Intel completes sale of its smartphone modem business to iPhone maker Apple

Intel announced on Monday that it has completed the sale of the majority of its smartphone modem business to Apple. This transaction, valued at US$1 billion, was announced in July. 

As previously disclosed, this transaction enables Intel to focus on developing technology for 5G networks while retaining the option to develop modems for non-smartphone applications, such as PCs, internet of things devices and autonomous vehicles.

Intel and Apple have signed an agreement for Apple to acquire the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business. Approximately 2,200 Intel employees will join Apple, along with intellectual property, equipment and leases. 

Combining the acquired patents for current and future wireless technology with Apple’s existing portfolio, Apple will hold over 17,000 wireless technology patents, ranging from protocols for cellular standards to modem architecture and modem operation. 

Intel will retain the option to develop modems for non-smartphone applications, such as PCs, internet of things devices and autonomous vehicles.

ATP A600Si/A600Sc SATA SSDs deliver MCU design for enhanced power management and PLP capabilities

ATP Electronics unveiled Tuesday its next-generation A600Si and A600Sc Serial ATA solid state drives (SATA SSDs) featuring a completely new design of the power loss protection (PLP) array, which utilizes a new power management IC (PMIC) and new firmware-programmable MCU (microcontroller unit). 

Integrated into its latest PLP technology, ATP PowerProtector 4, the new MCU design allows the PLP array to perform intelligently in various temperatures, power glitches and charge states.

ATP SATA SSDs with the new PowerProtector 4 MCU-based design provide enhanced device protection that suppresses power-up inrush current according to customer request and input over-voltage protection to prevent damage to the SSD circuitry. It delivers improved data integrity using input power noise de-glitch to prevent incorrect cache flushing caused by false triggers such as noisy or unstable host input voltage, and under-charge/over-charge protection for hold-up power capacitors.

It also provides fast power on/off control that cuts time required from power-off to re-power on the SSD;  precise control of reset signal generation and power up/down sequences prevents potential issues in the power up/down of the SSD; and industrial operating temperature support ensures reliable operation in extreme environments from ‑40°C to 85°C. 

As components perform and react differently in severely cold or hot scenarios, ATP PowerProtector 4 ensures reliable PLP capacitance in all states of cold start, hot temperature workload, and cross temperature.

With this line of SSDs, users get access to RAID support that ensures redundancy and fault tolerance to prevent data loss in the event of a drive failure; end-to-end data protection prevents unauthorized access to data while it is being transferred from one storage device to another; and customization options, as the new MCU-based design allows PLP capabilities to be tailor-fitted according to unique customer requirements, application-specific needs, or use cases.

"Superior power loss protection is essential in any embedded/industrial application. But not all PLPs are equal," said Marco Mezger, ATP vice president of global marketing. "By implementing this type of MCU design, we are able to showcase our engineering expertise and nearly 30-year experience in the design and manufacture of storage devices for wide temperature environments, particularly for compact form factors in embedded/industrial applications. We continue to blaze the trail, as we were also the first to design and release smaller form factor SSDs such as eUSB and M.2 2242 with an onboard PLP array."

The next-generation ATP SATA SSDs with the new MCU-based design include mSATA, 2.5-inch SSDs and M.2 2242/2280 modules. Available with I-Temp (A600Si) and C-Temp (A600Sc) support, the SSDs come in the following capacities — M.2 2280: 120 to 960 GB; M.2 2242 and mSATA: 120 to 480 GB; 2.5": 120 GB to 1.92 TB.

Apptio introduces Insights & Action Plans to automatically discovery cost optimization opportunities

Apptio Inc. has introduced "Insights & Action Plans," which will be available throughout Apptio's cost analytics applications, starting with cost transparency and IT financial management, and provides users with intelligent alerts designed to highlight opportunities for cost savings, increased productivity, risk reduction, and improved data quality.  

The scale of technology spending in most modern enterprise organizations has grown at a rate that is nearly impossible to manage manually. The average enterprise organization spends hundreds of millions of dollars on technology, often managed in spreadsheets alone. 

This lack of a business management system can lead to pervasive overspending, waste, and no discernible business value across hundreds of vendors, cloud services, infrastructure, labor and more. 

To address this complexity, Apptio is launching Insights & Action Plans to automate the identification and delivery of cost saving insights to users.    

Insights & Action Plans users will receive automated notifications of spend overages, hidden spending, costs associated with closed projects, poor forecast accuracy and much more. This solution works by applying machine learning and a system of rules to users' financial, operational, and vendor data, analyzing anomalies and identifying areas of redundancy. 

