 

Semper NOR Flash also supports automotive temperatures up to +125°C (AEC-Q100 Grade 1) and meets the density and performance requirements for storage in ADAS applications through Autonomous Driving level 5.

“For the Toshiba Visconti5 ADAS SoC, it is critical that the integrated components selected for the design are field-proven, built to the highest standards of safety and reliability, and will have the endurance required for advanced ADAS applications,” said Takeshi Sugahara, Technology Executive of Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. “Cypress’ fail-safe storage solutions are a key to enable our Visconti5 platform to exceed our customers’ expectations and requirements for next-generation automotive designs.”

“Cypress is proud of its success in providing the world’s most advanced and reliable fail-safe storage products with integrated compute core and functional safety for automotive applications,” said Amr El-Ashmawi, vice president of marketing, Memory Products Division at Cypress. “As the world’s number one market share provider of automotive-grade flash, we look forward to continuing our collaborative work with Toshiba for delivering next-generation ADAS systems in this growing segment of the automotive market.”

Everspin achieves data center OEM qualification of its 1Gb STT-MRAM offering; announces production shipments

Everspin Technologies announced on Wednesday that it has secured the qualification notice from a major server OEM of its 1-Gigabit (Gb) Spin-transfer Torque Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (STT-MRAM) device. This qualification notice affirms the quality, performance and specifications of the 1Gb device and enables its use in the production of products for this customer. 

The STT-MRAM provides a significant reduction in switching energy compared to Toggle MRAM, and is highly scalable, enabling higher density memory products. Everspin’s third generation of MRAM technology uses a Perpendicular MTJ, and has developed materials and Perpendicular MTJ stack designs with high perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, which provides long data retention, small cell size, greater density, high endurance and low power.

The 1Gb is the newest generation of STT-MRAM, utilizing ST-DDR4 which is a JEDEC-like DDR4 interface with some modifications needed to take advantage of the persistence from MRAM technology. These products perform like a persistent DRAM but with no refresh required. Additional products are planned which will utilize high speed serial interfaces for a range of embedded applications.

Earlier this summer, Everspin announced pilot manufacturing of its 28 nm 1Gb device and is now qualified to make production shipments to its first qualifying customer. 

No other manufacturer has achieved production of any discrete STT-MRAM device, a further testament to Everspin’s position in the field having achieved production of its 256Mb STT-MRAM in 2017. To date, Everspin has produced more than 120 million units of its Toggle and STT-MRAM devices.

Everspin’s STT-MRAM devices allow enterprise infrastructure and data center providers to increase the reliability and performance of systems where low latency data persistence is critical. This is achieved by delivering protection against power loss and allowing storage OEMs to significantly improve quality of service of their products. 

Similar benefits can also be achieved using the 1Gb STT-MRAM device as a persistent data write buffer in storage and fabric accelerators, computational storage, and other applications.

The data center OEM name is not being disclosed as they have not yet announced their end product(s).

“We continue to make great strides in the commercialization of MRAM across many market segments, including the data center,” said Kevin Conley, president and CEO of Everspin. “It is very rewarding to see the completion of this very important customer milestone with our 1Gb STT-MRAM, along with the collaboration that has taken place with our customers and our ecosystem partners.”