The centre will be powered in-part by IBM's newest iDataPlex dx360 M2 server, which features expanded memory from previous versions (128 GB); support for the new VMware vSphere 4 virtualization platform; and overall performance benchmarks recently listing the iDataPlex as the most power-efficient system among similar technology products, as compiled by SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark. The new Voltaire-designed centre will extend these advancements to all companies interested; for example, SaaS companies will be able to leverage the centre to benchmark their applications, such as broadcasting services and gaming. Also, the new centre will maintain a list of testing results and blueprints for the solutions created, providing a vital technical and marketing resource and best-practices guide for current and future Cloud innovations.

"Virtualization, which plays an important role in Cloud computing, has major implications on network architectures and overall data centre design", stated Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "Our technology partners will use the new centre to develop new fabric-based architectures for the Cloud, so we were looking for a system that would not only satisfy the intense power-efficiency and scalability requirements Voltaire has for our new testing centre, but also be equally efficient and easily manageable. The iDataPlex provides the right mix of technology innovation and computing power to help our new centre reach its ambitious goals."

In addition to making the list of most energy efficient computers in the world according to The Green500 List, iDataPlex is also among the fastest, according to The Top 500 Supercomputing Sites. The newest iDataPlex technology - which will be unveiled at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco - achieves up to 40 percent more performance per watt compared to other similar technology, while shaving 8-watts off total energy requirements from previous versions of iDataPlex.

IBM also announced two new virtualization technologies at VMworld, aimed at curing today's overstressed data centre servers:

• The IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric offers performance, scalability and investment protection. This solution can help to significantly reduce complexity and total cost of ownership by enabling up to eight virtual ports per Virtual Fabric adapter. At the same time, it provides clients the ability to allocate and adjust bandwidth at increments of 100Mb, thereby increasing network utilization. IBM BladeCenter Virtual Fabric also offers investment protection for the future technology like Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV).
• Continuing to demonstrate leadership with VMware, IBM will also be previewing one of several projects IBM and VMware are jointly developing, with the goal of producing technologies that display and manage energy usage of individual hosts and virtual machines within a data centre. This 'power metering' technology can help customers track energy-efficiency of specific platforms and workloads, and provide never-before-measured data such as aggregate and per-virtual machine power metrics for a cluster of machines.

The availability for the new iDataPlex dx360 M2 is planned for early September. The availability for the BladeCenter Virtual Fabric is planned for the fourth quarter, 2009.