DCN July 2017 | Page 46

Products & innovations Cisco Launches Next Generation Storage Networking Innovations Data stored in global data centres will increase by five-fold to reach 915 Exabyte by 2020, according to the recent Cisco Global Cloud Index. Cisco has announced technology innovations for next-generation storage networking that will help customers access, manage and automate this stored data to better enable digital business goals. With this announcement, Cisco offers storage networking customers 32Gb fibre channel performance across an integrated MDS storage director and Unified Computing System (UCS) fabric, storage networking analytics, and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) over FC support for flash memory appliances. To meet SAN scalability requirements, Cisco is collaborating with Broadcom/Emulex and Cavium/ Qlogic to provide customers with high bandwidth storage connectivity, and is providing 32Gb fibre channel host bus adapter with seamless support on the Cisco UCS C-Series. The 32Gb HBA’s are designed to address requirements of modern networked storage systems that utilise high performance and low latency solid state storage drives for caching and persistent storage, as well as hard disk drive arrays. With a built-in, high performing, hardware based analytics engine on Cisco MDS 32G Modules, organisations also gain complete visibility across SAN in real time. Customers will be able to analyse in real time FC exchanges and report on various metrics, providing comprehensive and timely monitoring of any potential performance issues in the network to make informed operational decisions. For further information visit: www.cisco.com 46 | July 2017 Lenovo Launches Largest Data Centre Portfolio in its History Lenovo has unveiled an end-to-end data centre portfolio that enables customers to harness the power of the ‘intelligence revolution’ and create a strong technology foundation that supports transformative capabilities such as data analytics, high performance computing, hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Building on Lenovo’s server reliability for x86 servers, Lenovo introduced its largest, most comprehensive portfolio of server, storage, networking, software and data centre services, as well as a new set of brands poised to take this leading position in customer satisfaction to even greater heights: ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile data centre solutions provide organisations with fluid resources that can adapt to the evolving needs of a business. The new completely redesigned ThinkSystem portfolio, based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors, brings the gold standard for the industry under a single unified brand spanning servers, storage and networking systems. ThinkAgile is a completely new software defined solutions portfolio built on the foundation of Lenovo ThinkSystem platforms: It adapts to changing IT needs while reducing complexity and cost created by silos in traditional IT. Even better together, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile portfolios empower customers to create the foundation of a future-defined data centre with simplicity, agility and flexibility and future proofed preparation. For further information visit: www.lenovo.com Romonet launches disruptive free tool to help companies choose the best data centre location Romonet has launched a new tool, the Site Analysis Tool (SAT), aimed at helping businesses and data centre managers to quickly analyse and compare the impact of location and design on the performance of their data centres. SAT is freely available on Romonet’s website to all business leaders and operational staff who want to understand and compare the differences in performance between the most common data centre designs: Adiabatic direct air economised; chilled water with cooling towers; economised chilled water with cooling towers and indirect air economised. The tool enables users to compare the energy, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), energy cost and CO2 performance of each design across many different climates in Europe and North America. Currently Romonet’s tool covers 69 locations in the US and 22 locations in Europe and the company plans to continue adding locations as its data grows. Users can either select a specific location and see how the four data centre types compare in performance, or they can select a specific data centre type to see how it performs across different geographical and climate regions. To ensure the simulation is as accurate as possible, users can also select the estimated IT load of the data centre. SAT’s results are generated using over 1,600 simulation years’ worth of data processed with Romonet’s patented Data Centre Analytics