Apptio then alerts users to these insights and tracks and manages progress made against them through Action Plans. The first set of insights launching today was selected based on input and validation from hundreds of Apptio customers and represent the highest areas of risk for overspending.

"Today's launch represents one of the most important advancements to Apptio's technology platform since our founding," said Sunny Gupta, Apptio CEO. "More than a year in the making, our vision is to eliminate the need for our customers to 'insight hunt' within their own data, one of the most pervasive challenges with modern business intelligence and analytics platforms."  

After each insight is discovered, users have the option to track and manage progress through dedicated Action Plans. These plans start by assigning work to an insight owner, correlating the associated data with each insight, and automatically updating the plan once action is taken. These Action Plans track the history of each insight and project future efficacy. 

"We've heard from customers who spend a significant amount of time every month attempting to achieve this level of awareness and understanding using spreadsheets or paying a premium for specialized consultants to conduct the work on their behalf," said Scott Chancellor, Apptio chief product officer. "Our customers want timely and actionable insights into their IT investments without that level of overhead—we've unlocked this today with Insights & Action Plans."

Additional insights will be added quarterly, examples include notification of unused SaaS licenses, non-critical applications using Tier 1 storage, end of life on mission-critical assets, new development work on retired applications and physical serves running non-production workloads.

Insights & Action Plans and Action Plans are currently in beta and will be generally available in early next year.

SwiftStack 7 provides ultra-scale performance and capacity for data storage and management from edge to core to cloud

SwiftStack announced Tuesday SwiftStack 7 with extensive enhancements to its data platform for performance, data utilization, and services at ultra-scale. The update enables demanding workloads such as advanced machine learning, media analytics, and scientific research, in environments like autonomous vehicle development, ingest and processing of 4K/8K video, and other compute-intensive processes.

SwiftStack 7 drives previously unseen throughput performance at massive multi-petabyte scale and can handle thousands of simultaneous workers accessing data. Independent third-party testing on similar hardware and workloads validates SwiftStack 7 is multiple times faster than competitors, realizing extremely high production throughput speeds at over 100GB per second. The simple, open architecture allows linear scaling of both performance and capacity.

ProxyFS Edge extends SwiftStack’s file services to be distributed at the edge, close to the application, for high-throughput, data-intensive use cases. The containerized ProxyFS agent at the edge provides caching capabilities to minimize latency, while providing massive throughput to large datasets stored at the core. ProxyFS Edge is an extension of the existing ProxyFS clustered file system that allows for file and object API access to the same data sets.

The newest component of SwiftStack 1space, the 1space File Connector, brings existing enterprise file data into the cloud namespace so cloud-native applications can access data via S3 or Swift object APIs without complex migration. 

The containerized 1space File Connector interacts with network-attached storage (NAS) and can scale out to provided high-performance access of files to modern applications. This allows businesses and organizations to modernize their workflows incrementally and apply 1space data placement and protection policies (copy, move, tier) to file data when needed.

SwiftStack PRO (Professional Remote Operations) is an optional service developed from best practices employed by hundreds of large-scale customers, includes advanced professional service- and software-based capabilities to allow 24x7 remote management and monitoring of SwiftStack production clusters. SwiftStack PRO ensures teams of any size can keep a highly utilized data storage and management platform optimized for demanding uses.

SwiftStack 7’s capabilities are essential for deep learning at ultra-scale. This customer-proven architecture stack satisfies the storage performance needed by GPU compute complexes and modern AI frameworks accessing and processing hundreds of petabytes of data. SwiftStack’s architecture delivers elasticity from edge to core to cloud, data immutability for long-term referenceability, and viable TCO. 

“Data scientists are constrained by inherited infrastructure, particularly in performance, scalability, cost, metadata enrichment, workflow integration, and portability to accommodate data at the edge, core, and cloud,” said George Crump, Chief Steward at Storage Switzerland. “Large enterprise customers need to architect a data pipeline and framework to deliver business outcomes and intelligence, and SwiftStack’s software is a strategic component supporting these modern applications.”

“Right now, data is changing the world, applications can exist anywhere from the edge to the core data center to the cloud, and data management and control has been decoupled from core infrastructure,” said Joe Arnold, SwiftStack founder and chief product officer. “Our customers are pushing the boundaries in demanding environments, such as deep learning, and SwiftStack 7 is the foundation for delivering performance, capacity, and services at scale.”

SwiftStack 7 will be released next month, containing the ultra-scale performance enhancements and the 1space File Connector. ProxyFS Edge is currently in beta and will be generally available in early 2020. SwiftStack PRO and the SwiftStack AI Architecture are available immediately.