Bull steps up its commitment to Green Computing with the use of the newest-generation Intel® processors

WHAT'S NEW

Bull announced that the Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor (codename: ‘Nehalem’) is to be made available on its NovaScale family of servers. With this move, Bull is affirming its commitment to speed up the transition from traditional server architectures towards much higher performance and more energy-efficient infrastructures.

“Having incorporated several thousand Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors into very large-scale supercomputers which we are currently delivering across Europe, we have now built up a unique body of experience in using these new processors at Bull,” explains Philippe Miltin, Vice President of Bull's Products and Systems Division. “Our customers’ Data Centers will also benefit greatly from our new, much more powerful and energy-efficient NovaScale servers, which will help to reduce their IT infrastructure costs still further.”

Lower power consumption, low heat dissipation, and higher performance and density
Equipped with two 4-core Intel® Xeon® 5500 processors, eight of the models in Bull’s NovaScale family will benefit from the improved price/performance ratio offered by these twin socket servers. The lower power consumption and heat dissipation of the new processors also means performance-per-watt is better than the previous-generation Intel® Xeon® processors by a factor of two, and almost six times better than those available in 2005.

The new range of eight Bull NovaScale servers is available in tower, rack and blade configurations, to cover the full range of requirements associated with current evolutions in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Data Center infrastructures.

• Ultra-dense HPC NovaScale R422E2 server equipped with 4 Intel® Xeon® 5500 four-core processors in a 1U rack delivers the highest level of performance required by HPC applications in areas such as fundamental and applied research, and computer simulation.
• Blade NovaScale BL265LV server for the Data Center features low-voltage processors and SSD disks, which use 60% less electricity compared with an equivalent rack server. It is also equipped with Solid State Disks (SSDs), which use 87% less energy than traditional storage solutions.
• Optimized NovaScale R460E2 servers for virtualization double the performance and memory capacity. Bull has integrated this server into its VMBox virtualization solution in order to double the number of virtual machines it can manage.
• Rapid implementation and optimized Data Center operation
  Thanks to the industrial-scale integration and manufacturing services provided by Bull Industrial & Logistics Services at Angers in France, massive infrastructures featuring several hundreds or even thousands of Bull NovaScale servers can be pre-integrated, in order to reduce the time taken to deploy them within the Data Center.

As part of its Bio Data Center™ initiative – which advocates the establishment of optimized Data Centers that can be operated on a large scale and with a smaller carbon footprint – Bull has perfected a Data Center management software suite based on Bull System Manager, which will immediately work alongside the new Bull NovaScale series, in order to optimize the operation of very large-scale infrastructures.