Five Minute Briefing - Data Center
April 16, 2012
Five Minute Briefing - Data Center: April 16, 2012. Published in conjunction with SHARE Inc., a bi-weekly report geared to the needs of data center professionals.
News Flashes
Intel Corporation introduced its Solid-State Drive 910 Series, a high-performing SSD designed to address data center storage demands driven by cloud computing, virtualization and online transactions. The Intel SSD 910 Series expands Intel's offerings for data center applications with its first entry in the 900 family of its highest-performing, PCIe-based SSDs. The Intel SSD 900 Family joins Intel's other high-volume SSD solutions for the data center including the Intel 700 SSD Family of SATA-based SSDs with High Endurance Technology and the Intel SSD 300 Family of SATA SSDs for a broad range of server and storage applications
Dell has acquired Clerity Solutions, a provider of applications modernization and re-hosting solutions and services. Clerity's capabilities will enable Dell Services to help customers reduce the cost of transitioning business-critical applications and data from legacy computing systems and onto more modern architectures, including the cloud. "The addition of Clerity gives us a clear advantage in helping customers modernize and migrate their applications off outdated hardware infrastructure to more current architectures," says Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services.
HP announced HP Converged Cloud, which it describes as the industry's first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture spanning traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds. "The whole idea of converged clouds is to say that, increasingly, as the cloud matures, companies are no longer looking at just one cloud to provide for all their needs," Christian Verstraete, chief technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They are going to start using multiple clouds to respond to the needs of their business people."
IBM introduced a new family of "expert integrated systems" with built-in expertise based on IBM's collective experience running customers' IT operations. The company says the new system, dubbed PureSystems, offers clients an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, in which multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain.
NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a provider of communication and IT solutions, has upgraded its grid storage platform to deliver encryption for data at rest, instant file copy, and shared system mode. NEC's system, HYDRAstor HS8-3000, is available to existing customers via software upgrade.
OpDemand, a provider of solutions for agile IT operations, announced it is shipping a cloud infrastructure management platform, designed to enable software development teams to leverage raw cloud infrastructure without being overwhelmed by technical complexity. "I think there is still a false assumption that mission-critical apps must be kept on-premise. While it's true that certain issues like security compliance and I/O performance may necessitate on-premise deployments, by and large you're going to see higher availability utilizing a cloud provider like Amazon who boasts eight geographic regions with dozens of isolated data centers. The trick is managing it all," Gabriel Monroy, CTO of OpDemand, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Red Hat announced the beta availability of Red Hat Storage 2.0, based on new capabilities that build upon the company's support for unstructured data storage. In December, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, its first integrated storage product, and since then, it says, there has been significant interest as organizations look to address the growth of unstructured data.
News From SHARE
Anyone who believes the mainframe is yesterday's technology, should consider this: plenty of mainframe tech jobs are currently available, and the number is bound to increase in coming years as long-time mainframe professionals reach retirement age. Veteran tech journalist Pedro Pereira explores the future of the mainframe-savvy workforce on SHARE's President's Corner.