Cleversafe, a cloud storage software vendor which offers its customers “limitless storage space”, says that it has designed a dispersed storage system that exceeds a storage capability of 10 Exabytes (EB), or 1,000 Petabytes (PB).

The system is based on Cleversafe’s Portable Datacenter (PD), which integrates 21 storage and network racks that include 189 storage nodes of 45 x 3 TB drives to offer a total storage capacity of 25,515 TB. The current configuration also includes 35 PDs per site (893,025 TB) and 16 sites total (14,288,400 TB with more than 4.7 million drives total). In total, Cleversafe offers about 13.6 EB of storage.

What could you do with so much storage? The best application scenario today may be data mining. Large scale data mining. “Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32 percent globally each year. It’s not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 EBs of data per month by 2015,” said Russ Kennedy vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe. Kennedy noted that the company’s storage solution is a “foundational enabler to Big Data analytics.” The object-based storage could especially be useful in large-data applicatiosn leveraged by governments and defense agencies.

However, Cleversafe noted that the creation of the Exabyte storage model was a result of Federal government and a telecommunications provider inquiring what it would take to achieve a 10 Exabyte storage system. Kennedy noted that, because of these inquiries, the company knows that there is “definitely interest” in such a product.

SOURCE via Cleversafe

Kingston’s turning its SSD solutions up to eleven on its new SSDNow family of products. The SSDNow V+200 is a solid state drive toting SATA 3.0 SandForce SF-2281, capable of up to 535 MB/s read speeds and 480 MB/s writing speeds. Regardless of whether it’s for your office or home rig, Kingston reckons it’s got your storage needs covered, offering up the V+200 in 60GB, 90GB, 120GB, 240GB and 480GB sizes. The 2.5-inch drives arrive with self-encryption as standard, alongside a three-year warranty with support — something that’s getting increasingly rare. Prices, alongside the upgrade kit, range from $156 to $985 — depending on exactly how many photo albums you need on solid state storage.

SOURCE via Kingston

There’s really no need to define what overclocking is all about here at Tom’s, but readers know that pushing a CPU too far can result in a useless, burned-up processor and other damaged system components. To some degree, overclocking is good business for Intel and AMD, as it means there’s a good chance tweakers will be back for more hardware. But on the other hand, they can’t fully endorse overclocking due to liability reasons.

That’s where Intel’s new program comes in. Intel has announced a pilot program to provide users with warranty protection for when they experiment with the overclocking features of their processor. For a small price, Intel will provide a one-time replacement of certain processors that are damaged through overclocking and/or over-volting. The protection plan is an addition to Intel’s standard 3 year warranty on its processors.

The program starts as of January 18, 2012, at 12:01AM PST and last for six months. The first part of the pilot program will include four resellers: CyberPower, Canada Computers and Electronics, Scan Computers, and Altech Computers, with additional resellers being added in February. Intel will make the plan available to its customers any time during the pilot by visiting its website. As with all pilot programs, Intel may decide to cancel the program at any time or continue on past the six month pilot. Intel will honor all plans purchased prior to the date of discontinuation and will be honored according to the terms and conditions accompanying the Plan at the time of such purchase

The Performance Tuning Protection Plan covers the following CPUs:

• Core i5-2500K – $20
• Core i7-2600K – $25
• Core i7-2700K – $25
• Core i7-3930K – $35
• Core i7-3960X – $35 

The number of covered processors seemingly indicates how many chips Intel expects to replace. After all, most chipsets have thermal and voltage safeguards built-in to prevent damage caused by overheated CPUs that are being pushed beyond their breaking point. Usually when a CPU becomes unstable due to overclocking, they return to their default settings before damage occurs. The number of customers who will actually need to use this plan will likely be relatively small, but there’s a good chance a large number will purchase the plan anyway just in case. Better safe than sorry, no?

Read more on the protection plan at Intel’s FAQ site.

In a move to address AMD’s Radeon HD 7970′s performance, Nvidia looks to have pushed its scheduled release of the GTX 680 to February over from the previously planned March/April to go along with Ivy Bridge’s release.

A rumor from Chinese forums Chiphell suggests that Nvidia has pushed up the release of the GeForce GTX 680 to February, over previous planned March/April time frame. The source says the GTX 680 should be competitive in performance with the HD 7970. The GTX 680 will have a clock speed of 780 MHz, which is similar to the GTX 580. It will come with 2 GB of memory. It is suggested that the card with have a 512-bit memory bus but this has neither been confirmed nor are there much details of the final specifications for the GTX 680.

Based on the leaked information, the card doesn’t look like it will be Nvidia’s fastest next-generation GeForce Kepler chip. It sounds more like the GK107 chip with a 128-bit memory bus previously discussed in December. Hopefully Nvidia isn’t rushing its next generation GPU to the market, as this writer remembers the GTX 280 release. That card didn’t shake some of its noise and heat concerns until the GTX 285.

