2013 Review - Part I

This post is the first of a series marking the end of 2013 and reflects on what was a busy year for everyone at Boston. We'll take a quick tour of the notable events, product launches, and other news that filled our 2013. The series will finish with a look ahead to 2014 and some of the exciting trends in the IT industry, but first up - Q1.

Cloud Expo Europe

Boston's year started by attending Cloud Expo Europe, held at London's Olympia Exhibition Hall. Cloud Expo saw the official launch of Boston's Business-in-a-Box cloud offering, an efficient and scalable way to deliver cloud services. The response to the Business-in-a-Box was great, particularly because it brings fresh simplicity to delivering cloud services. As part of the Cloud Expo launch we produced a case study with Managed Service provider SIMAC. SIMAC chose the Boston Business-in-a-Box platform as the core of their cloud deployment strategy and continue to develop it further as demand increased. A great story.

CeBIT

CeBIT was up next and Boston travelled to Hannover where we showed off the ARM-based Viridis microserver being powered in a slightly unconventional way - pedal power! We invited delegates to test out the Viridis' low power credentials and have a go at powering it themselves. The demo also sparked some extremely interesting discussions about the future of low power datacentres and the different approaches that could be taken when responding to the demand for computing power in an environmentally sensitive way. Watch this space for data centres being powered by on-site gyms!

Product Launches – RTG Workstations & ARM-as-a-Service

Q1 also saw the launch of the Ready-To-Go (RTG) range of high performance workstations by Supermicro and the world's first cloud based ARM platform - Arm-as-a-Service.

Supermicro's RTG workstation range consists of pre-configured solutions available for next day delivery with 3 years on site parts/engineer replacement warranty as standard. The high performance workstations are designed specifically to make the most of NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla cards for professional graphics and engineering/HPC workloads - perfect for those last minute requirements or the fast scaling up of resources to deliver a creative project on time.

Arm-as-a-Service (AaaS) was launched by Boston partners BIOS-IT, and is supported by Boston technology partners ARM, Calxeda, Ellexus and Eltechs. For those looking to experiment with ARM-based data centre hardware or ease the migration to an ARM-based infrastructure, there really is no other tool like AaaS. It's an exciting time for ARM-based data centre technology and Boston is extremely proud to be involved in the AaaS project.

3DWorld Reviews Venom 2305-7T

We round off Q1 with 3DWorld’s review of the Venom 2305-7T, an extremely high performance workstation equipped with both an NVIDIA Quadro K5000 and Tesla K20. 3DWorld noted that the 2305-7T's performance was "about as stunning as any we've seen" and "unbeatable... particularly if your rendering uses CUDA". High praise indeed! The Venom range is a popular Boston product, and there was more exciting news to come later in the year, but more on that in future posts...

To Recap…

Two major exhibitions, the launch of the world's first cloud-based ARM platform, high performance workstations delivered on a next day basis, and a 5 star review for one of our high performance Venom workstations... That's not a bad start to the year at all.

Next up is Q2. Is it possible to have a second quarter that's just as packed as the first? You'll have to wait and see.