Roundup: ReliaCloud, enStratus, HP, Intel

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

ReliaCloud Offers enStratus Management Platform.  Cloud provider ReliaCloud announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. ReliaCloud is a product of Minnesota managed hosting and data center provider VISI. ReliaCloud customers now have access to a suite of software management tools from enStratus that are also used with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms. "The highly regarded management platform and experience in cloud security and availability management at enStratus is invaluable to regulation-heavy businesses or enterprises that are concerned about reliability and business continuity," said Jason Baker, chief technology officer for ReliaCloud.  ReliaCloud and enStratus will be hosting the Minneapolis CloudCamp on Tuesday, March 2nd.

HP on Data Center Efficiency. Last week Hewlett Packard announced a range of services for small to midsize data center operations that help improve efficiency, increase flexibility of IT budgets and ensure service-level commitments.  HP services aim to simplify the management of multivendor environments and maximize return on investment.  Ron Silliman, Gartner principal research analyst said "organizations should take a whole-environment approach to operational efficiency to reduce risk and drive better business outcomes.” ZDNet reported that HP will launch its Singapore research hub, focusing on data center architecture, cloud computing services and sustainable processes and practices. Prith Banerjee, director of HP labs said that the Singapore site will aim to "lower total cost of ownership by 75 percent in data centers and halve the carbon footprint."  The lab will support cloud research at other HP Labs sites that will then funnel into Cirious, HP's enterprise cloud software platform.

Intel IT's network strategy. The Intel Open Port IT Community blog posted a video explaining the data center network strategy for IT at Intel.  Supporting an enourmous global network, key focus areas include network standardization and WAN optimization.  The video highlights connectivity from their 3-4 blade centers per cabinet directly cabled to a communication cabinet in the center of every row and then on to a communication room, connecting the data center to the Intel wide area network.  The data center in the video is 25,000 square feet and contains 18,000 servers.  This video runs 4 minutes, 11 seconds.