Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

Time	Event
11:30a	Data Center Jobs: Alban Cat At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Alban Cat, which is seeking a Sr Field Engineer System Solutions Group in Elkridge, Maryland. The Sr Field Engineer System Solutions Group is responsible for installation; acceptance testing; start up; commissioning; maintenance; and testing of complex electrical apparatus (Generators; Switchgear; ATSs; UPS; Motors; Motor Control Centers), experience with AC/DC Hi-Pot; Three Phase Doble Test sets; DLRO; Multi-meters; Oscopes; Insulation testing; Primary and Secondary voltage and current injection testing; Thermography; and phasing test sets from 120/208 up to 35Kv, reviewing; understanding; and making recommendations based on actual test values, and the implementation of safety practices in the electrical testing industry. To view full details and apply, see job listing details. Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our jobs RSS feed. (Comment on this)
12:00p	Eurora Ranked Most Energy Efficient Supercomputer A rack from the Eurora supercomputer, deployed in at CINECA in Bologna, Italy.(Photo: NVIDIA Corp.) Computing power is no longer the only benchmark that matters in supercomputing. Energy efficiency, as measured in performance per watt, is the key metric for the Green 500 list, which highlights the systems that combine power and efficiency. The Green 500 was established as a counterpoint to the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers. Debuting at number one on the June 2013 Green 500 list is the Eurora supercomputer, with 3.208 gigaflops per watt.  This result tops the energy efficiency record it set earlier this year of 3.15 gigaflops per watt. The Top500 number one Milkyway-2 (Tianhe-2) is ranked number 31 on the Green500, with 1.9 gigaflops per watt. The common feature the two systems is a heterogeneous approach, that combines two or more types of processing elements together, such as a traditional processor or central processing unit (CPU) combined with a graphical processing unit (GPU) or coprocessor. Gigaflops per watt “Overall, the performance of machines on the Green500 List has increased at a higher rate than their power consumption,” said Wu Feng, founder of the Green500. “That’s why the machines’ efficiencies are going up.”  The second spot on the Green500 belongs to Aurora Tigon, coming in at 3.179 gigalops per watt. Euora and Aurora Tigon are manufactured by Eurotech, and improve upon the previous greenest supercomputer in the world by nearly 30 percent. The top two spots are also powered by NVIDIA Kepler K20 GPU accelerators. IBM BlueGene/Q systems are predominant though the 28th spot in the Green 500 list, with six in the top 10. The IBM Vulcan jumped 57 spots on the Top500 June 2013 list, and was ranked 13th on the Green 500 at 2.177 gigaflops per watt. MEGAwatts The top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the June 2013 Top500 list, consume an aggregate 62.7 megawatts of power. The top 10 supercomputers combined on the Green 500 don’t even reach 1 megawatt. With the DARPA’s goal of an exascale supercomputer within a power envelope of 20 megawatts, extrapolating Beacon, the previous number one supercomputer on the Green500, to exascale results in a 408 MW machine. Seeking to raise the awareness in energy efficiency of supercomputing, the 13th edition of the Green500 list marks the Green500’s first use of new energy measurement methodologies developed in tandem with the Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Working Group, Top500, and The Green Grid. (Comment on this)
12:30p	Selling Management on Virtualized Infrastructure Alan McMahon works for Dell in enterprise solution design, across a range for products from servers, storage to virtualization, and is based in Ireland. ALAN McMAHON Dell While your management might know that virtualization is an IT method that will save you a lot of time and money, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to immediately jump on board the cloud computing train. Management may not completely grasp exactly how important it is to setup a virtualized environment, or they may be concerned about the security problems involved. When you want to really sell them on the idea of a virtualized infrastructure, one of the best ways to do so is to show them that it doesn’t have to be a pain to get all of the components in place. There are several companies that create pre-configured virtualization infrastructure that is pretty much ready to go completely out of the box. The advantage being these solutions are tested for compatibility, setup with the best software for the job, and tested extensively in order to give you no problems during the setup process. The planning and integration is already taken care of for you. You aren’t going to have to spend endless hours training your IT staff on the software or hardware, as it’s very easy to pick up, and most likely your IT department has more than a passing familiarity with the technology. Working in the Agile World The flexibility that you crave from a virtualized environment is also present with the pre-configured system. You can add in additional servers or entire new racks, depending on your requirements. Virtualized infrastructure is not just for large enterprises either. Small and medium businesses benefit from the scalability that this infrastructure affords, and they can start out on a smaller scale in order to make it much more affordable. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to move to a virtualized infrastructure outside of the cost savings. For example, you can use this environment to consolidate servers. Instead of getting physical servers for every need, you can virtualize the resources that you have on hand in order to receive a much greater benefit than the physical servers alone could give you. You have faster deployment and reducing overhead since less physical hardware is needed. Adding resources on demand is another huge benefit to having a pre-configured virtualized infrastructure. You already know exactly what hardware is going to work with your setup, so all you need to do is pick up extra servers or racks to keep going. You don’t even have to have any downtime to get the additional resources added to the network, which is especially a good benefit to those who require as much uptime as possible, such as online stores. Mobile Workforce Needs One benefit that a lot of people overlook with virtualized