IDC: Worldwide server market drops 11.6% in 2Q19

After a torrid stretch of prolonged market growth that drove the server market to historic heights, IDC has found that the global server market declined in 2Q19 for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2016. Vendor revenue in the worldwide server market declined 11.6% year over year to just over $20.0 billion during the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19).

Worldwide server shipments declined 9.3% year over year to just under 2.7 million units in 2Q19.

"The second quarter saw the server market's first contraction in nine quarters, albeit against a very difficult compare from one year ago when the server market realized unprecedented growth," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies. "Irrespective of the difficult compare, factors impacting the market include a slowdown in purchasing from cloud providers and hyperscale customers, an off-cycle in the cyclical non-x86 market, as well as a slowdown from enterprises due to existing capacity slack and macroeconomic uncertainty."

Some highlights:

• The number one position in the worldwide server market during 2Q19 was shared* by Dell Technologies and the combined HPE/New H3C Group with revenue shares of 19.0% and 18.0% respectively. 
• Dell Technologies declined 13.0% year over year, while HPE/New H3C Group was down 3.6% year over year. 
• The third position went to Inspur/Inspur Power Systems, which increased its revenue by 32.3% year over year. 
• Lenovo and IBM tied for the fourth position with revenue shares of 6.1%, and 5.9% respectively. 
• Lenovo saw revenue decline by 21.8% year over year while IBM saw its revenue contract 27.4% year over year. 
• The ODM Direct group of vendors accounted for 21.1% of total revenue and declined 22.9% year over year to $4.23 billion. 
• Dell Technologies led the worldwide server market in terms of unit shipments, accounting for 17.8% of all units shipped during the quarter.

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45482519

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Dell'Oro: 25 Gbps Ethernet adapter gain share

Shipments of Ethernet controllers and adapters marked the first sequential growth year-over-year (Y/Y) in 2Q 2019, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. The 25 Gbps continues to gain share in the Cloud and Enterprise markets.

“Shipments of 10 Gbps controllers and adapters were stronger than expected with demand from general enterprises and lower-tier Cloud service providers. Meanwhile, 25 Gbps continues to gain momentum across key vendors in the high-end Enterprise market,” said Baron Fung, Director, at Dell’Oro Group. “Among the major Cloud service providers, which generally deploy 25, 40, and 50 Gbps ports, growth was mixed, as select companies are still undergoing server capacity digestion. Thus, we continue to anticipate great volatility in this sector for these higher-speed ports.”

Additional highlights from the Controller and Adapter 2Q 2019 quarterly report include:

• Total controller and adapter port shipments increased 3 percent quarter-over-quarter (Q/Q) in 2Q 2019.
• Average sell price per port increased 6 percent Q/Q, which contributed to higher sequential revenue growth.
• Amazon still commands more than 90 percent share of the Smart NIC market by ports shipped, although Broadcom and Mellanox gained share.

https://www.delloro.com/news/shipments-of-ethernet-controllers-and-adapters-marked-first-sequential-growth-y-y-in-2q-2019-according-to-delloro-group/

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Credo ships HiWire Active Electrical Cables

Credo announced the production availability of HiWire Active Electrical Cables (AEC).

The company says its AECs provide plug and play, deterministic, persistent in-rack and inter-rack connections at lower cost and lower power of alternative optical approaches. Additionally, the AEC family provides system level, in-cable speedshifting providing seamless connectivity of 50G PAM4 enabled switch ports to widely available 25G NRZ based servers.

Credo is showcasing the AEC product family at the China International Optical Expo (CIOE 2019) in Shenzhen, China, through September 7.

“Our Credo connectivity solutions are being widely deployed in cloud, service provider, and enterprise networks,” said Jeff Twombly, VP of Marketing and Business Development Credo. “The addition of our HiWire AECs allow system providers to move rapidly to 400G while striking a strategic balance with CapEx and OpEx.”

https://www.credosemi.com/

HiWire aims for standard Active Electrical Cables at 400G and up

Tuesday, September 03, 2019  400G, Standards  

A new HiWire Consortium has been established to pursue the standardization and certification of a new category of Active Electrical Cables (AEC). The group is dedicated to the establishment and ongoing development of an AEC standard that defines a specific implementation of the many industry MSAs and a formal certification process. This will enable an ecosystem of trusted Plug and Play AECs, available from multiple sources, for the hyperscale data center, telecom and enterprise markets.

