Cloud News: SoftLayer, CyrusOne, Nirvanix, Cisco

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

SoftLayer adds HPC cloud-enabled solution.  SoftLayer announced it is offering a new high-performance computing (HPC) cloud-enabled solution consisting of servers powered by the latest GPUs from NVIDIA. Using an on-demand, consumption-based model for the GPU-powered solution provides an environment for traditional HPC fields such as data mining, numerical and seismic analysis as well as advertising agencies, game developers and interactive media firms with needs including video processing and 3D rendering. SoftLayer’s solution consists of dual-processor Intel E5-2600 based servers supporting one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, the flagship of NVIDIA’s range of data center GPU products, delivering up to 665 gigaflops of double precision floating point performance. “We are offering breakthrough performance in a unique delivery model,” said Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer of SoftLayer. “The beauty of this solution is the way users can break down the toughest computational problems and largest blocks of data to work them in parallel over our network driving quicker results. GPU technology is still in its infancy but customer demand continues to soar as more and more HPC applications get migrated over to cloud infrastructures.”

Nirvanix is first 'Sky for the cloud' customer for CyrusOne.  CyrusOne, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell (CBB) announced an enablement platform for the cloud, branded the “Sky for the Cloud".  Nirvanix, is the first customer to leverage this platform to provide unlimited cloud storage capacity to its customers for back-up, archival and large-scale content collaboration. To address capacity now a customer can look to use CyrusOne’s bandwidth marketplace, Internet Exchange Platform or a cross-connect to tap into Nirvanix cloud storage service. "Our capacity expansion at CyrusOne is based on customer demand, as more and more organizations generate massive amounts of unstructured data – many in the petabyte range, customers with terabyte-sized files – and it's clear that conventional storage solutions aren't addressing their needs," said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix. "Nirvanix fully managed cloud storage services with an on-demand, pay-by-the-drink model deployed within CyrusOne data centers provides the agility, security and cost savings customers are looking for; plus, customers benefit from CyrusOne's interconnected Internet exchange, which means better backup and archival performance and a substantial reduction in network-connection expenses."

Cisco selected by Netelligent for Desktop as a Service.  Netelligent announced a partnership with Desktone, a Desktops as a Service (DaaS) provider, to offer cloud-hosted virtual desktops. Utilizing Cisco's UCS platform and NetApp storage systems Desktone will  deliver full-featured virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a service on demand to any device. Through its partnership with Desktone, Netelligent will expand its services to offer cost-effective cloud-hosted full Windows 7 virtual desktops that can easily scale to meet customer needs."Cisco is committed to helping its service provider partners succeed in the marketplace by offering cloud-ready solutions that enable them to deploy differentiated and profitable services," said Phil Sherburne, vice president of engineering, Cisco. "By combining Cisco's expertise in cloud and virtualization environments with Desktone's multi-tenant virtual desktop platform, we make it easy for service providers to deliver Desktop Virtualization as a Service to end user customers on their journey to the future Workspace."