Roundup: Luxtera, SGI, NetApp, Cloudera

Here’s our review of some of this week's news in the data center industry:

Luxtera delivers 100Gbps Opto-Electronic Transceiver.  Luxtera announced the industry’s first single chip 100Gbps optical transceiver to support next generation cloud computing data centers and high performance computing (HPC) optical connectivity. The single chip opto-electronic transceiver is targeted at applications that would require 100 Gbps Ethernet, OTN or InfiniBand. The fully integrated chip leverages silicon photonics and uses light from a single co-packaged laser to power multiple optical transmitters on a chip, eliminating the need for multiple lasers and reducing transceiver cost and power consumption. “The introduction of the 100Gbps Silicon Photonics transceiver, which is the outcome of a joint Luxtera-Molex collaboration, is a key milestone in optical connectivity for a wide range of cloud computing, data center and HPC applications.  We are excited about this collaboration with Luxtera as it represents one of the many positive outcomes of our partnership and recent agreements,” said Doug Busch, Vice-President and General Manager of Molex’s Fiber Optic Products Business Unit. “As a strategic partner with Luxtera, Molex will deliver a line of connectivity products based on this IP spanning different data rates, lanes and mechanical form-factors.”

NASA upgrades with SGI ICE HPC.  SGI announced today that NASA has selected its next generation SGI ICE high performance computing (HPC) platform, code-named 'Carlsbad 3.0,' to extend the computational capability of NASA's Pleiades supercomputer system. Starting in 2012 NASA will expand their computational capabilities with the new SGI platform, future Intel Xeon E5 Romley family processors, FDR dual-plane and a hypercube-topology InfiniBand network. With the goal of attaining 10 petaflops of peak performance NASA has partnered with SGI and Intel under the Space Act Agreement for research, modeling and simulation work at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. The new system will be integrated into the Pleiades supercomputer, ranked number 7 on the June 2011 Top500 list. "Intel and SGI are working closely together to make sure that leading customers like NASA have the performance, density and programming efficiency they need to deliver on key multi-petascale workloads leading up to the exascale era," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of the High Performance Computing division at Intel. "We're excited that NASA selected the fifth generation of SGI's award-winning ICE system for the next stages of Pleiades expansion."

NetApp and Cloudera partner.  NetApp (NTAP)  announced a preconfigured, ready-to-deploy solution called NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop that will enable customers to maximize the value of their enterprise Hadoop implementations with improved flexibility and performance and lower total cost of ownership. Partnering with Cloudera they will distribute Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise, a subscription service comprised of Cloudera Support and Hadoop management software, with NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop to speed enterprise deployment and production use of Apache Hadoop. "NetApp has a long history of supporting open standards and giving our customers the flexibility and efficiency they need to drive results from their data. Our strategy for Hadoop is no different, and we will give customers choice for their Hadoop implementations, from enterprise-class to open-source Apache Hadoop solutions," said Clifton. "Cloudera strengthens our enterprise-ready NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, and together we make deployment of enterprise Hadoop easier, simplify management, and reduce the cost of deployments." Hadoop World was a sold out event November 8-9 in New York.