Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Business Wire | September 26, 2023
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today shared a new independent report published by Analysys Mason that shows switching enterprise network services from on premises devices to Cloudflare’s cloud-based services can cut related carbon emissions up to 78% for very large businesses to up to 96% for small businesses. The report is one of the first of its kind to calculate potential emissions savings achieved by replacing enterprise network and security hardware boxes with more efficient cloud services.
Global Internet usage accounts for 3.7% of global CO2 emissions, about equal to the CO2 emissions of all air traffic around the world. The Internet needs to reduce its overall energy consumption, especially as regulators continue to implement the Paris Climate Accord, including plans to transition to a zero emissions economy. The European Climate Law requires that Europe’s economy and society become climate-neutral by 2050, with a target of reducing net GHG emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. Regulators in the United States and the European Union, among others, have also announced plans to require companies to disclose climate-related information including carbon emissions resulting from their operations and supply chains, as well as climate related risks and opportunities. Finally, among the Fortune Global 500, 63% of companies now set 2050 targets for emissions reductions. Companies large and small will increasingly be looking to reduce carbon throughout their supply chains, particularly their IT infrastructure.
“The best way to reduce your IT infrastructure’s carbon footprint is easy: move to the cloud,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder, Cloudflare. “At Cloudflare, we’ve built one of the world’s most efficient networks, getting the most out of every watt of energy and every one of our servers. That’s why, with Cloudflare, companies can help hit their sustainability goals without sacrificing security, speed, performance, or innovation.”
The Analysys Mason study found that switching enterprise network services from on premises devices to Cloudflare services can cut related carbon emissions up to 96%, depending on the current network footprint. The greatest reduction comes from consolidating services, which improves carbon efficiency by increasing the utilization of servers that are providing multiple network functions. On premises devices are designed to host multiple workloads and consume power constantly, but are only used for part of the day and part of the week. Cloud infrastructure is shared by millions of customers, often all over the world. As a result, cloud providers are able to achieve economies of scale that result in less downtime, less waste, and lower emissions. Furthermore, the Analysys Mason study found that there are additional gains due to the high Power Usage Effectiveness of cloud data centres, and differences in the carbon intensity of generation in the local electricity grid.
“Happy Cog is a full-service digital agency that designs, builds, and markets experiences that engage our clients and their audiences. We’ve relied on Cloudflare for many of those websites and apps because it's secure, reliable, fast, and affordable – but also aligns with many of our clients’ sustainability roadmaps and goals,” said Matt Weinberg, Co-Founder and President of Technology at Happy Cog. “Switching our clients from their previous on premises or other constant-usage infrastructure to Cloudflare's network and services has let them be greener, more efficient, and more cost effective. It's ideal when you can offer your clients a solution that covers all their needs and provides a delightful experience now, without having to compromise on their longer term priorities.”
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Application Storage
prnewswire | July 14, 2023
Pure Storage®, the IT pioneer that delivers the world's most advanced data storage technology and services, today announced that University Hospital Centre of Saint-Etienne, one of the leading university hospitals in southeast France, is leveraging its portfolio - including FlashArray™, Pure1®, and its Evergreen® architecture - to secure and accelerate access to critical data in order to improve overall patient care and business continuity.
Customer Challenge:
The University Hospital Centre (CHU) of Saint-Etienne is a public institution that specializes in healthcare, research, and teaching, providing a variety of patient care to people in the region, ranging from pediatrics and maternity care to heart surgery and radiation treatment.
As CHU Saint-Etienne increased its data footprint, its legacy storage technologies - a mix of aging disk storage - struggled to meet growing capacity needs, taking up a great deal of space and threatening availability due to regular breakdowns.
Faced with growing demands and limited space, the hospital needed to modernize its IT infrastructure, which serves as the foundation for all of its patient systems. As a result, CHU Saint-Etienne worked with partner Axians to shift its legacy infrastructure to Pure Storage, replacing approximately 70 units of legacy hardware with just six units contained in two Pure Storage FlashArray systems, meeting the organization's space constraint requirements.
