Schneider Electric releases its initial integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT for data centers

Schneider Electric, vendor of digital transformation of energy management and automation, with Avnet and Iceotope, announces creation of commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. 

Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. 

This liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. 

Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data center operators “maximize cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions.” Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. 

Avnet, Iceotope and Schneider Electric plan to expand the offering as demand grows by welcoming other server OEMs into the partnership. 

“Schneider Electric is committed to making data centers more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach,” said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric, who is presenting on liquid cooling at the Gartner conference. “This latest development marks a significant step toward industrializing chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs. Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.”

“As a leading global technology solutions provider, Avnet has always excelled at adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies,” said Scott MacDonald, global president, Avnet Integrated. “We do well at this by partnering with the world’s best technology designers and hardware manufacturers. In this case, we’re partnering with liquid cooling-specialist, Iceotope, and global infrastructure giant, Schneider Electric, to make the best possible liquid cooling solutions for our customers. We’re excited to integrate, fulfill, and support this solution that smartly addresses customer cooling challenges around rising chip densities, harsh IT environments, rising energy costs, water use restrictions, and space constraints.”

“Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope. “We offer the only liquid cooling tech that scales easily from edge computing devices to large server farms in the cloud. And compared to direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems, our approach is more efficient, more reliable, saves more space, eliminates fans, and when deployed across the data center, it lowers cost.”

Diamanti joins AI/ML sector with its GPU platform that supports containerized workloads on Kubernetes

Diamanti announced availability of its enterprise platform with GPU support for running containerized workloads under Kubernetes, ideal for the demanding requirements of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. 

In conjunction with its recent announcement of Diamanti Spektra, customers can now provide to their end users GPU capacity in cloud clusters for scaling AI/ML workloads on premises out to public clouds to accelerate model development and training.

Diamanti recently announced the close of a $35 million Series C funding round that the company plans to use to ramp global go-to-market initiatives, along with increased investment in engineering resources to drive the roadmap for Diamanti Spektra, as well as new software, SaaS, and hardware solutions for emerging AI and ML workloads.

“AI is quickly proving to be the most disruptive set of new technologies in decades thanks to breathtaking advances in computing power, volume, velocity and variety of data,” said Tom Barton, CEO of Diamanti. “Our platform offers unmatched extensibility and flexibility for containerized workloads and now our customers can add GPU support for a heterogeneous environment under the same Kubernetes umbrella to help with even the most demanding AI/ML requirements.”

The Diamanti platform for AI/ML workloads fully supports Nvidia’s NVLink cross connect GPU card technology for higher performing workloads, as well as Kubeflow, a machine learning framework for Kubernetes that provides highly-available Jupyter notebooks and ML pipelines.

“Cloud-native methodology and software are crossing over with AI and machine learning, with Kubernetes an increasingly attractive option for data scientists to orchestrate the distributed architecture required to run multiple machine learning libraries and frameworks in production at scale,” said Matt Aslett, research vice president, 451 Research. “One key use case across several verticals involves infrastructure that can be quickly spun up or down to support massive simulations.”

Early access Diamanti customers are already benefiting from the new platform support for GPUs in industries as varied as financial services, energy and travel, among others.

For AI/ML applications requiring GPUs, the new Diamanti Spektra solution can also now manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads across on-premises and public clouds, moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters as necessary. 

Diamanti Spektra combines the power of Diamanti’s hardware-boosted x86 platform along with cloud-based infrastructure to provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Diamanti Spektra is in technology preview.

Quantela works with Cisco to introduce Outcome-based Project Financing for smart city projects

Quantela Inc. and Cisco have developed a unique, market disruptive Outcome-based Project Financing Model that will be launched at the Smart City Expo World Congress. The model can help cities get started on their Smart City projects by converting the upfront CapEx investment to an Outcome-based payment, that is tied to achieving solution SLAs and project KPIs.

Cities globally are in a state of transition that is impacting them in multiple ways. Budgetary pressures of having to deliver more with less; Capacity pressures due to rapid urbanization. 

Some of the key concerns on the minds of City Mayors are: How can they find new opportunities for revenue maximization and cost optimization? How can they attract investments into the city and create vibrant public-private partnerships? How do they derive value with the data being collected by the city from various sources? How can they provide a good quality of life for the residents?

