Microsoft Roundup: SGI, IE9, AMD and Oracle

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines scaling, powering and targeting Microsoft:

SGI scales Windows Server 2008.  SGI announced the availability of Altix UV with Windows Server 2008 R2, which has deployed the largest and most powerful certified instance to date of Windows Server.  The certification takes technical and data-intensive workloads to new levels of speed and scalability.  "Altix UV can now scale Windows Server technology to record levels," said SGI CEO Mark Barrenechea. "Customers can deploy with confidence their mission-critical software on larger scale hardware platforms supported by Microsoft and SGI with Intel Xeon-based processors. We are continuing our joint development work with Microsoft, and expect to scale Windows Server even further in the very near term."

AMD accelerates new Internet Explorer 9.  AMD announced that the new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) from Microsoft is accelerated by the AMD Fusion Family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and AMD Radeon graphics cards, helping to deliver the next-generation Web to consumers. Microsoft (MSFT) announced the global availability of IE9 Monday in 39 languages at an event at the SXSW Interactive conference. AMD's graphic cards and APU's work in parallel with IE9 which was designed specifically to take advantage of AMD's advanced GPU compute technology. A February AMD blog post has a video showing the difference between an AMD and Intel powered IE9 experience.

Oracle targets Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle announced a first ever MySQL Windows Online Forum for Wednesday, March 16, 2011.  Oracle's Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering will show how enterprise users and ISVs can benefit from Oracle's investment in making MySQL even better on Windows. Showcasing MySQL 5.5 they will show how it delivers up to 1,500 percent performance gains when operating on Windows. "There is a huge opportunity for customers to reduce costs and improve cross-platform support by selecting MySQL on Windows,” said Tomas Ulin, Vice President, Engineering, Oracle. “Oracle has delivered major enhancements to both MySQL 5.5 and MySQL Enterprise Edition, enabling customers to leverage significant benefits. This makes MySQL an extremely compelling alternative to Microsoft SQL Server for ISVs and enterprise users that are building and deploying business critical web and embedded applications.”