When it announced the deal in October, IBM cited the significant growth in the amount of data and complexity of applications, and said Platform Computing’s software can help IBM customers manage and analyze massive amounts of data in a timely fashion.

“The acquisition of Platform Computing will help accelerate IBM’s growth in smarter computing – a key initiative in IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy – by extending the reach of our HPC offerings into the high growth segment of technical computing,” said Helene Armitage, general manager, IBM Systems Software. “Our intent is to enable clients to uncover insights from growing volumes of data so they can take actions that optimize business results.”

Platform Computing’s software is used to manage resource-intensive applications such as simulations, computer modeling and analytics tools used in industries including financial services, manufacturing, digital media, oil and gas, life sciences, government, and research and education. Platform Computing currently serves over 2,000 clients including 23 of the top 30 largest global enterprises. Example customers include CERN, Citigroup, Infineon, Pratt & Whitney, Red Bull Racing, Sanger Institute, Statoil and University of Tokyo.

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.”

Cray delivers first Blue Waters Cabinet. On December 1 Cray delivered the first full cabinet for the NCSA Blue Waters system. A photo gallery of the installation day can be found on the NCSA Facebook album, where in the comments it is confirmed that the cabinets will be water-cooled. The National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project was awarded to Cray last month after NCSA and IBM terminated the original contract last summer.

Dell’s HPC Strategy.  The Register reports on how Dell is going to engage the market to grow its HPC strategy. The primary focus for Dell’s HPC strategy is to concentrate on smaller HPC systems where projects are well-bounded with known workloads and customers they know and understand. Dell is putting together recipes for popular HPC apps in small, medium and large configurations. Each of these is fully tested and guaranteed to hit the promised level of performance. Dell’s  High Performance Computing web site lists strategic insights, recommended configurations and a High Performance Cluster Advisory tool.

SGI selected for Poznan HPC System.  SGI announced that Poland’s Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) has purchased an SGI HPC solution. The purchased system is comprised of an SGI Rackable C1103-G15 cluster utilizing AMD Opteron 6200 series processors, and includes 120 servers each with one NVIDIA M2050 GPU per node and another 107 servers with two M2050 GPUs per server. The full configuration is expected to deliver 224 peak teraflops and will feature 12.6 TB of memory, 5448 CPU cores and 149632 GPU CUDA cores, and is intended to satisfy the increasing performance requirements of Poznan Supercomputing Center users. ”We decided to go for the combination of the most modern CPU technology together with proven GPU technology,” said Norbert Meyer, director of the Supercomputing facility at Poznan. “Such a combination allows us to ensure optimal parameters for our users. This system, which was financed from structural funds coming from POWIEW and PL-GRID national projects and will be also used in the PRACE (EU project), allowed us to reach 63 teraflops, enough for a place on the TOP500 list today, with less than half of nodes installed for the test. The full configuration will feature more than twice as many more nodes than the measured system, which ensures enough performance for our users as well as a good position on June 2012 TOP500 list.”

Through a hybrid computing approach made possible with the launch of the zEnterprise System in July 2010, some  IBM System x blades and System x applications can be installed in a zEnterprise mainframe. No changes are required for the application, and integration and management of blades and applications are handled by the zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, via a single console.

The benefit is that the application servers can be physically and logically close to the data running on the mainframe. IBM said the ability integrate Windows applications in zEnterprise will reduce the cost and complexity of corporate data centers and make it easier to manage workloads spanning mainframe and distributed environments.

“The new heterogeneous virtual IT infrastructure will give us greater flexibility and scalability,” said Huub Meertens, head of the Support Engineering Section at Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organization in the Netherlands. “On our existing servers, the various applications operate independently on diverse platforms, based upon the one-server-one application model. The combination of IBM System z with Intel servers in an ensemble configuration turns out to be the best solution for modernization of our IT infrastructure.”

The new capability will be available for either of the zEnterprise systems, the z196 or z114.

