Verizon enables 100G on its network.  Verizon (VZ) announced it will upgrade its IP network infrastructure in select U.S. markets, deploying Cisco’s CRS-3 Carrier Routing System platform. Beginning in the first half of 2012 the CRS-3 routers will extend Verizon’s next-generation 100G capabilities by terminating high-speed connections closer to the ‘edge’ to enable growth where traffic demand is the greatest. The CRS platform also plays a key role in Verizon’s network evolution strategy to IPv6, by providing the flexibility to support the anticipated wave of IPv6 services while continuing to expand and sustain IPv4 services. “We’re constantly seeking to improve the Verizon IP network to support traffic growth, improve performance and increase functionality,” said Ihab Tarazi, vice president of global IP and transport planning and technology for Verizon. “Upgrading the network using Cisco’s CRS-3 platform provides better scale and expanded capabilities that support traffic growth areas such as broadband access and content delivery.”

ViaWest selects HP  3PAR.  HP announced that ViaWest has selected HP 3PAR Utility Storage, based on HP Converged Infrastructure, to stay ahead of competition as a cloud services provider. HP 3PAR Utility Storage will power the ViaWest KINECTed Storage solution, a new managed cloud-storage service for customers seeking more efficient data center strategies. “At a time when exponential data growth is placing unrealistic demands on our clients’ legacy systems, tighter IT budgets have prevented companies from investing in the latest storage solution functionalities,” said Jim Thompson, vice president, Product Management, ViaWest. “The functionality and scalability of HP 3PAR systems has helped ViaWest to meet the needs of those clients and deliver reliable, flexible and affordable cloud storage services.”

Power Assure and ABB collaborate. Power Assure and ABB announced that ABB will integrate Power Assure EM/4 data center energy management software in the ABB Decathlon Data Center Enterprise Management (DCEM) product and services offering. Together the two software services will deliver real-time monitoring, analytics and automation, allowing IT to make appropriate adjustments in response to facility-side energy demands. “By integrating Power Assure EM/4 software solutions, ABB can offer our customers a new level of automated control over their operations,” said Eric Olson, ABB product manager for Decathlon. “Decathlon links IT capacity with cooling and power capacity to move processing where it needs to be to reduce costs, ensure business continuity and improve quality of service.” ABB is an investor in Power Assure.

Fusion-io and IBM selected by Front-safe.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that backup and archiving solutions provider Front-safe has integrated Fusion ioMemory-based IBM High IOPS Adapters into its Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) cloud solution to power performance improvements. The TSM cloud solution offered by Front-safe provides automated backup and recovery, with reporting and dynamic invoicing. “Conventional SSDs did not provide us the capacity we needed. We chose the Fusion-io powered IBM High IOPS Adapter because it gave us the highest performance with our existing hardware,” said Geirr Halvorsen, Front-safe Senior Systems Engineer. “The savings were enormous. We are now able to fully utilize the processors in our TSM servers. This allows us to cut our server footprint, and accompanying floor space, power and cooling costs, by two-thirds.  At the same time, we’ve increased the speed of database backups and tasks like inventory expiration jobs, which makes our servers more responsive. Our customers have noticed the difference.”

IBM to acquire DemandTec.  IBM and DemandTec (DMAN) announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive merger agreement for IBM to acquire DemandTec in an all cash transaction at a price of $13.20 per share, or about $440 million. DemandTec will bring cloud-based analytics software to IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative and add cloud-based price, promotion, and other merchandising and marketing analytics. IBM estimates the market opportunity for Smarter Commerce at $20 billion in software alone. “DemandTec has unprecedented capability to improve customers’ price and promotion tactics on a stand-alone basis and connect retailers and manufacturers for collaborative planning through the cloud,” said Dan Fishback, President and Chief Executive Officer of DemandTec. “IBM Smarter Commerce is the perfect fit for DemandTec. IBM is the only provider of price and promotion offerings within a rich solution set that supports companies’ buy, market, sell and service processes.”

