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PC blade pioneer ClearCube Technology and DataSynapse, which makes grid software, are bringing their technologies together to bring a new grid computing platform to the financial services industry.
By putting DataSynapses GridServer software onto ClearCubes PC blade platform, the two companies will be able to give financial institutions greater flexibility and scalability than solutions on traditional servers, said Raj Shah, chief marketing officer at ClearCube.
“Its a better platform to put [the grid software] on,” Shah said.
In a PC blade environment, small form-factor devices are placed in a chassis and housed in a central room or data center, and hold the key components of a computer—including the processor, memory and hard drive. Those PC blades are connected to a users desktop via User Port devices.
That platform offers greater security and manageability than traditional servers and desktop PCs, and can be scaled in smaller increments, one blade at a time, Shah said. The blades, which run on Intels Pentium 4 and Xeon chips, also allow for dual use, running them for trading during the day and high-performance computing tasks at night.
“It allows you to use the hardware in more than one way,” Shah said.
DataSynapses technology helps businesses create a virtualized environment, where computing resources can more easily be deployed to address business needs.
Both ClearCube and DataSynapse have a significant part of their businesses in the financial services industry. About 35 percent of ClearCubes business comes from that sector, Shah said.
Financial services institutions, including trading houses, insurance companies and banks, run complex, compute-intensive workloads that lend themselves to grid environments, he said. They also tend to be early adopters of new technology.
ClearCube and DataSynapse will jointly market the solution and make joint sales calls on customers, Shah said.
“It just makes a lot of sense,” he said of the partnership. “We believe we have the best hardware solution, and they believe they have the best software solution. Weve been doing it in a limited way. This will formalize the relationship.”
Shah said he expects this solution to grow beyond the financial services industry, into such areas as the federal government and the military as well as high-performance computing environments.