New Greenliant NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series offers high performance and ultra high endurance

Greenliant is now sampling its NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise EX Series solid state drives (SSDs) to customers that require ultra high endurance primary storage with sustainable low latency and high performance in extreme environments. 

Designed with Greenliant’s EnduroSLC Technology, NVMe U.2 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 five years.

The NVMe U.2 EnduroSLC Industrial Enterprise SSDs with 1-bit-per-cell (SLC) NAND includes ultra high endurance that reaches 30 DWPD for five years; delivers high capacity offered from 800 GB to 1.92 TB; with high performance that reaches up to 2,600/1,900 MB/s read/write. 

It also offers 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 functionality that supports AES 256-bit encryption and crypto erase.

“For the highest levels of data integrity, Greenliant’s NVMe U.2 Industrial Enterprise SSDs implement on-chip adaptive RAID,” said Xuanhui Li, vice president of business development, Datacenter Products, Greenliant. “With Greenliant’s NVMe U.2 Industrial Enterprise SSDs, customers can achieve the efficiency and scalability required to meet the demands of write intensive applications in harsh environments.”

Greenliant is sampling its new G7200 Industrial Enterprise EX Series SSDs to customers now, and expects to start shipping in volume production by end of 2019. Greenliant also plans to ship its 3-bit-per-cell (3D TLC NAND) Enterprise PX Series SSDs in capacities from 960 GB to 3.84 TB in the first quarter of this year. 

NetApp predicts data management and IT trends will lead in the New Year

2019 was a year of rapid innovation—and disruption—for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multicloud as the de facto architecture for enterprise customers, organizations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernize their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads.

As a result, organizations are shifting from on-premises environments to using public cloud services, building private clouds, and moving from disk to flash in data centers—sometimes concurrently. These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but they also introduce the unintended consequence of increased IT complexity.

NetApp predicts that a demand for simplicity and customizability will be the number one factor that drives IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to offer modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and to consume those technologies so that customers can keep pace with their evolving business models. As IT departments strive to deemphasize maintenance and hardware, to reduce overhead, and to adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be crucial.

Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends that we identify in the following sections.

1. As the advent of 5G makes AI-driven Internet of Things (IoT) a reality, edge computing environments are primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was.

In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be used to build compute-intensive edge environments. This effort will lay the groundwork for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation—and disruption.

The advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. It will take a few more years for 5G data technology to spread across the entire United States. However, 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT. These environments will make possible new use cases that rely on intelligent, instantaneous, and autonomous decision-making, with low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities. This evolution will bring us to a world where the internet will work on our behalf—without even having to ask.

This AI-driven IoT innovation, however, will depend on a massive prioritization of edge computing, further disrupting IT infrastructures and data management priorities. As edge devices move beyond home devices (such as connected thermostats and speakers) and become more far-reaching (such as connected solar farms), more data centers will be placed at the edge. Also, platforms such as artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) will be necessary to help monitor complex environments across the edge, the core, and the cloud.

2. The impact of blockchain will be undeniable as indelible ledgers rapidly enable game-changing use cases outside of cryptocurrency.

The world is quickly moving beyond Bitcoin to adopt enterprise-distributed indelible ledgers, setting the stage for a transformation that’s exponentially bigger than the impact that cryptocurrency has had on blockchain in finance. 

While the crypto frenzy continues to steal the limelight when it comes to blockchain, most players in the industry understand the bigger picture of the technology and its potential. Going into 2020, we will see a tipping point for larger implementations as enterprises go a step further to adopt indelible ledgers based on Hyperledger, which represents the maturation of blockchain for wider use cases. Indeed, we will start to see blockchain go “mainstream” as it enables industries such as healthcare to create universal patient records, to improve chain-of-custody pharmaceutical processes, and more.

With such use cases validating blockchain and indelible ledgers, additional widespread adoption of the technology will drive transformation across society on a larger scale. This widespread adoption will build on the disruption that cryptocurrency has brought to finance to touch nearly every industry. As a result, new data management and compute capabilities will encourage companies to invest in indelible ledgers to build differentiated applications and to collaborate on critical, sensitive datasets.

3. Hardware-based composable architecture will have less short-term potential against commodity hardware and software-based infrastructure virtualization.

Continued improvements in commodity hardware performance, software-based virtualization, and microservice software architectures will eliminate much of the performance advantage of proprietary hardware-based composable architectures, relegating them to niche data center roles soon. 

Hardware-based composable architecture is being hyped as the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture enables CPUs, networking cards, workload accelerators, and storage resources to be distributed across a rack-scale architecture and to be connected with low-latency PCIe-based switching. 