infrastructure is the fact that your employees can reach this cloud wherever they are. If you have a highly mobile workforce, or want to offer work at home or remote office options to your employees, then this infrastructure setup allows you to do this in a very easy fashion. You can provide the powerful resources at the main headquarters, while reducing the IT needs at the remote locations or home locations. When you have multiple demands on your IT department, you don’t want to take them away from their day to day tasks or priority projects in order to plan and build a virtualized environment. You avoid this issue when you go with a pre-configured setup, as most of the hard work is out of the way, and the time demands are not nearly as harsh on the IT department at that point. If you’re looking for flexibility with resource allocation, a private cloud provides one of the best options for this. No one is going to have to wait weeks in order to get additional resources added to the infrastructure for their projects. Instead, the IT department just has to go into the management tools to allocate resources from the private cloud, to the requestor. It’s this type of flexibility that really shows off the benefits you get with the cloud. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Oracle Launches SuperCluster T5-8 Engineered System With no single point of failure and extreme performance improvements over the previous generation, Oracle (ORCL) launched the SuperCluster T5-8 engineered system. The T5-8 system is engineered with security, database and infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities, and zero-overhead virtualization using Oracle VM Server for SPARC. It integrates over 16 TB of high-performance flash storage along with up to 256 compute cores and terabytes of accelerated database storage. “Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 runs Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic up to 10x faster than systems pieced together by costly integration projects,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “The benefits of this virtualized system extend to any application that uses Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic today, without changes, making this the world’s best enterprise mission critical consolidation platform. Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 can be applied with equal ease to problems of tremendous scale, or to transformative consolidation with impressive economics.” The T5-8 is optimized for Oracle Database and Exalogic Elastic Cloud software with unique hardware acceleration. Built-in hardware encryption provides end-to-end data security. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center makes it possible to rapidly configure, deploy, monitor and manage the most sophisticated and secure agile mission-critical service environments. Oracle Database 12c After making cloud announcements last week with Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Oracle announced Database 12c, a next-generation cloud database. The 12c edition provides a new multitenant architecture on top of a fast, scalable, reliable, and secure database platform. It simplifies the process of consolidating databases onto the cloud, thus enabling customers to manage many databases as one – without changing their applications. Serving as the foundation of Oracle Public Cloud Services, 12c is optimized on SPARC and Intel Xeon processors, and adds 500 additional features.  Oracle Database 12c includes more security innovations than any other previous Oracle database release. “The innovations in Oracle Database 12c were developed with our customers’ cloud requirements very much in mind,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, Oracle. “The new multitenant architecture makes it easier for customers to consolidate their databases and securely manage many as one. It also offers customers other capabilities for cloud computing such as simplified provisioning, cloning and resource prioritization without resorting to major application changes.” (Comment on this)
2:00p	LINX Housing IT Infrastructure in Interxion London Interxion is housing the London Internet Exchange’s IT hosting infrastructure out of its London data center. LINX was already running its network out of Interxion’s London campus, but today’s expansion means the operator will colocate its website, customer portal, back office systems, and critical business and network applications in the same facility. LINX has taken additional colocation space at Interxion London to resell to their members. The move is order for LINX to be able to provide for need of members looking to source colocation and Internet exchange services through one simple contract. “LINX’s decision to build on its existing relationship with us is testament to the level of service and quality of infrastructure we provide,” said Doug Loewe, UK managing director, Interxion. “LINX is one of the largest exchanges in the world and has always been a key member of our carrier community. We very much look forward to helping them expand within our data center and further contribute to our thriving campus.” LINX supports over 470 members from over 58 countries worldwide, enabling them to exchange Internet traffic reliably and with improved performance. Through LINX, the members are able to reach 80 percent of the total global Internet, making it one of the most connected Internet Exchange Points in the world. High quality data centers are critical to LINX’s ongoing reliability, as they house the equipment LINX uses to operate its network and upon which its members depend. Derek Cobb, chief technical officer, LINX commented: “As a member-owned world leading exchange point, we only choose partners who can help us deliver secure, reliable and essential services to the largest networks on the planet. Interxion is a core partner in helping us continue to provide these services to our membership.” (Comment on this)
4:22p	Video: Automation in the Data Center As infrastructure becomes more dense, system admins are managing more and more servers. Puppet Labs is one of several companies that have launched tools that help sys admins automate the process of managing servers, even whole data centers. We caught up with Puppet Labs VP Tech Operations, James Turnbull at Velocity 2013, and asked what’s the latest at Puppet Labs. The video runs about 11 minutes.   For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2013/07/03 [Calendar]

Next Day >>