Bladewatch.com

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/fusion-io-punches-through-one-billion-iops-barrier-53263

Storage specialist Fusion-io continues to improve the latency of flash storage devices after it achieved one billion input and output operations per second (IOPS) in a demonstration.

The company made the announcement just one month after a test involving its solid-state memory storage subsystems, showed how a single server test system reached 1.11 million transactions per second (tps).

In the most recent demonstration however, the company used eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets.

A great article talking about Fusion-io’s impressive announcement and achievements in their IOPS demonstration, with the right system configuration and an optimized application can create an impressive platform for revenue generation especially in low latency and high performance platforms. I’m off to read more about it.

MarketView

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – Nov 15, 2011) – Violin Memory, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest and most scalable Memory Arrays, today named Scott Metzger vice president (VP) of corporate development. With more than two decades of industry and technical expertise, Metzger will aggressively lead Violin’s expansion into data intensive markets such as analytics, search and real-time decision management. Metzger is the latest in a string of high-profile additions to the Violin executive team including Garry Veale, HP’s former VP of EMEA’s StorageWorks Division, and Jonathan Goldick, former CTO of OnStor.

“We are seeing companies increase sophistication in managing data as an asset. Entirely new business models and businesses are being created by unlocking the power of the vast amount of data companies have at their disposal,” said Metzger. “Flash Memory Arrays are paving the road to a new era of real-time data and information services, and I will be actively pairing Violin’s unique technology with industry leading software vendors and developers to demonstrate the unrealized value of data assets.”

Prior to Violin, Metzger was the senior vice president (SVP) of products, engineering and operations for Apigee Corporation, where he led the effort to transform the company from service-oriented architectures (SOA) to application programming interface (API) management products and services. These now support the billions of devices that drive the app economy, including over 45 billion APIs calls per month. With Metzger’s guidance, Apigee more than quadrupled revenue growth in less than two years.

It’s great to see Scott being brought on board to assist with their expansion into new markets to illustrate their unique value proposition based on their memory array technology. I look forward to seeing their progress in this space and to see the innovations and recommendations for industry standard data and high performance intensive compute solutions. I’ve been hearing good things about their arrays from engineers and cio level users alike, so it will be interesting to see what’s in store for the near and long term future of their platform.

http://www.violin-memory.com/news/press-releases/violin-memory-sees-ten-fold-growth-in-emea/

Nov. 28 — Violin Memory, provider of the world’s fastest and most scalable Memory Arrays, has just announced an 10x quarter on quarter growth in EMEA sales.

Both revenues and on-site customer POCs (Proof Of Concept) have exploded into multi-million euro opportunities in the last two quarters. This growth has been matched by the investment and recruitment of its EMEA field sales operation. By year-end Violin will have 20 field sales employees & delivery capability in UK & Ireland, Austria, Germany, France, Nordics and Benelux, with additional resource, expected to reach 50 in 2012, to support the remaining EMEA territories.

The technology does sound cool, and I wonder if combined with the right combination of technologies could deliver an extremely fast solution configured to utilize these memory arrays, I’m off to read up more.

When walking around HP Discover in Vienna, I stopped in to speak with Violin Memory, they’re an organization that I have been meaning to speak to and heard quite a lot of buzz about from colleagues across the industry. They offer a series of solutions using DRAM and solid state disk technology for high performance computing requirements including database, middleware and virtualization.

They had one of their arrays on display and I had a brief chat, so I’m off to read up about their offerings in the Oracle space – http://www.violin-memory.com/applications/oracle.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-11-07/fujitsu_announces_supercomputer_that_can_scale_to_23_petaflops.html

TOKYO, Nov. 7 — Fujitsu today announced the global availability of the PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which is capable of scaling to a top theoretical processing performance of 23.2 petaflops (PFLOPS).

Combining high performance, scalability, and reliability with superior energy efficiency, PRIMEHPC FX10 further improves on Fujitsu’s supercomputer technology employed in the “K computer,” which achieved the world’s top-ranked performance in June 2011. All of the supercomputer’s components—from processors to middleware—have been developed by Fujitsu, thereby delivering high levels of reliability and operability. The system can be scaled to meet customer needs, up to a 1,024 rack configuration achieving a super-high speed of 23.2 PFLOPS.

By leveraging the new system, it will be possible to address societal challenges—including new drug development, disaster prevention, disaster mitigation, and other measures, to bring about a safe and secure society—and to pursue cutting-edge research, such as enabling the development and manufacturing of new materials without the need to make prototypes. This has the potential to help companies enhance their competitive edge.

