UTC Shuttle Tops CARTA Growth
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By Ashley Rowland, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.  Jan. 27--The number of UTC students riding the Mocs Express shuttle grew  more than 50 percent in the past year, making it CARTA's fastest-growing bus  line in 2006.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 8  /PRNewswire/ -- A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket successfully launched six satellites at 10:10 p.m., EST, for the U.S. Air Force, marking the first use of the Atlas for an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program mission.
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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The Atlantis shuttle launches successfully on a mission to take Europe's Columbus science lab to the space station.
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HOUSTON -- NASA astronaut Sunita Williams set a new spaceflight record early Saturday as she and her Atlantis shuttle crewmates continue their mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
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By Kurt Loft, Tampa Tribune, Fla.  Dec. 10--CAPE CANAVERAL -- When the shuttle Discovery roared and rumbled into the Florida sky Saturday night, tens of thousands who came to watch stood in silent awe of the fire rising before their eyes.
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Carnival Corp. & Plc  , the world's largest cruise operator, said on Tuesday that its quarterly earnings rose 2.6 percent, as growth in Europe more than offset weakness in the Caribbean.
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WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn., Dec. 11  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Space Shuttle Discovery Saturday night carried a collection of new electrical and structural hardware developed and built by Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. .
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Ryder System Inc. R.N on Monday  reported an increase in quarterly net profit amid increased  demand for transport services, especially in its fleet  management division.
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SEQUENTIAL server revenue at Sun Microsystems has grown faster than the overall market, the firm claimed today. Citing a Gartner Dataquest report, Sun claimed that in the second calendar quarter of this year
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By Traci Watson  Early data from Saturday's launch of space shuttle Discovery show the ship is in good health and suffered no damage on the way to orbit, deputy shuttle program manager John Shannon said Sunday.  "It was a very typical ascent," Shannon said.
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Tuesday's shuttle launch marks the beginning of an intense period of space activity for Europe.
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Ljubljana-based trade hub BTC reported SIT 4.18bn (EUR 17.43m) in sales in the first six months of this year, up by 7 percent from the same period last year.
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American Superconductor announces record sales and progress toward profitability.
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(InfoWorld) - Swelling demand for high-end systems in the fourth quarter pushed the global server industry to its highest annual revenue since the market peaked in 2000 as IBMÂ and Hewlett-Packard held onto their top rankings. The industry overcame yet another quarter of slumping unit shipments to notch a 5.2 percent rise in quarterly revenue compared to the same period last year, pushing annual industry revenue up 2 percent to $52.3 billion in 2006, according to an industry report released Monday by IDC. The revenue came from an unexpected sector. For the first time in 10 years, quarterly demand for midrange and high-end systems outstripped demand for volume servers. Compared to the same period last year, fourth quarter revenue for high-end systems rose 11.5 percent, compared to rises of 5.4 percent for midrange servers and 2.1 percent for entry-level. Despite the changing market, the players remained the same. IBM claimed the largest chunk of revenue with 32.8 percent market share, followed by HP at 27.2 percent. With 10.8 percent share, Sun has a slight lead over DellÂ (10.3 percent) for third place but is growing much faster, IDC said. Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens was the only vendor whose server revenue dropped in 2006 as it held onto its position in a distant fifth place. Those numbers were nearly identical to aÂ server industry report released last Thursday by Gartner. IBM said much of its success came from its 32 percent share of the large Unix server segment and from strong growth in its SystemÂ Z mainframe sector, which posted its highest quarterly revenue in eight years with $1.7 billion, according to a statement by Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive for IBM's Systems & Technology Group. Despite that success, IBM's Z/OS recorded just 11.2 percent market share by revenue in the quarter, far behind Microsoft's Windows OS at 34.9 percent and the Unix OS at 33.5 percent, according to IDC. Linux-powered servers showed fast growth to reach 11.9 percent share. In comparison, Sun boasted that its results were strong in every sector, lead by total server revenue growth of 24.4 percent, more than four times the growth of its closest competitor, HP. Sun said its key driver was its Solaris Unix OS, which allows to company to scale from x86 to RISC-based systems and claim market growth in diverse market niches, said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's systems group in a statement. Although the vendors may be pleased with their 2006 revenue, IDC warned they should be worried about slumping demand. The industry stumbled to its tenth consecutive quarter of slowing growth in units shipped, grinding to a halt with no growth in the fourth quarter of 2006. The main culprit is virtualization as corporate IT managers learn to save money by sharing a shrinking pool of hardware resources. That trend has hit the x86 segment the hardest, putting a dent in revenue for chipmakers such as IntelÂ and AMD. Â
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To the European Space Agency, Atlantis's cargo represents an historic turning point in space history
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By John Johnson Jr. Los Angeles Times  CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The shuttle Atlantis, America's long- haul space truck, returned to duty Saturday, blasting into orbit with a 17-ton load of construction material for the International Space Station.