Logicalis UK selects CA. CA Technologies (CA) announced that Logicalis UK is bolstering its private cloud offerings with CA Automation Suite for Clouds. The CA suite will complement the existing Logicalis portfolio of cloud solutions and help its customers optimize resource utilization and reduce costs through dynamic orchestration and workload management to automate the entire cloud service workflow and lifecycle. “Private clouds have moved beyond virtualisation and our customers want to leverage private cloud as a single platform for consistent ICT service delivery,” said Chris Gabriel, marketing director at Logicalis UK. ”After reviewing the market for a robust private cloud solution, Logicalis UK chose CA Automation Suite for Clouds to feature as part of our cloud service and solution offerings.   CA Technologies expertise in developing and supporting cloud environments helps us to help our customers to take maximum advantage, architecturally and operationally, of this new approach to IT service delivery.”

HP and Microsoft partner for global communications cloud solution.  HP (HPQ) and Microsoft (MSFT) announced a global, four-year initiative to deliver Microsoft’s communications and collaboration applications via global private and public cloud services. Under the agreement, HP and Microsoft will offer private and public cloud solutions including private cloud applications from both companies, public cloud services like Office 365 from Microsoft and hybrid solutions that combine public and enterprise cloud services. “Microsoft is committed to putting the unique and ever-evolving needs of customers at the core of cloud innovation,” said Mark Hill, vice president, Enterprise Partner Group, Microsoft. “This alliance with HP not only broadens Microsoft’s geographic reach, it gives customers maximum flexibility to choose a cloud computing solution that meets their organization’s specialized messaging and collaboration needs.”

Unified Platform

The new unified platform announced last week will attempt to combine the resilience of UNIX-based platforms with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of industry-standard platforms, across a common, modular HP BladeSystem architecture. Operating systems that will continue to iterate include HP-UX and OpenVMS, and innovations will continue for the HP Integrity servers and HP NonStop systems. The HP Superdome 2 enclosure (code name Dragon Hawk) and c-Class blade enclosures are on the roadmap, as well as a fortification of Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years.

“Clients have been asking us to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure,” said Martin Fink, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Systems at HP (HPQ). “HP plans to transform the server landscape for mission-critical computing by using the flexibility of HP BladeSystem and bringing key HP technology innovations from Integrity and HP-UX to the x86 ecosystem. Unlike the competition, HP offers an open, integrated, single platform approach.”

DragonHawk

With the Superdome 2 system using Windows or Linux HP enables:

• 32-socket “DragonHawk” symmetrical multiprocessing x86 systems that will scale to hundreds of cores and support large, complex workloads.
• Increase reliability and flexibility with two-, four- and eight-socket “HydraLynx” scalable x86 server blades.
• Enable HP Analysis Engine for x86 to be embedded into the system firmware. HP Analysis Engine goes beyond error logging to ensure efficient diagnoses and automatic repair of complex system errors while restoring system stability in seconds.
• Fault-tolerant HP Crossbar Fabric that intelligently routes data within the system for redundancy and high availability.

“Intel’s continued innovation with a multigeneration Itanium processor roadmap, combined with existing and future mission-critical capabilities of Intel Xeon processors, allow HP and Intel to provide customers with greater flexibility and choice,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, Intel. “Together with HP we will be able to give customers the ability to do mission-critical computing on their terms, with a broad range of operating systems and applications.”

Project Odyssey is a key component of HP’s Instant-on Enterprise, and will showcased at HP’s annual client event, HP Discover which takes place today (November 29) through December 1 in Vienna, Austria.

The five-year agreement call for HP to create a private cloud computing environment for Maersk’s distributed and local applications using HP Cloud Computing Solutions. In addition, HP will take over the Service Desk function at Maersk Line and maintain the company’s computing devices, such as desktop and notebook PCs, for almost 38,000 users in more than 100 countries. As part of the agreement, HP will offer employment to all Maersk Line staff within these areas.

“As a global leader in its industry, Maersk Line is driving significant change in its markets and needs a reliable technology foundation to support these efforts,” said Mike Nefkens, senior VP and GM of HP Enterprise Services for EMEA. “To help achieve the company’s global strategy, HP will apply its cloud computing expertise and experience in managing complex technology environments enabling internal IT leaders to expand support.”

“Maersk Line operates in a competitive global industry that demands innovation to create the agile technology infrastructure we need to be a leader among our peers,” said Adam Gade, chief information officer, Maersk Line. “HP’s global scope combined with its proven expertise in standardizing technology across large enterprises will help us deliver greater value to our business and support our ability to remain the world’s most reliable container shipping company.”

