APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE, IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
Businesswire | May 12, 2023
Options Technology, the leading provider of cloud-enabled managed services to the global capital markets, today announced its achievement of Microsoft Solutions Partner designation for Infrastructure.
Microsoft’s Solutions Partner designation differentiates partners with broad technical capabilities, a dedication to skilling and training, and a proven ability to successfully deliver solutions for customers in a specific Microsoft Cloud solution area. This follows a change in the Microsoft Partner Program, consolidating its previous Gold Competencies to a smaller number of solution partner designations and a broader set of requirements for attainment.
The Infrastructure Solutions Partner designation showcases expertise in helping customers accelerate the migration of key infrastructure workloads to Microsoft Azure, architecting cloud environments and managing these environments at scale.
Options’ President and CEO, Danny Moore, said, “Over the past 24 months, the team has continued to enhance their expertise and advance our service offering, resulting in over 200 Microsoft certifications and our latest achievement as an official Microsoft Infrastructure Solutions Partner. Microsoft have raised the bar for their technology partners, so this accomplishment is a clear demonstration of the team's commitment to building and expanding our best-of-breed cloud-agnostic solutions and maintaining our position as the number one Microsoft Cloud partner to the Global Capital Markets.”
Today’s news comes as the latest in a series of exciting developments for Options, including its partnership with KX, the completion of SOC compliance for a 12th consecutive year and its deployment of OPRA in Frankfurt FR2.
In 2019, Options received investment from Boston-based Private Equity Firm Abry Partners. This investment has enabled Options to accelerate its growth strategy and develop its technology platform while expanding its global reach in key financial centres.
About Options
Options Technology is the No. 1 provider of IT infrastructure to global Capital Markets firms, supporting their operations and ecosystems.
Founded in 1993, the firm began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. Today, the company provides high-performance managed trading infrastructure and cloud-enabled managed services to over 550 firms globally, providing an agile, scalable platform in an Investment Bank-grade Cybersecurity wrapper.
Options clients include the leading global investment banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, broker/dealers, private equity houses, and exchanges. With offices in 8 key cities; New York, Toronto, Chicago, London, Belfast, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Auckland, Options are well placed to service its customers on-site and remotely.
In 2019, Options secured a significant growth investment from Abry Partners, a Boston-based sector-focused private equity firm. This investment has enabled Options to considerably accelerate its growth strategy to invest further in its technology platform and expand its reach in key financial centres globally.
Options has been named among the UK’s leading growth companies in the 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table.
About Abry Partners
Abry is one of the most experienced and successful sector-focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since its founding in 1989, the firm has completed over $82 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity or preferred equity placements. Currently, the firm manages over $5.0 billion of capital across their active funds.
Read More
HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE, STORAGE MANAGEMENT, IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
Prnewswire | May 22, 2023
Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, continues to expand its data center offerings with liquid cooled NVIDIA HGX H100 rack scale solutions. Advanced liquid cooling technologies entirely from Supermicro reduce the lead time for a complete installation, increase performance, and result in lower operating expenses while significantly reducing the PUE of data centers. Savings for a data center are estimated to be 40% for power when using Supermicro liquid cooling solutions compared to an air-cooled data center. In addition, up to 86% reduction in direct cooling costs compared to existing data centers may be realized.
"Supermicro continues to lead the industry supporting the demanding needs of AI workloads and modern data centers worldwide," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. "Our innovative GPU servers that use our liquid cooling technology significantly lower the power requirements of data centers. With the amount of power required to enable today's rapidly evolving large scale AI models, optimizing TCO and the Total Cost to Environment (TCE) is crucial to data center operators. We have proven expertise in designing and building entire racks of high-performance servers. These GPU systems are designed from the ground up for rack scale integration with liquid cooling to provide superior performance, efficiency, and ease of deployments, allowing us to meet our customers' requirements with a short lead time."
To learn more about Supermicro's GPU servers, visit: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/gpu
AI-optimized racks with the latest Supermicro product families, including the Intel and AMD server product lines, can be quickly delivered from standard engineering templates or easily customized based on the user's unique requirements. Supermicro continues to offer the industry's broadest product line with the highest-performing servers and storage systems to tackle complex compute-intensive projects. Rack scale integrated solutions give customers the confidence and ability to plug the racks in, connect to the network and become more productive sooner than managing the technology themselves.
The top-of-the-line liquid cooled GPU server contains dual Intel or AMD CPUs and eight or four interconnected NVIDIA HGX H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Using liquid cooling reduces the power consumption of data centers by up to 40%, resulting in lower operating costs. In addition, both systems significantly surpass the previous generation of NVIDIA HGX GPU equipped systems, providing up to 30x performance and efficiency in today's large transformer models with faster GPU-GPU interconnect speed and PCIe 5.0 based networking and storage.
State-of-the-art eight NVIDIA H100 SXM5 Tensor Core GPU servers from Supermicro for today's largest scale AI models include:
SYS-821GE-TNHR – (Dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, NVIDIA HGX H100 8 GPUs, 8U)https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/GPU/8U/SYS-821GE-TNHR
AS -8125GS-TNHR – (Dual 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, NVIDIA HGX H100 8 GPUs, 8U)https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/GPU/8U/AS-8125GS-TNHR
Supermicro also designs a range of GPU servers customizable for fast AI training, vast volume AI inferencing, or AI-fused HPC workloads, including the systems with four NVIDIA H100 SXM5 Tensor Core GPUs.
