Lots of updates, all good
By joe
- 4 minutes read - 672 wordsAll for the day job: First, our help system is now online. This allows us to provide an externally visible issue tracking and project management/tracking site for customers. Not just for our hardware. Scalable Informatics has been helping people support other peoples hardware for quite a while. Some of our biggest/best customers have not bought a single bit of hardware from us, but pay us to help them support, run, install, manage, …. their systems.
Along those lines, we have new remote cluster support offerings, where we can help you manage your clusters, and provide you whatever level and degree of support you need. Onsite if you wish, though this does incur additional cost. Second, our announcement about Cray CX1 sales is up. Yup, we are selling/supporting them. I am a huge fan of the concept of personal supers. Add ScaleMP to the unit, and you have a 64 core, up to 384 GB ram machine to use. This isn’t a bad thing at all. Tie a few JackRabbit’s into it with GlusterFS or Lustre, and you have something very hard to beat from a raw computing coupled to raw I/O firepower scenario. You can of course, aggregate these into larger clusters. You can run them in your office/lab. Really they are quite cool! Third, our announcement about GlusterFS sales is up. GlusterFS is a stackable translator based file system that provides no single points of failure, and very high performance over infiniband netowrks. Scalable has been using it and deploying it at customer sites for more than a year, we have now formalized a reseller arrangement with Z-Research over this. Fourth, we have covered the NVidia situation, and note our workaround for non-available Teslas. We have units on backorder now for close to 7 weeks. Also, NVidia has constructed a Tesla sale that provides 6 of its resellers with discounts, and leaves all the other resellers out in the cold. To say I am disappointed in them is … an understatement. Our complaints eventually caused them to add a link on a page back over to us, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental sales construction issue. So, to be plain about this, Scalable will offer the NVidia Tesla units at the same price as the sales price, when purchased as part of our Pegasus units. This price reduction is already factored into the pricing. So, we will provide you with precisely the same price benefit that the selected resellers will. And no, we are not getting the sales price from NVidia, so we are losing money per Tesla sold in the Pegasus. Yes, this is wrong, no, it is not our fault. I am going to raise the ante though. I am more than a little ticked off about this whole fiasco, so we are going to extend the sale price to ANY number of pegasus units. Thats right. You buy 100 pegasus workstations, you will get that sale price on any Teslas that we place in them. And again, NVidia has nothing to do with this, won’t support it, or provide sales pricing to us. We are doing this ourselves. So please help us send a message to NVidia, and buy as many GPU accelerated computing systems from us, as you can. Nothing opens eyes like volume. And I am going to go even further. We are dropping the price of the Cell cards immediately, by 10%. Our deskside units with Cell broadband coupled with Tesla represent the best of possible worlds for accelerated computing. And they are selling. These are PowerXCell units, same chip in the worlds fastest computer. These are the PCIe PXCAB cards from Fixstars, our partner in this endeavor. Complete with YDL. Only we use a much faster set of processors for these units. Intel Nehalem X55xx and AMD Shanghai (and now Istanbul). Build your own micro-Roadrunner if you wish. There is more, but some things I can’t announce right now. Very exciting, but I can’t say a word until i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.