Roundup: Equinix, Cray, Isilon, Alcatel-Lucent

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

Equinix Expands into China. Equinix announced a strategic partnership agreement Shanghai Data Solution Co., Ltd (SDS), a leading systems integrator for network and communications services in China. The partnership will enable customers at other Equinix data centers to have a similar level of availability and reliability of colocation services in China through the SDS data center. “A large percentage of the SDS existing customer base consists of foreign telecom operators, financial institutions and multinational corporations," said Samuel Lee, president of Equinix in Asia Pacific. "SDS's proven track record in supporting foreign customers and bilingual capabilities in both sales and operations functions make the company a natural choice as our data center partner in Shanghai."

Cray Launches CX1000 Supercomputer.  Supercomputer manufacturer Cray announced the launch of the Cray CX1000 system, a "rack-mounted supercomputer" that gives Cray a supercomputing solution at every level of the high performance (HPC) server market, the company said. The CX1000 lets customers architect a hybrid supercomputing system, is configurable with Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 or Linux and is priced starting at under $100,000.  Ian Miller, senior vice president of productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray said "from petascale technologies to deskside supercomputing systems using either CPUs or GPUs, we now provide a supercomputing solution for virtually any supercomputing need."

Isilon collaborates with Alcatel-Lucent. Isilon Systems (ISLN) announced that Alcatel-Lucent has selected Isilon IQ to provide the storage infrastructure for its Multi-screen Foundation, which combines Isilon scale-out NAS with video delivery technology from Harmonic to create an open foundation for extending the reach and monetizing multimedia services across multiple screens. "By partnering with Alcatel-Lucent and Harmonic for the Multi-screen Foundation, we are demonstrating our commitment to empowering the next generation of multimedia creation, delivery and access with cost-effective, highly scalable solutions that drive increased productivity and value," said Leonard Iventosch, vice president of global channels and OEM at Isilon Systems.