Roundup: Cisco, Cray, Avere

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

Cisco to acquire ClearAccess.  Cisco (CSCO)  announced its intent to acquire privately held ClearAccess, a Vancouver, Washington based company that provides TR-069-based software to service providers for the provisioning and management of residential and mobile devices. The Smart RG Gateways portion of the business will continue forward as SmartRG, Inc. and Cisco and ClearAccess' combined network management and software capabilities will enable service providers to better deliver, manage and monetize their services, while helping to improve operational efficiencies and customer experiences. The management software from ClearAccess will join Cisco Prime in the network management software portfolio.  ClearAccess' proven track-record for the delivery of cloud-based services will provide Cisco with new capabilities that will make it easier for customers to trial and deploy. "The ClearAccess acquisition reinforces Cisco's commitment to service providers by accelerating software architectural advancements in mobility, cloud and managed devices, and video," said Jamie Lerner, vice president and general manager, Cisco Network Management Technology Group, Service Provider Applications.  "ClearAccess provides a critical technology that will advance Cisco's mission to offer service providers a complete set of tools to manage their networks, within the home and across any connected device, amid the ongoing proliferation in network traffic."

Cray's YarcData launches big data graph appliance.  Cray's YarcData division announced the launch of the YarcData uRiKA graph appliance, a purpose-built solution for Big Data relationship analytics. The launch of the uRiKA solution addresses the challenge of delivering insightful analytics on graphs, not only in terms of its ability to handle size and complexity of relationships, but also in terms of its response time and speed of processing. "Graphs are an important segment of the Big Data market with increasingly important applicability to problems in areas such as social networking, healthcare, finance, life sciences, and telecommunications," said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum Research. "Given the importance of real-time interactive analytics on graphs, it's not just about Big Data but also Fast Data." Features of the new appliance include specialized graph-optimized hardware that provides up to 512 terabytes of global shared memory, massively-multithreaded graph processors supporting 128 threads/processor, and highly scalable I/O with data ingest rates of up to 350 terabytes per hour. It also complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster by offloading graph workloads and interoperating within the existing enterprise analytics workflow.

Avere unveils new NAS architecture.  Avere Systems unveiled a new NAS architecture that will ensure enterprise IT is best positioned to leverage the performance benefits of Flash, the consolidation benefits of virtualization and the collaborative and economic benefits of the cloud. As a part of the announcement Avere introduced its first NAS filer, the Edge filer, which operates in concert with legacy or Core filers, to implement the new architecture for NAS. "Since its inception, Avere has been challenging the concept of using a traditional, monolithic NAS filer as a single tier of storage," said Terri McClure, ESG Senior Analyst.  "With the introduction of its first full-fledged filer, the Edge filer, Avere is well positioned to offer an alternative model to solve some of the biggest technological and business challenges of NAS deployments, including the latency associated with remote storage deployments."  In this slidecast, InsideHPC's Rich Brueckner interviews Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems about Avere 3.0, Edge Filger and the new  NAS architecture.