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Supermicro had one of the largest and most active booths at the recent Supercomputing show in St. Louis. Their effort was spearheaded by the new Universal GPU server launched at the event. Supermicro was also showing off liquid cooling solutions, Supercloud Composer, BigTwin, Blade Chassis and so much more. My favorite thing at the booth though might have been the most simple, Supermicro's new toolless HDD caddy.

Less than two weeks ago, NVIDIA GA'd LaunchPad, their free-to-use AI playground. With LaunchPad, customers and prospects alike can get hands-on with a complete, and well-appointed, rig thanks to Equinix, VMware, and of course NVIDIA. Because LaunchPad runs on an easy-to-access vSphere client, it's simple for IT professionals to pick up and go. For AI pros, NVIDIA offers a number of hands-on labs, or practitioners can bring their own AI to the test environment.

IGEL just hosted a series of events dubbed Disrupt Unite, across the US and Europe. In-person events are exceedingly rare these days, but IGEL wants to be aggressive and part of their strategy is getting back out in front of their partners and customers. From my experience it worked out well for IGEL, I hit their Dallas event this month and spent the day with IGEL and their partners. Part of my journey included this podcast with IGEL's CEO, Jed Ayres.

PCIe Gen5 is coming along at a rapid pace, we should see it in enterprise systems next year. From a storage perspective, this means a theoretical doubling of performance again. The data rate specification for PCIe Gen5 at 32Gb/s is twice the lane speed of PCIe Gen4 at 16Gb/s. How that manifests still remains to be seen, the SSDs that leverage PCIe Gen5 will need to be designed well. Perhaps the most important component of these SSDs will be the controller. As with Gen4, Phison is the first to announce their SSD controller for Gen5 SSDs, the Phison E26. 

Microsoft's Azure Stack HCI offering has grown up a lot in the last year. We've looked at the solution a few times both from Dell and DataON. In fact, we just posted a review of DataON's AZS-6224 Integrated Systems. We gave the solution an Editor's Choice Award again. The new 3rd Gen Xeon CPUs, Gen4 Intel SSDs, and the updated Azure Stack HCI OS from Microsoft make a very compelling offering that in our case, saw over 4 million IOPS out of a base three-node configuration and only 15 Intel P5510 SSDs.

We've worked with DataON a good deal in the past around their Azure Stack HCI offerings. They've done some great work with their Intel platforms and they've been able to take advantage of the entire ecosystem, including Intel servers, Optane storage, TLC SSDs, and even QLC SSDs for a low-cost data tier. Now, with new platforms in hand, DataON is positioned even better than before to be the leader when it comes to Azure Stack HCI hybrid infrastructure.

We've been talking a lot about E1.S (ruler) SSDs lately. The last podcast covered ruler, we even transcribed key findings from that conversation in a ruler deep dive. Now, we've got a box of E1.S SSDs in from SK hynix, that leverage the popular 15mm z-height standard. Having the flash is fun and all, but the systems out there that can support Gen4 E.1S SSDs are pretty thin. Thankfully, the guys at Viking Enterprise Solutions have just the tool for this work.

This podcast offers an amazing deep dive into Ruler SSDs and what the new form factor means to the enterprise data center. The big cloud providers have been on ruler SSDs for a few years. But mainstream adoption of Ruler has been hampered largely because there are too many shapes and sizes. That's changing for the better. The industry is standardizing on a 15mm z-height, which believe it or not, is the lynchpin that was required for big server vendors to get to work. Even if you're not deploying Ruler SSDs today, learning about what's coming with E1.S and E1.L is what this pod is all about.

If you've followed us for long, you know we're big fans of Eaton. That's not just because they send us racks, UPSs and PDUs. We like them because they're always embracing new technology. This is abundantly clear as we point out in our last review of the new Lithium-ion 9PX UPS. Lithium-ion offers faster charging, more density, and lighter weight amongst other benefits. After the review, we saw a lot of social outreach asking for more of this type of content. So here you go, a podcast dedicated just to power talk.

In this podcast, our resident expert on end-user computing, Tom Fenton, commandeers the microphone for a deep look at the latest developments when it comes to enabling a remote workforce. We are excited to have Mirela Cunjalo from Teradici (the folks behind PCoIP) join us to discuss.