SOURCE via Chiphell

The 28nm card will feature 1792 stream processors, down 256 from the 7970′s 2048. The cards will arrive with a 384-bit memory bus and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory. Suggested retail prices will land between $400 and $450. The flagship model HD 7990 is still on track for a March 2012 release.

Nvidia is preparing for the release of its Kepler GPUs, including the GK107 for the entry-level market, the GK106 for the mid-range, the dual-GPU GK104 and the high-end GK112, as well as the GK104, which is expected to replace the GeForce GTX 560Ti. Kepler GPUs could be released at the beginning of Q2 and may be positioned to sail with the momentum of the introduction of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors.

AMD’s HD 7990 is rumored to be equipped with two HD 7990 GPUs and a total of 6 GB memory and 4096 stream processors. The card is likely to be rather expensive and could be reminiscent of the outlandish graphics card prices in the first half of the last decade. Fudzilla wrote that HD 7990 cards will arrive with a suggested retail price of $849.

SOURCE via DigiTimes

In an interview at CES in Las Vegas, ARM CEO Warren East called Intel’s latest attempt to enter the mobile market “good enough.” The rival’s new Medfield finally came out of hiding this week during the show, revealed to be heading to Android smartphones manufactured by Motorola Mobility and Lenovo for starters.

Yet East also acknowledged Intel as a serious competitor, and that the x86 giant will inevitably score a few smartphone wins. “Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer,” he said. “They (Intel) have taken some designs that were never meant for mobile phones and they’ve literally wrenched those designs and put them into a power-performance space which is roughly good enough for mobile phones.”

But even though Intel’s current entry is “good enough,” East said that ARM won’t take Intel’s x86 assault lightly. He pointed to the company’s new Cortex A7 design that features the performance of chips used just a few years ago, but with 20-percent of the power consumption. This will obviously help consumers do more with their smartphones while battery sizes remain relatively consistent.

“It’s like having a car with a fixed-size fuel tank and you want to drive 100 more miles,” he said. “You’ve got to make the engine more efficient. That’s what we do for a living.”

East went on to talk about Microsoft and its decision to bring ARM’s architecture into Windows 8. He also admitted that Android is “the flavor of the month” and “flavor of the year,” and ARM wants to be a part of that. But there’s also a special place in ARM’s heart for Microsoft’s flagship operating system, and seeing Windows 8 running on tablets using ARM chip designs is just simply “exciting.”

“We’ve waited a long time for this to happen. Another six months, another 12 months doesn’t matter,” said East. “I’d much rather wait however long it takes to get a quality experience than compromise.”

OCZ Technology has introduced the Chiron SSD Series for Enterprise that provides a staggering 4 TB capacity in a compact 3.5-inch form factor based on the Indilinx Everest controller. Chiron delivers performance speeds above 560 MB/s and 100,000 IOPS. The 4TB capacity helps eliminate the need for high capacity HDDs as anything other than backup devices. The Chiron Series enables mass SSD storage and is capable of deploying up to 96TB of storage in a 4U rackmount server chassis.

Texas Instruments promised us a new helping of OMAP right around a year ago, and sure enough, OMAP 5 processors will be sampling to partners as early as next week. Texas Instruments’ Remi El-Ouazzane (VP of OMAP) just debuted an OMAP 5-based reference design (or “development platform,” if you will) over at CES, a solid four years after OMAP 3 debuted on a nondescript Archos tablet.

Read more…

Bored by Plextor’s safe and steady M3S? Then ponder on its new performance model, the 2.5-inch, SATAIII-sporting M3 Pro. It notches up random read/write speeds by around seven percent to 75,000/69,000 IOPs, while sequential read/writes have also had a marginal bump to 540MB/s and 450MB/s. It’s not yet clear how much the new drives will cost when they reach stores in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB varieties next month, but the use of 24nm toggle flash — which squeezes more storage onto less silicon — should help to keep pricing relatively sane. Oh, and the 7mm height also means that the M3 Pro will slide happily into the compressed bowels of your Ultrabook — unless that slot has already been reserved for a Crucial.

So far in the last hour, we’ve learned that future Ultrabooks will have NFC, possibly larger screens, touchscreens, andmaybe even touch-enabled palm rests. Well, we’ve got one more marquee feature to add to the list: Intel just announced that they’re partnering with Nuance to bring voice recognition to Ultrabooks. And it sounds like Intel’s vision is comprehensive: the company envisions consumers being able to launch applications, compose emails, update social networks and control media playback. During the keynote, Intel PC client head Mooly Eden even said he would one day like to speak to the computer and have this words appear in a different language. Will that be a feature in the 1.0 product? We’ll have to see when it starts hitting Ultrabooks later this year.