Maersk Line is the global containerized division of the A.P. Moller – Maersk Group. HP didn’t indicate whether its IT solutions forMaersk Line would include any containerized data centers such as HP’s POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter). HP currently supplies Maersk Line other technology and support services as well as hardware, such as servers, storage, networking equipment and PCs.

AMD Launches 6200 and 6400

Formerly code-named Interlagos and Valencia, AMD Monday  announced the immediate availability of its AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors. The new chips achieve 84 percent greater performance, up to 73 percent more memory bandwidth, and use half the power per core.

“Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualization has provided a new level of reliable consolidation and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. ”We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment. The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over. Leading OEMs are now offering cloud, enterprise and HPC customers a full suite of solutions based on the industry’s most comprehensive server processor portfolio, the new AMD Opteron family of processors which deliver an inspired balance of performance, scalability and efficiency.”

AMD also announced the expansion of its 2012 roadmap with the addition of the new AMD Opteron 3000 Series platform, which will be targeted to the ultra-dense, ultra-low power 1P Web Hosting/Web Serving and Microserver markets.

HP launches new AMD ProLiant servers.

HP introduced ProLiant G7 servers featuring AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors, which can improve data center efficiency, scalability and performance up to 30 percent to support large-scale, virtualized and database workloads. The ProLiant uses AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors, for 2,048 cores per rack and 33 percent more cores for highly concurrent high-performance computing workloads.

“We are excited about the launch of the HP ProLiant DL385 G7 based on the AMD Opteron 6200 Series, as it will allow us to increase the density of virtual machines for our customers, while being able to dedicate processor cores for real-time applications like Microsoft Lync,” said Robert Adie, director of Digital IP, an HP customer. “Leveraging HP and AMD together allows us to meet our customer requirements by minimizing the physical footprint and power requirement while hitting an aggressive price point.”

The new HP servers will include Virtual Connect for remote management, and HP integrated lights-out (ILO), a server management tool enabling remote monitoring for reduced maintenance costs.

ZT Systems launches Opteron-based Precision-Fit server solutions.

ZT Systems announced solutions featuring the new AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 series processors. The Opteron 6200 series, with up to 16 cores, will be used in ZT Systems 2210Ra servers and the Opteron 4200 will be used in ZT Systems 1257Ra servers.

“ZT Systems servers featuring the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors enable greater throughput, exceptional value and readiness to scale than previous generations,” said John Fruehe, director of Server Product Marketing, AMD. “With ZT rapidly bringing customized solutions featuring this new technology to market, we look forward to enabling data center customers to help reach new levels of performance and energy efficiency.”

SGI ICE Servers Shipping with new Opteron.

SGI announced that it has begun shipping to customers worldwide its SGIRackable and SGI ICE server lines incorporating AMD Opteron 6200 series processors. With the SGI ICE 8400 launched November 2010 all that is required to upgrade is a socket-level change to the new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors.

“Our customers are using their AMD-powered SGI servers to break new barriers in research and engineering,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. “With industry-leading core counts, the AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors allow applications needing multiple cores to achieve optimal price, performance and density.”

Behind every digitally animated film, there’s a render farm where high-powered computers are working overtime to create amazing digital effects. So it was for “Puss in Boots” from DreamWorks Animation SKG, which took the number one box office spot last weekend. The new film was a spinoff from the “Shrek” series, and DreamWorks and Hewlett Packard (HPQ) once again collaborated on the digital production effort to render the movie.

HP this week provided details on the effort behind “Puss in Boots,” describing it as the company’s most technically advanced film to date, “Puss in Boots.” HP has been a long time partner in the production of DreamWorks movies, with their Converged Infrastructure powering movies like “Shrek“, “How to Train Your Dragon”, “Kung Fu Panda” and “Kung Fu Panda 2“.

Render Power

To create “Puss in Boots,” artists used more than 200 high-performance HP Z800 Workstations to design everything in the film. HP ProLiant BL460 blade technology powered five different server render farms geographically dispersed across the U.S. and India. The film utilized over 60 million render hours and 117 terabytes of data.

“As with all of our films, ‘Puss In Boots’ required powerful systems to support the digital demands of our creative teams,” said Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation SKG. “Knowing that we have the support of our partners at HP allows us to free our artists from technical limitations, letting them focus on creating the most powerful 3-D CG experiences.”