It’s always great to see what achievements there are in the high performance space, this article is talking about Fujitsu’s progress and achievements with their FX10 supercomputer, I’m off to read up more.

http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/news-events/news/2011/cmusv-launches-entrepreneurship-program.html

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — August 15, 2011 — Speaking to the growing controversy about the best path – university, incubator, or garage – to become a successful entrepreneur, Carnegie Mellon University today announced the launch of an Entrepreneurship Program at its Silicon Valley campus. Nestled in the global hub of technology discovery and innovation, Carnegie Mellon will launch its 12-month, intensive, full-time program on August 15th offering students a chance to learn entrepreneurship practices from one of the world’s most reputable educational institutions while simultaneously germinating their own projects from idea to fruition.

The Entrepreneurship Program is an accelerated one-year program that offers students a Masters of Science in Software Management degree and teaches key skills in management, metrics, product definition and strategy. By blending both technical and business skills, Carnegie Mellon is taking a cutting edge approach to higher education. In addition to traditional academic instruction, students will be encouraged and required to work in functional teams where they will collaboratively develop their own ideas for new products and services – all working toward the goal of becoming part of a global innovation ecosystem.

I had a great chat with Martin Griss about their new program which sounds very interesting, it is unique in combining learning by doing and academic training, something that I have written about on a few occasions, I even spoke to a few universities about it. You see I feel that for particularly IT degrees we need to be not only covering the theory, the academic learning, but the real world concepts and challenges, that’s not to say send students into a data center with an ESX dvd, but it is to explore current concepts and future trends. To be able to educate students for the next generation opportunities and enterprises.  I wrote about it here.

Key features include:

• Coursework blends world-class academic and “learn by doing” training: http://ow.ly/5Y5q1
• Accepting applications online for 2012: http://ow.ly/5ZMSZ
• Variety of partnership opportunities for Silicon Valley tech companies: http://ow.ly/5ZN1r

The course is bringing together sets of academic tools experience and education, with practical engagement and exposure to the right communities and networks. It aims to create an atmosphere of opportunity and empowerment to the students in  not only establishing and developing ideas, but also in being able to articulate them, to ask the right questions, developing ideas into reality. Establishing if you like a framework, combined with a series of networks within networks in which students can speak to the right people, examine the possibilities and be empowered to capitalize on the best of what Silicon Valley has to offer in the start-up community space.

I can see the opportunities for this course on multiple levels, a self fulfilling network of networks and communities, creating opportunity and empower students on their journey to self improvement and entrepreneurship.  It will be exciting to see how the course develops going forward, what ideas and start-ups develop from it, I wish both the university, it’s faculty and students all the very best for the future and offer to open any doors or create any opportunities if I can along the journey of entrepreneurship.

The course is something that would in fact appeal to me, not only to learn skills in the start-up or entrepreneurial space (to capitalize on the ideas I already have), but maybe to help me think outside the box, to meet smart people, and create opportunity or capitalize on opportunity that I hadn’t recognized within the constructs of the ‘here and now’, the “that’s not how we do things here”, or “there are reasons for that” (whether anyone knows what those are is an entirely different thing).

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20110620-02.html

Tokyo, June 20, 2011 — RIKEN and Fujitsu have taken first place on the 37th TOP500 list announced today at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’11) held in Hamburg, Germany. This ranking is based on a performance measurement of the “K computer⁽¹⁾,” currently under their joint development.

The TOP500-ranked K computer system, currently in the configuration stage, has 672 computer racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 CPUs. This half-build system achieved the world’s best LINPACK⁽²⁾ benchmark performance of 8.162 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), to place it at the head of the TOP500 list. In addition, the system has recorded high standards with a computing efficiency ratio of 93.0%. This is the first time since June 2004 that the Japanese supercomputer “Earth Simulator” has been ranked first on the TOP500 list.

Well done to Fujitsu, it’s always interesting to read what range of technologies and software they have used to achieve these impressive results for high performance computing. Do check out the article for more information.

http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/91172/

Boston will be showcasing liquid cooled performance enhanced workstations, high availability Igloo Storage solutions and their revolutionary SuperFlex Blade™ which supports 20 of NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU accelerators coupled with Intel’s most recent generation of Xeon® processors for unprecedented processing density, compute power and bandwidth.

