Roundup: Virtela Cloud, ASUS, AMD, Riverbed

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

Virtela launches mobile device management cloud service. Virtela announced the availability of its global cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) service, offering enterprises an easy approach to manage the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets, whether corporate- or employee-owned. Delivered via Virtela's 50 Local Cloud Centers around the world, the company said the new services can be turned up in minutes for significantly lower cost than on-premises solutions. MDM offers simple-click deployment, real-time roaming notification and enforcement, enterprise app store management, in-country compliance enforcement and a centralized control via VirtelaView. "Virtela's cloud-based mobility services offer solutions for companies who require best-in-class support without increasing internal IT resources. These mobility services protect us from increased liability associated with downloading inappropriate applications or content, and ensure our ability to meet local compliance requirements around the world while offering end users great experience and tools," said Dennis Hodges, CIO of global manufacturer Inteva Products.

ASUS releases new server. ASUS announced the launch of the RS724Q-E6/RS12, its latest flagship server based on Intel 6-core and 4-core 5500/5600 processors.  Able to support up to 96GB of memory, 4 independent hot-pluggable nodes in a 2U chassis and twin 1,60W 80Plus Platinum level high efficiency redundant power supplies the new server is aimed for the mission critical enterprise market.  For the HPC market it also includes onboard InfiniBand QDR (40Gb/s) with a QFSP port.

AMD adds Express Logic to G-Series.  AMD announced embedded software provider Express Logic has brought its industry-leading ThreadX real-time operating system (RTOS) to the AMD Embedded G-Series platform. The RTOS gives precise timing to the G-Series with “instant on” and a footprint as small as 6KB with automatic scaling as required by the application. “The combination of the AMD Embedded G-Series APUs and ThreadX is a very attractive platform, especially for our customers in highly regulated markets like transportation, medical devices, and gaming, where reliability and time-to-market are critical," said Buddy Broeker, director, Embedded Solutions at AMD.

Riverbed optimizes Microsoft RemoteFX.  Riverbed (RVBD) announced that Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been optimized for Microsoft RemoteFX—a new set of graphic capabilities delivered in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. RemoteFX virtualizes the GPU (graphics processing unit) and utilizes advanced codecs to enable an enhanced user experience for VDI. Riverbed performs this optimization via a combination of scalable data referencing (SDR), compression and TCP streamlining to allow the RDP protocol to fully utilize the available WAN bandwidth and significantly increase the amount of frames per second of a RemoteFX session. “Riverbed optimizes network traffic over a WAN so that Microsoft customers can extend the benefits of a virtual desktop infrastructure enhanced by RemoteFX to use cases beyond the traditional LAN environment," said Manlio Vecchiet, Director of  Product Management for Windows Server, Microsoft.