Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
Consonus and Midas Medici merge. Midas Medici Group Holdings, a leading provider of consulting and market data to the utility industry, announced that it has reached a definitive merger agreement with Consonus Technologies, a provider of energy-efficient data center solutions. "We have a wealth of experience in our certified engineers as well as a host of consultants focused on delivering IT solutions and service through our data centers," said John Roger, co-president of Consonus, which will continue to offer hosting and managed services in its data centers, but will now be able to also pair that with the energy service offerings of UtilPoint.
Camstar selects Peak 10. Peak 10 announced it will be providing data center and hosting services to Camstar Systems, Inc., leading innovator of software solutions in the manufacturing industry. Critical systems to support applications at Camstar will be migrated to Peak 10's Charlotte data center and will continue to use Peak 10's virtual server platform and managed hosting services. "A reliable, physical and virtual infrastructure and around-the-clock IT management and support are top priorities for us," said Scott Jones, chief technical officer and vice president at Camstar. "The security and integrity of our products are absolutely essential for Camstar and its customers."
SGI Altix ICE scale-out supercomputer. SGI announced the immediate availability of Altix ICE 8400, the next generation of the Altix ICE scale-out high performance computing (HPC) blade platform. The company has also submitted world record performance results for the SPEC benchmark with the Altix ICE 8400. The Altix ICE 8400 utilizes quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand interconnect and a backplane with up to three times the link-to-node bandwidth relative to competitive QDR InfiniBand clusters. It also supports up to 128 processors (1,536 cores) per cabinet and 130W CPU sockets. "Altix ICE 8400 is a significant step forward for SGI's scale-out blade computing. It is scalable to tens of thousands of nodes, and this highly flexible SGI platform is designed to economically address challenging compute problems," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for high performance computing. The Altix ICE hardware architecture is based on a cabinet-level design and can have up to four 10U blade enclosures with 16 compute blades per enclosure. All models are available immediately, with the exception of the IP106 and IP100 blades with AMD Opteron processors, which are expected during the third quarter of 2010.
PMC-Sierra acquires channel storage from Adaptec. Semiconductor solution provider PMC-Sierra (PMCS) announced the Company has entered into a definitive agreement with Adaptec (ADPT) to acquire its channel storage product line. The $34 million acquisition is expected to close in 30 days subject to customary closing conditions. Adaptec is the largest supplier of x86 RAID products through the channel. "The acquisition of Adaptec's channel storage business allows us to accelerate our entry into a new segment of enterprise RAID storage and leverages our leading RAID chip and software development with channel customers," said Greg Lang, PMC-Sierra's president and CEO.
