VISUALIZATION

Infrastructure virtualization driving adoption of grid computing among European banks and financial institutions… -- FIFTHWAVE Solutions today announced a partnership with ASPEED Software aimed at helping European banks and financial institutions capitalize on their infrastructure investments. With a growing trend towards infrastructure virtualization, many banks are exploring how they can create a grid computing environment in order to maximize their IT assets fully. The partnership with ASPEED will allow FIFTHWAVE to support these banks through the introduction of new software innovation designed to grid-enable legacy and other applications in an efficient and cost-effective manner. FIFTHWAVE has a particular strength in providing real-time infrastructure solutions. The inclusion of ASPEED’s ACCELLERANT will add to FIFTHWAVE’s extensive portfolio of services and allow the company to ensure that its customers can take advantage of the benefits of enhanced processing power offered by grid computing. FIFTHWAVE’s consultative-led approach has enabled the company to build an impressive client base and made it a trusted advisor to many financial services organizations. “As banks and other enterprises move towards virtualizing their infrastructure, the importance of a grid computing environment has taken on a greater significance. What has held many financial institutions back from pursuing a comprehensive grid computing strategy has been the prohibitive cost of moving legacy applications into such an environment. Our partnership with ASPEED will change this. For the first time, banks will have the ability to grid-enable a wider range of applications quickly and cost-effectively. ASPEED’s technology complements our own expertise in this area and we are confident that we can assist more financial institutions to tap into the raw computing power of their existing IT infrastructure and deliver tangible business benefits in the process,” said Neil Parker, CEO of FIFTHWAVE Solutions. ACCELLERANT is designed to enable financial services, pharmaceuticals and other organizations that rely on complex applications to take advantage of the new multi-CPU, cluster and grid configurations, while ensuring predictable and highly scalable run times. By using more cost-effective distributed Linux and Windows-based clusters or grids, and handling exponentially higher volumes to deliver more fine-grained analysis and greater precision, the software enables them significantly to reduce time-to-decision. Greg Ammirati, vice-president, worldwide field operations for ASPEED Software said: “Fifthwave specializes in helping UK financial services companies drive down the cost of ownership and accelerate the ROI from their IT infrastructure. ACCELLERANT is designed to do just that, so it was the perfect choice for us to partner with in the UK. Working with Fifthwave, we will deliver unprecedented access to the power of distributed computing for even the most computationally intense applications. Our software will enable organizations to move even the most notoriously non-parallel, non-distributed legacy applications to commodity processor grids, and will provide the European grid community with a comprehensive and robust application acceleration solution that can be quickly enabled and deployed.”