HPCwire: Novell's PlateSpin Helps New Zealand Supercomputing Centre

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December 01, 2008

Novell's PlateSpin Helps New Zealand Supercomputing Centre

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PlateSpin workload management product provides datacenter automation

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, Dec. 1 -- Novell today announced that the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre (NZSC) has chosen one of its PlateSpin workload management products to automate the management of its on-demand computing infrastructure. Together with partner InterGrid, the NZSC hosts high-intensity computing projects for oil companies, bio-pharmaceutical enterprises, movie production houses and universities.

The NZSC owns one of the world's largest commercially available supercomputing clusters. It started as a distributed computing system in partnership with visual effects expert Weta Digital*, the computer-graphics company behind the Lord of the Rings* trilogy. Over time it grew into a full-scale supercomputing facility owned by Telecom New Zealand and operated by ICT subsidiary Gen-i.

Located in Wellington, the NZSC delivers computing services to industry sectors with intense data storage and processing requirements. Workloads include; life science and biological research, digital content development, seismic processing and financial modelling. The facility is made up of 1,008 Intel 2.8 Gigahertz Xeon processors on more than 500 IBM dual blade servers.

"With the increase in size and complexity of the facility, the NZSC needed to build new infrastructure management tools. PlateSpin Orchestrate was chosen for its capabilities in automating the management of virtualized datacenter resources," said Steve Osborn, service line manager for Open Source solutions at Gen-i. "Novell made a unique product available to us and have worked tirelessly to apply it to our situation. They never said, 'No, that's too hard' or 'we can't do that' and that's quite special when choosing a partner for a project this complex."

Novell worked with the NZSC team on the deployment of PlateSpin Orchestrate in the supercluster.

Jo De Baer, Novell product manager, explained, "Our product helps the NZSC to transform a static, manually operated datacenter into a highly flexible and automated environment, where resources are dynamically allocated based on what is needed by any given business at any given time. The implementation uses the core strength of our product: the capability to automatically, rapidly and securely create and scale heterogeneous virtual environments."

"The high degree of automation makes manual interventions practically unnecessary. Not only does this reduce operating costs, it also mitigates risks, as human error is one of the most common causes of business outages. To be involved in such a ground-breaking project was quite exciting for Novell. It shows how the strength and flexibility of our offerings help customers to tackle complex datacenter automation problems at a large scale," said De Baer.

Osborn added, "This project is very much on the leading edge as far as 'cloud' or 'grid' solutions are concerned. People are amazed at what we're doing with our partners to make this offering a reality. This is the kind of concept that Kiwis have come to be known for internationally. Novell kept up and offered us a high quality solution -- one that could evolve with our vision and targets for on-demand services. We can now be sure that with this integrated management solution our offering can be easily scaled to extend to other markets in Asia-Pacific and around the world."

Novell is positioned within the top tier of global software companies in New Zealand and worldwide, and has a large footprint of infrastructure technology in market sectors of government, healthcare and education.

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