Roundup: Oracle, Savvis, Nimsoft, Interxion

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

Oracle invests in Mellanox. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has made a strategic investment in Mellanox Technologies (MLNX), a leading supplier of end-to-end connectivity solutions for servers and storage systems, to further align product vision and maximize partnership efforts. The Mellanox InfiniBand solution is seen in many enterprise and high performance computing data centers. “InfiniBand is by far the fastest and most efficient switch fabric for running enterprise data centers,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Mellanox has been instrumental in maintaining InfiniBand's immense competitive lead over Ethernet. We are a big supporter of the company and this investment based upon our belief in the InfiniBand technology and in the Mellanox management team.”

Savvis selected for GSA cloud storefront. Savvis (SVVS) Federal Systems announced that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) to provide cloud computing to federal, state, local and tribal government organizations. Savvis is one of just 11 vendors who were selected to provide Infrastructure-as-a-service solutions for Apps.gov. "We offer what mass market clouds cannot, from security architecture to service-level options to hybrid solutions," said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis. "We look forward to providing government organizations with the same excellent cloud services and customer experiences that our enterprise clients have come to expect from Savvis." Through Apps.gov, government agencies will be able to procure Savvis Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC), Savvis' signature enterprise-class cloud computing services.

Nimsoft cloud readiness assessment tool. Nimsoft announced a new online diagnostic tool that enables clients to quickly assess their readiness for monitoring cloud environments, along with support for the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). The online assessment tool aids in gauging existing cloud monitoring capabilities and challenges in order to make well-informed decisions about how to optimally manage their cloud environments. "Cloud computing offers organizations tremendous business value-but it also requires IT to adopt a whole new approach to management and operations," said Gary Read, Nimsoft CEO. "Nimsoft is helping customers make this transition by providing IT teams with a practical way to quickly gauge how well-equipped they are to monitor the cloud and to determine where they need to address potential technology and process deficits."

bwin extends Interxion relationship.  Interxion announced that bwin, an online gaming platform, has extended their data center requirements, taking additional space in Interxion's Vienna data center as well as space in one of Interxion's Paris data centers.  bwin requires connectivity, resilience, uptime and low latency in order to support over 30,00 bets a day across 90 sports in 22 languages and 25 core markets.  “After an in-depth market analysis, it quickly became clear that Interxion was ‘best-in-class’, offering the best selection of carriers, the best technical specifications, the best references and excellent know-how," said Johannes Hobel, Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations Vienna at bwin.