With such radical forces in action, it is imperative for cities and Municipal Corporations globally to adopt different financial structures that would help them acquire new technology to deliver more efficient and cost-effective urban infrastructure services like reducing energy consumption for public street lighting, reducing traffic congestion and improving revenues from city parking, improving efficiencies related to waste collection and bridging the digital divide using City Wi-Fi Services.

One of the first cities in North America that has embraced the outcome-based Project Financing Model is the City of Erie, PA to launch the second phase of its Secure Smart City project that will be implemented in the Opportunity Zones of Erie. The project scope will involve the operations of Cisco Kinetic for Cities (CKC) Platform combined with Quantela's Atlantis Intelligence Solution to launch smart city services.

“Cities worldwide are harnessing the power of technology to reduce traffic congestion, bridge the digital divide, enhance connectivity, promote economic development, fight crime and make local governments more sustainable and resilient,” said Mayor Schember. “We are excited to partner with Cisco Systems and Quantela to execute this ambitious project and what it can mean for Erie's growth as a center of innovation.”

Trend Micro reveals that over a dozen obfuscated APT33 botnets have been used for extreme narrow targeting

The threat group regularly referred to as APT33 is known to target the oil and aviation industries aggressively, Trend Micro revealed. This threat group has been reported on consistently for years, but recent findings show that the group has been using about a dozen live Command and Control (C&C) servers for extremely narrow targeting. 

APT33 is a suspected Iranian threat group that has carried out operations since at least 2013. The group has targeted organizations across multiple industries in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, with a particular interest in the aviation and energy sectors.

The group puts up multiple layers of obfuscation to run these C&C servers in extremely targeted malware campaigns against organizations in the Middle East, the U.S., and Asia.

“We believe these botnets, each comprising a small group of up to a dozen infected computers, are used to gain persistence within the networks of select targets,” Trend Micro wrote in a post this week. 

The malware is rather basic, and has limited capabilities that include downloading and running additional malware. Among active infections in 2019 are two separate locations of a private American company that offers services related to national security, victims connecting from a university and a college in the U.S., a victim most likely related to the U.S. military, and several victims in the Middle East and Asia.

APT33 has also been executing more aggressive attacks over the past few years. For example, for at least two years the group used the private website of a high-ranking European politician (a member of the country’s defense committee) to send spear phishing emails to companies that are part of the supply chain of oil products. Targets included a water facility that is used by the U.S. army for the potable water supply of one of its military bases.

These attacks have likely resulted in concrete infections in the oil industry. For example, in the fall of 2018, Trend Micro observed communications between a U.K.-based oil company with computer servers in the U.K. and India and an APT33 C&C server. 

Another European oil company suffered from an APT33 related malware infection on one of their servers in India for at least three weeks in November and December last year. There were several other companies in oil supply chains that had been compromised in the fall of 2018 as well. These compromises indicate a big risk to companies in the oil industry, as APT33 is known to use destructive malware.

Panasas releases PanFS on the ActiveStor Ultra Storage System to enhance performance, efficiency

Panasas announced that its re-engineered PanFS parallel file system, delivered on the Panasas ActiveStor Ultra appliance, is now shipping and in early deployment at Sumitomo Metal Mining and the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Built for price/performance and engineered for manageability, the new generation of PanFS is integrated with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to deliver the fastest parallel file system at any price point.

The system is also deployed at a large U.S.-based aerospace manufacturer, at the world’s largest provider of subsurface data to the energy sector, and at a U.S.-based global security and aerospace company. 

The next generation of PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra offers unlimited performance scaling in 4 GB/s building blocks, utilizing multi-tier intelligent data placement to maximize storage performance by placing metadata on low-latency NVMe SSDs, small files on high IOPS SSDs and large files on high-bandwidth HDDs. The system’s balanced node architecture optimizes networking, CPU, memory and storage capacity to prevent hot spots and bottlenecks, ensuring consistently high performance regardless of workload.

The PanFS parallel file system is delivered on Panasas ActiveStor Ultra, a turnkey appliance that provides the extreme performance, enterprise-grade reliability and manageability required to process large and complex datasets. These datasets are associated with HPC workloads and emerging applications such as AI, precision medicine, autonomous driving, and augmented and virtual reality. 

ActiveStor Ultra goes from dock to data in one day, providing a plug-and-play solution that is easy to install, manage and grow. With ActiveStor Ultra’s modular architecture and building-block design, enterprises can start small and scale linearly by scaling metadata performance, bandwidth and capacity independently and without limitations.