Customer Impact:
Pure Storage provides CHU Saint-Etienne the availability, security, and performance it needs to both scale and improve patient care, while enabling easy maintenance for its small IT team. Benefits include:
Modernized, Efficient Storage Infrastructure: With Pure Storage FlashArray, CHU Saint-Etienne has significantly reduced its power consumption while increasing storage capacity by 50% compared to its legacy storage environment. The increased capacity enables the hospital's IT team more flexibility to shift workloads and increase demand as needed, providing a future-proof foundation to scale with patients.
Reduced Time Spent on Storage Management: Pure Storage's Pure1 AI-driven management platform enables CHU Saint-Etienne to reduce administrative time with an easy-to-use interface that simplifies storage management and allows new IT team members to get up to speed quickly. Additionally, the Pure Evergreen architecture further simplifies management with seamless, non-disruptive upgrades to existing controllers, eliminating downtime for the hospital.
Enhanced Data Protection and Greater Availability: Using Pure Storage SafeMode Snapshots in FlashArray, CHU Saint-Etienne can now secure its storage environment with fast recovery of data that has been inadvertently deleted, making it easier to comply with data retention requirements. Snapshots, along with ActiveCluster™ active-active replication across the FlashArray systems, help to minimize the impact of cyberattacks. Pure Storage thus reinforces CHU Saint-Etienne's business continuity plan by helping to deliver greater availability.
Improved Application Performance: The new Pure Storage infrastructure dramatically improves application performance for CHU Saint-Etienne, reducing latency from around 17 milliseconds to under a millisecond in most use cases. Staff and clinicians can access data faster and provide a better quality of care to patients and other users of the hospital.
Executive Insight:
"Moving our legacy storage environment to Pure Storage was one of the best decisions we could have made as an IT team. Not only does Pure Storage deliver unrivaled performance and management capabilities that meet our data storage needs, but it enables us to truly secure and scale sensitive and business-critical data to meet growing patient demands, ultimately helping us deliver better care across the region." – Samuel Pelissier, IT Infrastructure and Operation Manager, CHU Saint-Etienne
"We're supporting CHU Saint-Etienne to power the healthcare of tomorrow. Data is central to delivering better patient outcomes and faster diagnosis and our solutions enable the University Hospital in this regard. Not only are we meeting CHU's needs and positively impacting patients' lives, we're also supporting sustainability for the public sector organisation in greatly reducing its data centre footprint." - Hugues Hueze, Country Manager France, Pure Storage.
About Pure Storage
Pure Storage uncomplicates data storage, forever. Pure delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Pure's commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, or more. Pure believes it can make a significant impact in reducing data center emissions worldwide through its environmental sustainability efforts, including designing products and solutions that enable customers to reduce their carbon and energy footprint. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.
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Data Storage
Business Wire | September 21, 2023
Astera Labs, the global leader in semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for AI infrastructure, today announced that its Leo Memory Connectivity Platform enables data center servers with unprecedented performance for memory intensive workloads. Leo is the industry’s first Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) memory controller that increases total server memory bandwidth by 50% while also decreasing latency by 25% when integrated with the forthcoming 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor. Through new hardware-based interleaving of CXL-attached and CPU native memory, Astera Labs and Intel eliminate any application-level software changes to augment server memory resources via CXL. Existing applications can effortlessly “plug-and-play” to take advantage of the highest possible memory bandwidth and capacity in the system.
“The growth of computing cores and performance has historically outpaced memory throughput advancements, resulting in degraded server performance efficiency over time,” said Sanjay Gajendra, COO of Astera Labs. “This performance scaling challenge has led to the infamous ‘memory wall,’ and thanks to our collaboration with Intel, our Leo Memory Connectivity Platform breaks through this barrier by delivering on the promise of PCIe 5.0 and CXL memory.”
