Roundup: SGI, EMC, PEER 1, Cisco

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

SGI selected by CSC for NOAA project.  SGI announced that it has been selected by CSC to meet National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requirements for weather and climate forecast modeling. This system will be installed in NOAA's Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, West Virginia. The installation will consist of 36 racks with a SGI Altix ICE 8400 enhanced by hypercube supercomputer cluster containing 27,648 cores of 6-core Intel Xeon 5690 processors with more than six petabytes of storage. "We selected SGI for this major HPC deployment based on the company's proven history of high performance, and the unparalleled computer power that this system will provide to NOAA researchers," said Steve Baxter, program manager at CSC.

EMC helps PEER 1 roll out Storage-as-a-Service.  EMC  announced that PEER 1 Hosting, one of the top hosting providers in the world with 12,000 customers, has deployed EMC Atmos globally distributed cloud storage as the foundation of its CloudOne Storage, a self-service, metered storage solution. After evaluating eight providers, PEER 1 selected the Atmos solution because of the complete integration of software and hardware in a cloud storage solution, and for EMC's large R&D investments in cloud.  John Hamner, Product Manager, PEER 1 Hosting said, "Atmos has a lot of built-in flexibility because we can easily set different policies to match the different cost and availability requirements of our cloud storage customers. We want to make sure that CloudOne Storage provides not just raw storage but also the high availability our customers demand. Additionally, with Atmos' GeoProtect, we get sophisticated data protection that is designed specifically for cloud environments."

Cisco to eliminate 6,500 employees.  As predicted by many, Cisco (CSCO) announced that it will reduce its global workforce across all functions by approximately 6,500 employees, roughly 9 percent of Cisco's regular full-time workforce. Approximately 15 percent of those impacted are of vice president level and above. The reduction comes as a part of their $1 billion annual operating expense reduction and includes 2,100 employees who elected to participate in a voluntary early retirement program. In an upcoming earnings call it is anticipated that Cisco will recognize other restructuring charges to its GAAP financial results as a part of their continued plan to simplify the organization and refine operations. Cisco also announced an agreement with Foxconn Technology Group, for the sale of its manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico. Cisco assumed ownership of the 5,000-person Juarez facility with the acquisition of Scientific Atlanta in 2006.