Roundup: Power Assure, Dell, Violin Memory

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

New UN framework based on Power Assure technologies.  Power Assure announced that its EM/4 Dynamic Power Management (DPM) solution and PAR4/UL2640 for IT equipment baseline measurements are the foundation of a new United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) baseline and monitoring methodology, AM0105: "Energy efficiency in data centres through dynamic power management."  Prepared and proposed by Power Assure and carbon credit consultants Carbonomics, it will help data centers realize potential energy savings and carbon reduction, especially in the Asia-Pacific region and other developing countries where carbon emission reduction credits can be traded and sold to buyers in industrialized regions. Trading of these emission credits, under Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), is now a multi-billion dollar market.  "CDM certification expands Power Assure's value proposition to include carbon emission management, thus enabling data center operators to monetize efficiency efforts in the global carbon markets," said Brad Wurtz, president and CEO, Power Assure.  "This is a 'first to market' solution in what is becoming a huge market:  increasing the efficiency and lowering the power cost and associated carbon usage of the rapidly expanding growth of data centers across the globe. To expedite and simplify the approval process for our customers, we have partnered with Carbonomics who has the expertise necessary to move projects quickly through the CDM system."

Dell helps power NASA Mars mission. Dell announced that it supported the landing of NASA’s new Mars rover, the most complicated portion of the mission, with data analysis conducted in two NASA High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running Dell PowerEdge servers. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dell HPC clusters Galaxy and Nebula, provided vital support to NASA’s Curiosity rover in analyzing the vast amounts of test data needed to correctly prepare the rover for entering the Martian atmosphere and landing it on the planet. “We’re proud to work hand-in-hand with NASA, a true American institution that provides the world with the understanding that modern day pioneering delivers optimism and the drive to go further," said Jere Carroll, general manager civilian agencies, Dell Federal.  "This notion echoes Dell’s mission to provide customers with a full spectrum of IT hardware and services, helping them to accomplish their mission more effectively and efficiently. Most importantly, we are honored to be able to test and validate this mission’s most critical portion, landing on the Red Planet.”

Violin Memory helps virtualize 1,000 desktops.  Violin Memory announced it  helped Anglia Ruskin University virtualize nearly 1,000 desktops for 32,000 students. Realizing the bottlenecks of disk, the university replaced their existing architecture with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that used Violin 3000 Series flash Memory Arrays. After moving its infrastructure to Vmware vSphere the University saw the  limiting factor was the back-end storage performance in the VDI environment. The storage performance required a solution that can scale to at least 800 concurrent users with no appreciable degradation to user experience, and introduce a resilient architecture, avoiding single points of failure. Anglia Ruskin selected Violin’s 3000 Series flash Memory Array for its ability to handle 220,000 random write IOPS in 4K blocks. “We chose the Violin 3000 Series flash Memory Array because it’s very well-engineered, reliable and offers high storage performance,” said Waddell. “Storage performance is key to VDI, but our traditional spinning disk infrastructure did not offer enough performance.  The virtual machines needed 800-1000 IOPS per desktop, most of which were writes.”