IBM said it has continued to see mainframe momentum. Since shipping its System zEnterprise 196 in July 2010, Big Blue has added more than 80 new mainframe clients worldwides. China recently announced its selection of System z to build a cloud computing platform for an online portal for a variety of social services.

IBM introduces Solar designed for the Data Center.  IBM announced that it is rolling out a solar power array designed specifically to run high-voltage data centers, integrating AC and DC-based servers, water-cooled computing systems and related electronics. A 6,000 square foot rooftop houses the array at IBM’s India Software Lab in Bangalore. The solar array is capable of providing a 50 kilowatt supply of electricity for up to 330 days a year, for an average of five hours a day. “The technology behind solar power has been around for many years, but until now, no one has engineered it for efficient use in IT,” said Rod Adkins, senior vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “We’ve designed a solar solution to bring a new source of clean, reliable and efficient power to energy-intensive, industrial-scale electronics.” IBM plans for the Bangalore solar-power system to connect directly into the data center’s water-cooling and high-voltage DC systems. IBM also recently announced that in collaboration with scientists at ABB, the world’s largest builder of electricity grids, they are using supercomputers to study and potentially develop a new type of high-voltage insulator that will improve the efficiency of transmitting electricity.

NetApp sets SPECsfs2008 NFS world record.  NetApp (NTAP) announced six high-performing SPECsfs2008 NFS benchmark results, including a world record. The SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) standard SPECsfs2008 measures file server throughput and response time. NetApp scalable storage architecture achieves world-record NFS performance for demanding NAS workloads with 1,512,784 ops per second and an overall response time of 1.53 milliseconds. Benchmarks were achieved using NetApp FAS6200 series, running on the Data ONTAP 8 operating system. “Companies today require IT that helps grow their business by providing support for enterprise business applications, big data, and cloud computing,” said Chris Cummings, vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “These SPEC benchmark results validate that NetApp can provide companies with a high-performance storage infrastructure for their demanding business-critical workloads that require always-on availability. Additionally, NetApp delivers on-demand flexibility to start with a small storage solution and easily, nondisruptively scale as their demand grows.”

SGI selected in Japan for 32.6 Teraflops HPC system.  SGI announced today that the Institute for Chemical Research at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan, has selected an SGI high performance computing (HPC) and storage system to advance genomics research at the Institute. Once operational the HPC system is expected to be 32.6 teraflops, using SGI UV 1000 systems and will deliver up to 6.6x performance increase over the previous system. The new system will consist of more than 3072 cores of Intel Xeon processor E7 series, 48 Terabytes of total memory and 840 Terabytes of total storage. ”Researchers at the world’s leading scientific, academic, government and commercial laboratories are using SGI computers to achieve important advances in science, medicine, and genomics,” said Ryutaro Ishimoto, president of SGI Japan. “Kyoto University and the Institute for Chemical Research are among the most respected institutions of advanced research and higher learning in the world. The results of their genomics research will lead to exciting new learning and discoveries that will impact scientific communities around the world for years to come.”

“We have a strong working relationship with Digital Realty Trust, which is founded on the flexibility and reliability of its Turn-Key Datacentre solution,” said Lilian Hwang, Country Manager for Information Technology Services at IBM Singapore. “This valuable partnership has allowed IBM to better meet the needs of customers through accelerating the deployment of new data centres while reducing capital costs.”

Other companies leasing space in the building include SoftLayer Technologies and Adobe Systems (ADBE). The Singapore building is Digital Realty’s first project in the Asia Pacific region, where the company has several additionalprojects under development.

“We are delighted that IBM has once again chosen to work with Digital Realty for its mission-critical data centre facility in Singapore,” said Kris Kumar, Regional Head, Asia Pacific, for Digital Realty. “Singapore plays an important role as one of the multinational commercial and financial hubs in the APAC. We are continuing to see strong demand here for our data centre solutions from new and existing global enterprises customers, such as IBM.

