DCN September 2016 | Page 41

products & innovations SPICEWORKS LAUNCHES FREE TOOL TO HELP IT PROFESSIONALS TRACK AND MANAGE CLOUD SPENDING Spiceworks has launched Cloud Cost Monitor, a free online tool that connects to IT professionals’ Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services accounts to analyse and report on organisations’ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) costs and utilised resources. The tool’s online dashboard displays a breakdown of an organisation’s IaaS spending, including weekly cost trends that can be delivered as an email report. This helps IT professionals identify and address any usage anomalies before their monthly invoice arrives.   According to Spiceworks’ study, ‘Diving into IT Cloud Services’, only 25 per cent of IT professionals believe cloud services are more cost effective than on-premises infrastructure, potentially due to a lack of visibility in how their cloud services are being utilised and the impact on monthly costs. Cloud Cost Monitor is designed to help IT professionals overcome the challenges of keeping their IaaS costs under control by enabling them to track how their usage and costs are trending over time. IT professionals can set up Cloud Cost Monitor in less than five minutes to quickly see their cloud computing, storage, database, and networking usage, track how their service costs change over time, and identify cloud services that are unused or using too much bandwidth. For further information visit: www.spiceworks.com  Microsemi extends Flashtec product line with NVMe controllers Microsemi has announced the availability of its mainstream Flashtec NVM Express (NVMe)2108 eight channel and NVMe2104 four channel controllers, enabling leading enterprises and data centres worldwide to realise cost and power effective high capacity solid state drives (SSDs). The second generation PCIe devices extend Microsemi’s product line to mainstream capacity, performance and power while maintaining architectural consistency and attractive enterprise features from its current controllers. The company’s two new devices offer eight and four channel PCIe NVMe controllers capable of supporting capacities of greater than 7Tb, a DDR4 interface capable of supporting 8Gb and higher, dual port, SRIS, end-end data protection and M.2 form factor support using the four channel product. In addition, the new devices enable reuse of firmware with existing Microsemi NVMe controller customers, expanding support and making design cycles shorter. The new Flashtec NVMe2108 and NVMe2104 controllers are optimised for leading mainstream read/write performance. Since the controller performs all flash management operations on-chip and consumes negligible host processing and memory resources, it can also be used by customers for host based Flash Translation Layer (FTL) implementations. For further information visit: www.microsemi.com IBM expands all-flash storage offerings for cloud and cognitive computing IBM has announced new, enterprise class, all-flash storage designed to provide small, mid-sized organisations and global enterprises with primary storage for cloud or cognitive applications and workl