Roundup: Oracle, Dell, Cloupia, NetApp, SGI

Here’s our review of today’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

Oracle launches Big Data Appliance and Netra SPARC T4 Servers.  Oracle (ORCL) announced the availability of Oracle Big Data Appliance Tuesday, an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager. The appliance comes configured in a full rack of 18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of 864GB memory, 216 CPU cores, 648TB of storage, 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity and 10 Gb/s Ethernet data center connectivity. “Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions,” said Cetin Ozbutun, vice president, Data Warehousing Technologies, Oracle. Oracle also introduced new Netra SPARC T-Series servers based on the SPARC T4 processor, the first processor designed to meet the demands of application workloads in communications network infrastructure. “Oracle’s new Netra SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris 11 deliver the performance and scale communications companies require to rapidly deploy new services and support cloud-based offerings,” said Raju Penumatcha, Vice President, Netra Systems and Networking, Oracle. “With Oracle’s new carrier-grade servers and complete solutions portfolio for the communications industry, customers have a rock solid platform for long-term service deployments.”

Dell delivers new storage solutions. At the first Dell Storage Forum in Europe Dell announced advancements in its Fluid Data architecture that enable customers to quickly adapt to the changing demands of their organizations and increase automation for management of their primary, backup and archive data. Designed for small to medium sized business the new DR4000 Storage Platform combines the performance and reliability of disk-based backup with innovative deduplication and compression capabilities from Dell’s Ocarina Networks acquisition. A new Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.0 software  includes new 64-bit support that doubles memory size to improve performance and scale. “Dell is one of the unique companies to offer an end-to-end data center solution that can help customers transform IT from a rigid cost center to a flexible productivity center,” said Scott Winslow, CEO, Winslow Technology Group, a Dell Premier PartnerDirect channel partner. “These new Dell storage solutions offer an open, flexible platform that provides customers with a foundation for painless future growth and complements Dell’s expanding server, networking and software portfolio.” On Wednesday Dell announced today that Adriana Karaboutis has assumed the role of Global Chief Information Officer, responsible for continuing to drive Dell’s IT organization evolution, from managing an efficient and innovative global information infrastructure, to creating innovative breakthroughs that provide technology advances for the company and its customers.

Cloupia supports NetApp FlexPod.  Cloud and data center management and automation provider Cloupia announced the general availability of a new module of the Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) that now supports the Cisco and NetApp FlexPod architecture.  The CUIC provides comprehensive management and automation solution that integrates with the FlexPod management system with features that include: provisioning, monitoring and management for physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is available for the Cisco and NetApp FlexPod immediately.

SGI reaches $90 million in ICE X orders in 8 weeks. SGI announced today that its new SGI ICE X high performance computing (HPC) platform has $90 million in orders under contract, reflecting the strongest and broadest customer interest of any new product introduction in the company's history. Announced at the Supercomputing 2011 show in November 2011 the ICE X is the fifth generation for the ICE platform and is able to scale from tens of teraflops to up to tens of petaflops. "IDC expects that over the next few years more HPC buyers will be looking for systems with higher performance capabilities beyond what is available in standard products," said Earl Joseph, program vice president, High Performance Computing at IDC. "The newest design of the SGI® ICE platform, based on the next generation Intel Xeon processor E5 family, fits well with the needs of these demanding customers to achieve new levels of speed and scale in their compute workloads. ICE X is a flexible, performance-oriented design that should fit well into these customer requirements."