To address soaring demand from users for more powerful storage solutions, Silicon Graphics has unveiled the SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 RAID storage array. This marks the industry's first Fibre Channel storage array equipped with a 4Gb/second (gigabit per second) Fibre Channel interface, doubling the performance of SGI's previous offerings. The increased performance of the TP9700 means that users need far less infrastructure - adapters, cabling, switch ports, etc - to access and manage their storage. Bottom line, this results in lower cost of ownership and far simpler configurations to manage.

SGI InfiniteStorage solutions are taking front and centre stage in a newly expanded SGI Channel Programme. A special emphasis has been placed on recruiting new storage-centric value-added resellers (VARs) whose primary business is the supply and integration of data storage solutions and services. Recently SGI has signed reseller agreements with twelve storage-dedicated Solution Providers that join a global community representing SGI InfiniteStorage to customers around the world.

Bull extends its Escala AIX/POWER5 processor-based server offer with the announcement of the Escala PL250R-L model, an entry-level server running AIX 5.2 and 5.3. This model, in a compact 2U format, combines the strength of the new generation of POWER 5 RISC processors, flexibility through on-demand usage, advanced functionalities such as resource virtualization through AIX/Power micro partitioning and I/O and network virtualization. These functionalities allow the co-hosting or the straightforward consolidation of many applications per server, all at a very competitive price: less than 5400 euro, 3-year guaranty included.

Voltaire, specialized in interconnect solutions for high performance Grid computing, has contributed its iSER (iSCSI RDMA) protocol sources to the Linux community. The move underscores Voltaire's commitment to drive adoption of open InfiniBand-based solutions for server, network and storage networking and virtualization in enterprise Grid and high performance computing applications.

Topspin Communications has been selected by Hitachi Ltd. to provide its Infiniband-based server switching products as part of Hitachi's BladeSymphony blade server product line. The combined solution will deliver a compelling return-on-investment (ROI) for Hitachi customers.

HP researchers have proven that a technology they invented could replace the transistor - the fundamental building block of computers for the last half century - leading to a new way to construct computers in the future. In a paper published in today'sJournal of Applied Physics, three members of HP Labs' Quantum Science Research (QSR) group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors. The technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.

At next month's CeBIT, Fujitsu Siemens Computers will present its new SX150 business server, a model that outperforms its predecessors by around 40 percent. The system, which is based on SPARC64 V processor technology and available immediately, supports different operating systems and applications running in parallel under BS2000/OSD and Solaris in separate hardware partitions. This increases the flexibility of the Dynamic Data Center and allows new web-oriented applications, for example, to be linked to mainframe applications. Such mainframe features should appeal in particular to mid-tier enterprises looking to consolidate their servers, integrate their business critical applications into e-business solutions, or simply gain more capacity.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has the power of its PRIMERGY BX660 server blade worldwide by setting a new record in the MAPI Messaging Benchmark (MMB3). On January 21, 2005, it achieved the outstanding result of 9500 MMB3 users in the single server category, the best mark for all published 4-way servers,

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has announced the new PRIMERGY TX300 S2 dual processor tower server, which has already beaten its own world record performance benchmark for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and XM Satellite Radio have signed a long-term agreement for Sun to be the company's sole supplier of UNIX and storage technology and support services.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is introducing two new Intel-based entry-level servers targeting the small and medium enterprise (SME) market. The PRIMERGY Econel 50 comes with the latest Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processors as well as powerful Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) technology and drastically reduced noise levels thanks to a new cooling concept. The PRIMERGY Econel 200 is the first Fujitsu Siemens Computers entry-level server to combine a two Intel Xeon processor capability with SATA hard disk technology. The new additions to the Econel series are now available for prices starting at 649 euro respectively 1099 euro (e.g. Germany, without tax) and will be showcased at CeBIT 2005.

Digipede Technologies, a provider of distributed computing solutions on the Microsoft Windows platform, has publicly unveiled the Digipede Network for companies with compute-intensive, data-intensive, and transaction-intensive applications. The Digipede Network is the first commercial distributed computing solution based entirely on Microsoft .NET.

ClusterVision, specialist in Linux supercomputer clusters, has announced another top year as a supplier of Linux supercomputer clusters in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The year 2004 saw a near doubling of sales revenue and a further increase of market share as a result of new customer wins as well as considerable repeat business from existing customers.

Linux Networx received more funding in 2004 than any other company in Utah, USA, according to PricewaterhouseCooper's (PWC) MoneyTree survey, a quarterly study of investment activity in the United States. In November 2004, Linux Networx received $40 million from Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Ventures, making it the largest single investment in a Utah company last year.

IBM will sponsor the 2005 IBM North America Grid Scholars Challenge, a contest offering American and Canadian university students and faculty advisors the opportunity to increase the understanding of Grid computing and the importance of open standards and open source implementation. IBM is seeking the greatest in student innovators, providing the winners a laptop from the IBM ThinkPad T-series line.

GridXpert, supplier of on-demand service architecture, today opens the door towards the next step in Grid computing. Their solution Synergy federates and shares the use of IT resources and data on an enterprise Grid, either locally or spread over several sites, and furthermore can offer these resources to partners of the company, or even provide an on-demand service architecture in ASP mode.

Members of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) have announced a new secure payment solution, piracy-proof peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software, advanced micropayment aggregation engine, and technology for integrating cell phone and P2P payments. The announcements were made at a special evening session of Media Summit New York, a two-day conference for senior executives of the entertainment and technology sectors presented by Digital Hollywood.

Aspeed Software plans to include Critical Software’s high performance fault tolerant message passing technology in its next release of Accellerant expected later this month.

