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HP

HP today announced the immediate integration of the highly anticipated Six-Core AMD Opteronâ„¢ 2400 Series processor into the award-winning family of HP Workstations.

Ideal for high-end workstation applications in fields such as engineering, 3-D digital content creation, oil and gas, and science, the HP xw9400 Workstation taps the power of the new AMD Opteron processors to deliver higher productivity, especially for multi-threaded applications, multi-tasking and mega-tasking environments.

With the built-in engineering advantages of HP’s highly tuned workstations, the HP xw9400 Workstation can accommodate up to two Six-Core AMD Opteron processors – for a total of 12 cores – each of which offers up to 34 percent more performance per watt⁽¹⁾ over the previous-generation quad-core processors.

“HP understands the immense pressure its customers are under to deliver more return on investment in a shorter period of time,” said Jeff Wood, director, Worldwide Marketing, Workstations, HP. “By providing the most extreme combination of technologies – up to 12 cores in one workstation – HP continues its commitment to bringing customers leading-edge technologies.”

One of my colleagues who works on the trade floor had told me they were looking at the next batch of workstations at their bank for the traders, they’re currently running ones that are a few years old, there was genuine excitement to see how they’d perform running the bank’s build of XP, there was a debate about Intel vs AMD, in the meantime, do check them out.

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VMware

Attendees to Learn How Virtualization is Revolutionizing the Next Generation of Computing New Developer Day Focuses on Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation Using the VMware vSphereâ„¢ 4 Platform

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 29, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that VMworld® 2009, the leading virtualization event, makes its return to San Francisco August 31–September 3, 2009 at Moscone Center.  With more than 11,000 attendees expected and more than 180 sponsors and exhibitors, including AMD, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Intel, NetApp, Terremark and SunGard, VMworld 2009 will spotlight how virtualization is revolutionizing the next generation of computing.

The theme for this year’s VMworld is “Hello Freedom,” an expression of how virtualization is transforming business through IT. VMworld 2009 events, sessions and speakers will demonstrate how companies of all sizes can liberate IT from the technical constraints of conventional computing so that IT can focus more on the business.

This years VMworld is set to be another great VMware event, it’s always a great chance to meet people and see what issues or successes they’re having, colleagues are always trying to get me along, we’ll see.

I’m looking forward to the speakers, and it would be great to see what demonstrations and discussions their having both in terms of business transformation or IT delivery.

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PR Newswire

TORONTO, July 7 /PRNewswire/ — Platform Computing, the leader in grid and cloud computing software, today announced that Platform will be enabling Singapore’s largest commercial grid computing service with its technology. Platform will be providing virtual machine management and high performance computing (HPC) software to Alatum, Singapore’s cloud computing utility. Alatum, established by SingTel in conjunction with partners including Platform, delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystem to businesses and public sector organizations within Singapore and across Asia. Platform’s software helps manage the infrastructure behind this large scale cloud computing project, equipping enterprises with on-demand and pay-as-you-go access to data center compute resources and software including HPC and business applications.

Alatum will deliver a range of computing power, storage and software applications on a pay-per-use basis, on-demand and online to enable commercial and public sector organizations access to more cost-effective, integrated and easily-managed IT solutions. Combining the benefits of Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO), Platform LSF, Platform Cluster Manager (PCM) and Platform Symphony software with some of the leading technologies from vendors including Citrix, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and Salesforce.com has created a robust computing environment for both business and technical users. Customers already using the Alatum platform include Research International, K2 Specialist Services and Vestas Technology R&D Singapore.

It’s always interesting to read how HPC/grid solutions are being deployed, and what technologies are being used, in this case Platform, I’m off to read up more.

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PR Newswire

LONDON, July 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) was awarded the prestigious Coffey International Award for its application of technical expertise in innovative ways to address the greatest societal challenges of our time at the annual Business in the Community (BITC) Awards for Excellence yesterday.

IBM earned the award for World Community Grid, in essence the virtual equivalent in processing power to a Top 10 supercomputer devoted to humanitarian research. World Community Grid gains its power from the aggregated spare computing capacity of 1.3 million PCs belonging to 460,000 volunteers from over 200 countries. For participating members, some with perhaps limited time for volunteering, it provides the opportunity through the World Community Grid to make a significant contribution to tackling the Millennium Development Goals.

