Three Areas of Upgrade

Written by yanglu September 27, 2008 16:40

There are three areas of Barcelona that AMD (Quote) looked at for software optimization, said Lewis. First is performance tuning to get as much performance as possible out of the processor, such as how tasks are scheduled. Second, support AMD's PowerNow power optimization technology, which has been enhanced in Barcelona for maximum power savings. Nevertheless, the risks to the outlook are now more on the down side, given uncertainties about the global financial system, the U.S. outlook, and investors' risk appetite, including for emerging markets. Twelve-month inflation is now projected to rise through the end of this year, reflecting exogenous shocks, including a jump in global food prices, unusually cold weather conditions in Chile, and disruptions in energy supply.

Given the strong growth momentum, with excess capacity in the economy gradually vanishing and unemployment at historically low levels, the Banco Centrale has appropriately raised interest rates in recent months. This should insure that inflation expectations remain well-anchored around the 3 percent target and that food and energy price shocks do not spill over into other sectors. Looking ahead, with risks to the outlook more on the downside, the future monetary policy path will need to depend on economic and financial development in the coming months. The strong improvement in the government's financial position in recent years has allowed a moderate reduction in the target for the structural surplus rule. We support this reduction and commend the government for keeping overall spending increases consistent with macroeconomic stability, as well as for the efforts to maintain the high quality of public spending in Chile. Keeping a small positive surplus target is appropriate, as it will allow the build up of some reserves to address future liabilities such as in the context of the planned reform of the pension system. Let me perhaps elaborate on the impact of the recent global financial turbulence.

This impact has been relatively mild in Chile, both compared with most other countries in the region and also with Chile's own past experience. In our view, this is really a strong testimony to the very robust macroeconomic framework that Chile has built over the past two decades, with strong cushions against adverse shocks--a sound fiscal position, low public debt, and independent central bank, high international reserves, and a flexible exchange rate. The past few weeks have also served to underscore how resilient Chile's financial markets have become in the face of global turbulence. Threats have widened relatively little. The exchange rate has been fairly stable, and in line with fundamentals. And the interbank market has continued to function in a normal way.

This resilience reflects a healthy banking system and strong corporate balance sheets, again the result of Chile's excellent economic policy framework. Therefore, assuming no further major unexpected shocks or a global downturn, we believe that growth and employment in Chile will remain relatively strong, benefiting also from Chile's diversified export structure and continued brisk commodity demand. Third is support for AMD-V, its virtualization technology, and nested page tables, a feature of AMD's processors that greatly improves virtualization performance. "Our design goal is to make it so an application running in a virtual world will run as native as possible. Once again, what the user sees is a more efficient running of a virtual environment," said Lewis. AMD also announced at LinuxWorld San Francisco this week the availability of AMD Validated Server platforms certified for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This means system builders can build and ship systems with SLES and carry the "YES Certified" sticker, so long as they use the endorsed parts. Since its acquisition of ADIC in 2006, Quantum Corp. of San Jose, CA, appears to have done a better job than many other storage vendors in integrating the products of the acquired company into its portfolio. ADIC's Scalar and StorNext products, in particular, are being marketed heavily since the deal and appear to be front and center in the company's product development roadmap. Most recently, Quantum released StorNext 3.0. This latest version extends data sharing to servers on the LAN and integrates data de-duplication into the software. StorNext has been upgraded in three core areas. Data Reduction Storage (DRS) is a specialized disk tier that incorporates de-duplication. DRS tunes data reduction to a specific data set and increases the likelihood that very high levels of data reduction can be achieved. DRS is established on a local StorNext volume attached to the MetaData Controller (MDC), which serves as the traffic cop - handling disk allocation as well as client side buffering so that when multiple clients are reading or writing to/from the same file, they all see the same content. This architecture guarantees high throughput at FC speed rather than LAN speed.

"Data De-duplication reduces a customer's data footprint, saves money by lowering capacity requirements and enables data to be retained on fast recovery disk for a much longer period of time," says Nathan Moffitt, StorNext product manager at Quantum. "Data reduction rates of 10x or more can be achieved, depending on the data type and amount of data in the de-dupe volume." StorNext's Storage Manager includes an integrated policy engine that automatically moves files from primary disk to one or more storage repositories (including tape). Thus data movement policies can also be established to manage the migration of files from primary storage to DRS and back. Further, primary disk can be freed up easily for high priority tasks.