At the European Grid Conference 2005 (EGC2005) in Amsterdam, Wolfgang Gentzsch, director of MCNC Grid Computing and Networking Services discussed the current status of Grid computing for business. Grids are ready for early adaptors, he concludes. But there is no single Grid business case. Instead he provides some guidelines that can help build your own specific Grid business case.

The Commission of the European Union has awarded 8.3 million Euro to a pan-European task force who will improve access to biological information for scientists throughout and beyond Europe. The EMBRACE Network of Excellence, which encompasses computational biologists from 17 institutes in 11 countries and is coordinated by the European Bioinformatics Institute's Associate Director Graham Cameron, will use these funds to simplify and standardize the way in which biological information is served to the researchers who use it.

A two-day workshop at ESA’s centre in Italy this week covered scientific and also industrial Grid computing applications, highlighting current systems as well as the likely course of future Grid development and applications. Around 40 local scientific researchers and representatives from industry gathered for the ’Grid and e-Collaboration for the Space Community’ workshop. The event took place on 2 and 3 February at the European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) in Frascati overlooking Rome. A day of discussion was followed by a second day of tutorials in Grid use.

ModViz I has made available its Virtual Graphics Platform (VGP) Release 1.0, a standards-based software solution that virtualizes 3D graphics intensive applications across clusters of commodity-based computers. VGP provides to customers, independent software vendors, cluster computing manufacturers and application developers a common OpenGL-based computing platform that delivers supercomputing level visualization with extreme data size and scalability on clusters of 3D graphics Linux computing nodes.

Cluster File Systems, specialized in high-performance parallel file systems, has released a major update to the Lustre file system on its public download site. Used on many of the world's largest Linux clusters, Lustre 1.2.4 represents a significant advancement in the development of a world-class open-source file system. This release further demonstrates Cluster File Systems' ongoing commitment to make new versions of Lustre available to the free software community on a regular basis.

Mandrakesoft and BRGM will participate along with INRIA in IGGI, a research project in Grid computing. The consortium will develop the technologies needed to turn any network of commodity desktop machines into a cluster. The project will receive governmental funding.

Voltaire, specialized in interconnect solutions for high performance Grid computing, has expanded its alliance with Silicon Graphics to further integrate Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect into SGI Altix 1350 clustered systems. Under the terms of the agreement, Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect will serve as the high performance interconnect in preconfigured Altix 1350 clusters introduced today by SGI.

HP has introduced a suite of storage resource management software that bridges the islands of server and storage management prevalent in data centres today. The first storage offering in the company's roadmap for a unified server and storage management architecture, HP Storage Essentials enables customers to simplify IT infrastructure administration and drive collaboration without compromising control.

Kazaa developers hate their software, according to a current trial document. TrustyFiles High Performance File Sharing Software is the clear and superior alternative for Kazaa employees and P2P users. Similar to Kazaa, TrustyFiles is free and uses the Fast Track network accessed by Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh, and other P2P software for searches, downloads, and sharing. But the similarities end there.

HP has introduced two solutions that help health care organisations efficiently and cost-effectively access and manage patient information in order to improve quality of care. The HP Medical Archiving Solution and the HP Forms Automation System 1.2 were being showcased at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference, recently held in Dallas.

HP is enabling faster, more collaborative biomedical research for the Harvard Medical School - Partners HealthCare Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG), one of the United States' premier biomedical research organisations, with the delivery of a high-performance HP server cluster based on Linux. HP will develop a computational infrastructure capable of facilitating the use of genetic, genomic and proteomic technologies in both research and clinical medicine.

ObjectWeb, the international consortium dedicated to open-source infrastructure software, has completed the certification effort to make the open-source application server JOnAS compliant with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE 1.4) specifications. By successfully passing the J2EE 1.4 Compliance Test Suite, JOnAS is becoming the first non commercial open-source application server to be certified compliant with the J2EE specifications.

At the launch of the 2005 BMW Williams F1 Team car, the FW27, the Williams F1 design team was able to assess twice as many aerodynamic models in computational fluid dynamics this year than ever previously possible, thus allowing the team to investigate the optimal design for the car.

HP is making medical imaging storage and retrieval more reliable and manageable for Banner Health, one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the United States.

Sarvega and Cyclone Commerce have successfully completed interoperability certification between the Sarvega XML Guardian Gateway and Cyclone Interchange Advanced Server.

A virtual reality drama by University at Buffalo (UB) researchers, aimed at transforming the movie-going experience, is driving the development of increasingly "self-aware" computational agents that are able to improvise responses to the spontaneous actions of human users.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has unveiled further details of its next-generation Netra ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) blade platform strategy by announcing partnerships with network interface providers, including Ulticom, Adax and NMS Communications. These partnerships strengthen Sun's offering by integrating best-in-breed, high-performance signaling products into its Netra ATCA blade platform, supporting both Solaris and Carrier-Grade Linux operating systems, to accelerate development and delivery of new telecom services for the rapidly-growing wireless and broadband markets.

A regional collaboration of three University of North Carolina campuses - UNC Wilmington, UNC Pembroke and Fayetteville State University - is providing advanced networking capabilities to boost economic development in the southeastern region of the state.

Representatives of MATAV and Cisco Systems officially inaugurated the national backbone network that now provides high-speed Internet access for the Budapest headquarters of the Hungarian National Research Education Network (Hungarian NREN). It will also support seven universities, which operate as regional network centres, and several other research and educational institutions. The new network will help ensure reliable access to the GEANT2 computer network - the pan-European research network supported by the European Union - for nearly 600,000 users of the Hungarian NREN in almost 700 institutions.