Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Thursday, July 2, 2026
DDN Claims Faster Object Storage ‘Cross-Region’ S3 Connectivity than AWS
Advanced-scale storage specialist DataDirect Networks (DDN), whose solutions populate the upper-rung of the Top500 supercomputing list, today announced new “cross-region” features to its WOS object storage platform that support multi-site AWS connectivity as well as new data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. According to DDN, Extended ObjectAssure offers low-cost data protection along with control for ... Full article
Storage Security Emerges Along With Flash
The vibrant storage sector is churning out a steady stream of products, tools and network platforms as datacenter operators struggle to keep up with and secure torrents of terabytes. Much of the focus in storage technology development focuses on hyper-converged infrastructure as datacenter operators look to cut costs while boosting performance. Baked-in security and new ... Full article
Nvidia Responds to Google TPU Benchmarking
Last week, Google reported that its custom ASIC Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) was 15-30x faster for inferencing workloads than Nvidia’s K80 GPU (see our coverage, Google Pulls Back the Covers on Its First Machine Learning Chip), and it didn’t take Nvidia long to respond. Unlike the semi-contentious back-and-forth between Nvidia and Intel over benchmarking methodology (see Nvidia ... Full article
Cloud Shift, Strong Dollar Slow IT Revenues
Global IT spending faces "headwinds" that include a rising U.S. dollar and a continuing slowdown in the server market as potential customers flock to the cloud. All this is reflected in anemic forecast for datacenter and over IT spending by market analyst Gartner Inc. In its quarterly forecast, Garter (NYSE: IT) pegged global IT spending ... Full article
New Frontiers in Cyber Security: Locomotives without Wheels, Moats, Deep Learning at the Edge
Industry analyst Bob Sorensen recently told us something most IT managers already know deep in their apprehensive hearts: cyber security is in a sorry state (see “Be More Afraid,” EnterpriseTech, Nov. 18, 2016). Security at many companies is somewhat marginalized, an unfavored area that lies outside core IT operations and procedures, a focal point at ... Full article
New Malware ‘Bricks’ IoT Devices
Despite repeated assurances that Internet of Things security issues are being addressed, so-called "in-the-wild" attacks on poorly secured devices reveal that securing the IoT still has a long way to go. The latest threat comes from a new malware strain known as BrickerBot that, according to security experts, intentionally "bricks" IoT devices, meaning the malware ... Full article
Google Pulls Back the Covers on Its First Machine Learning Chip
This week Google released a report detailing the design and performance characteristics of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), its custom ASIC for the inference phase of neural networks (NN). Google has been using the machine learning accelerator in its datacenters since 2015, but hasn’t said much about the hardware until now. In a blog post published yesterday ... Full article
Elastifile’s ‘Cross-Cloud Fabric’: Flash-Native Distributed File System for Hybrid IT
The tidal movement toward hybrid on- and off-prem IT is well underway and well understood. But the data management challenges of multi-site implementations, with data and applications straddling multiple storage and compute environments on-site and in a public cloud, can be highly complex. Deeply funded start-up Elastifile, formed in 2013 and now coming out of ... Full article
AWS Lead Slips as Multi-Cloud Advances
New market intelligence emerges each week about the steady enterprise shift to the cloud as companies conclude they must upgrade their IT infrastructure to compete. A "cloud transformation" study released this week by market analyst 451 Research found that 80 percent of the organizations it surveyed expect to overhaul IT operations over the next five ... Full article
How Agile Teams Make Digital Transformation Happen
Digital Transformation — the use of such technologies as mobility, analytics, social media and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to improve enterprise effectiveness — is revolutionizing how businesses operate and the ways project teams do their work. In order to keep up with and get closer to a new generation of digitally empowered customers, companies ... Full article
IBM Bare Metal Cloud Targets AI with New P100 GPUs
IBM announced today that it will be adding Nvidia P100 graphics processors to its Bluemix cloud later this month, becoming the "first major global cloud vendor" to provide the high-end "Pascal" GPUs. Big Blue is targeting the new hardware at customers who run compute-heavy workloads, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, data analytics and high-performance computing. ... Full article
Datacenter Giant Acquires VMware vCloud
VMware is selling its cloud operations to a European cloud-hosting provider that is aggressively expanding its U.S. operations. French cloud provider OVH will acquire VMware's vCloud Air business in a deal expected to close by the end of June. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. After completion of the acquisiton, OVH said it would ... Full article
Seagate Seeks to Drive Down Flash Costs
The number of all-flash storage options continues to grow as datacenters burst at the seams and operators look for ways to connect legacy and flash storage while reducing cost. The latest entry comes from Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX), which like other purveyors of all-flash arrays claims to have made the performance gains of all-flash storage ... Full article
EMC Storage Driving Dell Revenues
Dell Technologies, the computer hardware and storage giant, reported brisk fourth-quarter hardware sales fueled by its acquisition of storage leader EMC. For its full fiscal year, however, the company reported a sizeable operating loss tied to the EMC deal. The holding company (NYSE: DVMT) that owns Dell and EMC along with majority ownership of VMware, ... Full article
Autonomous Cars: Google No. 1, Toyota Sees Carbon-free Future, Memory a Speed Bump?
With billions of dollars at stake in the car market of the future, technology and auto companies are aggressively jockeying for position to deliver self-driving vehicles that could, ultimately, produce no greenhouse gas emissions Regarding autonomous vehicles, projected to be a nearly $5 billion market by 2025 (McKinsey & Co.), industry analyst Richard Windsor of ... Full article
Bringing Big Data and HPC Together
What does the intersection of big data and high performance computing look like? About 50 technology leaders from across industries got an exclusive glimpse during Tabor Communications’ inaugural LBD + EHPC event at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in Florida last week. Readers of Datanami and EnterpriseTech will recall that Leverage Big Data and ... Full article
IBM Jumps on Bandwagon for Cloud Databases
Responding to what it says is growing demand for deploying SQL databases in the cloud, IBM this week rolled out a transactional database as a service on its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. The move reflects the steady advance of cloud-native data platforms along with a growing number of analytics and transaction databases provisioned in the cloud. ... Full article
Data-Hungry Algorithms and the Thirst for AI
At Tabor Communications’ Leverage Big Data + EnterpriseHPC Summit in Florida last week, esteemed HPC professional Jay Boisseau, chief HPC technology strategist at Dell EMC, engaged the audience with his presentation, “Big Computing, Big Data, Big Trends, Big Results.” Trends around big computing and big data are converging in powerful ways, including the Internet of ... Full article
IoT Deployments Fuel ‘Chaotic’ Cloud Security
Cloud security remains "complex and chaotic" and the Internet of Things threatens to increase cloud security risks, warns a survey of IT security managers conducted during last month's RSA security conference. The survey of nearly 1,000 RSA attendees by security vendor AlienVault found that one third considered their cloud security monitoring to be "complex and ... Full article
AI in HPC on Wall Street: Getting Going Is the Hard Part
IT managers in the financial services industry are fully aware that high performance data analytics, AI and deep learning technologies are plentiful and available, and they know that some FSI companies are already deriving advantage from them. But they hesitate to take the plunge into AI/DL themselves because of sticker shock ($200,000 for an initial ... Full article