Roundup: Gnodal, AMD, Cisco, Dell, SAP

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

Gnodal announces 10/40 GbE Switches.  Bristol, UK based startup company Gnodal Limited announced its initial Ethernet switch offerings last week at Interop 2011.  The company unveiled the GS-Series of 1RU, top-of-rack (ToR) switches built upon its own PETA ASIC, each delivering 1.5 Terabits of non-blocking, ultra-low latency switching to the data center. Three 1RU products were introduced: the GS7200, a 72 port 10 GbE SFP+, the GS4008, a 40 port 10 GbE SFP+, and the GS108, an 18 port 40 GbE QSFP.  The unique quality of the switches is the ability to act as both an edge and fabric device. In multi-chassis networks, a link or entire switch can be removed from the fabric without disrupting the rest of the network and the fabric will automatically and dynamically adjust to the changing environment without management intervention. Highly efficient arbitration techniques enable the Gnodal fabric to dynamically load-balance traffic seamlessly, thereby allowing for near 100% bandwidth utilization. "We looked to address some of the historic challenges of Ethernet in congestion, scalability, power, and latency and have built the GS-Series to target these high performance data center requirements with our revolutionary technology," said Fred Homewood, CEO, Gnodal Limited.

AMD and Dell offer multifunctional server solution.  At the Microsoft Tech-Ed North America conference AMD announced that their FirePro professional graphics are entering the data center with Dell blade servers.  Equipped for ultra-fast performance and massively parallel processing power the FirePro V7800P is ideal for server environments. “The AMD FirePro V7800P is AMD’s first multifunctional server solution for compute, VDI and professional graphics offering IT departments GPU compute for High Performance Computing matched with leading edge graphics virtualization,” said Sandeep Gupte, director of professional graphics product management, AMD. “The AMD FirePro V7800P allows AMD to draw upon a powerful professional graphics solution to meet the needs of an entirely new set of data center customers.” Dell and Microsoft worked to have the FirePro 7800P in a Dell blade server certified  with Microsoft RemoteFX under the Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL).

Cisco announces new MS-SQL solutions.  Cisco (CSCO) announced new data center solutions for customers who want to run Microsoft enterprise software on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).  In support of Microsoft SQL Server for data warehousing and on-line transaction processing.  Cisco announced R2 Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 for Cisco UCS and R2 OLTP reference configuration for Cisco UCS. "We developed the Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse program to help our customers accelerate their data warehouse road maps, lower costs, and reduce risk with reliable reference architectures and best practices for warehousing. Using the Cisco Unified Computing System with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise provides our mutual customers with scalable, preconfigured servers, storage and networking design guides that are specifically balanced and optimized for data warehousing workloads."

Dell and SAP join forces. At the Orlando SAP Sapphire Now conference SAP AG (SAP) and Dell announced an expansion of their long-standing relationship that will deliver new cloud and in-memory computing offerings to help organizations transform their businesses. As a part of Dell’s VIS Next Generation Datacenter Platform the SAP applications will be available for deployment. Additionally the PowerEdge 910 server has been certified by SAP for running SAP In-Memory Computing technology. Dell is also now an SAP-certified provider of cloud services, as well as an SAP-certified provider of hosting services. “SAP is committed to delivering its solutions in open and flexible ways that best support customer success,” said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP. “This announcement underscores our commitment to delivering enterprise applications via the cloud in cooperation with our leading partner ecosystem. Through this expanded cooperation with Dell, customers will benefit from our complementary cloud and in-memory solutions, enabling them to transform their businesses, flexibly and affordably.”