3Leaf Systems today marked a significant milestone as it announced a disruptive set of technologies that enable the Dynamic Data Center. The company launched the x86-based Dynamic Data Center - Server for the AMD Opteron family of processors and outlined plans for supporting the Intel QPI 1.1 interconnect beginning with the Sandy Bridge processors. With an innovative product portfolio, world-class partners, and strong financial backing, 3Leaf Systems is helping original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and enterprises to exploit industry standards in brand new markets and make data center infrastructures more agile and scalable while dramatically reducing both capital and operational costs.

“Using high-volume components to build high-value systems, 3Leaf Systems offers a brand new capability for CIOs to do much more with much less,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO of 3Leaf Systems. “For the first time, large shared memory, high agility, and scalability are available in a low-cost industry standard package.”

“Companies remain focused on reducing IT costs, both in terms of acquiring technology and managing their total cost of operations. Further, as economic conditions improve and new business opportunities appear, organizations want to be prepared for rapidly and easily delivering the computing resources needed by applications to exploit those opportunities,” said Richard Partridge, VP of Server Hardware Research at Ideas International. “By enabling the creation of large shared memory servers built from smaller, high-volume servers, 3Leaf Systems offers a scale-up platform with attractive price/performance for workloads that can take advantage of its low-latency interconnect hardware.”

3Leaf Systems technologies will enable enterprises to treat x86 servers as building blocks and coalesce them into contiguous pools of CPU, memory, and storage that can span across multiple physical machines and be allocated or de-allocated as needed. This will enable customers to build dynamic “systems” of any configuration, and flexibly push and pull specified resources across silos on-the-fly and without rebooting.

Enabling The Dynamic Cloud

In the dynamic world of cloud computing, flexibility and agility are essential for increasing revenue, maximizing return on investment, and delivering against service-level agreements. 3Leaf Systems technologies enable the deployment of a massively-scalable cloud infrastructure based on cost-optimized building blocks while also enabling service providers to defragment and thus monetize unused server capacity.

“Large scale software as a service (SaaS) applications that implement multi-tenancy at the data level require individual servers with immense compute and memory capacity,” said Paul Burns, President of Neovise. “The 3Leaf Systems solution meets this need by using x86 servers rather than requiring the use of more expensive mainframe-class servers. Cloud and hosting providers will benefit from the elastic hardware aspect. They will be able to serve multiple data-intensive customers on the same hardware. Ultimately cloud service providers will be able to scale up the data tier of an application on 3Leaf hardware while scaling out the rest of the application on their cloud infrastructure.”

Supporting Global OEM Requirements

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are seeking innovative ways to differentiate offerings while keeping R&D costs at bay and addressing new markets such as cloud computing, data warehousing and data mining, high-performance computing, and social media. By integrating 3Leaf Systems technologies, OEMs can expand their offerings, tap into new market opportunities or fill a current product gap. In the process, they are able to achieve significantly lower costs, faster time-to-market, and the possibility to serve both the Intel and AMD x86 markets.

“This is definitely a technology to watch. 3Leaf Systems is pioneering a unique hardware approach that will allow a single operating system instance to expand across multiple server blades, boxes or racks; or shrink to just a fraction of a single server,” said Dan Olds, Principal at Gabriel Consulting. “This will give customers the ability to scale various system resources to match a given workload, increasing overall utilization and efficiency.”

Revitalizing High-Performance Computing

In addition to the traditional enterprise, eCommerce and social media companies, 3Leaf Systems technologies are also revitalizing the High-Performance Computing community. HPC customers today face challenges in flexibility, cost management, software optimization time, and realized performance as a fraction of peak speeds. 3Leaf Systems Dynamic Data CenterServer brings back to the HPC community powerful shared memory systems, but with the industry-standard hardware and software that are critical customer requirements.

The 3Leaf Systems technology is ideal for Multi-Disciplinary Science since it can be used simultaneously as both a distributed memory cluster and a shared memory system. Customers can run existing or even old applications and achieve higher productivity when creating new parallel applications. At the same time, they can take better advantage of their investment in memory (sometimes more than 50 percent of the system cost) by minimizing unnecessary data replication and eliminating memory waste. Such a “distributed-and-shared” system architecture also minimizes system management costs by providing a single management image.

“Our HPC environment uses both common types of parallel processing systems: shared memory and distributed memory, and thus, we were very interested in working with 3Leaf during their beta-test program to see how their new machine performed compared with our existing systems,” said Jim Lupo, Ph.D., HPC user services manager at LSU. “We used two codes for the testing process, ADCIRC, which is a hurricane storm surge prediction code, and CPMD, or Carr-Parinello Molecular Dynamics code. Our staff worked with the 3Leaf Systems staff to figure out the best techniques to maximize performance of these codes on their new system, and we found the 3Leaf System server is comparable in performance to other HPC systems. Because of its portability, the 3Leaf machine could work very well for groups that need computer power but have very little administrative and programming support.”

World-Class Partnerships

3Leaf Systems is committed to working with global technology leaders to drive a common vision for the dynamic data center. Working with AMD, LSI, and Intel has been essential for the company’s progress and its ability to support 100 percent of the x86 industry-standard server market.