Data Center Links: Dell, Cisco, SAP, Riverbed, Tilera

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

Dell awarded large NIH contract.  Dell announced that it was selected as one of the prime recipients by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) for their Chief Information Officer – Solution and Partners 3 (CIO-SP3) contract. CIO-SP3 is a multiple award Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) with a ceiling value of $20 billion. A wide variety of services can be delivered by Dell with this contract, such as software development, enterprise management systems, digital government, critical infrastructure protection and information assurance, integration services, IT operations and maintenance, outsourcing, imaging, CIO support, and IT services for biomedical research, health sciences, health care and general IT. "We look forward to working with NITAAC to provide innovative technological solutions relating to biomedical, health IT, mobility, data center consolidation, security, data management and cloud computing in support of various Federal agencies," said George Newstrom, general manager, Dell Services Federal Government. "CIO-SP3 enables civilian and defense agencies to procure services that directly impact their mission in a more streamlined and efficient way."

SAP to resell Cisco IT Process Automation.  Cisco (CSCO) announced a global reseller agreement, whereby SAP will offer its customers the SAP IT Process Automation application by Cisco. Extending and complimenting SAP Solutions the Cisco automation software  tells an IT department when a system is likely to go or has already gone down, and also detects incidents with non-SAP systems. Through this agreement, SAP and Cisco will cooperate to deliver solutions that leverage the Run SAP methodology and the SAP Solution Manager application management solution. This will provide an IT operations blueprint that aligns with business processes to help ensure continuous operations of applications and technologies across IT landscapes. "Automation will increasingly become the major contributor to efficiency, cost-containment and risk-mitigation in the new dynamic data center models," said Flint Brenton, senior vice president, Intelligent Automation Solutions, Cisco. "As leaders in IT, it is important that we help the market as it undergoes this transformation from traditional to more dynamic, virtualized and cloud-based models. Through this agreement, we are helping to not only meet the demands for IT process automation but are doing so rapidly to address customer needs."

Riverbed enhances Stingray ADC.  Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced enhancements to its software and virtual application delivery controller (ADC) product family, Stingray. These enhancements allow enterprises and cloud operators to extend the benefits of the ADC with the integration of its Aptimizer web content optimization (WCO) solution. Riverbed is redefining the role of the ADC from focusing primarily on load balancing and offload to also delivering the accelerated user experience, scalable cloud utilization, and reliability expected from web and cloud-based applications. "While ADCs have primarily focused on application scalability and availability within the datacenter, the emergence of cloud computing, and the diversity of devices that enterprises are being forced to support, is driving a greater need for ADCs that address a new set of application performance issues," said Neil Rickard, research vice president, Gartner. "As companies continue to move online and to the cloud, the need to meet end users’ demand for constant availability and exceptional performance is essential.” Stingray Traffic Manager 9.0 and the new Stingray Aptimizer models are expected to be generally available in the second quarter of 2012.

Tilera announces MDE 4 software.  Tilera Corporation announced the general availability of its Multicore Development Environment (MDE) 4.0 release on theTILE-Gx processor family. The release integrates a complete Linux distribution including the kernel 2.6.38, glibc 2.12, GNU tool chain, more than 3000 CentOS 6.2 packages, and the industry’s most advanced manycore tools developed by Tilera in collaboration with the open source community. “High quality software and standard programming are essential elements for the application development process. Developers don’t have time to waste on buggy and hard to program software tools, they need an environment that works, is easy and feels natural to them,” said Devesh Garg, co-founder, president and chief executive officer, Tilera. “From 60 million packets per second to 40 channels of H.264 encoding on a Linux SMP system, this release further empowers developers with the benefits ofmanycore processors.”