Nimbus announces E-Class Flash Memory.  Nimbus Data unveiled the new E-Class Flash Memory System, which it said ws the industry’s first fully-redundant multiprotocol solid state storage system.  Built for applications such as enterprise-wide server virtualization, Web infrastructure, and database clusters the E-Class platform contains no single point of failures. The E-Class platform consists of a pair of redundant controllers and up to 24 solid state storage enclosures. New features supports 500 terabytes as one logical pool, consumes as little as 5 watts per terabyte, and has comprehensive data management software and “unified” storage without any licensing fees. “The Nimbus E-Class sets a new standard for solid state storage scalability and operating cost economics,” said Benjamin  Woo, program vice president, worldwide storage systems at IDC. “Large enterprises and cloud providers must consider the significant infrastructure consolidation possible with all-flash storage systems. By providing both innovative hardware and comprehensive software, Nimbus is well-positioned to not only capitalize on the need for high-performance systems but also the significantly greater trend towards primary storage based exclusively on solid state technology.” The Nimbus E-Class is available immediately.

SGI introduces modular InfiniteStorage Platform. SGI announced the introduction of SGI Modular InfiniteStorage, an integrated server and storage platform designed to provide cloud and data storage customers with the maximum flexibility for compute and data management applications. To meet diverse data environments the new platform will be available as either SGI Modular InfiniteStorage Server (SGI MIS Server) or SGI Modular InfiniteStorage JBOD (SGI MIS JBOD) products. When built into SGI’s D-Rack cabinet configuration, up to 2.37 petabytes of capacity and up to forty discrete processors can be supplied within a single standard 19 inch rack footprint. ”The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform is designed to couple very dense storage and compute capabilities in an adaptable platform, to give cloud and other storage IT customers important new choices for tuning and growing the system to meet their specific requirements,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for HPC. “The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform aims to allow IT managers to design customized solutions based on standards-based components.” Both storage products are available for preorder now from SGI.

EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with Hadoop support.  EMC announced that EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with HDFS, combined with EMC Greenplum HD, is an enterprise-ready solution with native support for Hadoop. EMC Isilon’s OneFS 6.5 operating system natively integrates the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol and delivers the industry’s first and only enterprise-proven Hadoop solution on a scale-out NAS architecture. As a single vendor solution it leverages end-to-end data protection including Snapshots, Replication and Backup for Hadoop Big Data. “Hadoop will be a game-changer in unstructured data analytics once enterprise customers are convinced that adoption can simplify their infrastructure and architecture without compromising data security or management capabilities,” said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing at EMC Isilon. “We’ve taken the guesswork out of Hadoop deployment by bringing together the strengths of Isilon’s enterprise scale-out NAS storage systems with the Hadoop ecosystem. With EMC Isilon, enterprises now have the type of archiving, replication and management capabilities their businesses rely on combined with the innovative analytics of EMC Greenplum and the training, services and support of EMC to make the most of their Hadoop deployments.”

Interxion selected by Infront.  Interxion (INXN) announced that Infront, a real-time market data and electronic trading solution company, has selected Interxion’s Stockholm data center and City of London data center to house its solutions.  This will give Infront customers faster connectivity to exchanges and key liquidity venues. Infront has has over 9,000 customers in Europe spanning from large financial institutions to private investors. “The fact that we are based in all of Europe’s key financial hubs, offer access to over 400 carriers and have a truly diverse financial community makes Interxion an ideal environment for financial firms such as Infront to house their business critical applications,” said Peder Bank, Managing Director at Interxion in the Nordics. “This deal further reinforces Interxion’s commitment to the financial services market and continues to position us as a key liquidity centre within Europe.”

Ciena upgrades NASA network.  Ciena Corporation (CIEN) announced a new partnership with Abacus Technology Corporation to upgrade the expansive campus IT network at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Leveraging Optical Transport Network technology from Ciena KSC will support a variety of activities on the 144,000 acre complex to consolidate the Center’s Ethernet video and legacy ATM and TDM traffic. The new intelligent network is connecting major campus facilities via a fiber optic infrastructure using Ciena’s 4200 Advanced Services Platform. “The use of OTN technology provides an elegant solution for complex networks like the one at Kennedy Space Center that support many types of legacy, Ethernet and real-time applications,” said David Peed, vice president and general manager, Ciena Government Solutions. “Ciena’s solution can more efficiently carry this multiservice traffic over a single infrastructure, and easily add new types of applications to the network as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center continues to push the boundaries of exploration.”

