DCC, Mellanox Technologies set sights on South Africa’s big data centre market

Mellanox Technologies executives were in South Africa last month to educate distributor Drive Control Corporation’s (DCC) resellers on the opportunities InfiniBand technologies and interconnect solutions have to offer to data centre infrastructures.

Explains Meytal Mar-Chaim, Regional Sales Manager at Mellanox Technologies: “Mellanox’s interconnect solutions provide the super highway that connects servers and storage systems found in the world’s fastest supercomputers and Fortune 500 company data centres.”

The company is the leading promoter of InfiniBand, a powerful architecture that supersedes Ethernet and is designed to offer connectivity for a high-speed and reliable server and storage infrastructure. It is also supported by all the major OEM server and storage vendors.

Mar-Chaim says that in today’s business environment transactional applications grow exponentially and databases that house information must grow in step with application usage to ensure that the business continues to operate smoothly and without bottlenecks. Furthermore, she says today’s enormous amounts of unstructured data such as video, voice and social media, provide an edge to business that harness applications such as Hadoop.

Hadoop is a 100 percent open source software that enables distributed parallel processing of huge amounts of data across inexpensive, industry-standard servers and storage systems that both store and process the data, and can scale without limits.

“Using Hadoop, Mellanox enables data mining data centres to run at the highest performance and efficiency as well as to achieve extreme scalability for big data applications to ensure fast and reliable data analytics,” adds Mar-Chaim.

Additionally, she says a critical element in any cloud solution stems from concerns of complexity and performance. Mellanox’s servers and storage interconnect solutions have been designed to deliver the required network capability of bandwidth, application and virtualisation offloads for an efficient cloud infrastructure.

“In addition, in biosciences drug research and earth sciences Mellanox’s products are dramatically accelerating the introduction of life-saving medicines and new discoveries that benefit our environment. Also, by providing film production companies with the highest performing interconnect adapter and switch solutions, Mellanox is at the forefront of the entertainment marketplace. Digital image capture, digital effects, rendering and mastering can now be quickly performed, bringing imagination to life, faster than ever and saving production costs,” she adds.

Raul Del Fabbro, Storage Division Manager at DCC says that by using Mellanox technologies, companies can achieve greater system efficiency and unprecedented storage performance while reducing data centre complexity, power consumption and total cost of ownership.

“The proliferation of data is a catalyst for growth of these technologies. As servers mature and evolve into new form factors, it is clear that InfiniBand is the choice as the primary I/O interconnect on server boards and the single fabric that enables clustering, communication, storage and I/O for the Internet and enterprise data centres of the future,” adds Del Fabbro.

He says that DCC, in partnership with Mellanox Technologies is well-positioned to capture the data centre opportunities, such as Web 2.0 storage, cloud computing, financial services and databases.

“Mellanox Technologies presents a huge opportunity for our resellers to profit from the growing data centre market. The company has demonstrated continuous revenue growth, has a strong cash flow and has attractive gross margins for our partners,” he concludes.