GIGABYTE to Demonstrate Innovative Server Product Line-Up at CES 2019
Taipei, Taiwan, 20th December 2018 — GIGABYTE, an industry leading server design and manufacturing company, has always defined and created specialized product lines with enhanced specifications and performance to meet the different computing needs of our customers. Our product range, which includes our G‑Series Servers for high-density GPU computing, S‑Series Servers for high-density storage, or H‑Series Servers for scale-out computing, can meet the different usage scenarios for a large majority of enterprise users.
Open source hardware and software, which has gained momentum since the release of OpenStack in 2010 and Facebook’s advocacy of open source hardware for their infrastructure from 2011, is a growing trend in the server industry that cannot be ignored. And as large scale public cloud services are now supporting open source software platforms, “open source” has become a driving force for the integration of hardware and software, allowing for the popularization and mainstream availability of unique technologies and products, breaking open the market previously controlled only by large international technology brands and providing an opportunity for hardware manufacturers and startup software companies to enter the space.
Responding quickly to these developing trends, starting from bare-metal hardware and infrastructure to provide a PaaS (platform as a service) and co-operating together with numerous new startup companies, GIGABYTE is planning to gradually develop and offer fully vertically integrated cloud building services that include SaaS (Software as a Service) and DaaS (Data as a Service) capabilities. GIGABYTE will use the upcoming commercialization of 5G technology as a starting point to showcase the results of the first phase of this strategy, and at CES 2019 will co-operate with a number of cross-industry partners to demonstrate these various innovative solutions:
Two-Phase Liquid Immersion Cooling
Processors and other components with ever increasing performance that make their operating temperatures higher and higher are often physically limited by traditional air cooling systems. Therefore, various alternative cooling technologies have been invented. At CES 2019, GIGABYTE has collaborated with immersion cooling expert Allied Control to showcase the next generation of a two-phase liquid immersion cooling system, featuring a standardized proof of concept unit that is immediately available to purchase. Two years earlier GIGABYTE had already demonstrated the first generation of systems using our server hardware with immersion cooling. Through continuous improvement, this new generation is able to provide double the amount of floating point operations performance and achieve even better PUE (power usage efficiency) in an even more compact physical size, allowing customers to achieve an even faster return on their hardware investment when deploying in large numbers.
DNN (Deep Neural Networks) Training Appliance
Considering the adoption of AI technology is becoming more mature and customers also wish to keep their confidential data on premises, the demand for on-premises self-built AI infrastructure is ever increasing. GIGABYTE’s G‑Series Servers have always been well-known on the market as a cost effective hardware solution supporting NVIDIA accelerator cards for AI and machine learning to meet this demand. Wishing to go a step further, GIGABYTE has partnered with ITRI (Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute)to develop a DNN (Deep Neural Networks) workload-optimized appliance, based on our G481-HA1 server which uses a single-root GPU hardware topology. In addition to optimizing batch operations through automatic hyper-parameter adjustments and better GPU memory utilization, DNN training can be performed through an easy to use graphical interface, making it easier to be used by non-technical staff and allowing for a cross-discipline AI training program to be implemented.
All-Flash High Performance Software Defined Storage
GIGABTYE has always maintained an excellent partnership with software-defined storage vendor Bigtera, working together to provide customers with a decentralized storage cluster solution as part of a virtualized system architecture, helping to simplify storage management and reduce capital and operating expenditure, beginning with VirtualStor Scaler and now including a new product, VirtualStor Extreme, which will be showcased together by GIGABYTE and Bigtera at CES 2019. VirtualStor Extreme is powered by Bigtera’s high performance back-end storage engine – Bigtera Store – and is aimed at combating the weakness of distributed scale-out storage which is not good at handling random I/O reads. Using I/O scheduling technology, VirtualStor Extreme is able to break through performance bottlenecks, supporting up to 800K IOPS of random reads / writes and a latency of 1 millisecond for high performance data storage. At the same time, VirtualStor Extreme can integrate and manage existing storage systems (including the vast majority of storage types on the market such as SAN, NAS, Object, File), providing IT personnel with the flexibility to allocate and use existing storage resources.
AMD & ARM Server Platforms
In addition to collaborating with cross-industry partners, GIGABYTE also strives for continual innovation in our core offerings of server hardware. In addition to having complete product lines such as the R‑Series 19” Standard Rack Servers for general purpose enterprise IT applications or the W‑Series Tower Servers for office environments, GIGABYTE also has launched solutions using different processor platforms, such as our AMD EPYC Hyper-Converged Servers and Tower Server, or our Marvell Thunder X2 Arm Servers that have been some of the first products to pass the Arm ServerReady certification, all of which will also be showcased at CES.
The wave of AI innovation and adoption occurring during these past few years is an obvious example of disruptive technology affecting the IT industry. For successful adaption of the complex digital transformation that is currently occurring, the key is not only the integration of hardware and software, but the digital maturity of user organizations when actual deployment occurs. For example, has the organization’s view of IT changed from a cost burden into a core driver of business? And if AI or smart business is to help enhance an organization’s predictive capabilities, the user must first understand the data which has been generated and stored over the past few years. This maturity will not be easy, but the changes brought to an organization’s business model and the value of innovation will become an indispensable part of its ability to create competitive advantage and sustainable operations.
GIGABYTE has developed a variety of server types to meet different customer requirements that all seek to maximize performance in a limited space. And by providing vertical and cross-domain integration, GIGABYTE seeks to enable customers to quickly build the infrastructure and platforms they need to meet the challenges of digital transformation in ICT, allowing them to focus instead on the planning and development of their key business and enabling them to stand out from the crowd. With the development of any new field, enterprises will inevitably face many challenges, but we hope that through this year’s CES many more customers to know about GIGABYTE’s various types of product solutions, and can discuss with our experts about how they can prepare for their next IT deployment and avoid risks as much as possible, so that they may able to get the most out of their investment.
JAN 8–11, 2019, LAS VEGAS, NV