HPC 2015-16 | Integrators


fewer hoops than the Tier 1s – we’re faster to market.’ It is not always the technology that is the issue for the larger companies, Huggins explained. Tere have been cases where the larger companies have dithered over the pricing of their products, whereas for a smaller company such as ClusterVision, the issue is less complicated and therefore quicker to reach a decision.


Customers and providers both benefit It is not just the end-user customers who profit from the services of the integrators – the large manufacturers also benefit. Tennert cited three of Transtec’s partners: Lenovo; NEC; and Huawei. Each has a slightly different approach but all benefit from using integrators as intermediaries. NEC, he suggested, has realised that its installation and delivery services are limited so they need partners such as Transtec to ‘amplify’ their sales and distribution. Huawei is also looking for partners, he


explained, because it is not interested in selling direct to the end-user customer (or not yet, at any rate). As a relative newcomer to HPC, certainly compared to NEC and Lenovo (in its former IBM persona), the market pressure on Huawei is to find partners if it is to get its products accepted. Lenovo is a manufacturer that also sells direct, but because of the size of the company its sales and distribution is focused on very large orders, which means that smaller customers find it easier to acquire Lenovo hardware via an integrator. ClusterVision works with the ‘white box’


providers such as Supermicro, and Huggins sees one of the primary advantages of using an integrator such as his company as being its ability to deploy hardware and soſtware from multiple vendors, to the end-user customer’s advantage. But it also has a very strong partnership with Dell, Huggins said. Dell is very strong in HPC in the USA but less so in Europe and the Middle East, so ‘that is where we complete their offering.’ Dell has a much larger sales force that ClusterVision so they have many accounts to manage and Dell’s account manager may not be an HPC specialist. Delivering an HPC cluster requires different project management to what Dell is used to and so ClusterVision provides that project management. However, Tennert was careful to point out


that an integrator is not just a sales channel: the relationship is a partnership with both sides bringing different expertise to the


project. Being simply a distributor does not work in HPC, he said, something more was needed: a solution provider. Huggins concurred; the service that a specialist provides starts long before a sale is made – before the customer even writes the tender, he said. Being a relatively small company was not


a hindrance when it came to keeping up with technology, Tennert felt, rather it could be an advantage. Te very large companies of necessity focused on themselves and their own technological lines of development. For the time being, x86 technology is dominant and within that, the main player is Intel. However, Lenovo is right to be looking at ARM, in Tennert’s view, and NEC’s SX vector system is also worth watching. IBM is now specialising on the Power architecture and on Big Data applications which, he said, were not traditionally areas that Transtec specialised in.


Why technology providers can also be integrators Even though one of Transtec’s partners – Lenovo – is a very different organisation, Noam Rosen, its EMEA sales director, also believes that ‘HPC is a solution, not a specific product’. In a multinational industrial corporation that does its own manufacturing, from PCs and mobile phones through to enterprise servers, Lenovo’s concept of partnership includes partnering internally with the general-purpose server team, so that there is a fit with the HPC business, he said. Te HPC business also benefits from some similarity with hyperscale computing – the data centres for Google, Facebook, and


the like. In fact, since Lenovo is a Chinese company, about a third of its revenue comes from hyperscale data centres within China for whom the hyperscale team within Lenovo has been developing unique design form factors. But a counterweight to any introspective


tendencies, highlighted as a potential problem by Tennert, was that many of the company’s clients at the very high end have their own talents, and so partnership with their expertise can help the company


“Te service starts before the customer even writes the tender”


decision on what to bring to the marketplace that makes sense for HPC. He cited the example of the Hartree Centre in the UK with whom Lenovo is collaborating over an ARM prototype. Even within the context of its own


systems, Lenovo is, to some extent also an integrator. It does not make its own interconnects, for example, but uses Mellanox InfiniBand, though Rosen also looked forward to having the option of Intel’s interconnect fabric as an alternative. ‘We design the solution with the client,’ he said, ‘integrating all the elements we need to make a workable HPC cluster.’ Not everything is designed and built by Lenovo, he pointed out.


Now that the HPC business has separated


from IBM, it can offer other storage options and other scheduling and machine


Both Lenovo, as a systems supplier, and the end-user customer can benefit from the services of an integrator such as Transtec


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