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.”

Intel Research recognizes digital skills gap slowing Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing sector

Intel released Thursday results of a new study “Accelerate Industrial,” which represents comprehensive view of Industry 4.0, the digital transformation of the manufacturing sector. The research uncovered a serious skills gap that most Western industrial production training programs and government investment initiatives fail to address.

The study found that current leaders need to create tomorrow’s future-ready workforce. This requires the collaboration of universities, government and industry – including initiatives that focus on worker training for the transforming manufacturing sector.

“Accelerate Industrial” was conducted and authored by Dr. Faith McCreary, a principal engineer, experience architect and researcher at Intel, in tandem with Dr. Irene Petrick, senior director of Industrial Innovation for Intel’s Industrial Solutions Division. The study encompasses mobile ethnographies and interviews with over 400 manufacturers and the ecosystem technologists that support them. The work is being released as a series of reports.

A recent Deloitte/Manufacturing Institute study suggests that industries are entering a period of acute long-term labor shortages, with a shortfall in manufacturing expected to be 2.4 million job openings unfilled by 2028, resulting in a $2.5 trillion negative impact on the U.S. economy. Germany and Japan, two other developed economies, are expected to fare even worse in terms of this projected labor shortage.

With the increasing proliferation of data, connectivity and processing power at the edge, the industrial internet of things is becoming more accessible. However, successful adoption remains out of reach for many: two of three companies piloting digital manufacturing solutions fail to move into large-scale rollout.

The study uncovered the top five challenges cited by respondents that have the potential to derail investments in smart solutions in the future, with 36 percent citing “technical skill gaps” that prevent them from benefiting from their investment; 27 percent expect “data sensitivity” from increasing concerns over data and IP privacy, ownership and management; 23 percent found that they lack interoperability between protocols, components, products and systems; 22 percent citing security threats, both in terms of current and emerging vulnerabilities in the factory; and 18 percent reference handling data growth in amount and velocity, as well as sense-making.

“Accelerate Industrial” points to the rising importance of the digital skills required to navigate and succeed in this new landscape.

The research found that while there is a big appetite for digital transformation – 83 percent of companies plan to make investments in smart factory technologies – the most important skills and characteristics cited for that transformation are not ones that are typically emphasized by most industry job training programs or relevant policymakers.

Future skills cited by respondents point to the need to go beyond the basics of programming to embrace a deep understanding of digital tools, from data collection to analytics and real-time feedback directly to the operating environment. 

The top five future skills required to support digital transformation in manufacturing are “Deep understanding” of modern programming or software engineering techniques; “digital dexterity,” or the ability to leverage existing and emerging technologies for practical business outcomes; data science; connectivity, and cybersecurity.

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.”

Keysight, Marvin Test Solutions come together to speed manufacturing of mmWave semiconductors

Keysight Technologies announced this week that its collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions Inc. (MTS) – a supplier of functional test solutions – has resulted in the development of a fast and accurate 5G semiconductor manufacturing test platform.

The two parties focused on advancing beamformer integrated circuit (IC) test technology to help manufacturers of semiconductors accelerate the production of high performance 5G integrated ICs. Marvin integrated Keysight’s PXIe-based Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to achieve accurate and fast measurements in its TS-960e-5G mmWave Test System.

The Keysight M980xA PXIe Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) meets the most demanding multiport challenges with a true multiport architecture that offers exceptional performance no matter how many ports you use. Gain deeper insights into devices with the widest available line of measurement applications for PXI VNAs, including spectrum analysis and noise figure measurements.

The M980xA Series offers the performance required for testing passive components, amplifiers, mixers or frequency converters. It provides key PXI VNA specifications such as dynamic range, measurement speed, trace noise and temperature stability. 

Keysight’s recently introduced M980xA Series network analyzers offer the scalability required to test multi-port components, front end modules (FEMs) and base stations that rely on beamforming technology. Mobile operators are deploying beamforming technology to extend cellular coverage and deliver higher data rates, leading to improved mmWave 5G network reliability and efficiency. 

To ensure reliable and efficient 5G mmWave communications, the performance of critical elements that form part of the beamformer IC need to be rigorously tested under linear and nonlinear conditions across the entire workflow from design, validation to manufacturing.

“Our collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions demonstrates that scalable production testing of beamformer solutions can be achieved with Keysight’s PXI VNAs,” said Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Keysight's wireless test group. “We’re excited to help shape the future of 5G mmWave production testing with our beamformer IC test solutions using integrated component and system-level simulation tools to deliver high precision measurements at mmWave frequency bands.”

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.

DXC Technology improves IT acceleration for large enterprise clients with Virtual Clarity acquisition

DXC Technology announced it has acquired the outstanding shares of Virtual Clarity, provider of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) transformation advisory services. This acquisition further positions DXC as a leading provider of IT modernization services for applications and infrastructure and strengthens DXC’s ability to assess, design and manage transformations to cloud.

The addition of Virtual Clarity also builds on DXC’s acquisition earlier this year of Luxoft as clients increasingly are seeking industry specific application development and innovation as part of their IT modernization approach.

Founded in 2008, Virtual Clarity is comprised of a blend of enterprise IT experts with knowledge of modern tools, techniques and industries – including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications.

“I am excited to welcome Virtual Clarity’s talented team to the DXC family,” said Mike Salvino, DXC’s president and CEO. “Virtual Clarity is a solid fit with our growth strategy with proven expertise in IT transformation and cloud migration. The company complements and enhances DXC’s capabilities in cloud, platforms and IT modernization, enabling DXC to help our clients with their digital transformation journey and improve their business outcomes.”

“From inception, we’ve been obsessed with customer outcomes,” said Virtual Clarity CEO Steve Peskin, who will report to Salvino. “Our approach to help clients transform their business quickly, seamlessly and safely complements the ability of DXC to execute globally at scale. Together with DXC, we create an immensely powerful and compelling opportunity for clients to unlock new value and competitive agility across the enterprise. We will make a real difference for clients, partners and our industry.”

DXC will combine its deep cloud and application engineering services and strategic partnerships with Virtual Clarity’s IT modernization capabilities to enable enterprise clients to accelerate their digital transformation, harness technology to improve efficiencies at scale, and drive business innovation, while accelerating customers’ digital transformation journeys with Virtual Clarity's Precision Guided Transformation services and unlocking the value of DXC’s application migration and modernization capabilities.

Aligning IT-as-a-Service to the needs of the business-lines quickly and safely.

It also helps turn IT innovation into business value for customers with Virtual Clarity’s “Air Traffic Control” offering – a combination of unique tools, highly experienced enterprise IT leaders, and provide deep understanding of what it takes to implement change in complex enterprises.

The DXC and Virtual Clarity alliance has assisted in the moving of several thousand applications for a large bank holding company to a hybrid cloud and clearing regulatory concerns by implementing a solution based on migration factory (cloud assessment, architecture, and air traffic  control) and automated IT platform. 

It also accelerated IT application modernization for a North American commercial bank by delivering a new, dynamic IT platform and migration factory which boosted implementation and safeguarded the outcome. The client realized an 80 percent-plus reduction in IT unit costs and a 50-fold increase in the speed of change

Migration of 7,000 applications to the public cloud for a Fortune 100 telecommunications leader. DXC and Virtual Clarity analyzed the IT applications platform, assessed options and charted the most effective course of action to rapidly migrate the 7,000 applications to the public cloud.