HP Cloud Services were used to meet the extreme demands from DreamWorks, which rendered 8 million of the total 63 million total render hours. “Our decade-long collaboration with DreamWorks has challenged HP to develop technology that continually meets the intense, high-performance needs of the world’s best digital animators,” said Doug Oathout, vice president, Converged Infrastructure, HP. “HP effectively serves as an infrastructure extension of a premiere Hollywood animation studio providing cutting-edge technology to support some of the most creative minds in film and animation.”

HP Everywhere

In addition to HP powering the render process DreamWorks chose HP Networking solutions as well, taking advantage of HP 120508 and 5800 series switches, HP Networking Intelligent Management Center and HP Intelligent Resilient Framework. The HP X9000 IBRIX Network Storage System was also used to help scale the demanding needs of the studio.  The two companies developed the billion-color HP DreamColor LCD display and HP’s DreamColor was used to process to provide high-end color prints of the creative team’s visual development work.

An HP Redstone Development Platform server, using ARM chip technology from Calxeda.

In the increasingly competitive battle to sell servers for “hyper-scale” data centers running armadas of servers, HP has turned to next-generation chip company Calxeda to power a new line of servers. Today HP announced the Redstone Development Platform, a line of servers running on many-core processors from Calxeda based on low-power ARM technology popularized in cell phones.

The Calxeda-powered servers are part of a broader HP initiative to develop low-power, many-core servers known as Project Moonshot. HP executives describe it as a multi-year, multi-phase effort to advance HP technology for hyper-scale computing. The name, a reference to the U.S. space program, suggests the ambitiousness of HP’s thinking. Naming the platform Redstone – which was the launch vehicle for the first sub-orbital space flights during Project Mercury – reflects the fact that this is a starting point on a longer mission.

First Step: Testing and Proof-of-Concept

The Redstone Platform servers unveiled today are being described as appropriate for testing and proof-of-concept, rather than production. The HP-designed system contains 288 Calxeda servers in a single 4U chassis, meaning a full rack of 10 chassis could house 2,880 servers. It is currently available “in limited volumes to selected customers with sophisticated lab environments,” according to HP.

Project Moonshot also includes the HP Discovery Lab, a series of HP facilities where clients can test and benchmark applications on the HP Redstone Server Development Platform, as well as on traditional servers. The first lab is scheduled to open in Houston in January, with additional sites planned to open in Europe and Asia. Clients can work on-site or via remote access.

“We’re shaping the future of extreme high-scale computing, and Moonshot is the first salvo,” said Glenn Keels, director of worldwide marketing for HP’s Hyperscale program, who said HP also intends to incorporate Intel’s low-power Atom servers into Project Moonshot. Keels said its Moonshot infrastructure offerings are an extension of HP’s ProLiant servers, which use traditional x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

“We value our partnerships with Intel and AMD and all of our silicon providers,” said Keels. “This isn’t the death of the traditional x86 server. For some workloads, the savings (with Redstone) can be phenomenal. It’s not for everybody.”

Calxeda EnergyCore chips are ideal for workloads such as web serving, Big Data applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming, and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory scalable databases.

In Competitive Niche, Leading With Power

For HP, Moonshot represents an initiative to beef up its offerings for these hyper-scale users. It’s a niche where the largest server vendors face competition from specialists like high-performance computing vendors and custom solutions from demanding end-users. Dell formed its Data Center Solutions (DCS) team to develop custom solutions for the largest cloud providers, at least partly in response to the success that specialized players like SGI (then Rackable) were experiencing with scale-out customers.

HP clearly sees an opportunity in building low-power many-core servers, which can slash power usage over large footprints of Internet infrastructure. That’s an area where HP’s goals were aligned with Calxeda.

“The fundamental constraint in the world of massively parallel approaches to data management and analytics is power,” said Karl Freund, the VP of Marketing at Calxeda. “Today marks the beginning of a new way of thinking about what is possible in data and analytics. What is happening here at Calxeda is the beginning of that revolution in the data center.”

“They’re smart guys, they get the vision and the architecture and they’re very flexible,” Keels of Calxeda. “They know how to work with large OEMs.”

In looking ahead to the changing landscape for data center infrastructure, HP compares its hyper-scale initiative to the adoption of blade servers – a sector in which HP has experienced huge success. Can it apply that experience and lessons learned to Project Moonshot?