“We have made a similar commitment to the Australian market with the acquisition of two development sites earlier this year, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne,” Kumar added. “As the groundbreaking on our first project in Sydney approaches, we are nearly fully staffed there with local personnel who have deep roots in the Australian market and unmatched data centre expertise. We look forward to delivering the same high quality, flexible and reliable data centre solutions to Australian customers looking to expand and/or consolidate their IT systems with a long-term, financially sound partner.”

The Modular Market

While the modular market is still fairly young, there has been some tremendous innovation and engineering design efforts put into solutions.  As engineered solutions continue to grow the adoption from businesses of all sizes continue to grow as well.

Many of the major server vendors have modular data center products and while they are optimized to work with their hardware, will typically support anything a standard rack supports. Vendors worldwide have engineered their own version of a container or module and incorporated a variety of unique capabilities into their solution. Having one vendor supply all components for and within the rack for a module enables them to engineer it as a complete solution that can then have modular power and cooling products complement the IT module.  Modular data center products, including containers, are available from: IO, HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, Cisco, Cirrascale, Bull, AST, Schneider Electric, PDI (acquired by Smiths Interconnect), Emerson Network Power, Silver Linings, and Telenetix.

Within the everything-as-a-Service model, a modular provider is able to offer the entire data center as a service, by quickly adding a module of IT with all supporting power and cooling infrastructure. The entire module is available as a package, integrating all aspects of the IT within and subsystems through DCIM or other management tools. Modular data center Providers include: IO, NxGen Modular, COLT, Cannon, Pacific Voice and Data, BladeRoom, Pelio & Associates, Dock IT, Lee Technologies (acquired by Schneider Electric), Datapod and Turbine Air Systems (TAS)/Celestica (CLS).

The entire Guide to Modular Data Centers white paper can be downloaded here, courtesy of IO.

DCK Guide to Modular Data Centers Home

“Enterprise clients are much more conservative because their revenue, reputation and supply chain are closely related to the performance and security of their infrastructure,” said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM. “Our focus with SmartCloud is to bring the benefits of this model in a way that supports enterprise level service, leverages existing investments and opens new doors to productivity and innovation.”

SmartCloud Application Serviced Unveiled

IBM’s new platform as a service (PaaS) offering, IBM SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), will be available in beta this year, and offer enterprise–grade security, open Java and cross-platform support, and managed services to enable development and deployment of applications to the cloud.

The SCAS will run on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ – the industry’s first enterprise class infrastructure-as-a-platform – and offer “business centric” service level agremeents (SLAs).

IBM says it has also added services for automating the most common tasks associated with managing SAP environments in the cloud. The SmartCloud for SAP Applications leverages IBM’s experience in managing over 1.5 million users of SAP to significantly reduce the cost and labor associated with SAP cloning, refreshes and patching.

Nirvanix Storage Now Part of SmartCloud

IBM is unveiling new storage-as-a-service offerings from Nirvanix as part of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. With the integration of Nirvanix cloud storage technology, IBM’s SmartCloud storage services will provide customers with a solution capable of supporting millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data to complement IBM’s existing secure, virtual server environments in the cloud.

“Nirvanix’s cloud storage services offer the advanced, production-grade cloud storage capabilities that are built on experience with hundreds of enterprises,” said Jan Jackman, Vice President, Global Cloud Services, IBM. “The company’s presence and strong adoption in leading Fortune 500 corporations makes its cloud storage technology ideally suited to IBM’s global customer base.”

“We look forward to teaming with IBM in the enterprise cloud storage space and cooperatively enhancing our leading cloud storage service for the most demanding IBM global customers,” said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix. “Today’s announcement marks an important step in accomplishing Nirvanix’s strategic goals of capturing cloud storage market share and accelerating revenue growth.”

