IBM POWER Technology To Be Used in Suzhou PowerCore Technology

Suzhou PowerCore licenses IBM POWER technology to develop and market chips for servers in China, Cirrascale makes power infrastructure improvements to its BladeRack 2 F-Series platform, and Tolly Group testing finds Fusion-io ioControl outperforms conventional hybrid flash arrays.

Suzhou PowerCore Technology to design chip with IBM POWER technology. IBM, the Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company and the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology today announced the two Chinese organizations will join the OpenPOWER Foundation, with Suzhou PowerCore intending to use IBM's POWER architecture to provide customized chip design solutions to push server innovation in such areas as big data, cloud computing and next generation data centers. To develop and market processors for servers in China, Suzhou PowerCore will license the IBM POWER architecture and intellectual property related to POWER8 and chip design tools.

"The proposed collaboration between Suzhou PowerCore, the Research Institute of Jiangsu Industrial Technology and IBM will benefit those innovative businesses in China that are aggressively taking advantage of big data and cloud computing to capture growth in such industries as banking, communications, retail and transportation," said Bradley McCredie, Vice President and IBM Fellow, IBM Systems & Technology Group.

Cirrascale improves BladeRack 2 F-Series.  Cirrascale announced the next generation of power infrastructure improvements to its BladeRack 2 F-Series blade-based platforms. The next generation power infrastructure employs an enhanced power shelf which integrates within the platform's unique modular shelf architecture providing up to 18% better power efficiency over comparable competitive solutions. With improved efficiency, the power shelf converts the 48V power present in the rack to 12V power suitable for use by the company's blade architecture. BladeRack 2 F-Series platforms are engineered to handle mission critical customer installations where high availability, ultra dense systems are a requirement, and feature its patented Vertical Cooling Technology.

"By introducing a way to scale the power available to each BladeRack 2 F-Series shelf, increase the power conversion efficiency, and allow for N+1 redundancy, this next generation power infrastructure is yet another tool that can be used to tailor solutions closely to customer needs," said David Driggers, Chief Executive Officer, Cirrascale Corporation.

Tolly Group Testing shows Fusion-io Flash outperforming others.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that the Fusion ioControl hybrid flash array has outperformed other hybrid storage arrays by up to seven times in testing conducted by The Tolly Group. Tolly Group found that Fusion ioControl delivers leading performance and scalability for virtual machines and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), as well as application input/output requests.

Looking at performance for VDI, where boot storms caused by users logging on at the same time can overload storage resources, the results showed that Fusion ioControl provides greater read throughput than a SSD hybrid array. “Conventional SSD hybrid storage arrays offer acceptable performance for small datasets, but they are ultimately limited by SSD architectures,” said Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group.