Boston Limited experts in lower powered servers unveiled the latest release of Viridis Microserver range. Powered by ARM Cortex A15 quad-core processor. Based on six EnergyCore ECX-2000 cards, the Boston Viridis 2.0 hosts two four-core SoC’s (Server-on-Chip) running at 1.8GHz and consuming as little as 6 Watts of power.

The ARM Cortex A15 quad-core processor, ECX-2000 delivers twice the performance, three times the memory bandwidth, and four times the memory capacity of the earlier ground-breaking ECX-1000.

It is highly scalable thanks to the integrated 80GB Fleet Fabric switch. The embedded Fleet Engine simultaneously provides out-of-band control and intelligence for autonomic operation and power optimization.

Cassandra has been the wildly popular key value (nosql) database due to it's performance and scalability. The announcements for Cassandra 2.0 claim offer more traditional database features as well as means to integrate with large event processing engines.

These features include:

• Lightweight transactions allow ensuring operation “linearizability” similar to the serializable isolation level offered by relational databases which prevents conflicts during concurrent requests.
• Triggers which enable pushing performance-critical code close to the data it deals with, and simplify integration with event-driven frameworks like Storm
• CQL (Cassandra Query Language) enhancements such as cursors and improved index support
• Improved compaction, keeping read performance from deteriorating under heavy write load
• Eager retries to avoid query timeouts by sending redundant requests to other replicas if too much time elapses on the original request
• Custom Thrift server implementation based on LMAX Disruptor, a high-performance inter-thread messaging library that achieves lower message processing latencies and better throughput with flexible buffer allocation strategies

Adapteva announced that the first “beta” units of the 16 core 'super computer' are being shipped to the early kicstarter 'developer' backers. Other backers are said to receive their boards by summer's end “after some final refinements.”

Also Adapteva has now opened up general pre-orders for the 16-core version on its website. While all Kickstarter-bought boards will bear a Zynq-7020 SoC, new pre-orders are configured with a 7010 as standard,

However, newcomers will receive “Gen-1” boards, which will offer slight improvements over earlier versions, such as reduced power consumption and an added serial port three-pin header.

The basic 16-core board going for $99 on the online store , with an expected October delivery date. The company tells us the 64-core version will also be available for public consumption, with pre-orders beginning in Q4 this year.

In Sun Tzu terms tech is like fighting in a marsh, where you have to keep moving or sink.

It wasn't that long that MongoDb was the disruptive technology. Now a blizzard of noSql db's are disrupting the disrupters. Google's Sergio Bossa the reasoning for moving from MongoDB to Cassandra:

• the JVM, and we have lots of in-house experience on it.
• It scales in terms of processing and storage capacity.
• Its column-based data model gives us some advanced capabilities
• Its tunable consistency levels provide greater control over high availability and consistency requirements.

As regards what made them look into a different solution:

• We need higher resiliency to faults: MongoDB provides replica sets, but we’re experiencing lots of problems with replication lags and during replica synchronization.
• For scalability: MongoDB global lock and huge memory requirements aren't already going to cope well with our growing data set.

http://metabroadcast.com/blog/looking-with-cassandra-into-the-future-of-atlas

For good measure he is not a big fan of Scala either http://thegeektalk.com/interviews/sergio-bossa/

With data volumes and pressure to reduce power all increasing, it is back to the future with NCSA380 Petabyte High Performance Storage System. The world’s largest automated near-line data repository which has multiple automated tape libraries, dozens of high-performance data movers, a large 40 Gigabit Ethernet network, hundreds of high-performance tape drives, and about a 100,000 tape cartridges.

The system is being used with the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer making it the world’s largest HPSS now in production,