Roundup: IBM, NTT, SC09 demo, PhoenixNAP

Key milestone to 100 Gigabit Ethernet demonstrated. At the SC09 conference in Oregon Monday Infinera, Internet2, Juniper Networks and Level 3 demonstrated 100 Gbps data transport between Seattle and the SC09 show floor in Portland.  The 100 Gbps of test data was sent via a single slot on the Juniper T1600 Series Core Router, populated with a new 10x10GbE physical interface card and an Infinera optical system, over Level 3 and Internet2's fiber-optic network.  An 802.3ba compliant 100GbE router interface was demonstrated by Juniper as well.  The demonstrations follow-up on an initiative announced at the SC08 conference last year between the same partners and the U.S. Department of Energy Sciences Network.  Kanalya Vasani, vice president of product management at Juniper said "with ‘Big Science' projects like the Large Hadron Collider expected to be generating data flows of 100Gbps as soon as 2010, it's clear that the world's scientific research and education community needs to move beyond groups of 10Gbps waves and be ready with 100GbE solutions in the very near term."

IBM selected by LBNL for cloud research. Monday IBM announced that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected an IBM System x iDataPlex server to run the Lab's program to explore how cloud computing can be used to advance scientific discovery.  The LBNL program is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy and will allow scientists to accelerate discoveries in energy efficiency, climate change and genomics.  According to the August 2009 Green500 list, the iDatPlex system is one of the most energy efficient computers in the world.  It also will have the theoretical peak speed of more than 60 teraflops.

NTT to Power OpSource Cloud: NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), and OpSource today announced their intention to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud computing by powering OpSource Cloud, which will use  NTT America’s secure data centers and Tier-1 global IP network. OpSource Cloud is designed to allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure. OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity.

IBM Analytics Cloud: Also on Monday, IBM announced the world's largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics. Known as Blue Insight, the cloud will provide new levels of insight for 200,000 IBM sales teams and developers and will launch initially with more than a petabyte (1,000,000 gigabytes) of data and gathers information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores.  Blue Insight will run on a System z10 mainframe with 48 processors and strong cryptography capable of handling up to 10,000 secure transactions per second.

PhoenixNAP Gets Wired: The PhoenixNAP data center announced this week that it has arranged connectivity from Level 3, AGL Networks and AboveNet. PhoenixNAP is a new 160,000 data center facility in Phoenix being developed by Global Datacenter Trust.