Grid Computing News : Grid-X Quietly Collects Cash

Grid-X has nabbed additional funding — but the stealthy startup still isn't saying much about what it's up to (see Grid-X Grabs Cash ). The 100GigE grid company has added more than $800,000 "in new government contracts, customer contributions, and seed investments," bringing total funding to more than $2 million. Grid-X is using the money to develop its series of offload engines, which the company says "uses patent-pending algorithms and coding to implement what will be the lowest cost, fastest offload engine on the market." Beta sites include aerospace firms, government laboratories and defense firms that need "ultra high-speed offload and networking within their data centers, clusters, and grid computing systems." Grid-X "is being developed in stealth mode by engineers, computer scientists and seed investors from the grid computing community." For more information, visit Grid-X.com . Gridbus Makes Sensors Work Harder The GRIDS Lab at the University of Melbourne and National ICT Australia have released SensorWeb 2.0 software, which unites sensor networks and grid computing with the Web so users can access sensors using Web services. The software allows sensor networks to off-load heavy processing activities to the grid and allows grid-based sensor applications to create advanced services for smart-sensing.... read more

Grid Computing News : Survey Claims HPC Trumps Virtualization, Green IT

A new survey claims that high-performance computing is the top IT priority, at least for a few industries. Surprisingly, 'green' IT initiatives ranked last in the survey. The IT execs also said they face a couple of major challenges on their cloud computing initiatives. The respondents overwhelmingly said that four key areas would be the most helpful to their IT processes: the ability to tie business metrics to services; policy-driven server provisioning capabilities; dashboards and real-time reporting; and the ability to dynamically scale applications to meet peak service levels. Nearly half the respondents said cost reduction is the primary motivation in choosing a data center technology, and a quarter of them said the biggest issue with data center operations is aligning IT with business objectives.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform Manages Virtual Environments

Platform Computing has released the next version of its virtual environment management product, Platform VM Orchestrator 4. Platform says VMO 4 offers "faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability and power consumption," helping users get more from their virtualization environments. For now, the offering helps manage Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) XenServer environments, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors — including VMware (NYSE: VMW) — coming later. Platform said VMO is built to manage virtualization deployments, optimize computer resources and remove performance bottlenecks. In other news, Platform also acquired the Scali MPI business from Norway's Scali AS.... read more

Grid Computing News : Grid Duo Boosts Amazon EC2

Grid Dynamics and GridGain have teamed up to boost the power of Amazon EC2, and they have the numbers to prove it. The two recently conducted what they said was the "largest publicly known grid scalability test" for Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which demonstrated linear scalability up to 512 nodes on a Monte Carlo simulation problem when GridGain's middleware and Amazon EC2 were used together. DataSynapse Adds FabricServer Support for VMware DataSynapse unveiled FabricServer 2.6 software, which now includes support for VMware (NYSE: VMW) Virtual Center for faster adoption of virtualization. FabricServer automates the deployment and provisioning of enterprise applications in a VMware-based virtual infrastructure, boosting server utilization rates and enabling virtual applications to be dynamically assembled at run-time from reusable operating system, middleware and applications templates, which reduces the storage needed for virtual images by up to 80 percent. Xeround Nabs Funding Round Xeround, which claims to have developed the "first distributed data grid with virtualization capabilities," has closed a $16 million round of Series B funding led by Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership.... read more