The Award was presented to Larry Hirst, Chairman IBM Europe Middle East Africa, by HRH The Prince of Wales, President of BITC, at a garden party reception hosted by The Prince at his home, Clarence House.

Charles Duff, Corporate Development Manager, Coffey International Limited and Chair of judges said: “The scale, significance, power and potential of World Community Grid is impressive. IBM has collaborated with a wide spectrum of research partners and encouraged businesses, community groups and individuals to provide free computational capacity to support international humanitarian projects. The judges salute IBM’s programme and hope that the recognition conferred by this award will encourage individuals everywhere to join with IBM so that more research can be completed even faster as part of this exciting, inspiring and innovative development initiative. We also challenge the business world at large to sign up to World Community Grid and help grow its potential to achieve even greater impact on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the world’s most pressing needs.”

Well done to IBM for their recognition and work in the World Community Grid. I’m off to read up more about the project.

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Cnet

Through July 11, Microsoft is offering steep discounts on Windows 7 upgrades for the Home and Pro versions of the software–but not Windows 7 Ultimate.

According to a CNET report, users can “preorder Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional at roughly half the list price, but the Ultimate version is offered at the full $219 price.”

Those who currently use Windows Vista Ultimate and were hoping to switch to Windows 7 Ultimate were understandably upset. After getting little more than a few extras with Vista Ultimate, like Microsoft’s BitLocker Drive Encryption software, they were hoping they’d be treated better this time around when they opted for Windows 7 Ultimate.

No such luck.

But instead of railing against Microsoft for treating its Windows Vista Ultimate customers so poorly, perhaps we should turn our focus to Windows 7 Ultimate itself. It might be the follow-up to Windows Vista Ultimate. Microsoft might have thrown every feature into it. But if we take an objective look at what it really offers, I don’t think Microsoft can justify its existence as a consumer operating system.

We’ll have to see how users respond to Windows 7, getting users to upgrade from XP let alone Vista might be a hard sell for a while, as with most operating system launches, the majority of users will upgrade when they buy a new pc.

My main concerns in comparison to Vista are the performance or perceived performance and that are you sure you want to do that thing when I want to run computer manager. I know the mac does the same to me, you need to enter a username and password,  but the problem? On a Windows pc I feel I know what I’m doing, let me get on with it, and the thing is I don’t know how you get around that.

It will be interesting to see what the response is when Windows 7 launches, it certainly looks nice, however as a proud owner of a Dell Optiplex 755 with a Core 2 Duo and 2G RAM, I think we’ll stay on XP, it’s nice and fast. We’re only ever browsing the web/office work, and as my wife said “What’s this Vista thing? Can’t we have XP?”, the icon changes, the options it gave her were just that little bit too much, and the load time was just that bit too much. Switching it back to XP classic mode kind of seemed like defeating the object of upgrading.

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HPC Wire

July 7 — The First International Conference on Cloud Computing, which takes place Oct. 19-21, 2009, in Munich, Germany, is accepting paper submissions atwww.cloudcomp.eu.

The theme for the conference is Cloud Computing, which is defined as a pool of virtualized computer resources. Based on this virtualization, the cloud computing paradigm allows workloads to be deployed and scaled-out quickly through the rapid provisioning of virtual machines or physical machines. A cloud computing platform supports redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models that allow workloads to recover from many inevitable hardware/software failures and monitoring resource use in real time for providing physical and virtual servers on which the applications can run. A cloud computing platform is more than a collection of computer resources because it provides a mechanism to manage those resources. In a cloud computing platform, software is migrating from the desktop into the “clouds” of the Internet, promising users anytime, anywhere access to their programs and data. What challenges does it present to users, programmers, and telecommunications providers? The goal of this Cloud Computing Symposium series is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss all aspects of cloud computing. All topics of design, theory and realization are of interest.

I wonder what groups, vendors and users might attend? That we can submit papers for discussion is great, I hope there will be some discussion of Cloud and how we can get it working for the SMB and enterprise alike, how we examine the operational issues of ownership and delivery etc. I’m off to check out the site.

