December 05, 2005
Sun Microsystems Inc.
in partnership with InTechnology Plc, a data
management company headquartered in the United Kingdom, unveiled
two new services for the upcoming Sun Grid Storage Utility: Sun
Grid Remote Backup and Restore Service (RBR) and Sun Grid Remote File
Vault (RFV) for United Kingdom-based customers. Sun Grid RBR provides secure,
centralized and remote data backup, offered through usage-based
monthly billing. The complementary service, Sun Grid RFV, runs on the
Solaris 10 Operating System and enables long-term remote archiving
without a formal backup process.
Sun also announced that Virtual Compute Corp. (vCompute), a
high-performance computing service provider, has extended its agreement
to use over 2 million hours of central processing units (CPUs) on the
Sun Grid Compute Utility. In only three weeks, vCompute agreed to
purchase and subsequently used its first million CPU hours on the Sun
Grid, demonstrating the incredible efficiency and flexibility of the
Sun Grid Utility model. Sun Grid helps customers and partners derive
immediate benefits from an open, Grid-based computing infrastructure on
a utility basis by giving them more choice and control over how they
purchase and leverage IT.
The operational and financial implications of losing data can be
catastrophic to companies. Yet many organizations still trust the
backup and archival of data to a fragmented and often ineffective
policy of distributed devices and manual routines. Sun Grid RBR and Sun
Grid RFV eliminate the risks and costs of internal backup
and archival infrastructure and processes, while providing services
that will scale with a customer's unique and evolving storage needs.
Additionally, customers pay only for the services they
use, receiving monthly statements and access to a portal detailing
daily consumption.
"This new model of storage on demand addresses the challenges of
limited budgets and dispersed data center staff -- prompting companies
in every industry to reexamine data center management," said Stuart
Wells, executive vice president utility computing at Sun Microsystems.
"We're seeing explosive demand for utility computing from major
financial institutions, oil and gas companies like vCompute, and small
to medium-sized businesses across industries -- and are working with
innovators like InTechnology to ensure we're staying ahead of the
incredible industry demand every step of the way. These new product
offerings, combined with Sun's recent acquisition of StorageTek,
underscore Sun's commitment to data management."
"We are delighted to partner with Sun on this important next step in
the Sun Grid utility computing initiative," said Peter Wilkinson, CEO
and founder of InTechnology. "Our proven expertise and delivery
infrastructure, combined with Sun's strong brand, technical excellence
and unquestionable commitment to utility computing will be a compelling
proposition to end users wrestling with the challenges of data storage,
data protection and data management."
"With Sun Grid, we've thrown open the doors to a new era of utility
computing -- and after proving to our customers that we can extend our
compute capacity with the Sun Grid, many clients have rushed in to book
time," said Edward Hawes, chief executive officer of Virtual Compute
Corp. "Our immediate need to scale from 1 million to 2
million CPU hours speaks volumes about the validity of our utility
computing model. The new Sun Grid Storage Utility that is being linked
to the Sun Grid Compute Utility empowers vCompute to provide more
robust business continuity services to our high performance computing
customers."
Sun Grid RBR provides centralized backups of desktops, laptops, file
servers and applications/database servers ending the delays, risks and
high cost of traditional tape and data replication processes. All
services are delivered via a secure telecommunications link, ensuring
data is regularly copied to a remote data center facility for immediate
restoration. Benefits to Sun Grid RBR customers include: secure, data
protection; best practice and dedicated backup process; regular
updates; and enhanced protection of business critical data.
For customers requiring long-term data archiving, Sun Grid RFV is
available as a complementary storage service to Sun Grid RBR or as a
standalone service. The service introduces a pay-per-use approach to
storing key files at a remote, secure facility, while retaining easy
access for restoration. Customers store only what they need, without
the costs of running extensive backup processes on a user's system. Sun
Grid RFV customers will enjoy: added security; best practice and
dedicated file storage service; and redundancy of data.
Researchers from the Suddhananda Engineering and Research Centre in Bhubaneswar, India developed a job scheduling system, which they call Service Level Agreement (SLA) scheduling, that is meant to achieve acceptable methods of resource provisioning similar to that of potential in-house systems. They combined that with an on-demand resource provisioner to ensure utilization optimization of virtual machines.
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Experimental scientific HPC applications are continually being moved to the cloud, as covered here in several capacities over the last couple of weeks. Included in that rundown, Co-founder and CEO of CloudSigma Robert Jenkins penned an article for HPC in the Cloud where he discussed the emergence of cloud technologies to supplement research capabilities of big scientific initiatives like CERN and ESA (the European Space Agency)...
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When considering moving excess or experimental HPC applications to a cloud environment, there will always be obstacles. Were that not the case, the cost effectiveness of cloud-based HPC would rule the high performance landscape. Jonathan Stewart Ward and Adam Barker of the University of St. Andrews produced an intriguing report on the state of cloud computing, paying a significant amount of attention to the problems facing cloud computing.
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Jun 19, 2013 |
Ruan Pethiyagoda, Cameron Boehmer, John S. Dvorak, and Tim Sze, trained at San Francisco’s Hack Reactor, an institute designed for intense fast paced learning of programming, put together a program based on the N-Queens algorithm designed by the University of Cambridge’s Martin Richards, and modified it to run in parallel across multiple machines.
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Jun 17, 2013 |
With that in mind, Datapipe hopes to establish themselves as a green-savvy HPC cloud provider with their recently announced Stratosphere platform. Datapipe markets Stratosphere as a green HPC cloud service and in doing so partnering with Verne Global and their Icelandic datacenter, which is known for its propensity in green computing.
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Jun 12, 2013 |
Cloud computing is gaining ground in utilization by mid-sized institutions who are looking to expand their experimental high performance computing resources. As such, IBM released what they call Redbooks, in part to assist institutions’ movement of high performance computing applications to the cloud.
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Jun 06, 2013 |
The San Diego Supercomputer Center launched a public cloud system for universities in the area designed specifically to run on commodity hardware with high performance solid-state drives. The center, which currently holds 5.5 PB of raw storage, is open to educational and research users in the University of California.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.