SGI selected by Sikorsky Innovations.  SGI announced that Sikorsky Innovations, the technology development organization within Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, has selected an SGI UV 1000 high performance computing (HPC) system with 576 cores and 1.5 TB of RAM. The three rack system will consist of six blade enclosures, each with 96 cores and 256GB of memory and be powered by Intel Xeon processor X7500 series.  ”The SGI UV 1000 meets our stringent requirements for computing power, scalability, program security and configurability, all within our control” said Joseph Pantalone, technical fellow and chief engineer of Special Programs at Sikorsky Innovations. “With this computing platform we conduct iterative design and analyses of highly detailed aircraft subsystems as well as full helicopter models and simulations, greatly reducing our iterations in hardware.”

Jerry Yang resigns from Yahoo.  Yahoo (YHOO) announced that Jerry Yang has resigned from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company. Yang co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in 1995 with David Filo and served as a member of the Board of Directors since March 1995 and as Chief Executive Officer from June 2007 to January 2009. ”Jerry Yang is a visionary and a pioneer, who has contributed enormously to Yahoo! during his many years of service,” said Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board. “It has been a pleasure to work with Jerry. His unique strategic insights have been invaluable.”

“Having Mark as member of the Board will help ensure that the management transition will be smooth,” said Ronald Verdoorn, chairman of the SGI Board of Directors, will step in as interim CEO while the board conducts a search for a permanent CEO.

On Friday, Wasatch Advisors said in an SEC filing that it has increased its position in SGI to nearly 2.1 million shares, raising its stake to about 6.6 percent of the company’s stock. In the filing, Wasatch said that if SGI’s shares don’t recover, it will urge the board to “consider broad strategic alternatives in addition to searching for a replacement CEO.”

Wasatch said they “intend to present their views and concerns to the company’s current management team, including the company’s interim CEO. (Wasatch) want to explain to management what they believe are the factors contributing to the shares’ undervaluation and encourage management to take action to address these factors. … If the discount persists, (Wasatch) believe that, in keeping with sound stewardship principles, the company’s board will be required to consider broad strategic alternatives in addition to searching for a replacement CEO.”

Wasatch said it does not have any current plans other than the monitoring and communication program outlined in the SEC filing. Wasatch is the third-largest holder of SGI shares, after Fidelity Investments and Sun Life Financial.

Under Barrenchea’s leadership, the company once known as Rackable Systems, has made progress since acquiring Silicon Graphics in May 2009 and repositioning the company and its brand. In the wake of the acquisition, SGI has focused on the market for technical computing, targeting customers in high-performance computing and supercomputing markets.

Barrenechea’s resignation is effective January 1. Ronald Verdoorn, the chairman of the Board of Directors, will serve as interim CEO while the board conducts a search for new leadership.

“We are thankful for Mark’s leadership over the past five years as the company has undergone a successful transformation and achieved profitability,” said Verdoorn. “We wish Mark the best in the next phase of his career.”

“SGI will continue its strategic focus on growing revenues and maintaining profitability,” Verdoorn added, noting that the company has made no changes to its fiscal year 2012 guidance.

Shares of SGI dropped sharply following the announcement of Barrenechea’s departure. After closing Tuesday at #14 a share, SGI stock fell to $11.48 in Wednesday’s session, and closed today at $11.29.

Under Barrenchea’s leadership, the company once known as Rackable Systems, has made progress since acquiring Silicon Graphics in May 2009 and repositioning the company and its brand. In the wake of the acquisition, SGI has focused on the market for technical computing, targeting customers in high-performance computing and supercomputing markets.

“I am proud of our accomplishments over the past five years as we have transformed SGI and taken the lead in Technical Computing,” said Barrenechea. “I am sincerely grateful for the support I’ve received from the Board of Directors, our customers and our employees. SGI is well positioned and on a clear path to $1B in revenue. While I am transitioning as CEO, I will remain a fan and shareholder of SGI.”

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.”

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.”