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PR Newswire

ARMONK, N.Y., July 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) issued its Corporate Responsibility Report, detailing the company’s social performance results and strategies in the areas of governance, supply chain, environment, community engagements, employment policies and practices, and public policy.

The 40-page report features IBM’s Corporate Service Corps on its cover, a program IBM characterizes as a corporate version of the Peace Corps, to develop a next wave of IBM leaders while addressing critical societal challenges in emerging markets in innovative ways. The report demonstrates how fully integrating business and social strategies can make significant and lasting impacts in communities. Another program described is IBM’s work in the Sichuanprovince in China, the area stricken by a powerful earthquake last year where teams of IBMers engaged in the relief and recovery effort using their technology skills. The report with more details on all topics is available online at:http://www.ibm.com/responsibility/.

I’m off to read the report, it will be interesting to see what efforts have been made organizationally and technically, do check it out. The more we share how we achieved results, whether it’s Green technology deployments, grid or virtualization, the more we talk, the more we can get the technology working for us, which can only further revenue and adoption of it.

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Business Wire

AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Univa UD, a leading provider of software solutions for enabling dynamic IT environments, announced today that Corus Automotive has chosen Univa to provide them with a solution for private cloud enablement of high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

This single solution includes Univa UniCluster 4.1 and Univa UniPortal 5. The UniCluster 4.1 HPC stack features Sun Grid Engine workload management, Oracle Enterprise Linux operating system, and the UniCluster suite of cluster and cloud management software. UniPortal 5 provides a web-based user cockpit, delivering engineering and technical computing applications on-demand in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment.

The integrated Oracle-Sun-Univa private cloud solution will optimize computational workload and make HPC computing simpler and more flexible via SaaS delivery of applications over the web. Univa increases the value of the solution by supporting all components, so users have a single path for support of the Oracle, Sun and Univa products.

Corus, a leading global manufacturer of steel products and services, selected the Univa solution for the Automotive Engineering team to create an internal environment for more easily submitting, executing, tracking, and monitoring HPC workload, providing their users all necessary functionality to run HPC applications.

It’s always great to see how companies are using private clouds to achieve their business requirements, an interesting post, do check it out.

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Computerworld

Computerworld – Next month is the one year anniversary of a guideline by the American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) that recommend increasing (PDF document) the temperature of air entering servers and other data center equipment. This increase of 77 degrees Fahrenheit to 80.6 degrees may not seem like a big deal, but it took a year-and-half of work to arrive at this recommendation and agreement by most of the major equipment vendors. The person who led the society’s IT team on Technical Committee 9.9 was Roger Schmidt, an IBM fellow and its chief engineer for data center energy efficiency.

Check out this interview talking about the temperature of the data center, a topic I’ve written about and many have spoken about before – for specific applications or tiers how cool do we need to make the data center?  For that resilient grid platform where if a node fails there is no impact, could we not raise the temperature of the data center, reduce our cooling costs and have marginal impact to production? The example I got given was £500,000 saving on cooling a blade farm, with a support contract increase cost of £100,000, and marginal impact to production service, it wont fit all businesses, all applications, but as we move to the data center by tier, where I have a data center for a specific role/business line or application, or even as we change the data center to one of production/development/staging, where I have truly separate environments, we can look at changing the design, the way we manage our data centers in line with the business availability or need.

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Finextra

American Express has awarded a five year technology services contract to HP unit EDS in a deal the card outfit hopes will help slash IT costs.

Under the agreement, signed in December, EDS is managing the American Express end-user desktop computing environment and its global voice and data networks.

In addition, the tech firm will provide on-site services for about 60,000 employees in more than 130 countries around the world.

It will be interesting to see what range of technologies, best practice and process will be deployed to aid in the delivery of IT services combined with the need to reduce their costs.  Outsourcing the IT can be an ideal platform to achieve cost reduction or service transformation, equally it can be as one manager had told me, the way to hand the ‘nuts and bolts’ stuff over to someone else and let you concentrate on the core, whether it’s application development, service delivery or bus servicing, will depend on your business, your core business and areas of skill.

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