Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.

Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.

The device is sampling with potential customers now.

Micron says the video security market is estimated to be worth $83 billion by 2030. In this category applications include corporate fleet dash cameras, smart home security, police body cameras, AI-enabled cameras in factories, and cloud-based video security as a service, or VSaaS.

With its 1.5TB capacity, the i400 microSD card should be a good fit for video storage at the edge and hybrid VSaaS deployments, Micron claims, as it can store up to 120 days of video security footage locally, allowing users to prioritize which data gets uploaded and stored in the cloud.

Beyond security video there are numerous other edge and IoT applications where large volumes of data need to be stored, managed, and analyzed, rather than simply transmitting it all back to a centralized data repository for processing. Micron claims that treating the i400 microSD card as primary storage for edge applications will give users real-time AI analytics and faster decision-making within smart cameras and other devices.

The i400 has a mean time to failure rating of two million hours, and can concurrently handle 4K video recording with "up to eight AI events per second," according to Micron, which presumably means simultaneous access to the data for applications such as object detection and classification for license plate or facial recognition.

The microSD card is manufactured using Micron's 176-layer 3D NAND process, which the company began using for volume shipments of products towards the end of 2020. Since then, Micron has revealed it has 232-layer 3D NAND under development with a roadmap to delivering chips with 500-plus layers in future, as reported by our sister site Blocks & Files.

Micron also disclosed that its LPDDR5 DRAM embedded chips have received ISO 26262 ASIL D (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) certification for in-vehicle applications such as advanced driver-assistance systems. The certification reduces the burden on automakers by minimizing their need to build in additional mechanisms to mitigate risk, Micron claims. ®

Western Digital has confirmed the board is considering "strategic alternatives" for the storage supplier, including spinning out its flash and hard disk businesses.

This follows calls last month by activist investor Elliott Management, which has amassed a $1 billion investment in WD equating to a six percent share stake, for a "full separation" based on those product lines.

In a statement, CEO David Goeckeler said: "The board is aligned in the belief that maximizing value creation warrants a comprehensive assessment of strategic alternatives focused on structural options for the company's Flash and HDD businesses.

India’s Reserve Bank has lifted its ban on Mastercard issuing new cards within the nation.

The ban was imposed in July 2021 when the Bank (RBI) found Mastercard to be “non-compliant with the directions on Storage of Payment System Data”.

Those directions were issued in April 2018 and gave banks and payment systems six months to store “full end-to-end transaction details / information collected / carried / processed as part of the message / payment instruction” on Indian soil. If a transaction involved a foreign entity, replication of data offshore was allowed.

Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.

The announcement from the The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI SIG) was made to coincide with its Developers Conference 2022, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the PCI-SIG itself.

While the completed specifications for PCIe 6.0 were only released this January, PCIe 7.0 looks to double the bandwidth of the high-speed interconnect yet again from a raw bit rate of 64 GTps to 128 GTps, and bi-directional speeds of up to 512 GBps in a x16 configuration.

Splunk has released a major update to its core data-crunching platform, emphasizing reductions in the quantity of data ingested and therefore the cost of operations.

It also addresses a few security flaws that may not be fixable in earlier editions. The release is called Splunk 9.0.

As explained to The Register by Splunk senior vice president Garth Fort, the changes reflect users' concerns that Splunk sucked up so much data that using the application had become very expensive. Fort even cited a joke that did the rounds when Cisco was said to have $20 billion earmarked to spend on Splunk and observers couldn't be sure if that was the sum needed to buy the company or just pay for licences.

Amazon Web Services has launched two significant challenges to on-prem hardware.

One is the addition of Dedicated Hosts to its on-prem cloud-in-a-box Outposts product.

Outposts see AWS drop a rack full of kit, or individual servers, onto customers' premises. AWS manages that hardware, which is designed to run its own cloud services such as the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on-prem.

Immersion cooling has long been the domain of larger datacenter operators but with increasing density and therefore smaller datacenter facilities, there is a need for shops of all sizes to get around heavy-duty AC and air cooling.

This is the target for German server maker RNT Rausch, which has teamed up with cooling specialist Submer to provide immersion cooling for RNT's server and storage systems

The partnership means businesses of any size can deploy liquid cooling in their datacenter. A relatively small space is required for this as it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers, or for expensive and sophisticated fire extinguisher systems, the companies said.

Imagine a future where racks of computer servers hum quietly in darkness below the surface of the Moon.

Here is where some of the most important data is stored, to be left untouched for as long as can be. The idea sounds like something from science-fiction, but one startup that recently emerged from stealth is trying to turn it into a reality. Lonestar Data Holdings has a unique mission unlike any other cloud provider: to build datacenters on the Moon backing up the world's data.

"It's inconceivable to me that we are keeping our most precious assets, our knowledge and our data, on Earth, where we're setting off bombs and burning things," Christopher Stott, founder and CEO of Lonestar, told The Register. "We need to put our assets in place off our planet, where we can keep it safe."

Memory and storage maker Micron Technology has revealed a new business model intended to address the volatility in the memory market that has resulted in sharp swings in pricing over the past several years.

Revealed at Micron's Investor Day 2022 event, the new forward pricing agreements enable a Micron customer to sign a multi-year deal that guarantees them a supply of memory at a predictable price that follows the cost reduction that the chipmaker sees during the lifecycle of a particular product.

Micron's chief business officer Sumit Sadana told Investor Day attendees that the chipmaker has already signed up an unnamed volume customer to one of the new agreements, which the company is currently trying out to see whether it delivers on the expected benefits.

Samsung has dished up a new variety of SD card that can, it claims, sustain 16 years of continual writes.

The Korean giant's calculations for the longevity of the PRO Endurance Memory Card – for that is the new tech's name – assume their use to record 1920×1080 video content at 26Mbit/sec (3.25MB/sec).

At that rate, the 256GB model is rated to endure 140,160 hours of use. Smaller capacity models won't last as long because they'll be overwritten more often, so the 128GB, 64GB and 32GB each halve their larger sibling's lifetime.

Cloud storage company Panzura has received an $80 million injection in a Series B funding round, which CEO Jill Stelfox says it'll use to build a "different" kind of storage company.

"The whole storage industry and management of end user data hasn't changed in 20 years," Stelfox told The Register. "We think we've got a shot at bringing it all together and making a real change."

Panzura competes in the enterprise cloud-based NAS market, with its hybrid cloud-based CloudFS. More recently, the file sync-and-sharer added cloud outage failover, shared NFS and SMB access, and Hyper-V support via its Data Flex release in February this year.

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022