Designed in partnership with industry leader Supermicro, Boston’s most recent generation of their SuperFlex 7U processing appliance brings to the industry a new dimension of energy efficient hybrid parallel compute processing power for technical and enterprise computing. Powered by NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU compute accelerators Boston SuperFlex Blade™ platforms have fast earned a reputation for being some of the world’s fastest CPU to GPU configurations available today. With an extraordinary 10,240 GPU processing cores, 120x Intel Xeon CPU cores and a phenomenal 1.93TB of memory all within a single appliance, Boston’s SuperFlex appliance provides up to an astounding 26+ TeraFlops of hybrid computational performance.

It’s always interesting to read about further developments in the HPC space whether it’s in the blade, worksation or server technologies, extending the possibilities of the platforms whether it’s in cooling, adding processing capabilities through GPU upgrades enhancing the scalability of the platform in terms of memory, throughput or cpus, all create opportunities in capacity and opportunity for HPC solutions and HPC as a platform. I’m off to read up more.

So in reference to this post, we’re looking at four major products as part of the bladewatch research activities:

Veeam – backup solution for VMware

Dell PowerEdge C6100 server for cloud builders and high density environments.

VKernel vOPS Reporting and chargeback – something that I know has been a topic of interest for colleagues and our blog

HP Proliant DL980 G7 – the 8 socket server powered by AMD processors – what does this platform have to offer for today’s requirements and is there demand for the 8 socket server in the x86/x64 space?

I got asked by Chris how this would work. Well basically, we go off to the product pages, read all about them, phone a few friends and ask their views, then put together some words and analysis.

Want to feature in our weekly four products/services of the week?

Email us: martin237@gmail.com, but please put in the subject “Four products/services of the week”, Martin gets about 200 emails a day in press releases, announcements and questions.

There is no ulterior motive, it’s simply a way of keeping up to date, we don’t ask that you be a multi national but we do ask that you take a look at the blog and decide if your product or service would be relevant to our readers.

http://www.servicemesh.com/

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – May 10, 2011 – ServiceMesh, a provider of enterprise software and services that enable Agile IT operating models for Global 2000 clients, today unveiled version 7.2 of its Agility Platform. With this product release, ServiceMesh extends its leadership position with the industry’s only enterprise cloud governance and lifecycle management platform which now includes a powerful drag-and-drop visual policy modeler, advanced reporting engine, and a range of expanded security and asset management capabilities. These new features, combined with the platform’s workload portability across heterogeneous clouds and comprehensive policy-based governance capabilities, are critically important for successful enterprise cloud adoption by providing robust governance and management controls that can be enforced across the enterprise. The resulting benefits include significantly reduced risk, costs, complexity, cycle times, and capital spending associated with IT operations, infrastructure, and platforms.

Industry leaders in financial services and other Global 2000 firms have relied on ServiceMesh to transform the way their IT organizations acquire and deliver IT services to the business. This includes leveraging the Agility Platform to manage and govern multiple pools of internal and external “as-a-service” offerings, so that IT can be more responsive and demand-driven, and to allow internal IT resources to focus on more innovative, high value activities.  The Agility Platform uniquely addresses enterprise requirements for a unified governance and lifecycle management layer that can optimize workload placement across multiple, disparate internal and external cloud environments while ensuring transparency, security, and portability.

Enterprises that undertake cloud computing initiatives without an extensible and auditable policy-based governance system risk exposure to security compromises, service failures, inadequate performance, violated service level agreements, and costly legal and regulatory penalties. Additionally, a lack of cloud portability and end-to-end workflow automation can compromise key benefits such as vendor contestability and lock-in avoidance, time-to-market improvements, workload placement and performance optimization, and operating cost reductions.

Unlike other offerings available today, the ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides a holistic solution that addresses broad aspects of an organization’s IT operating model to achieve strategic benefits. Agility Platform capabilities span the end-to-end lifecycle, encompassing application migration planning, assembly of fully portable and policy-compliant cloud workloads, automated deployment and run-time management, self-service access to services, and comprehensive cloud security capabilities that include federated identity management.

An interesting announcement from ServiceMesh, as we move into cloud solutions, we need to be thinking more about how we use and consume that service as well as fit it around our governance and internal IT policies. Anything the service providers can do to aid customers in the analysis and reporting of their usage to better understand their requirements and utilization has to be a good thing, the more we understand about the environment, the more we can tune and adapt our platforms to fit out unique requirements. I’m off to read up more about it.