IBM drives blade servers to SMEs

IBM seeks to market its blade servers to small and medium-sized businesses with the release of a package of multiple storage devices on a single blade-based box, reports CNN Money.

IBM has created blade.org, a programme aimed at providing development help to start-up businesses that target this space.

"We already had a blade chassis for small to medium-sized businesses, but what we've added is the ability to share the storage between all the blades," says Alex Yost, VP for IBM BladeCentre.

Interactive Supercomputing has revealed that its Star-P software will support Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008, says OBBEC.

Star-P is an application development platform that allows scientists, engineers and analysts to code algorithms and models on their Windows desktops using familiar mathematical software packages such as The MathWorks' MATLAB or Python, and run them on parallel clusters and servers running Windows HPC Server 2008.

Vince Mendillo, director of HPC marketing at Microsoft, says: "Star-P's support of Windows HPC Server 2008 helps ensure our customers will be able to tap the power of parallel processing from their desktops with a familiar Windows platform and easy-to-use tools."

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) says the roll-out of its first 45-nanometer server chip, code-named Shanghai, is ahead of schedule and promised that computer servers with the new quad-core processor would be available in the fourth quarter, states Information Week.

The first Shanghai chips, which are currently in full production, will be 75-watt processors for mainstream x86 servers, while the desktop version, called Deneb, is also set to be generally available in the fourth quarter.

In the first quarter of next year, AMD plans to ship a 55-watt Shanghai processor for blades and low-power servers used in large clusters that form the foundation of cloud computing environments, and also expects to ship a 105-watt chip for the highest-performing servers.