Cloud Roundup: ScaleMP, 3Leaf, Unisys

ScaleMP announces vSMP Foundation for Cloud. High-end virtualization provider ScaleMP announced Wednesday an addition to its vSMP Foundation product line, vSMP Foundation for Cloud.  The new product enables provisioning and re-provisioning of large virtual machine resources within existing cloud infrastructure and on-demand creation of virtual machines on a per job, per project or per customer basis.  Key features include aggregation of up to 16 x86 servers to create virtual SMP with up to 128 cores and 4 Terabytes of main memory, support for any programming model, and integration with systems management and provisioning tools. “By aggregating memory and CPUs from multiple servers in the cloud on the fly, vSMP Foundation for Cloud provides greater computing capability for users running applications requiring large memory capacity and high memory bandwidth," said IDC technical computing research manager Jie Wu said. vSMP Foundation for Cloud will be available December 1.

3Leaf enables the dynamic data center. On Tuesday 3Leaf Systems launched the x86-based Dynamic Data Center (DDC) Server for the AMD Opteron family of processors. The 3Leaf technology treats x86 servers as building blocks and coalesce them into contiguous pools of CPU, memory and storage that can span across multiple physical machines and be allocated or de-allocated as needed. "By enabling the creation of large shared memory servers built from smaller, high-volume servers, 3Leaf Systems offers a scale-up platform with attractive price/performance for workloads that can take advantage of its low-latency interconnect hardware," said Richard Partridge, VP of Server Hardware Research at Ideas International. According to a second press release on the 3Leaf site "A DDC-Server configured with a massive 1 TB of shared memory, 192 cores of AMD Istanbul processors at 2.8 GHz, and 8 TB of storage, all connected via an InfiniBand switch and complete with cables, Linux OS, and DDC-Pool software lists for $250,000." Shipments will begin in December 2009. See our previous coverage of 3Leaf.

Unisys Private Cloud solution. On Monday Unisys announced a secure private cloud solution, aimed at allowing companies to realize the economic benefits of cloud computing in their internal data centers.  Scheduled for availability in December, the secure private cloud solution leverages what Unisys announced last August with the Unisys secure cloud solution.  Unisys states that automation and consulting services will make this private solution easy to deploy, operate and use. Unisys has also added Disaster Recovery as a service to the secure cloud solution portfolio, offering DR and BCP on a subscription basis.  Richard Marcello, President, Systems and Technology at Unisys was the opening keynote at the Cloud Computing Conference.