HiWire AECs provide a full solution for layer 1 and 2 interconnect to deliver persistent and deterministic connectivity necessary for the next generation of data centers as the industry moves to 400G and beyond.

The founding companies of the HiWire Consortium are: Accton Technology, Alpha Networks, Arrcus, Bizlink, Cameo Communications, Zhejiang Canaan Technology, Centec Networks, Chelsio Communications, Credo, Dell EMC, Delta Electronics, Edom Technology, Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co.(Foxlink), Innovium, Barefoot Networks (an Intel Company), Inventec, Juniper Networks, Keysight Technologies, Quanta, Senao, Spirent Communications, Steligent Information Technologies Co., Wistron, Wistron NeWeb, and Wywinn Corporation.

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Federated Wireless raises $51M for CBRS spectrum management

Federated Wireless, a start-up based in Arlington, Virginia, announced $51 million in Series C funding for its Citizens Band Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum management services.

Federated Wireless highlighted its role in the development of CBRS, including:

• Co-founding the CBRS Alliance
• Being the first to complete deployment of a nationwide Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) network
• Readying multiple customers to deliver CBRS services using its Spectrum Controller (Spectrum Access System or SAS) when commercial services begin this month

The latest funding included contributions from existing investors Allied Minds, American Tower and GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, in addition to new investors Pennant Investors and SBA Communications. The

“We passed all of the major hurdles on the road to CBRS deployment in the first half of 2019 and we are fully ready to engage the growing number and types of customers clamoring for access to shared spectrum services,” said Iyad Tarazi, President and CEO of Federated Wireless. “I would like to thank Allied Minds, American Tower, GIC, Pennant Investors and SBA Communications for their support and alignment with our vision for this truly unique opportunity. This funding will propel us, and by extension the CBRS industry as a whole, to new heights, helping us to ensure that we are able to not only meet but exceed the needs of the customers and partners who have collaborated so closely with us to make this vision a reality.”

http://www.federatedwireless.com

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Samsung's prototype Key Value SSD offloads processing from server

Samsung Electronics announced the first standards-based prototype of a new type of SSD that moves the storage workload from the server CPUs into the SSD.

Samsung’s KV SSD prototype is based on a new open standard for a Key Value Application Programming Interface (KV API) that was recently approved by SNIA.

Samsung says there are numerous benefits of KV storage technology. Rather than operating as a block device, the KV SSD moves resource-draining storage operations from the host CPU to the SSD itself. This results in:

• Much-improved system-level performance
• Freeing the CPU from computational work, such as block operations and storage-level garbage collection
• Substantially greater scalability in the number of linked SSDs by reducing CPU overload
• Greatly reduced write amplification (WAF)
• Much less wear on each SSD
• Greater software efficiency

SNIA’s KV API standard was developed in response to growing concern that as the speed of SSDs further increases, system-level performance was reaching the point of saturation, allowing relatively few SSDs to be optimally interlinked. As the performance of SSDs continues to improve, the situation is expected to worsen when ever-increasing loads are placed on the CPU to manage block operations.

While there are other approaches to this now under development, KV SSD technology is likely to be the most cost-efficient for use with many storage appliances and IT systems.

“The SNIA KV API specification, which provides an industry-wide interface between an application and a Key Value SSD, paves the way for widespread industry adoption of a standardized KV API protocol,” said Michael Oros, SNIA Executive Director.

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CIG demos 200G FR4 optical module for DCI

Cambridge Industries Group (CIG) will demonstrate a 200G FR4 optical module at this week's CIOE 2019 exhibition in Shenzhen, China. The module is fully compliant with Open Eye MSA specifications and interoperable with multiple vendors’ products including DSP based 200G optical modules.

“This live demonstration of our new analog CDR based 200G FR4 module, in addition to our DSP-based modules, reaffirms our commitment to bring low cost and low power technologies to the industry,” said Gerry Wong, CEO of CIG. “CIG is the first in the world to introduce this product into the datacenter interconnect market, and together with our large scale, high quality automated manufacturing capabilities, we are capable of quickly meeting the needs of the DCI market.”

