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Toughbooks add Centrino 2 chips; Vizioncore updates management tools; Navy gets a new supercomputer.
Toughbooks add Centrino 2 chips
On the heels of Intel’s announcement of the availability
of Centrino 2 processor technology, Panasonic announced that
upgrades to its semirugged mobile laptop PCs — the Toughbook
CF-52 and the Toughbook CF-74 — will feature the new Centrino
platform.
The new Toughbooks have increased video and graphics capability,
hard-drive capacity of 160G, and expanded Wi-Fi capabilities that
include IEEE 802.11 Draft N.
The Toughbook CF-52 has a 15.4-inch screen, while the Toughbook
CF-74 has a 13.3- inch display that’s viewable outdoors. The
laptops also include durable design features such as magnesium
alloy cases, flexible internal connectors, shock-mounted hard
drives and spill-resistant keyboards, Panasonic said.
The upgraded Toughbooks will be available next month. The
Toughbook CF-52 will come in a value version that sells for $1,949,
and a premium version that will cost $2,849. The Toughbook CF-74
will sell for about $3,199.
Vizioncore updates management tools
Vizioncore has updated its vCharter Pro virtualization
monitoring software and its vRanger Pro virtualized environments
backup software.
Version 3.01 of vCharterPro, which allows administrators to
watch over VMware virtualized environments, now can run on the
64-bit version of Microsoft Windows and can work with Oracle
databases. Various bug fixes and updates to the user interface have
also been included. Version 3.2.4 of vRanger Pro, which can back up
a virtualized machine while it is still running, now includes
support for Federal Information Processing Standard 140. That is
expected to make it usable in the Navy Marine Corps Intranet and
other highly secured government settings, said George Pradel, chief
security strategist at Vizioncore. The software has also been
updated to work with VMware’s Consolidated Backup
framework.
Navy gets a new supercomputer
The Defense Department’s High Performance Computing
Modernization Program has procured an IBM supercomputer for the
Naval Oceanographic Office’s Major Shared Resource Center at
Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
The system will be capable of a sustained performance of about
90 teraflops, said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at
IBM. The system, running IBM’s AIX operating system, has
5,500 Power6 IBM processors, with 32 cores per node. IBM is also
providing 500T of storage.
The Navy will use the Power 575 Hydro-Cluster principally for
oceanographic modeling and weather forecasting.
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