SYS-421GU-TNXR - (Dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, NVIDIA HGX H100 4 GPUs, 4U)https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/GPU/4U/SYS-421GU-TNXR
SYS-521GU-TNXR - (Dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, NVIDIA HGX H100 4 GPUs, 5U)https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/GPU/4U/SYS-521GU-TNXR
Supermicro's liquid cooling rack level solution includes a Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) that provides up to 80kW of direct-to-chip (D2C) cooling for today's highest TDP CPUs and GPUs for a wide range of Supermicro servers. The redundant and hot-swappable power supply and liquid cooling pumps ensure that the servers will be continuously cooled, even with a power supply or pump failure. The leak-proof connectors give customers the added confidence of uninterrupted liquid cooling for all systems. Learn more about the Supermicro Liquid Cooling system at: https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/liquid-cooling
Rack scale design and integration has become a critical service for systems suppliers. As AI and HPC have become an increasingly critical technology within organizations, configurations from the server level to the entire data center must be optimized and configured for maximum performance. The Supermicro system and rack scale experts work closely with customers to explore the requirements and have the knowledge and manufacturing abilities to deliver significant numbers of racks to customers worldwide.
Read the Supermicro Large Scale AI Solution Brief - https://www.supermicro.com/solutions/Solution-Brief_Rack_Scale_AI.pdf
Supermicro at ISC
To explore these technologies and meet with our experts, plan on visiting the Supermicro Booth D405 at ISC High Performance 2023 event in Hamburg, Germany, May 21 – 25, 2023.
About Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first to market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are transforming into a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, and switch systems, software, and services while delivering advanced high-volume motherboard, power, and chassis products. The products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Taiwan, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions® allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).
Supermicro, Server Building Block Solutions, and We Keep IT Green are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc.
Read More
HYPER-CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE, WINDOWS SYSTEMS AND NETWORK
businesswire | May 03, 2023
Windstream Enterprise, a leading IT managed network provider, today announced it has fully migrated its leading Voice over IP (VoIP) platform to Microsoft’s Azure for Operators clustered Call Feature Server (cCFS). This upgrade is the latest in an ongoing series of investments that Windstream Enterprise has made to enhance the value of its cloud-based communications services provided to customers.
VoIP is an IP-based unified communications infrastructure that combines separate voice and data channels into a single, cloud-based connection to optimize network performance with stable voice quality, survivability and feature standardization across multiple locations. This investment made by Windstream Enterprise gives its Dynamic IP and Unified Communications (UC) customers greater reliability, access to new communications and integrated data and voice features to support their businesses, and a more robust portal to deliver a consistently positive user experience.
The collaboration with Microsoft expands upon Windstream Enterprise’s Dynamic IP solution, a VoIP platform that supports multiple call paths—analog, SIP turning and PRI—and allows customers to leverage their existing network infrastructure with flexible bandwidth. In doing so, the solution ensures multiple levels of redundancies that help businesses run smoothly and prevent unplanned downtime via network outages, human or system error, or cyberthreats. The solution also enhances the user experience by seamlessly integrating with Windstream Enterprise’s award-winning WE Connect customer portal, enabling clients to self-manage their network and communications needs, data and assets—all in a single-pane-of-glass view.
“In this hyper-connected world, businesses require failproof, reliable voice and data solutions. With this move to the Microsoft Azure for Operators VoIP platform, we are ensuring customers are on the most advanced, leading-edge technology so they can unlock their own revenue and profitability potential,” said Art Nichols, chief technology officer, Windstream Enterprise. “This investment is about giving our customers the technology, support and constant innovation they must have to drive their businesses forward.”
Voice solutions have significantly advanced beyond legacy underlying access technology like Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), DS1 and DS3 Access solutions and copper-based services, such as primary rate interfaces (PRIs) and plain old telephone services (POTS). These solutions no longer support the basic necessities of modern business communications and the need to collaborate remotely both internally and with customers. With Dynamic IP, businesses can seamlessly scale their communications with minimal or no additional infrastructure investment. As a managed service, Dynamic IP is set up and run by Windstream Enterprise, and backed by a dedicated team of technology experts to provide strategic planning, design and 24/7 support.
Windstream Enterprise customers are already taking advantage of the streamlined integration between Azure for Operators offerings and Windstream Enterprise for seamless collaboration across both voice and data solutions. Banking, education, retailers, government and healthcare providers, among other businesses, are leveraging Windstream Enterprise’s proprietary software solutions, which include the robust Secure Access Security Edge (SASE) and Security Service Edge (SSE) cybersecurity offerings.
“Cloud-ready voice and data integrations are essential for almost all businesses operating in our hybrid workplace and always-on world,” said Austin Herrington, vice president, product management, Windstream Enterprise. “Our cost-effective, scalable VoIP and UC solutions give customers all the features they want, along with ironclad security and reliability. By aligning with technology providers like Microsoft, we can keep our customers moving toward their goals by helping them get out from underneath burdensome legacy technology.”
“By using the Microsoft Azure for Operators clustered Call Feature Server to underpin its VoIP and UC solutions, Windstream Enterprise is demonstrating its commitment to extending customers a flexible, secure, and modern suite of carrier grade communications solutions,” said Tad Brockway, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure for Operators.
About Windstream
Windstream Holdings is a privately held communications and software company. Windstream offers managed communications services, including SD-WAN and UCaaS, and high-capacity bandwidth and transport services to businesses across the U.S. The company also provides premium broadband, entertainment and security services through an enhanced fiber network to consumers and small and midsize businesses primarily in rural areas in 18 states.
Read More