Although composable architecture does have potential, standardization has been slow, and adoption has been even slower. Meanwhile, software-based virtualization of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware-accelerated) compute and networking virtualization solutions, offers much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.

Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly. However, most organizations that must transform within 2020 will be best served by a combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerization.

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.

Ericsson strengthens its agreement for 5G research and development with NIB

Ericsson is announcing that it has signed an agreement for credit facility with the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for USD 150 million, maturing in 2025. Of these new funds, 98 million will replace credit with NIB that was set to mature in 2021.

In addition to strengthening Ericsson’s balance sheet and financial flexibility, the loan has been granted for the purpose of financing Ericsson to support investments in research and development (R&D) in relation to the development of 5G technology during the years 2020-2022.

Key for success in the telecom industry is the delivery of future-proof, high-quality networks and solutions. To build on its technology leadership, Ericsson invested SEK 38 billion in R&D in 2018. This has enabled the company to be the leading contributor in the development of open telecom standards, with some 49,000 patents.

"Our increased investments to secure technology leadership in 5G, IoT and digital services have enabled us to reach nearly 80 commercial 5G agreements and contracts with unique operators, 24 of which are live networks - more than any other company,” said Erik Ekudden, Ericsson chief technology officer. “In the coming years, we will see 5G networks going live around the world, with major deployments from 2020 and we expect the global number of 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 billion in 2025. The technologies that we are investing in are fundamentally changing the way we innovate, collaborate, live and do business.”

National Science Foundation Awards grant to develop next-generation cloud computing testbed powered by Red Hat

Red Hat announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) division of Computer and Network Systems has awarded a grant to a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) to help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a production cloud developed collaboratively by academia, government, and industry through a partnership anchored at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing. 

As a founding industry partner and long-time collaborator on the MOC project, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies.

Testbeds such as the one being constructed by the research team, are critical for enabling new cloud technologies and making the services they provide more efficient and accessible to a wider range of scientists focusing on research in computer systems and other sciences.

By combining open source technologies and a production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware through field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the project aims to close a gap in computing capabilities currently available to researchers. 

As a result, the testbed is expected to help accelerate innovation by enabling greater scale and increased collaboration between research teams and open source communities. Red Hat researchers plan to contribute to active research in the testbed, including a wide range of projects on FPGA hardware tools, middleware, operating systems and security.

Beyond this, the project also aims to identify, attract, educate and retain the next generation of researchers in this field and accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use via collaboration with industry partners such as Red Hat.

Since its launch in 2014, Red Hat has served as a core partner of the MOC, which brings together talent and technologies from various academic, government, non-profit, and industry organizations to collaboratively create an open, production-grade public cloud suitable for research and development. The MOC’s open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

Beyond creating the national testbed, the grant will also extend Red Hat’s collaboration with Boston University researchers to develop self-service capabilities for the MOC’s cloud resources. For example, via contributions to the OpenStack bare metal provisioning program (Ironic), the collaboration aims to produce production quality Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) software, a key piece to enabling more flexible and secure resource sharing between different datacenter clusters. 

By sharing new developments that enable moving resources between bare metal machines and Red Hat OpenStack or Kubernetes clusters in open source communities such as Ironic or Ansible, Red Hat and the MOC’s researchers are helping to advance technology well beyond the Open Cloud Testbed.

Agero supports nearly half of passenger vehicles on the road with Oracle SD-WAN

Agero is using Oracle enterprise communications technologies to safeguard drivers in more than 115 million vehicles in the U.S. When a driver is stranded roadside, time is of the essence. With Oracle, the company has achieved continuous contact center uptime, so customers can get the assistance they need and are back on the road as quickly as possible.

For 45 years, Agero has provided smart solutions for its clients and their drivers. Currently, Agero’s  roadside assistance, accident management and consumer affairs services are leveraged in the U.S. by drivers in two-thirds of new passenger vehicles, policyholders from nine of the top 15 auto insurance carriers and customers of a variety of other diversified clients. 

Oracle SD-WAN was created to solve the ongoing IT challenges network managers face every day—from expensive, sluggish, inflexible WANs to difficulties deploying new office WAN links and accessing cloud services. 

With Oracle SD-WAN, enterprises can benefit from internet economics, leverage high-bandwidth and inexpensive Internet connections, and safely migrate applications to the public cloud and SaaS at their own pace – without sacrificing the high availability and predictable application performance they expect from their MPLS-only WANs..