“This is the green flag,” said Keels. “We think we’ve got a decent formular on how to work with our customers to invent the future. “

Gartner: PaaS to reach $707.4 million in 2011.  Gartner announced that Worldwide platform as a service (PaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $707.4 million in 2011, up from $512.4 million in 2010.  According to Gartner’s research, the market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totaling $1.8 billion in 2015. As products in the market expanded to include other middleware capabilities as a service, PaaS enterprises took notice and the application integration and middleware (AIM) market expanded. ”When application infrastructure is deployed on-premises, organizations can take a best-of-breed approach and integrate all acquired components in their data center. When middleware services are acquired in the cloud from different PaaS providers – the services remain in different data centers and resist optimized integration. Mainstream users of PaaS services will likely look for providers that deliver comprehensive and integrated PaaS functionality suites – forcing the specialist offerings to consolidate,” said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Gartner analysts predict a rapid aggregation of PaaS offerings into suites of functionalities, providing users with well-integrated and optimized platform services (from the same or different suppliers), co-located in the same data center to provide appropriate levels of performance, security, manageability and availability.

Cisco Evolves WAN Optimization Appliances.  Cisco(CSCO) introduced the next generation of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances – the Cisco family of WAN (wide area network) optimization solutions. The WAAS appliances improve the user experience across their entire network infrastructure by providing up to five times the bandwidth and supporting up to three times the users than the previous generation. The appliance models are split out among the deployment types they serve: branch offices, large branch offices, and an organization version that is integrated as an on-demand WAAS on the Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2. Cisco is also announcing Cisco WAAS v4.4 software, which brings together application and network optimization with the industry’s first context-aware DRE (Data Redundancy Elimination).  “Today’s enterprise networks are experiencing increased bandwidth-heavy applications such as video, virtual desktops and cloud services,” said Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC. “The momentum behind this trend will only grow as cloud applications take center stage in the enterprise. WAN optimization and application delivery solutions like Cisco’s WAAS appliances provide IT and network managers with a compelling solution that scales and improves application performance across the network.”

HP and SAP partner to accelerate the cloud.  HP and SAP AG announced an agreement for HP Enterprise Services to provide cloud-based delivery of SAP applications that enable enterprises to deploy applications in a scalable and affordable manner. The first SAP application to be delivered by HP Enterprise Services via its cloud platform is the SAP Customer Relationship Management rapid-deployment solution. As a SAP-certified provider HP brings their global data centers to the partnership with secure processing capacity, with security and privacy policies that can rapidly adjust to meet each client’s specific needs. “Cloud delivery models are becoming a top priority for clients due to their quick deployments, cost-effectiveness and overall flexibility,” said Eric Clark, vice president, Enterprise Application Services, HP Enterprise Services. “In collaboration with SAP, HP is empowering clients to dramatically increase the availability and speed of business information via the cloud, paving a flexible path toward future growth.”

Citrix updates NetScaler MPX and SDX.  Citrix Systems (CTXS) unveiled four new additions to its leading Citrix NetScaler MPX and SDX product lines, delivering the unprecedented performance and virtualization that businesses require in the Cloud Era. The new NetScaler MPX and SDX platforms, including the 50 Gbps SDX 21550 appliance, provide the right networking footprint to tackle large-scale network consolidation initiatives with the flexibility to scale without additional hardware. The new SDX appliances integrate virtualization directly into the network fabric to support up to 40 completely independent NetScaler instances for large-scale consolidation projects. “Citrix continues to demonstrate a relentless focus on improving the performance of virtualized, cloud-delivered applications, including at the network infrastructure layer.  This new set of NetScaler capabilities represents an aggressive move to leverage both virtualization and hardware advances to elevate the state of the art in Application Delivery Controllers,” said Jim Frey, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

HP’s new Storage Federation Technology. HP (HPQ) expanded its converged storage portfolio with HP Peer motion, new federated storage software that enables clients to transparently move application workloads between disk systems in virtualized and cloud computing environments. Available to LeftHand and 3PAR, Peer Motion delivers a peer-to-peer storage federation capabilities that span from a virtual storage area network (SAN) software appliance to midrange and high-end storage systems. This enables clients to respond to unpredictable environments with federated workload balancing, increase the return on investment with federated thin provisioning, and improve productivity by moving data from retiring arrays to new systems nondisruptively with federated asset management. HP also introduced new HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, featuring the delivery of enterprise IT within public and private clouds, called IT-as-a-Service. The two new models, the V400 and V800 (HP 3PAR V-Class) are powered by the unique capability delivered by the HP 3PAR Gen4 ASIC. The ASIC makes management easier by autonomically load balancing all data within the array in one click as new resources are added to the system, giving 1.5 times greater port connectivity and disk resources, and consolidating unpredictable workloads. HP VirtualSystem and HP CloudSystem solutions featuring the HP 3PAR V-Class Storage System are expected to be available later this year and start at a list price of $288,633. HP 3PAR Peer Motion is a separate software product available for an additional charge.

