Roundup: Gartner News Announcements

SGI Announces New ICE Cube Air Modular Data Center - SGI today announced the introduction and immediate availability of SGI ICE Cube Air, a third generation product that elminates the need for tradtional HVAC and can be operational within hours. With highly efficient fans, along with an innovative three-stage evaporative cooling system, ICE Cube Air runs globally with air and evaporative cooling, achieving a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of less than 1.06. Supplemental direct expansion (DX), or chilled water cooling coils, provides an optional cooling system for customers deploying in extreme environments. Using one percent of the water needed by standard water-chilled containers and requiring a water flow of only two gallons per minute, ICE Cube Air can get its water from almost any clean source, including a garden hose.Press release.

IBM Adds Analytics to Data Center Services - IBM is adding analytics to its information-technology services to attract more customers and spur sales in its largest division. The company will use analytics to predict clients’ long- term costs of running different computer systems, Steve Sams, IBM’s head of data center services, said in an interview last week. The analytics will help IBM win contracts by demonstrating cost savings of its technology and help current customers to determine where to invest in data centers, Sams said.

Obsidian Launches File Migration System - Obsidian Strategics is introducing a new storage transport solution at the Gartner Data Center Conference. Obsidian's patented Longbow technology enables InfiniBand's superior switch and adapter performance to span the globe over standard optical WANs. At the Gartner show, Obsidian is launching -- dsync+ -- an easy to use file migration tool that works with the complete family of Longbow products to very efficiently fill long-distance, high-capacity WAN connections providing an end-to-end bulk data transport system. Press release.

Nimbula Opens PublicBeta - Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, today announced the availability of the public beta of its flagship Nimbula Director product. Based on Nimbula's Cloud Operating System technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services behind the firewall. Allowing customers to efficiently manage both on- and off-premises resources, Nimbula Director quickly and cost effectively transforms inflexible, inefficient and under-utilized private data centers into muscular, easily configurable compute capacity while supporting controlled access to off-premise clouds. Nimbula Director provides powerful utility-grade cloud features like policy based authorization, enabling secure multi-tenancy, topology-independent distributed network security and monitoring and metering.