Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Recently, at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) interviewed Shoulin Chua, Business Development Manager for Amax.

Chua noted that Amax is an ISO 9001-certified company, with one division dedicated to OEM appliance manufacturing, "where we build appliances for companies like McAfee and Cisco (News - Alert)," including design, prototyping and manufacturing, putting their software on it and inventorying and drop-shipping it worldwide.

The other division is high-performance computing, Chua said, where they build servers, storage and cluster products, for companies in the cluster storage industry, video surveillance industries. "We build best-of-breed, open architecture systems," he noted.

When asked what changes he'd seen in the market over the past few years, Chua said in terms of the high-performance computing market, he's seen a growth of high-performance computing, parallel computing. "For example, the growth of GPU, cards and systems, has been phenomenal." He said that for some cards, "you're able to have 240 cores, just in one card."

Chua noted that for companies in oil and gas, companies in biomedical industries, companies doing a lot of number-crunching, there's been a phenomenal increase in how much time and how much equipment cost can be saved.

And in the next generation products, he said, "you're seeing cards with over 500 cores."

When asked how companies such as Apple (News - Alert) and Google were affecting their business, Chua said it's helping them with regards to cloud computing, citing Apple's MobileMe program and Google's (News - Alert) cloud computing program. "We build a lot of products for customers in the cloud computing industry," he said, "so whether it be virtualized storage, that can store 36 terabytes, it's definitely helping and improving our industry."

Tehrani wanted to know, given the dominance of Apple in the tablet market they've essentially re-created and are dominating, if Chua had seen interest in tablets from other manufacturers. Chua said yes, they've seen interest in tablets from Asus, and mentioned HP's imminent The Slate product, adding that they don't really see Apple as a competitor in the market.