SelectelTechDay #2
The second annual SelectelTechDay took place on September 21 in the Selectel conference hall. Over 200 people (twice as many as last year!) came out to learn about the latest technological and developmental trends on the IT market. Today we’ll be taking a quick look back at what went on in our data center: the latest hardware, impressive presentations, surprise gifts, and data center tours, which even invoked a sense of nostalgia in some of our guests.
Please note that all presentation materials and links are in Russian.
The day started off with a guided tour; Selectel staff led guests around the data center and showed them the power and cooling systems, control room, and of course, server rooms. Due to the overwhelming demand to see Selectel from the inside out, we ended up leading four simultaneous tours in the morning and during the lunch break. There were quite a few questions and requests for our impromptu guides, like to pull up network monitoring data in the control room and to make an interactive map of our existing channels with traffic data.
Lectures were kicked off by an Intel® representative. In his presentation “Unique Opportunities: Intel and Selectel Collaboration”, Nikolay Mester talked about a new server architecture—the planetary data model—and how the physics behind Intel Optane SSDs combine the advantages of high performance and data storage.
Selectel’s product director, Aleksandr Tugov, introduced Selectel Lab: a new project, where clients can test the latest enterprise-class hardware and software solutions for network security, virtual environment management, and performing other cloud infrastructure-based tasks completely for free.
Visitors could get first-hand look at the latest technology and innovations in the demo zone, where servers built on the Intel Xeon Phi and Intel Xeon Scalable processors were showcased alongside servers built for matrix calculations using FPGA programming logic. Aleksandr Tugov said the following software would soon be available in the Selectel Lab:
- a WAF Wallarm solution for combating network vulnerabilities,
- a Hystax package for migrating and replicating virtual environments between different hypervisors,
- the MyOffice office suite for government organizations, which have to work with Russian-made software.
Participants watched a presentation given by HGST System Engineer Grigoriy Nikonov, “The Present and Future of the HDD and SSD Industry“. Grigoriy dispelled the popular notion that enterprise-class harddisks will soon give way to solid state drives. According to Western Digital forecasts, the high-end HDD and SSD segment will grow in unison until 2020, and HDDs will continue to dominate the number of drives produced. Grigoriy predicts we won’t be seeing any low-cost 7200 rpm HDDs, which there are currently no alternatives to in terms of volume and price, any time soon.
In his presentation “A New Generation of Broadcom Controllers as a Data Storage and Distribution Solution”, Yaroslav Nadporozhskiy from Broadcom explained that the company logo looks like the center of the universe because it “connects everything”.
In total there were 12 presentations: Dmitriy Zotov from Microsemi announced the start of a new era with the next generation of controllers; Selectel Technical Director Kirill Malevanov talked about trends in data center technical developments; and Anton Redkorebrov from Kingston discussed the latest Kingston Server Premier Memory modules, which have a clockspeed of 2666 MHz. A transcript of all the presentations and video of the event is available (Rus).
During the breaks, our guests shared their impressions of SelectelTechDay. Anton from Huawei told us, “Co-workers invited me. We’re manufactures and are considering a joint project with Selectel. We’re just audience members today, but hopefully we’ll be presenting in the future. You want SelectelTechDay to become an iconic event—there aren’t many like it in Petersburg. We like that you get to see vendor solutions and the user’s point of view. You usually only get one. Invite us to speak next year.”
Mikhail, a startup owner said, “I’m interested in how fault-tolerant systems are built, and Selectel is the only large-scale provider. I thought I’d be alone, but I’ve actually run into and talked to some people I know. I liked the presentation by HGST; it was really cool. The tour was excellent; it reminded me of my youth and those night shifts working as tech support (laughs). There’s a lot here for advanced specialists; it’s a little difficult for the average admin. Next time, I’d like to see something, like, how to easily build an infrastructure for standard developers.”
SelectelTechDay ended with a lotto and awards, and guests received gifts from Selectel and our partners. We’d like to thank everyone who came out to the office. It’s always a pleasure having you here and we hope you enjoyed yourselves. We’ll see you next year!
Links:
Presentations from SelectelTechDay
Conference video on Youtube