Category: Grid Computing

Michael Dell gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, and there is blog post summarizing his presentation. Michael emphasizes they go embrace the PC. 2. We Still Love Hardware: Without mentioning Hewlett-Packard by name, Dell took a few shots at HP’s potential PC division spin-out. Dell said his company has rapidly evolved from PCs to servers to cloud solutions. “There are many reasons to stay committed to the PC, he said. “There will be two billion PCs in a few years.” Dell estimated that 95 percent of disk drives are in PCs, and five percent are in servers. A company without PCs can’t gain volume pricing advantages for server components, Dell asserted. “The client offers enormous scale,” said Dell. “Give up that scale and you need to raise your prices.” Data Center is not specifically mentioned, but implied in this statement. 3. Total Picture: “Dell is not a PC ...

September 27, 2011 -- Cloud and hybrid hosting provider Voxel announced on Tuesday it will expand its Asian hosting capacity with the acquisition of an 1,800 square foot private data center suite from global telecommunications provider KDDI, located near Singapore's Changi Airport.

Cloud computing is still in its early stages and most enterprises are still in the learning phase trying to understand how the cloud can best suit their needs. What are the key differentiators for the cloud model in the enterprise decision-making process?

Ellen Rubin is the founder and Vice President of Products for CloudSwitch, which allows enterprises to run applications in the cloud without re-architecting the application or changing existing management tools. Pharmaceutical companies are finding that cloud computing is meeting their needs for massive computing power that is scaleable as well as for quick turnaround in deploying infrastructure.Enterprises across many industries have taken their first steps into the cloud. As comfort levels grow, companies are starting to move beyond small, experimental projects to full-scale adoption and deployments. Pharma is emerging as the breakout industry that is leading the way. What Makes Cloud Work for Pharma?

APC by Schneider Electric has introduced the next generation of its InfraStruxure architecture, a modular data center infrastructure system that integrates power, cooling, racks, security and management. APC also introduced new features to the InfraStruxure management software portfolio offering additional energy management and efficiency tools. “APC pioneered scalable and modular data centers with the introduction of InfraStruxure in 2002 and we continue to invest and evolve the architecture,”” said Jim Simonelli, Chief Technology Officer, APC by Schneider Electric. “As data center challenges escalate with increasing server densities, virtualization, and a new focus on efficiency, it has become a priority for data center managers to align their power and cooling infrastructure designs with their IT requirements. This next generation of InfraStruxure makes it easier than ever before to meet these new dynamic challenges while achieving desired availability levels and deliver maximum efficiency.”

As it passes its 10th year in operation, the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research has plenty to celebrate: in the past 12 months, it has received more than $11 million in new funding, including two major competitive federal grants for advancing computational science and a New York State grant to make supercomputing more environmentally friendly.

Multi-disciplinary researchers from across the University of Edinburgh -- working in areas including bioinformatics, speech processing, particle physics, material physics, chemistry, cosmology, medical imaging and psychiatry -- will now benefit from a significant upgrade to the University's shared, high performance computer (HPC) system known as "Eddie." The new HPC system, operational from July 2010, immediately doubles the compute power available to researchers enabling them to run more complex computer simulations and scenarios, and obtain research results more quickly. A second planned upgrade for 2011 is expected to result in at least five times the current compute power of Eddie being available to researchers.

In the run-up to the two next Cloud Expos, 6th Cloud Expo (June 21–22, 2010) in Prague, Czech Republic and 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Being in Iceland there is obviously an abundance of geothermal energy and free cooling but Iceland is also a network hub with redundant low latency multi-terabit fiber connections to N-America and Europe making it much cheaper to serve both markets ...

It’s fair to say that the pharmaceutical industry has an image issue, generally ranking just above the tobacco industry in public opinion surveys. One recent Harris Interactive poll reported that only 26% of Americans view pharma favorably. Even worse, 52% of respondents expressed a negative opinion of the drug industry. And this for an industry that enhances health and extends life! Low public esteem may stem from a perception of excessively high prices for life-saving medications or negative media coverage and inflammatory political oratory. At the same time, drug-safety scares and product recalls have undermined the public’s faith in drug therapies. Clearly, the pharmaceutical industry has some serious work to do to reverse the trend of declining public opinion.

As a disaster recovery specialist, Sungard Availability Services has an armada of workstations in its facilities for that “what if” moment, ready to provide an instant operations center in the event a disaster affects a client. But what about the rest of the time? The company has decided to put these computers to work through a new initiative called the Responsible Computing Project. Sungard is using more than 1,000 disaster recovery workstations in its Philadelphia, New York and Chicago data centers to create a computing grid that will perform processing for scientific and humanitarian projects.

Cluster Resources, the company behind the Moab® unified intelligent automation technology, today announced a strategic move into the commercial data center market with a new name and brand identity, Adaptive Computing, and an upgraded software suite focused on extending the value of Moab to the data center, private and public cloud environments. The company’s robust Moab Adaptive Computing Suite™ platform for data centers and private clouds now allows a wider range of organizations to leverage Moab’s proven management and automation capabilities in order to create dynamic, intelligent IT environments.

Can a little software go a long way to trimming power consumption?  Packing more customers per server and rack is both cost effective and power efficient, but there are other tricks that larger firms are looking at to cut back on buying hardware and more bandwidth.

Last week, I talked about how today’s data centers can be located almost anywhere, through the power of virtualization. We are certainly seeing this trend play out in the news. Just this week, Apple ended weeks of speculation by announcing its plans to base a data center in North Carolina. That state, and many others, are competing for these projects, offering tax incentives and more, because of the jobs they bring to the region. While Apple is saying the new facility will mean about 50 jobs, North Carolina officials expect the Apple data center project to generate more than 3000 total jobs, including construction jobs to build the facility – not something to sneeze at in this economy. What’s good for economic development isn’t always what’s best for the environment, however. One part of the appeal of the North Carolina site is the available power grid, as ...

Virtual reality is one of those terms forever associated with science fiction and gaming – I immediately think of the hologram deck on the USS Enterprise of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. But “going virtual” as a networking and data center concept is a powerful idea that can reshape how and where data centers are built, and the way in which networks are used. By making more intelligent use of virtualization and smart networking, network operators and enterprises alike can not only save money but also reduce carbon emissions. The key is to consider the network as a seamless whole, and the data resources hanging off that network as shared facilities. Virtualization already does this within the data center – servers are no longer dedicated to individual applications, rather the virtualized server resources are shared across applications and thus used more efficiently. There is no under-utilized server capacity sitting idly ...