The module adopts 50Gbps PAM-4 format and advanced technologies in analog clock and data recovery (CDR) chipsets. This enables lower cost, lower power, and lower latency compared to DSP-based modules. Low latency is especially important because mission critical applications such as real-time application or high- frequency trading require very low latency transmission.

CIG said it is applying its expertise and leadership in optical module design and manufacturing for 25Gbps, 100Gbps and 400Gbps products into these new 200Gbps modules targeted for datacenter applications. The product is in the early sampling stage with general availability (GA) expected in early 2020.

http://www.cigtech.com/

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ThousandEyes targets app, infrastructure and Internet performance visibility

ThousandEyes introduced an Internet-aware synthetic monitoring solution for proactive detection of application performance issues.

ThousandEyes Synthetics visually correlates application performance to underlying infrastructure and Internet delivery performance in a single, shareable dashboard for instant root cause identification and collaborative issue remediation.

The solution combines a new, programmable javascript-based approach with deep active monitoring that correlates application insights gathered through synthetic tests with HTTP, network metrics, network paths, Internet routing, and outage visibility, in a single view.

"Traditional synthetic monitoring solutions simply don't cut it in today's Internet-dependent, cloud-centric ecosystem. An app-centric view with no knowledge of the underlying dependencies leaves IT, Digital Ops and service delivery teams dead in the water while troubleshooting application performance issues," said ThousandEyes vice president of product, Joe Vaccaro. "ThousandEyes Synthetics enables both SaaS app owners and IT teams to deliver and deploy with confidence knowing they will be able to quickly identify exactly what's causing any issues in end-user digital experience regardless of where the issue lies, eliminating massive business continuity risks."

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STACK expands data center in Portland

STACK INFRASTRUCTURE announced a major expansion of its data center in Hillsboro, Oregon. The near-term campus additions will provide more than 60MW of additional critical capacity and, when combined with STACK’s established Hillsboro facilities, bring the company’s total capacity in Hillsboro to nearly 100MW. STACK developed its first data center here in 2012.

“STACK has a rich heritage in Hillsboro, where we’ve built some of our most important and enduring client relationships,” said Brian Cox, Chief Executive Officer of STACK. “We view this as a high-priority market for ongoing investment, and this is only the beginning of the presence STACK intends to build as we rapidly scale our critical capacity.”

STACK operates data centers in six U.S. markets: Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; Northern Virginia; Portland, Oregon; and Silicon Valley.

http://www.stackinfra.com

STACK issues $850 million in bonds for its data center ambitions

Monday, February 11, 2019  Data Centers, Funding, Stack  

STACK Infrastructure, the new data center company that combines facilities from Infomart Data Centers and IPI Partners,  announced the issuance of $850 million of securitized notes (rated investment grade at A- by Standard & Poor’s).

STACK said it is committed to being the data center industry leader in building and delivering flexible critical infrastructure solutions that meet and support the complex requirements of enterprise and hyperscale deployments.

“This financing immediately positions STACK with the long-term capital structure to support the scaled critical infrastructure demands of our growing clients,” said Brian Cox, Chief Executive Officer. “We are pleased that the offering was well received by investors and believe their confidence highlights the strength of our team and the quality of the platform we’ve assembled. This is just the most recent success of many since STACK launched and there is much more to come."

http://www.stackinfra.com

STACK Infrastructure outlines U.S. data center strategy

Tuesday, January 15, 2019  Data Centers  

STACK Infrastructure, the new data center company that combines facilities from Infomart Data Centers and IPI Partners, unveiled its newly established platform and strategy for rapidly scaling enterprises and hyperscale companies.

STACK, which is underwritten by IPI Partners, combines existing operating data centers in six U.S. markets with significant expansion and development capacity. The company’s offering includes hyperscale campuses and build-to-suit data centers, immediately available wholesale colocation and private data suites, and powered shell options.

The existing STACK operating assets, totaling over 100 megawatts of capacity and approximately 1.5 million square feet in aggregate, include:

Assets previously marketed under the Infomart Data Centers brand:

• Ashburn, Virginia
• Portland, Oregon
• Silicon Valley, California

Other assets already owned by IPI Partners:

• Atlanta, Georgia
• Chicago, Illinois
• Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas (2)

STACK also owns development parcels in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Portland, and Silicon Valley available for additional future development, including data center campuses and build-to-suits. In addition, the Company will continue to expand in existing and new markets in the future to meet the growing demands of clients.

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