Looking ahead to 2020, Rackspace CTO Joel Friedman offers his predictions

As the New Year 2020 begins, hybrid and multi-cloud will continue to gain traction, as will software as a service (SaaS). Security remains a tough nut to crack, and edge computing will gain ground, but Joel Friedman, Rackspace CTO, predicts more modestly than the current hype may suggest.

PREDICTION 1: HYBRID/MULTI-CLOUD REMAINS ASCENDANT

Smart organizations have locked onto the benefits of running apps and data in the places that make the most sense, whether that’s public or private cloud, colocation or, most commonly, a bespoke combination of these that can evolve as business needs and resources dictate. However, the complexity of managing multiple clouds across the dimensions of cost, security, governance, identity and DevOps patterns will continue to grow in 2020.

This complexity is related to the forced reliance upon a multitude of platforms, the rate of technological change, disruptions to traditional service delivery models and a real shortage of skill sets required to bring it all together. Due to these factors, it is likely that multi-cloud solutions will prevail, while the search for qualified external help will intensify.

Finding external help may prove difficult, as not only will managed service providers need to maintain a multi- or hybrid cloud instance, but internal and external vendors will need to work together to manage a multitude of issues around cost governance, security and tagging, to name a few. Fortunately, 451 Research has found these growing pains can be alleviated with clear communication and flexibility on each partner’s part.

PREDICTION 2: SAAS = PROBLEM SOLVED

On top of infrastructure, one of the cloud strategies I hear on repeat when working with customers is that “cloud first” starts with SaaS. They don’t want to reinvent the (inferior) wheel by developing applications for ‘solved’ problems. Mature SaaS offerings are a culmination of many iterations of customer mandated features, user experience analysis, and just as important, industry best practices around process workflows.

In many cases, organizations choosing to fit their internal process to best match their SaaS vendor’s implementation – as opposed to always opting for customizing the platform to suit legacy workflows. Furthermore, SaaS has a compounding effect with data; once data is in the system, other ecosystem players can offer turn-key integration and add-on services, further enhancing the value proposition of SaaS. 

While this isn’t necessarily a new trend, Friedman predicts this will be the norm in 2020 and expects to see more and more niche, and vertically-focused applications developing a SaaS model.

PREDICTION 3: SECURITY REMAINS A STRUGGLE

When it comes to security, many organizations remain burdened with legacy systems riddled with technical debt and corresponding security vulnerabilities. They understand the need to harness cloud-compatible security frameworks, operating models and tools to operate securely in cloud-native environments, but it can be slow and rough going.

Most industries simply have not reached the place where mature cloud security practices are being implemented, and this creates fertile ground for breaches. Too many are still attempting to apply traditional security controls and methodologies to cloud-native environments and deployments. 

This generally does not work well; not only is the security implementation likely to be ill fit, it also creates drag on the organization’s desired benefits of agility. This sometimes leads to fragmentation, where business units go around central security and implement on their own shadow security. The risks of this should be obvious.

In 2020, Friedman thinks that the cloud continues to present some growing pains to even the most digital-native and forward-thinking organizations. These organizations understand how the cloud can aid their business in moving fast, but they don’t yet have the maturity to implement real-time or just-in-time posture management and ‘least privilege’ protocols in the ephemeral, complex and constantly changing world of multi-cloud. 

While security teams straddle the old world of insecure legacy applications and platforms (those which cannot or should not be modernized), and the relative newness of cloud operating models, I unfortunately expect to see the breach headlines continue in 2020 along with all of the free credit monitoring can handle.

Even when the security teams agree in concept that it’s possible to be more secure in the cloud, many do not have cloud compatible security frameworks, operating models and tools to aid the business in operating in cloud-native environments securely.

