Roundup: Dell, Fusion-io, Ciena

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Dell to acquire Make Technologies.  Dell announced  it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Make Technologies a provider of application modernization software and services that reduce the cost and time required to re-engineer applications. Dell continues a 2012 spending spree, with a third acquisition in just this week.  Make Technologies follows other acquisitions this week of Wyse Technologies and Clerity Solutions.  Make Technologies' approximately 100 employees will join Clerity in the Dell Services division. The company has developed unique intellectual property, including TLM Enterprise Suite, its applications migration software suite. “We continue to build and acquire the intellectual property necessary to execute on our strategy, and enable our customers to more simply and quickly deploy solutions that meet their needs,” said Dave Johnson, senior vice president, Dell Corporate Strategy. “By implementing the technologies acquired in Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies, Dell can help customers consolidate their legacy application on industry standard infrastructure. This will simplify their operational environments, lower their infrastructure costs, and enable them to leverage the cloud.”

Fusion-io selected by a Denmark city.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that the Danish city of Esbjerg Kommune has virtualized its Microsoft Exchange 2010 infrastructure with Fusion ioTurbine virtualization caching software to support a range of community services. Esbjerg was able to virtualize its 20,000-user Exchange environment and achieved a 40 percent reduction on its existing storage area network (SAN) workload with Fusion’s ioDrive memory platform, and the VMware vMotion-compatible caching software. The intelligent, application-level ioTurbine caching software installs in VMware’s ESXi as a vLun driver and as a component in the guest operating system. Caching then becomes an attribute of the workload, targeting performance to loads with high data demand that require acceleration. “The latency of a SAN is milliseconds, and we were seeking a solution that could provide more I/O with faster response time than our SAN. Putting solid-state technology in the system is a quick fix, but it does not really help that much in terms of response time,” said Esben Foverskov, Head of IT Infrastructure, Esbjerg Kommune. The complete details of the deployment have been published in a new case study.

AAPT and Ciena launch 100G Australian network. Australian telecommunications provider AAPT and Ciena (CIEN) announced the first commercially-available 100 Gigabits per second (100G) inter-capital network, operating between Melbourne and Sydney. The 100G service, which launched on April 1, is powered by Ciena’s  6500 Packet-Optical Platform equipped with WaveLogic coherent optical processors to enable delivery of 100G wavelength services. "AAPT is responding to customers’ requirements for increased bandwidth mainly driven by cloud, storage and Internet usage," said AAPT CEO David Yuile. "Three years ago, 1G was the usual customer requirement and now it is being replaced with 10G bandwidth orders. The added attraction of this network upgrade is that it is on our shortest path, taking less than 5 milliseconds between Melbourne and Sydney. When you couple AAPT’s network capacity to this speed, it is a very attractive proposition for banks and financial institutions."