Xilinx intros Vivado Design Suite

Xilinx Inc. has announced the Vivado Design Suite. It enables an IP and system centric next generation design environment. Especially meant for the next decade of ‘All-Programmable’ devices, it also accelerates the integration and implementation up to 4X. And, why now? That’s because the all-programmable devices enable programmable systems ‘integration.There are system integration bottlenecks, such as design and IP re-use, integrating algorithmic and RTL level IP, mixing DSP, embedded, connectivity and logic, and verification of blocks and “systems”.

There are implementation bottlenecks as well, such as hierarchical chip planning, multi-domain and multi-die physical optimization, predictable ‘design’ vs. ‘timing’ closure, and late ECOs and rippling effect of changes.

Vivado accelerates productivity up to 4X. The design suite elements include an integrated design environment, has a shared scalable data model, is scalable to 100 million gates, and debug and analysis. It shares design information between implementation steps that ensures fast convergence and timing closure. This enables highly efficient memory utilization. Also, it is scalable to future families, that are greater than 10 million logic cells (100 million gates) and enables cross-probing across the entire design.

Vivado also enables packaging designs into system-level IP for re-use. You can share IP within your team, project or company. Any 3rd party IP is delivered with a common look and feel. You can re-use IP at any point in the implementation process. The IP can be source, placed, or placed and routed.

IT in smaller companies need help too!

According to Steve Bailey from CommVault, IT managers are said to be walking on a tightrope between resources and data growth! Conversely, the resources for CIOs are much lesser, compared to the data growth, which is explosive!! Find all of this hard to believe? Well, ask around!

IT storage professionals are actually considered to be somewhat of 'tightrope walkers', given the fact that they have to perform tremendous balancing acts while driving projects -- all along with the budget allocated to them.

As per a survey conducted by CommVault, the IT organizations are prioritizing managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) first, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software, data backup and recovery and backup of virtual server environments. Managing data growth remains a major budgetary priority for the IT managers. Besides, all of the data has to be managed by organizations without the benefit of adding IT staff!

There's hardly anything that anyone, let alone the IT staff, can do to curtail the data growth. And now, the advent of mobile devices, virtual servers and the increasing use of social media have added to the creation of even newer and massive data!

By the way, have you visited media houses, small IT shops or companies, small retail stores, and so on? IT protection is, most of the times, way of the mark. Why, there are even media houses that have poor IT infrastructure! In fact, some of the offices even had their web site spammed quite often in the past. I have little idea right now, but I do hope they have improved their IT defence. Some commentators have even expressed the need for next-generation firewalls as the need of the hour!

Apparently, managing the IT side of things or the IT infrastructure is considered not so important by many of the small organizations. Don't you think that it is necessary that they too protect their organizations? Forget about the absence of IT storage professionals in such organizations!

If one may add, vendors either seem to charge these companies exorbitantly, or, they are least bothered if such companies get into 'IT trouble'. The fact is: such companies are small in nature, and do not have that much money to spend on IT. Or, at least, that's not their main game! It takes a great deal of convincing on part of vendors, I am sure, to get such companies to protect their IT infrastructures.

So, how do the CIOs and the IT managers manage all of this exploding data (and devices, of course)? Certainly, this calls for a seamless process -- from backup to recovery to archiving data. There is a need to develop and have a single platform to manage and protect data. This needs to be done across heterogenous applications, hypervisors. operating systems and infrastructure -- from a single console.

Well, how do you help the smaller companies, especially those located in smaller and sometimes, remote areas and cities? The answer is simple: vendors really need to take upon themselves the trouble of going down to such places, meet companies, and at least, sound them out on the IT solutions on offer. That will be a start!