PREDICTION 4: CLOUD CONTROL PLANE WILL BECOME THE NORM

There has been a trend over the past few years in which the management plane has been reversing from the datacenter to the cloud. For early cloud adopters, the datacenter was still the central control point. Organizations burst into the cloud or had back-end projects with no internet accessibility. As cloud grew in popularity, more and more greenfield projects became cloud-native.

Granted, many still integrate with on-premises or hosted private clouds for identity, business intelligence or other data enrichment requirements, but the hyperscalers have now moved past denying that hybrid cloud is real (in attempts to capture all workloads), and pivoted their strategy to capture those datacenter workloads where they stand and bring them into their ecosystem. 

This includes Snowball Edge, AWS RDS of VMware, Azure Stack/Azure Arc and Google Anthos. Expect to see more such services in 2020. And why shouldn’t we? Cloud providers have proven their effectiveness of securely operating at scale, and API-enabling everything.

PREDICTION 5: EDGE WILL GAIN MODERATE GROUND

Edge computing is a new frontier — no player is currently dominating this space, as it is a naturally fragmented market. When choosing locations over platforms to address local markets, data sovereignty, and other use case specific needs, I believe organizations may want to align in a technology-neutral and consistent manner. And based on the trends over the past year, containers and serverless seem like a natural beneficiary for edge.

As Kubernetes dominates in the container orchestration arena, serverless is another story in which, as of yet, there are no victors. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform all have their own flavors of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), which are embedded within their respective cloud ecosystems. Will OpenFaaS with kNative gain some ground based on open standards, addressing the often spoken lock-in avoidance and mobility potential? We shall see. 

Either way, Friedman predicts that 2020 will see lots of innovation and exploration in the edge space, but he suspects this is the year of gaining momentum and the floodgates won’t open until 2021.

Greenliant SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC industrial enterprise SSDs deliver SLC data storage that provide ultra high endurance

Greenliant is currently sampling its SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series solid state drives (SSDs) for primary storage applications that require ultra high endurance under extreme temperature conditions. 

Designed with Greenliant’s EnduroSLC technology, SATA 2.5-inch Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs provide ultra robust data retention and ultra high system-level lifetime endurance of 30 drive writes per day (DWPD) for 5 years. EnduroSLC is a proprietary 3D NAND management technology that delivers high reliability applications requiring superior data retention and endurance in extreme temperature, high stress environments. 

With advanced hardware ECC capabilities and NAND flash management algorithms, EnduroSLC Technology significantly extends the write endurance of 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) SSDs reaching industry leading 250K+ program-erase (P/E) cycles. EnduroSLC enabled products meet robust data retention requirements under complex temperature conditions and support wide cross-temperature ranges between data programming and reading. Further, due to its substantially lower bit error rate, an EnduroSLC SSD provides better consistency in read/write performance throughout product lifetime. 

The SATA 2.5-inch EnduroSLC industrial enterprise SSDs with 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) NAND include ultra high endurance that reaches 30 DWPD for five years; high capacity offered from 800 gigabytes to 1.92 terabytes; on-chip adaptive RAID that improves SSD reliability; power interrupt data protection that helps prevent data corruption during power failures; industrial temperature that operates between -40 and +85 degrees Celsius; and data security supports AES 256-bit encryption and crypto erase.

By leveraging over 25 years of solid state storage design expertise, Greenliant is dedicated to developing durable, reliable and secure storage solutions for embedded systems and enterprise data centers. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with product development centers in Santa Clara, Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Hsinchu.

“Greenliant has brought its SLC NAND expertise to the enterprise with its new line of EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs,” said Xuanhui Li, vice president of business development for datacenter products, Greenliant. “With high reliability and outstanding quality of service, Greenliant’s industrial enterprise storage products are ideal for mission critical, I/O intensive applications in aerospace, defense, transportation, energy and power, communications and industrial control.”

The SATA 2.5-inch Industrial Enterprise EX Series expands the EnduroSLC product family, which also includes SATA M.2 2242/2280, mSATA, SATA 2.5-inch and CFast ArmourDrive, and SATA 6Gb/s NANDrive and 100-ball/153-ball eMMC NANDrive ball grid array (BGA) SSDs.

