SelectelTechDay

On April 26th, Selectel held its first SelectelTechDay, a meetup for discussing current trends in international manufacturing and new technologies, in its St. Petersburg office. Individuals with a particular interest in these topics—IT directors, product managers, and technical specialists—were invited to take part in our conference hall.

SelectelTechDay: Intel

Our first presenter was Nikolai Zaozerskiy, an Intel sales engineer. He told us that over the past few years, Selectel has become a platinum partner with Intel, the highest level attainable. These partners receive extensive support, which translates to additional benefits for their clients.

This first and foremost is financial support: Selectel gets special prices on various Intel products.

Secondly, Intel holds frequent training sessions for Selectel engineers, so you can be sure they know what they’re doing. Another benefit is that Selectel gets to test Intel products before they even make it to market. When products are finally released, Selectel already has their equipment ready to go.

In addition to Nikolai, Aleksandr Melnikov and Mikhail Tsvetkov from Intel also presented. One of their presentations, FPGA in Data Centers: The Present and Future, is available as a PDF (in Russian).

SelectelTechDay: Micron/Crucial

Artem Basikhin, an application engineer for Micron/Crucial products, talked about current trends affecting the DRAM market. Audience members found the presentation to be particularly useful, especially since “memory is a sore subject for everyone now”.

The main points of the presentation included:

• The amount of information has grown massively, and users now require more DRAM. In light of this, it would be logical to migrate to 32GB and 64GB server modules.
• Manufacturers are not expanding: manufacturing is limited and there is not enough memory for everyone.
• Memory will get more expensive, and it’s unclear how long this will go on for.
• DDR3 is becoming more and more rare. DDR5 is now in development, but won’t be released anytime soon (no sooner than 2020-2021).

Artyom’s presentation Prospects and Reality of DRAM & FLASH is available as a PDF (in Russian).

SelectelTechDay: Juniper

Ivan Lysogor from Juniper gave a review of Juniper switches for data centers, talked about vSRX virtual firewalls, and also looked at virtual integration solutions from Juniper and VMware.

Audience members later remarked that this presentation was very informative.

SelectelTechDay: Adaptec

Adaptec engineer Dmitri Zotov talked about SAS technology and modern information storage systems.

For his closing remarks, Dmitri noted, “Storage system controllers are soaking up more and more AI, but there still aren’t any robots that are capable of replacing parts. Administrators still have to take on some responsibility: they have to track abnormal situations and monitor their system’s reliability.”

His presentation SAS Technology and Modern Information Storage Systems is available in PDF format (in Russian).

SelectelTechDay: Seagate

In his presentation, Alexander Malinin, an enterprise sales manager, explained that the world is moving away from the traditional data storage architecture. Two prevalent trends were noted:

• In applications, which require high-speed data exchanges, SSDs are prevalent.
• In configurations that just save data, HDDs are more popular.

Seagate predicts that the amount of data in the world will soon surpass the total volume of all the SSDs available.

SelectelTechDay: Selectel

Alexander Tugov, product manager at Selectel, talked about our partners and our “jump to the cloud”.

After wrapping up all of the presentations, guests could talk one on one to the presenters, ask them questions in an informal setting, and get detailed responses. It’s always useful to find out “which direction I should develop my business in” from representatives from the world’s leading manufacturers.

We hope the event was, firstly, a success, and secondly, both interesting and useful.

This first round was a bit touch and go; we had to guess which topics would be interesting for our audience. Since we plan on making SelectelTechDay a regular event, we’d love to hear your suggestions for topics for the next meeting. Please share what technologies you’d like to learn more about in the comments below.

Anyone interested in learning about current technological trends from informative and insightful presentations is welcome to join, and we’d be happy to see you all at our next meeting.

A video (in Russian) of SelectelTechDay is available on our YouTube channel.

P.S. Some information given during the event can be filed under “top secret”, and thus we could not disclose it here or in the linked content. Come out to the next SelectelTechDay and don’t miss a thing.