New Products

HP Enhances Cluster Portfolio for High-Performance Computing

HP has announced enhancements to its Unified Cluster Portfolio for high-performance computing (HPC). Product updates include support for new HP servers and workstations powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 series processors. The HP Cluster Platform 3000 system now runs new Quad-Core processor-based HP ProLiant servers that, according to the company, offer greater energy efficiency and can improve system performance by nearly 50 percent.

Additionally, the HP Scalable Visualization Array (SVA) V2.0 is available on the new HP xw8400 Workstations running the Quad-Core processors. These HPC systems and software are part of the HP Unified Cluster Portfolio, a comprehensive, modular package of hardware, software and services to help customers manage, store, access, and visualize the large volumes of data created by highly complex science, engineering, and analysis applications. More information is available at: http://www.hp.com/go/clusterportfolio5pr.com.

Aventail Launches Updated Version of Remote Access Controller

Aventail has announced Aventail ST2+, the most recent release of its SSL VPN remote access platform. New features include comprehensive end point checking, the first integrated professional reporting solution for usage and user tracking, and a new virtual keyboard for additional protection from keystroke loggers and identity theft.

According to the company, Aventail ST2+ is the only remote access controller with universal access through one gateway, a seamless user experience, and central management for all access methods. Aventail SSL VPNs running the ST2+ platform can secure access from devices running Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, and Macintosh. For more information, visit: http://www.aventail.com.

DataDirect Networks Debuts
High-Performance NAS Storage Solution

DataDirect Networks has announced its new S2A9550 NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution. The S2A9550 NAS solution integrates the latest in high-performance NAS technologies with DataDirect's seventh generation S2A Technology to deliver up to 1.6 GB/s of sustained throughput while scaling up to 336 TB of Fibre Channel or 840 TB using SATA II disk drives.

According to the company, the S2A9550 NAS Solution overcomes the performance, availability, scalability, and management challenges in deploying complex high-performance NAS architectures. It also offers a rich set of management tools that make it easy-to-install, scale, and manage a high-performance, high-capacity storage solution. The S2A9550 NAS Solution includes GigE or 10 GigE connectivity supporting up to 336 TB FC or 840 TB SATA capacity. The S2A9550 NAS Solution features Active/Active Cluster Nodes with Client Transparent Failover and supports multi-protocols. For more information, visit: http://www.datadirectnet.com.

Evergrid Announces High-Performance Resource Management Software

Evergrid, Inc., a provider of advanced quality of application service management for next generation datacenters, has announced its entry into the high-performance computing market with patent pending high availability and resource management software that lets massively parallelized distributed applications run at near 100 percent reliability on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

The Evergrid software sits between the operating system and the applications, and captures the collective state of the application and its IO across all processors. By recording the state of the application, Evergrid is able to checkpoint and recover from failures rapidly with minimal overhead. The software installs on Linux systems and requires no modifications to either the OS or application. It is scalable up to thousands of nodes at a time, with less than five percent performance overhead. For more information, visit: http://www.Evergrid.com.

Firebird Project Releases Firebird 2.0 Final

The Firebird Project has officially released version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software. According to the company, Firebird 2.0 is the happy culmination of more than two years' efforts from a broad-ranging, truly international community of dedicated developers and supporters. It brings with it a large collection of long-awaited enhancements that significantly improve performance, security, and support for international languages and realise some desirable new SQL language features. Under the surface, it also provides a much more robust code platform from which the re-architecting planned for Firebird 3.0 is proceeding. For more information, visit: http: //www.firebirdsql.org/.