Greenliant is sampling its new G3200 Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs to customers now, and expects to start shipping in volume production by end of this year. Greenliant is also shipping its 3-bit-per-cell (3D TLC NAND) G3100 Enterprise PX Series SSDs in capacities from 480 GB to 3.84 TB. 

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.”

Rambus completes acquisition of Verimatrix silicon IP, secure protocols and provisioning business

Rambus Inc. announced on Monday that the company has completed acquisition of the silicon IP, secure protocols and provisioning business from Verimatrix, formerly Inside Secure, for US$45 million at closing, and up to an additional $20 million, subject to certain revenue targets for the transferred business for the calendar year 2020. 

The combined portfolio of products, including the secure silicon IP and provisioning solutions from both companies, creates the most comprehensive silicon-proven security IP portfolio in the industry.

“This acquisition is a natural fit for the company in line with our areas of focus in semiconductor,” said Luc Seraphin, president and CEO of Rambus. “The addition of this business from Verimatrix augments our portfolio of mission-critical embedded security products and expands our offerings for data center, AI, networking and automotive.”

Although this transaction will not materially impact 2019 financial results due to the timing of close and acquisition accounting, Rambus expects this acquisition to be accretive in 2020.

Supermicro debuts server class edge systems for open 5G radio access network (RAN) offerings

Supermicro Computer announced new solutions for 5G cell tower deployments leveraging fully-configurable SuperServers based on second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, O-RAN compliant partner software, and ability to operate in harsh environments. These capabilities accelerate the mobile network evolution from proprietary hardware/software to open source software and disaggregated hardware for 5G installations. 

Supermicro's two new systems are its first servers for 5G, the Intelligent Edge, and other embedded applications to be based on second generation Intel Xeon processors. 

The E403-9P-FN2T is built for demanding environments and includes three PCI-E slots for GPU and FPGA accelerator cards. The compact 1U 1019P-FHN2T is ideal for controlled environments such as micro data centers and re-purposed central office locations and features two full-height full-length PCI-E slots.

With these expansion slots, Supermicro can provide real-time Edge AI inferencing via GPU cards, and accelerate 5G RAN software and open-standard site-to-site communication using the Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000. These new servers complement Supermicro's Xeon D-based 1019D and E403 models. 

Supermicro is developing IP65-rated protective enclosures to meet the needs of outdoor environments such as cell towers and microcell sites.

Supermicro is a market leader in delivering high-performance, power-efficient open hardware server platforms extending the data center level remote management to edge computing platforms, and has deep experience with virtualization and containers, including software such as Kubernetes and VMware. 

The 5G architecture is based on open hardware platforms connected by standardized interfaces, and virtualized network elements. Supermicro joined the O-RAN Alliance to help build a cloud-native, open 5G RAN architecture, and these solutions will concurrently support 4G as networks transition to 5G.

The 5G core network has moved to a virtualized model, which runs on data center hardware where Supermicro's Resource-Saving Architecture provides computing platforms such as the high-performance multi-node BigTwin and the high-density SuperBlade and MicroBlade products. These systems leverage shared cooling and efficient power, and feature a disaggregated structure to enable the latest upgrades without the wasteful rip-and-replace of entire server racks.

Intel releases tiny EMIB that assist chips to ‘talk’ with each other

Intel unveiled its Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIBs) chips that speed the flow of data inside nearly 1 million laptops and field programmable gate array devices worldwide. That number will soon soar and include more products as EMIB technology enters the mainstream. 

EMIB is a cost-effective approach to in-package high density interconnect of heterogeneous chips. It delivers a complex multi-layered sliver of silicon no bigger than a grain of rice, and lets chips fling enormous quantities of data back and forth among adjoining chips at blinding speeds: several gigabytes per second.