IBM empowers partners for Netezza appliances. IBM announced that after the successful integration of its 2010 acquisition of Netezza, the company has launched a global initiative to help its Business Partners expand their analytics portfolio with IBM Netezza appliances. IBM will help partners with sales, marketing, and technical resources to market and sell Netezza to industries such as financial services, healthcare and energy and utilities. ”Business analytics is going mainstream and IBM’s goal is to arm its partners with the right skills and support to help our clients take advantage of this trend,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager, IBM Information Management. “These resources are geared to make it easy for our partners to quickly infuse Netezza into their business model.”   Specifically IBM will hold global skills bootcamps for partners, allow partners to bring clients into Innovation Centers for proof of concepts, offer a Software Value Plus program and a Software Value Incentive. On September 15, IBM will host a worldwide Webcast that details how IBM Business Partners can take advantage of these resources to market and sell Netezza appliances.

Iomega announces rackmount network storage for SMB.  Iomega, an EMC company announced the worldwide launch of the new Iomega StorCenter px12-350r Network Storage Array, a powerful next-generation network storage solution delivering the highest levels of performance and advanced data protection for small-to medium-sized businesses and distributed enterprises. The new px12-350r is geared for the small and medium size business market as it supplies a maximum of 36 terabytes of network storage for prices less than $10,500. The array supports Hyper-V Live migration, multiple RAID levels and hot swap drives, certification for the most popular virtualization environments, and native support for Avamar deduplicating backup. ”As the flagship of our most advanced and powerful business class of NAS devices, the px12-350r incorporates the latest in high performance technologies including solid state disk drives, expanded memory and 3TB 7200 RPM disk drives, as well Iomega’s Personal Cloud technology and the only network storage array in the world to natively support Avamar deduplicating backups. The px12-350r is truly advanced network storage that can be the foundation for today’s high growth SMBs and distributed enterprises,” said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega. The new Iomega StorCenter px12-350r is available immediately and is available in a 8TB model ($5,999.99) and a 12TB model ($6,999.99).

Equinix Switzerland earns ISO 27001.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that they have successfully passed the external audit for ISO 27001 certification for its six International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in Switzerland. ISO Security standards have been verified within all business processes within Zurich and Geneva data centers. “Equinix designs and builds all of its IBXs to the highest operational standard, particularly where security is concerned,” says Marco Dottarelli, managing director of Equinix Switzerland. “We are delighted to earn this certification for all our data centers in Switzerland. It demonstrates our commitment to providing robust information security measures that preserve the integrity of our customers’ sensitive information.”

Peak 10 selected by new customers.  Peak 10 announced that it is delivering premium data center services to Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA), a nonprofit trade association representing the U.S. material handling and logistics sector. Served out of the Peak 10 Charlotte campus MHIA will host their network and receive managed services, network device management and additional security for its servers. Peak 10 also announced that Rise Health, a healthcare services company will receive data center solutions from Peak 10. Served from their Jacksonville campus Rise Health will locate their production environment, specifically its web-based application, which allows it to serve physicians across the country. “We chose to work with Peak 10 due to its local presence and geo-redundant network of data centers. We were instantly impressed with its team and their ability to get our environment up and running quickly,” said Nicole Bradberry, the chief information officer of Rise Health. “Peak 10 has provided us with a state-of-the-art facility that ensures we have a secure environment for our Web-based applications.”

Silver Peak sues Riverbed.  Silver Peak Systems has filed claims against Riverbed Technology (RVBD) for infringing three of Silver Peak’s United States patents related to its WAN optimization technology.   Silver Peak seeks to have Riverbed permanently enjoined from making and selling the features of Riverbed’s Steelhead series appliances, Riverbed Operating System (RiOS) software, and related services that are accused of infringement.