AppliedMicro, Vapor IO Get Together For Telemetry Advancements

Data centers are not easy things to manage. With an ever-increasing amount of data flowing through the system, which in turn needs to be regulated to make sure it all gets where it's going without an unnecessary bottleneck or the like. Certain tools, meanwhile, can make this process easier—though never really easy—to handle, and one such advance recently came out as a result of a new partnership between AppliedMicro Circuits Corporation and Vapor IO.

The partnership calls for AppliedMicro (News - Alert)—a well-known firm in the field of connectivity options—to supply its HeliX 2 processor, a 64-bit quad-core processor to Vapor IO's Vapor Edge Controller (VEC) system. Vapor IO is likewise well known as the provider of a first-in-its-class data center solution that features both intelligent and hyper-modular operations.

The VEC has the particular advantage of going beyond the standard “top-of-rack” system by maintaining separate zone operations directly inside the data center proper. It can manage a data center at the rack level, which in turn means there's no more need for baseboard management controllers in each server. That means costs drop since there are fewer components involved to deliver the same level of operations, and also due to simpler management that requires fewer resources.

Better yet, the HeliX 2 itself can run at a clock speed of up to 2 GHz, including as many as six lanes of PCIe 3.0 and a lane of SATA 3.0, along with a memory controller and fully three USB 3.0 ports, which makes for a whole lot of connectivity all in one place.

AppliedMicro's vice president of marketing, John Williams, offered up some comment around the partnership, saying “With IT organizations continuously seeking to enhance data center management capabilities and lower costs, the Vapor Edge Controller represents a major step forward. Vapor IO has taken advantage of the performance of the HeliX 2 processor to replace a large number of BMC devices within a rack with a disaggregated solution, reducing cost and complexity while increasing overall reliability and telemetry.”

That makes for a lot of inducement for data centers to bring this technology into the fold. It covers several different major points at once and allows for several different options at once. Its flexibility and resiliency should prove a big help in managing data center operations. Considering how increasingly important data center operations are to a growing number of firms, the VEC should have a lot of interested parties coming around looking for it.

With as much as the VEC is capable of, it's safe to say that this partnership should pan out quite nicely for both Vapor IO and Applied Micro, and it's likely a partnership that wouldn't have worked near so well with anyone else involved.