The industry refers to this application as 2.5D package integration. Instead of using a large silicon interposer typically found in other 2.5D approaches, EMIB uses a very small bridge die, with multiple routing layers. This bridge die is embedded as part of the substrate fabrication process.

For example, Intel’s Ponte Vecchio processor, a general-purpose GPU the company unveiled this month, contains EMIB silicon.

To meet customers’ unique needs, this innovative technology allows chip architects to cobble together specialized chips faster than ever. And compared with an older, competing design called an interposer — in which chips inside a package sit atop what is essentially a single electronic baseboard, with each chip plugged into it — tiny, flexible, cost-effective EMIB silicon offers an 85 percent increase in bandwidth. That can make tech — laptop, server, 5G processor, graphics card— run faster, and next-generation EMIB could double or even triple that bandwidth.

The silicon interposer in a typical 2.5D package is a piece of silicon larger-than-all interconnecting die. In contrast, the silicon bridge is a small piece of silicon embedded only under the edges of two interconnecting die. This allows for most size die to be attached in multiple dimensions, eliminating additional physical constraints on heterogeneous die attachment within the theoretical limits.

The image shows a difficult yet desirable layout. The industry standard 2.5D solution cannot accommodate this, as the silicon interposer cannot be produced large enough to connect all the die. Yet EMIB allows for the flexibility in this die placement, allowing scaling in both dimensions.

Embarcadero releases InterBase 2020, its database management system with Tablespaces and patented Change Views technology

Embarcadero, a division of Idera, announced InterBase 2020, the latest release of its database management system including support for tablespaces. InterBase is a light, ultra-fast, embeddable SQL database with commercial grade data security, disaster recovery and change synchronization. 

The solution leverages multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU systems, along with a unique versioning approach and advanced disk I/O caching to retrieve and update data quickly. With a small footprint and fast install, it is ideal for use in mission-critical contexts such as patient management, railways, medical labs, multi-national POS, CRM, and emergency response systems.

In previous versions of InterBase, all files for a SQL database had to be mapped to the same physical storage, either a fast but small SSD or a large but slow HDD or SAN. With InterBase 2020, support for tablespaces maps individual tables and indexes to specific files and storage for improved performance and more balanced, optimized use of hardware technologies. These include SSDs for key tables and indexes and HDDs for larger but less commonly used tables.

Tablespaces allow for better performance and more balanced and optimized use of the hardware. Technically this feature allow a database object definition to specify a storage location in a particular logical file collection. This is especially beneficial for disk technologies, allowing you to better mix the use of fast SSDs and large HDDs. This is a key difference, since prior to InterBase 2020, all of the files for a database had to be mapped to the same storage. 

A database administrator can leverage tablespace characteristics to optimize runtime database performance. Selective tablespaces including active data can be backed up and restored as needed to minimize backup/restore time.

InterBase 2020 expands the OS platform support. Embedded InterBase (IBLite and IBToGo) is now available for Android 64-bit and macOS 64-bit. This allows RAD Studio developers to build InterBase enabled 64-bit Delphi applications and target both the Google Play Store and macOS App Store. 

The full list of supported InterBase 2020 IBLite and IBToGo platforms include Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Supported platforms for InterBase 2020 Server Edition include Windows with macOS and Linux support currently in beta and coming later.

InterBase 2020 comes in two versions: InterBase Server and Embedded InterBase (IBLite and IBToGo editions), the latter of which is now available for Android 64-bit and macOS 64-bit. IBLite and IBToGo can be used without InterBase Server as a stand-alone embedded database across multiple platforms, reducing costs and improving application speed and user experience with mobile data encryption support. Change Views provides the infrastructure for ensuring offline data is kept current with minimal effort.

InterBase Server powers Embarcadero’s RAD Server REST-service engine and the Embedded version is an integral part of RAD Studio which offers single-source applications for mobile and desktop operating systems.