Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
January 27, 2020
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: January 27, 2020. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
Delta Air Lines is embarking on a multi-year collaborative effort with IBM - including joining the IBM Q Network—to explore the potential capabilities of quantum computing to transform experiences for customers and employees. Through the IBM Q Hub at NC State University, Delta will have access to the IBM Q Network's fleet of universal hardware quantum computers for commercial use cases and fundamental research, including the recently-announced 53-qubit quantum computer, which, the company says, has the most qubits of a universal quantum computer available for external access in the industry, to date.
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., has announced plans to acquire the business of privately held Waterline Data, Inc. Waterline Data's patented "fingerprinting" technology uses AI- and rule-based systems to automate the discovery, classification, and analysis of distributed and diverse data assets to accurately and efficiently tag large volumes of data based on common characteristics.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the Swiss Data Center Efficiency Label was announced with the initial goal to decarbonize data centers in Switzerland and reduce their overall energy consumption. "We are witnessing a paradigm shift in IT, whereby conventional silicon technologies that historically resulted in doubling in chip density and efficiency every 2 years for 5 decades have reached their physical limits," said Babak Falsafi, professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and founding director of the EcoCloud, an industrial/academic consortium at EPFL. "As a result, sustained IT performance growth can only come from building more infrastructure."
Red Hat has introduced Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 to provide an integrated, multi-cloud experience to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform users. Enhanced with Multi-Cloud Object Gateway from Red Hat's 2018 acquisition of NooBaa, Red Hat says that OpenShift Container Storage 4 enables greater abstraction and flexibility so customers have the freedom to choose data services across multiple public clouds, while still operating from a unified Kubernetes-based control plane for applications and storage.
News From SHARE
With the rise of cloud computing and the entrance of major technology companies like IBM into the container market, IBM Z installations need to understand how the mainframe can participate in these ecosystems. At SHARE Fort Worth 2020, there will be several sessions on the new industry standard footprint z15 system, designed for enhanced modularity.
Think About It
Researchers at Google recently announced they had achieved "quantum supremacy" by performing a non-trivial computation on a quantum computer that decisively outperformed a "classical" computer performing the same task. Although IBM disputed some details of the achievement, this announcement will probably stand as a milestone in the development of quantum computing technology. In minutes Google's quantum computer performed the calculation that would have taken most traditional computers thousands of years.