“The re-engineered PanFS returns Panasas to the ranks of top-performing HPC data storage systems on the market, while maintaining the frustration-free storage experience our customers have come to expect and value,” said Faye Pairman, chief executive officer at Panasas. “With the new PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra, our customers can take advantage of the industry’s leading price/performance in a storage appliance that maximizes simplicity, boosts reliability, and delivers the lowest total cost of ownership.”

“The advanced-research computing infrastructure deployed at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute has used Panasas data storage for more than 12 years,” said James Wilgenbusch, Ph.D., director of research computing, office of the vice president for research, University of Minnesota. “Ours is a truly mixed workload environment, and we value the ease and speed with which Panasas handles multi-discipline workloads such as CFD, CAE, computational physics and chemistry, and bioinformatics, to name a few. The new PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra expands on that tradition by delivering an appliance built for unlimited linear performance scalability at a highly attractive price point.”

“When we moved to a large cluster system we decided to deploy a parallel storage solution that delivered operational simplicity in addition to limitless scalability of capacity and performance,” said Toshiki Kishimoto, general manager, Computer-Aided Engineering and Development Dept., Technology Division, Sumitomo Metal Mining. “PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra offers us an environment that doesn’t require tuning to maintain peak performance, automates common maintenance and recovery tasks, and in case of questions, we have immediate access to support expertise from highly-qualified storage professionals.”

AES partners with Google to develop and implement solutions that enable broader adoption of renewable energy

The AES Corp. announced that it is entering into a ten-year strategic alliance with Google to accelerate the growth and adoption of clean energy by leveraging Google Cloud technology to pioneer innovation in the sector. This alliance builds on the recent agreement between Google and AES to provide long-term renewable power to Google’s data center in Chile.

As part of this alliance, AES will use Google Cloud technology to help create the grid of the future and improve the experience for energy customers. AES innovation partner, Uplight, will also utilize Google Cloud technology to enhance its end-to-end energy action system, to increase customer satisfaction and reduce carbon emissions. 

Google Cloud’s platform, tools and technology will help redefine and improve AES and Uplight’s delivery of customer solutions through advanced cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The two companies will work together to improve the experience for corporate energy customers and to develop and implement solutions that enable broad adoption of clean energy. 

AES will collaborate with Google Cloud on energy management and opportunities to sponsor clean energy projects in targeted markets in the United States and Latin America that have the potential to help Google meet its clean energy objectives.

“AES has been working with its customers to accelerate the transformation of the electric sector through energy storage, renewables and energy efficiency. Today, we are one of the largest renewables solutions providers and developers in the world,” said Andrés Gluski, AES president and CEO. “We’re proud to have been selected by Google to form this strategic alliance. By combining the capabilities, footprint and experience of both companies, we will be able to provide better and more efficient energy solutions.”

“Cloud technology is an enabler for forward-leaning organizations seeking to put customers at the center of their business strategies,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Together, AES and Google Cloud will leverage the cloud, AI/ML and data analytics to help transform the energy industry’s infrastructure, while driving wider adoption of renewable energy around the world.”

Samsung SDI meets rack-level safety standards of UL9540A’s fire protection test for diverse applications

Samsung SDI has become the first Li-ion battery manufacturer to fulfill the rack-level safety standards of the UL9540A test for Energy Storage System (ESS), which was developed by UL, a global safety certification company.

The battery maker was recognized by the UL test for its capability of preventing large scale fire in the ESS by applying proprietary designs for safety of cells, modules and racks to prevent battery thermal runaway propagation.

The largest fire prevention organization in the U.S., National Fire Protection Association has recently published the NFPA 855 standard for the installation of stationary ESS. Under this regulation, battery racks must be spaced three feet (92cm) from each other to increase safety, which, however, reduces space efficiency.

According to NFPA’s ESS installation standards, when meeting UL9540A test standards, such space requirement between racks can be waived by the Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJ).

The UL9540A is a test method consisting of cell, module, rack, and system level safety evaluations in the event of a failure mode by thermal runaway. It measures the characteristics of thermal runaway and the amount and composition of gas during thermal runaway. 

The test results are utilized to define mitigation strategies against ESS fire or explosion.

The main test of UL9540A is divided into a battery rack-level test and an optional battery system-level test. The racks that satisfy the rack-level test standards, like Samsung SDI’s racks, can be installed without needing to add separate fire-fighting system.