CSC eyes NPfIT cluster
688384
Looks to feed on Accenture scraps A director of Computer Science Corporation (CSC) has confirmed the company's interest in taking over another region of England's NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).â¦
141080
One-stop server slicer Software start-up Cassatt this week continued its virtualization march with a new release of its flagship product that adds more support for server partitioning software.â¦
467250
The National Science Foundation will fund projects that push computing power beyond silicon.
462370
The researchers who spawned the idea of grid computing will launch a company on Monday to commercialise what so far has been a very academic software project for sharing computing resources.
544593
Representatives of the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) project, which launched in December 2005, reported to Black Hat DC attendees that progress continues on the project. The DHS-sponsored effort is currently sifting through "mountains" of vuln data, and they're in touch with the affected companies.
234474
The growth of supercomputing as an enterprise IT option is one of the highlights of this week's SC2004 Supercomputing Conference, which kicks off tomorrow in Pittsburgh.
263965
There is something rather antiquated about many of the server clusters used today by engineers, scientists and media fiends. Their high-powered computing machines are often cobbled together over many days
605056
It&#39;s hard to overstate how important the&#160;Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor&#39;s enterprise business, it&#39;s the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according to the two key executives on the project.At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the Internet is Cisco&#39;s turf, and it wasn&#39;t willing to give any ground to upstarts.The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in datacenters and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.-- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15Tbps of traffic ripping through a data center, up from just 2Tbps for a current Catalyst 6500 switch.-- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental conferencing sessions using Cisco&#39;s TelePresence Collaboration system. It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.-- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10Gbps ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100Gbps.-- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&amp;D team numbered more than 500 engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco&#39;s Data Center Business Unit.As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco&#39;s first OS that can be fully virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible with it, Cisco said.The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel is huge, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet as a reliable, lossless datacenter transport, he said.Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system, said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s datacenter group. Deployments will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the introduction, she said.But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation datacenters is likely to justify Cisco&#39;s efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft&#39;s MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, &quot;I would hope so.&quot;
568359
Sybase Tuesday launched its strike in the cluster-database market, releasing Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition to compete with the likes of Oracle&#39;s Real Application Clusters.Sybase&#39;s offering is aimed at IT shops that require high availability from their datacenters. It uses shared-disk clustering, where a number of ASE server instances is grouped into a cluster seen as a single system managing the same set of data. This allows application workloads to be balanced among the instances. The software automatically migrates connections if a node fails, according to the company.Noel Yuhanna, a Forrester Research analyst covering database technologies, said Sybase has made a wise move.&quot;They&#39;ve realized they need to innovate to stay competitive and they&#39;re doing that,&quot; he said. &quot;I think it&#39;s a good move and makes them comparable in certain situations with Oracle RAC.&quot;While most companies employ some type of failover technology in their data centers, it may take effect in minutes, not seconds, Yuhanna said. &quot;Companies who want it to happen really fast, that&#39;s when shared-disk clustering can really help,&quot; he said.&quot;It&#39;s only about five to 10 percent of the applications in an organization that would really need that up-to-the second [performance],&quot; Yuhanna added.Sybase hasn&#39;t necessarily surpassed Oracle&#39;s capabilities, according to Yuhanna. Its new product might be more suitable for &quot;smaller environments, or those that are only focused around Linux and Solaris,&quot; he said, adding that word hasn&#39;t yet circled back from customers regarding the product&#39;s performance.David Jonker, senior product marketing manager in the ASE group at Sybase, said the company worked with 12 large companies on a technology preview version of the software. He declined to name them, and said none had agreed to speak to the media.ASE Cluster Edition is compatible with systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 (x86_64); Solaris 9 and 10 on Sparc (64-bit); and SUSE Linux 9 and 10 (x86_64). Sybase did not release pricing information.
185576
Start-up Orion Multisystems believes it has found the key to open a new chapter for workstation technology: The company offers 12- and 96-node cluster
29488
Initially targeted at the businesses in the life sciences, computer-aided engineering and finance sectors, IBM will offer preconfigured "snap-together" cluster systems for customers.
649727
SiCortex investment will go toward development and marketing of Linux cluster machines; debut is set for November.
273058
A handful of technology companies plan to announce that they are forming a consortium to accelerate utilitylike grid computing in the corporate world.
74870
Startup firm Fortisphere on Monday plans to launch a product suite aimed at managing virtualization &quot;sprawl.&quot;&quot;We spent nine months talking to [data center professionals],&quot; said John Suit, Fortisphere&#39;s CTO. &quot;What was apparent to us was that typically, how these guys are tracking their virtual machines is with an Excel spreadsheet.&quot;The company&#39;s offering, Virtual Essentials, is based on two products. The first is Fortisphere Virtual Insight, a toolset for tracking, tagging, and monitoring virtual machines as they move throughout their lifecycle, from preproduction to production.Users get a visual representation of a virtual machines&#39; parent, sibling and child relationships. There is also a reporting engine and an auditing function for recording changes and transactions. Fortisphere Virtual Foresight is the other half, dealing with policy enforcement.Policy rules are embedded within virtual machines, meaning the information will remain with each one, as well as any clones and copies, according to Fortisphere. There is also a repository component, and an analytic engine that monitors risk and compliance violations by crunching data from virtual machines and hypervisors.Fortisphere&#39;s product uses kernel-level drivers, rather than other means of interacting with virtual machines, such as agents. Fortisphere contends this approach affords a great deal of control, while remaining lightweight.The company is competing with a number of other startups, such as Embotics. Fortisphere said it has a number of beta customers, but company officials declined to name any or make one available for an interview.Pricing for Virtual Essentials starts at &quot;little bit over $10,000,&quot; including maintenance, according to Fortisphere executives, who declined to be more specific.The software was built with a mid-market customer in mind, in terms of its ease of use, according to Fortisphere.Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said one strength of Fortisphere is its ability to manage virtual machines across multiple hypervisors -- VMware, Citrix&#39;s XenServer and Microsoft&#39;s Hyper-V. &quot;This is a something end-users are asking for as they deploy more than one solution for server virtualization,&quot; he wrote in an e-mail message.Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst with Kusnetzky Group, predicted that within five years, Fortisphere and its peers will either be absorbed into larger companies or those firms will develop software with similar capabilities.&quot;It&#39;s likely in my view that these people are going to be acquired by the management framework players, because they are doing something different but also complementary,&quot; he said.Kusnetzky noted, however, that Fortisphere&#39;s tools have a limited focus, aiming on the management and tracking of virtual machines and not other areas of virtualization, such as virtual storage. &quot;If you&#39;re working in the environment they&#39;re targeting, this might be interesting,&quot; he said.
503955
The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) formally introduced itself this week at a Tuesday (Sept. 28) press conference in Washington, DC The new group, consisting initially of 28 companies
3739
A startup company is rolling out a family of workstations aimed at the technical computing space that offer clusterlike capabilities inside a single box.
245180
Much of the technology being showcased at this week's SC2004 supercomputing conference could eventually make its way into corporate IT data centers, say supercomputing backers.