Data center infrastructure scaling limitations due to the memory wall are none more evident than in AI servers where memory bandwidth and capacity bottlenecks result in inefficient processor utilization. The CXL innovations delivered by Astera Labs and Intel directly address these bottlenecks and lay the foundation for cloud, hybrid-cloud and enterprise data centers to maximize accelerated computing performance.
Extending leadership of PCIe® 5.0 and CXL 2.0 solutions
Astera Labs has a history of delivering industry-first solutions that are critical to advancing the PCIe and CXL ecosystems. In addition to memory performance advancements with Leo, Astera Labs is also driving interoperability leadership with its Aries PCIe 5.0 / CXL 2.0 Smart Retimers on state-of-the-art Intel server platforms. As the most widely deployed and proven PCIe/CXL retimer family in the industry, Aries features a low-latency CXL mode that complements Leo to form the most robust CXL memory connectivity solution.
“We applaud Astera Labs for their contributions to the CXL ecosystem and are delighted to extend our ongoing collaboration. We believe Memory Connectivity Platforms containing innovations from companies like Astera Labs will help deliver enhanced performance on next generation Intel Xeon processors, and accelerate a myriad of memory intensive workloads,” said Zane Ball, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Platform Engineering and Architecture Group, Intel.
Visit Astera Labs at Intel Innovation!
Astera Labs will showcase Leo and Aries together with Intel’s latest Xeon® Scalable processors at Booth #210, September 19-20 at the San Jose Convention Center. Talk to Astera Labs’ experts to learn more about industry benchmarks and how to optimize PCIe/CXL memory solutions in data center architectures to deliver optimized performance for applications ranging from AI, real time analytics, genomics and modeling.
About Astera Labs
Astera Labs, Inc. is a global leader in semiconductor-based connectivity solutions purpose-built to unleash the full potential of intelligent data infrastructure at cloud-scale. Its class-defining, first-to-market products based on PCIe, CXL, and Ethernet technologies deliver critical connectivity in accelerated computing platforms optimized for AI applications.
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Application Storage, Data Storage
Business Wire | August 31, 2023
Belden Inc. (NYSE: BDC), a leading global supplier of network infrastructure and digitization solutions, announces four new products and updates that are designed to maintain connectivity in rugged environments and ensure uptime.
Data Acquisition & Transmission
Belden OptiTuff Connectivity and Cable Managementoptions support new field-termination connectivity for OptiTuff Mini Fiber Cables. Through the creation of new systems and improvements to the transition points, connectors and patch panels in Belden’s existing FiberExpress(FX) line, installers can now benefit from OptiTuff’s fast, easy installation plus compatibility with the popular FX Fusion Splice-On Connector and FX ECX Patch Panel System.
The newLumberg Automation M12 Circular Connector Automotive Lineis designed to withstand harsh environments, thanks to new PUR construction, which prevents damage caused by welding sparks, crushing, and shearing. The connectors promote safety and application output by maintaining optimal machine uptime.
Data Orchestration & Management
Belden PROVIZE Network Planning, Commissioning and Management Suite updatessimplify MRP configuration for redundant ring topologies to prevent network disruptions. In addition, enhanced integration lets users shift between PROVIZE Planner and Explorer easily. User interface enhancements also improve both products.
The newLumberg Automation LioN-X Digital I/O Modulesoffer cost-effective flexibility and fast configuration, data transfer, and data security for automation applications using digital sensors and actuators. The modules offer integration in PLC and cloud environments, making them a fit for almost all industrial applications.
About Belden
Belden Inc. delivers the infrastructure that makes the digital journey simpler, smarter and secure. We’re moving beyond connectivity—from what we make to what we make possible through a performance-driven portfolio, forward-thinking expertise and purpose-built solutions. With a legacy of quality and reliability spanning 120-plus years, we have a strong foundation to continue building the future. We are headquartered in St. Louis and have manufacturing capabilities in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
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