Pakedge Device & Software launches an own fibre optic cable brand for commercial AV projects, one designed specifically to work with the company's routers, switches and GBICs.

The cables should optimise network performance by providing an improved AV experience for the end-user, with less electromagnetic interference, greater speed capabilities (up to 10Gbps), greater bandwidth, greater durability, less signal degradation, elimination of heat dissipation and less transmission power.

Qualcomm is ready for a slice of datacentre pie-- at its annual analyst day meeting the company confirms plans to expand beyond smartphone chips with processors designed for low-power server applications.

"This is something we're working on but not talking about for some time. Now, we are going to have a product that goes into the server," Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf says. "We're now at a point where a lot of the growth in the data centre tends to happen in areas where the operating system is already being written from scratch on Linux and driven by a smaller number of people who design their own data centre, are interested in alternatives [to x86] and interested in new architectures."

Details on what Qualcomm plans to off are scant, other than its being ARM-based. The company already makes a 64-bit ARM-based processor, the Snapdragon 805 smartphone CPU, even if the company admits there is more to server hardware than sticking a smartphone chip on a motherboard.

According to IDC the global total of datacentres deployments (of all types) will peak at 8.6 million units in 2017 before a slow decline, as the transition to the 3rd Platform directly impacts datancentre construction and remodeling.

A decline in internal datacentre server rooms starting in 2016 and internal server closets starting in 2017 should trigger the shift. The analyst adds all other datacentre categories will grow throughout the forecast period, with service provider datacentres increasing much faster.

"Over the next 5 years, a majority of organisations will stop managing their own infrastructure," IDC says. "They will make greater use of on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets, and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider datacentres for new services. This will result in the consolidation and retirement of some existing internal datacentres, particularly at the low end. At the same time, service providers will continue their race to build, remodel, and acquire datacentres to meet the growing demand for capacity."

HP teams up with VMware to to announce the Converged System 200-HC, a hyper-converged appliance combining server, networking, storage, and virtualisation and management software.

Designed for mid-size businesses, remote offices and branch office locations, the system uses VMware's EVO:RAIL hyper-converged infrastructure to consolidate IT resources into a single appliance. According to HP it features a pre-integrated pre-tested VMware software stack with vSphere, Virtual SAN and vRealize Log Insight, as well as the EVO:RAIL engine.

The hardware allows for rapid software-defined service deployment, and is scaleable from 1 appliance of 4 nodes to 4 appliances of 4 nodes.

In addition HP and VMware are extending HP's OneView convergence management platform to EVO:RAIL, as future OneView releases will allow customers to directly manage the EVO:RAIL appliance.