2013 Review - Part III

Into the second half of the year and there was no let up during the summer months. Boston made some major product announcements and held a highly successful charity event! Q3 was a good one. The sun even made an appearance!

Hyper-Speed Venom 2400-0T Launched at Siggraph 2013

When the Boston Venom 2400-0T was launched in June it was the industry’s most powerful workstation – powered by high performance, yet-to-be-released CPU technology by Intel (read further into the blog for more information). The response on the show floor at Siggraph was resoundingly positive, especially when delegates saw the performance improvements for workloads like the CINEMA CRAFT HD encoder. DigitalArts also picked up on the announcement.

Boston Signs Distribution Deal with Mellanox Technologies

August saw the signing of a major distribution deal with Mellanox Technologies. Mellanox is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and increases efficiency by offering the highest throughput with the lowest latency. The announcement was great news for the team at Boston who are excited about making the most of the relationship with Mellanox. There have already been some key wins which we hope to bring you news of soon in future reports.

First to Market with Intel ‘Ivy Bridge’-based Solutions

To coincide with Intel’s launch of their new Xeon E5-2600 V2 processors, based on the ‘Ivy Bridge’ microarchitecture, Boston launched a range of solutions that make use of the new CPUs. Two Boston solutions were reviewed immediately after Intel’s official launch: the Venom 2401-7T workstation and the Value Series 361 G8 server.

The Venom 2401-7T is the ultimate workstation for creative and HPC professionals, using NVIDIA’s Maximus technology to deliver astonishing compute and rendering performance. DigitalArts said it was “the most powerful workstation we’ve ever seen” and 3DArtist said it is “in a different league and shows what two of the new Intel Xeon E5 V2 processors can do”.

ITPro reviewed the VS 361 G8 and found major plus points in its high CPU core count, good storage features, embedded 10GbE, and improved remote management. The site also awarded the server their prestigious ‘ITPro Recommended’ award, summing it up by saying it offers “impressive processing density for a 1U rack server” and “the integral BBUs mean you don’t have to waste valuable rack space with a separate UPS”.

‘Boston on Bikes’ Charity Event raises over £1,000 for Cancer Research UK

The team at Boston enjoys doing their bit for charity, and this year we got on our bikes for a 30 mile cycling challenge to raise money for Cancer Research UK. Starting in St Albans and led by Boston Managing Director Manoj Nayee, the team followed the Alban Way cycle route all the way to the county town of Hertford before looping back to St Albans to complete the run as evening set in.

An original target of £1,000 was completely smashed, with the team exceeded the target and raising £1,278! Despite there not being enough money in the world to pay for the therapy required to get over seeing so many Bostonians in Lycra, it was a heroic effort by everyone and we’re delighted to have raised so much for Cancer Research UK.

Goodbye Summer…

Three action-packed quarters in a row. Surely Q4 and the lead into Christmas would see things calm down a little? Surely…? Join us in the final instalment of our 2013 review to find out.