To maximize the quality of its customers’ experiences and to eliminate communication failures or downtime, Agero needed predictable enterprise communications performance and real-time application support. Agero selected Oracle for the failsafe reliability, security and interoperability.

“When drivers are stranded on the road in the winter, creating not only an uncomfortable situation but also a health and safety issue, it is crucial for our customers to get directly in contact with an agent,” said Robert Sullivan, vice president, technology and shared services, Agero. “Oracle has the best of breed technology in the Oracle SD-WAN and Enterprise Session Border Controllers, which have helped us to deliver high availability, reliability and quality of experience for our customers.”

Since working with Oracle and Presidio to implement the Oracle SD-WAN solution, Agero has reduced downtime and created special routing situations for sites without substantial circuit diversity. This advanced, “always-on performance” is invaluable to Agero as the company processes more than 12 million roadside and emergency support requests per year.

“Agero is reinventing how driver assistance is delivered, while elevating the consumer experience in often dire scenarios,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications - Networks. “As enterprises demand flexible WAN solutions supporting shifting business requirements, Oracle is increasing and leveraging bandwidth for affordable and trusted WAN connectivity, anywhere and whenever it’s needed.”

In addition to the Oracle SD-WAN, Agero deployed Oracle 1100 Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) Oracle 3900 E-SBC and the Oracle Communications Converged Application Server (OCCAS) to protect its network and contact center from external threats.

LogMeIn enters into definitive agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Francisco Partners, Evergreen Coast Capital for $4.3 billion

LogMeIn Inc., vendor of cloud-based connectivity, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired in a transaction led by affiliates of Francisco Partners, a technology-focused global private equity firm, and including Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management, for US$86.05 per share in cash. The all-cash transaction values LogMeIn at an aggregate equity valuation of approximately $4.3 billion.

Under the terms of the agreement, LogMeIn shareholders will receive $86.05 in cash for each share of LogMeIn’s common stock they hold. This consideration represents a premium of approximately 25 percent to LogMeIn’s unaffected closing stock price on Sept. 18, 2019, the last trading day before a media report was published speculating about a potential sale process. The Board of Directors of LogMeIn approved the agreement and recommended that shareholders vote in favor of the transaction.

LogMeIn will have the right to terminate the definitive agreement to accept a superior proposal subject to the terms and conditions of the definitive agreement. There can be no assurance that this process will result in a superior proposal, and LogMeIn does not intend to disclose developments with respect to the solicitation process unless and until its Board of Directors makes a determination requiring further disclosure.

Qatalyst Partners and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are acting as financial advisors to LogMeIn, and Latham & Watkins LLP is serving as the company’s legal advisor.

Mizuho Bank Ltd. is acting as lead financial advisor and Barclays, Deutsche Bank Securities, Jefferies LLC, and RBC Capital Markets are acting as co-financial advisors to Francisco Partners and Evergreen with Paul Hastings LLP, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP serving as legal advisors. Barclays, RBC Capital Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, Jefferies Finance LLC, and Mizuho Bank, have provided committed debt financing for the transaction.

“This transaction acknowledges the significant value of LogMeIn and provides our stockholders with a meaningful and certain cash offer at a compelling premium,” said Bill Wagner, president and chief executive officer of LogMeIn. “Together, Francisco Partners and Evergreen are committed to addressing the unique needs of both our core and growth assets. We believe our partnership with Francisco Partners and Evergreen will help put us in a position to deliver the operational benefits needed to achieve sustained growth over the long term.”

“LogMeIn has a compelling product portfolio and leadership in the Unified Communications and Collaboration, Identity, and Digital Engagement markets,” said Andrew Kowal, senior partner at Francisco Partners. “We look forward to working with Bill and the leadership team at LogMeIn to accelerate growth and product investment organically and inorganically.”

“This investment builds on the strength of our infrastructure and security software franchise and we are thrilled to partner with the company to achieve its long-term strategic vision,” added Dipanjan “DJ” Deb, co-founder and CEO of Francisco Partners.

“We have deep appreciation for the LogMeIn franchise and leadership team from our long-term involvement in the business,” said Elliott Partner Jesse Cohn and Portfolio Manager Jason Genrich. “We look forward to partnering with Bill and the entire executive leadership team alongside Francisco Partners on the next phase of growth and value creation for LogMeIn as a private company.”

Christine Wang, principal at Francisco Partners also commented, "We are excited to invest in LogMeIn and support its mission to deliver best-in-class software solutions to the modern workforce.”

The transaction is expected to close in mid-2020, subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of stockholder and regulatory approvals.