While expanding its public cloud offerings, IBM is announcing SmartCloud Foundation private cloud solutions to help companies design and deploy private cloud environments. Big Blue will also offer a Cloud Migration Service for hosting and application on demand clients in the U.S., and is announcing a commitment to the business partner community to help them quickly ramp up and participate in the industry shift to cloud computing by making it easier for them to deliver enterprise-grade public and private cloud solutions to clients.

The IBM Watson supercomputer will help WellPoint launch patient care applications.

Here’s our review of noteworthy health care links for the data center industry:

IBM and WellPoint put Watson to work. IBM and WellPoint (WLP) announced an agreement today to create the first commercial applications of the IBM Watson technology. Earlier this year IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated top Jeopardy champions in a three day match. Now Watson will be used to develop and launch solutions to help improve patient care through the delivery of up-to-date, evidence-based health care for millions of Americans. IBM will develop the base Watson healthcare technology on which WellPoint’s solution will run. Well-suited for health care, Watson can sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data, and analyze this information and provide precise responses in less than three seconds. IBM will develop Watson to have the ability to look at massive amounts of medical literature, population health data, and even a patient’s health record, in compliance with applicable privacy and security laws, to answer profoundly complex questions. “Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient’s medical care — symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies,” ” said Sam Nussbaum, M.D., WellPoint’s Chief Medical Officer. “Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment.”

Terremark selected by CareCloud.  Terremark, a Verizon Company, announced that it is enabling CareCloud, a healthcare management solutions provider, to successfully grow its business and help modernize hundreds of health care practices across the United States via the cloud. Delivered through the Software as a Service model CareCloud addresses common challenges such as practice management, electronic health records and revenue cycle management. Using the Terremark Infrastructure as a Service solution CareCloud can grow from start-up to an established leader by using the flexible solution that gives them the same resources as large enterprises. ”Terremark’s portfolio of secure infrastructure solutions is a natural fit to integrate into our platform,” said Albert Santalo, president and CEO of CareCloud. “As a cloud-based company that serves a growing network of healthcare businesses and partners, we require the kind of agile IT infrastructure platform with a dedicated resource pool for computing and storage, built-in security and stringent service level agreement terms that the Terremark’s cloud computing infrastructure provides.

Online Tech achieves HIPAA Compliance.  Online Tech announced that they have achieved compliance across all 54 HIPAA citations and the complete set of 136 audited components when audited by an independent Certified HIPAA Professional and Certified Health Security Specialist.  In addition to SAS70, SSAE 16 and SOC2 and SOC3 reports, Online Tech’s growing health care client base drove the additional compliance need to achieve HIPAA compliant hosting. “Being in healthcare, we have special needs for dealing with HIPAA compliance to provide business continuity, disaster recovery, security of the data, and restricting access to the data both physically and across the network,” explains Erik Yochum, Director of Information Technology at Online Tech customer Michigan Multispecialty Physicians. “Online Tech has different power, network, and connectivity feeds coming in so that they can provide different ways of accessing the data. So if we have a power outage, we have access to our data and systems for patient care.”

Consonus relocates large healthcare data center.  Consonus announced that they have completed a successful data center relocation for High Point Regional Health System (HPRHS), a large healthcare system in North Carolina. The move took place after months of meticulous planning to ensure that confidential patient data and business-critical systems were transferred safely, securely, and with minimal downtime. When the customer forecasted an annual growth rate of 15% for both servers and storage they realized that they could not accomodate those needs in the existing data center location. Using a DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) tool Consonus was able to shorten planning by four months, saving HPRHS $60,000 in preparation and consulting time. “Consonus helped us through the entire process, defining the current environment and the desired future state, as well as helping design the path to migrate from one to the other. For each of the 8 move events, specific “day of move” plans were created jointly with application and infrastructure staff to ensure that everything happened as planned, in the timeframe needed, and with minimal disruption.” said Thomas Northrup, manager of Technology Infrastructure for HPRHS.