NewServers partners with Scalable Informatics for cloud storage solution

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Privately held NewServers, the “bare metal cloud” people, sent me a note over the emails about a new announcement between them and Scalable Informatics, Joe Landman’s Michigan-based HPC company that is starting to get a lot of attention lately for the quality of its storage and personal supercomputing solutions. I have been getting to know NewServers over the past several weeks; they seem like an interesting company.

Here’s the gist of the storage part announcement

NewServers Inc., the leading provider of Hardware as a Service (HaaS) dedicated cloud servers, today announced a strategic partnership with high performance computing (HPC) provider Scalable Informatics that will provide cloud storage solutions capable of supporting HPC.

NewServers will integrate Scalable Informatics’ JackRabbit high-performance server storage solution into the company’s service.  Customers, particularly those with high performance or high volume  storage requirements (in petabytes), will benefit from the design, maintenance, and support of this system by Scalable Informatics.

…Under the partnership, Scalable Informatics and NewServers will team up to design a new line of servers-on-demand for high performance computing environments that includes Infiniband and 10 GbE connected storage.

“Scalable Informatics is excited to be working with NewServers, to provide high performance storage on demand, and build and enable customers to use ‘instant-on’ HPC environments, and easily create specialized environments,” said Dr. Joseph Landman, CEO of Scalable Informatics.

The announcement also says that SI will be working with NewServers to develop a new hosted HPC service. A little bit about NewServers “bare metal” approach

The bare metal devices allow end users to install and use precisely the same operating system images as they would normally use on their own systems.  There is no virtualization vendor lock-in which, in light of the shutdown of Virtual Iron, could potentially leave users unable to access or control their own data.  This is a significant concern for end users of  mission critical computing as a service.  Moreover, as these are bare metal units, direct access to low latency Infiniband devices is possible using various MPI stacks.  This is not possible using virtualized computing nodes, which renders most of the virtualized stacks inappropriate for low latency computations.