Roundup: VegasNAP, SGI, InfiniBand vs. Ethernet

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

VegasNAP opens new data center. Colocation and data center provider VegasNAP announced on Friday it has opened its 14,000 square foot data center in the heart of Las Vegas.  Located just five minutes from the Vegas strip and McCarran airport, VegasNAP caters to small to medium sized businesses with secure and affordable colocation services as well as larger companies that have outgrown current services.  Founded in 2009 VegasNAP provides colocation, disaster recovery and managed IT solutions.

SGI announces HPC training.  SGI announced hpctraining.com, the industry's first complete, vendor-agnostic training portal aimed at the technical high performance computing (HPC) user community.  With a range of in-depth technical topics available to novice or advanced users the site brings together instructors from a breadth of notable server, storage, and software companies that span the industry. "HPCtraining.com literally opens the door to worldwide ‘local' training, delivering courses directly to individual HPC users," said Derek Burke, channels and marketing director at Panasas. "It is extremely simple to manage training, from registration to coursework; it streamlines the entire learning process, and eliminates costly and time-consuming travel."

Infiniband to Outpace Ethernet.  The Register commented on the race between InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies and keeping pace over the years.  With 40 and 100 Gigabit per second Ethernet standards being ratified it was noted that at the SC09 conference last year three Mellanox quad data rate (QDR at 40 Gigabit per second) InfiniBand pipes were combined to make a twelve port 120 Gigabit per second switch.  The second half of the article by Timothy Prickett Morgan covers the InfiBand roadmap, showing a basic curve, doubling bandwidth every three years.