Luxtera delivers 100Gbps Opto-Electronic Transceiver.  Luxtera announced the industry’s first single chip 100Gbps optical transceiver to support next generation cloud computing data centers and high performance computing (HPC) optical connectivity. The single chip opto-electronic transceiver is targeted at applications that would require 100 Gbps Ethernet, OTN or InfiniBand. The fully integrated chip leverages silicon photonics and uses light from a single co-packaged laser to power multiple optical transmitters on a chip, eliminating the need for multiple lasers and reducing transceiver cost and power consumption. “The introduction of the 100Gbps Silicon Photonics transceiver, which is the outcome of a joint Luxtera-Molex collaboration, is a key milestone in optical connectivity for a wide range of cloud computing, data center and HPC applications.  We are excited about this collaboration with Luxtera as it represents one of the many positive outcomes of our partnership and recent agreements,” said Doug Busch, Vice-President and General Manager of Molex’s Fiber Optic Products Business Unit. “As a strategic partner with Luxtera, Molex will deliver a line of connectivity products based on this IP spanning different data rates, lanes and mechanical form-factors.”

NASA upgrades with SGI ICE HPC.  SGI announced today that NASA has selected its next generation SGI ICE high performance computing (HPC) platform, code-named ‘Carlsbad 3.0,’ to extend the computational capability of NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer system. Starting in 2012 NASA will expand their computational capabilities with the new SGI platform, future Intel Xeon E5 Romley family processors, FDR dual-plane and a hypercube-topology InfiniBand network. With the goal of attaining 10 petaflops of peak performance NASA has partnered with SGI and Intel under the Space Act Agreement for research, modeling and simulation work at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. The new system will be integrated into the Pleiades supercomputer, ranked number 7 on the June 2011 Top500 list. ”Intel and SGI are working closely together to make sure that leading customers like NASA have the performance, density and programming efficiency they need to deliver on key multi-petascale workloads leading up to the exascale era,” said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of the High Performance Computing division at Intel. “We’re excited that NASA selected the fifth generation of SGI’s award-winning ICE system for the next stages of Pleiades expansion.”

NetApp and Cloudera partner.  NetApp (NTAP)  announced a preconfigured, ready-to-deploy solution called NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop that will enable customers to maximize the value of their enterprise Hadoop implementations with improved flexibility and performance and lower total cost of ownership. Partnering with Cloudera they will distribute Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise, a subscription service comprised of Cloudera Support and Hadoop management software, with NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop to speed enterprise deployment and production use of Apache Hadoop. ”NetApp has a long history of supporting open standards and giving our customers the flexibility and efficiency they need to drive results from their data. Our strategy for Hadoop is no different, and we will give customers choice for their Hadoop implementations, from enterprise-class to open-source Apache Hadoop solutions,” said Clifton. “Cloudera strengthens our enterprise-ready NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, and together we make deployment of enterprise Hadoop easier, simplify management, and reduce the cost of deployments.” Hadoop World was a sold out event November 8-9 in New York.

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.”

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

The company reported revenue of $195.5 million for the quarter ended June 300, along with profits of 12 cents a share, well ahead of Wall Street’s estimates of $160 million and a loss of three cents. SGI closed at $15.10 per share, up $3.17 (26.5 percent) in trading Friday.

Growing Role for Technical Computing

CEO Mark Barrenechea said SGI was benefiting from the increased reliance upon technical computing and high-density server environments.

“We are on the leading edge of a trend where more and more things are being modeled or simulated in a computer,” said Barrenechea. “Everything from potato chips to nuclear arsenals are modeled on a computer. The total market is large, $19 billion, and growing at 8 percent per annum. SGI is in the right industry.”

Last week SGI closed on the acquisition of OpenCFD, which will allow the company to work more closely with customers on the ue of comutational fluid dynamics (CFD) to create airflow models of high-density data center space. OpenCFD is the provider of OpenFoam, the leading open source application for CFD modeling.

“We see an opportunity to change the landscape of fluid dynamics by providing an integrated CFD solution and expanding the availability of CFD codes,” said Barrenechea. “We will bring to our customers a variety of options:  an integrated and optimized CFD solutions consisting of our hardware, software and services; trusted production binaries through a subscription fee service; professional services for migration, training and new solvers; and a community version of OpenFoam.”