Bright Computing to Roll Out New Line of Products 

Bright Computing today announced plans to roll out a new line of products designed to manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, Apache Hadoop clusters, and OpenStack private clouds. The first product in the new lineup — Bright Cluster Manager 7 for HPC — will ship on March 26, 2014.

Focused on the technical computing customer, Bright Cluster Manager 7 features enhanced dynamic cloud provisioning capabilities that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources more efficiently to reduce customer costs. It also has a software image revision-control feature, and full support for Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers.

Bright’s cloud utilization feature now enables the use of native Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage services (S3 and Glacier). Separating storage from compute allows Bright Cluster Manager to instantiate compute resources in the cloud only when the data is ready, saving the customer from paying for resources they don’t need.

Also new is Bright’s ability to take full advantage of Cisco UCS technology. Bright manages bare-metal BIOS settings and multi-node firmware upgrades, out-of-band services (e.g., power) and integrates directly with the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) to configure network, identity and other services. Finally, Bright samples a multitude of metrics and incorporates various health checks specific to Cisco UCS rack servers.

 “This release represents an important step in the evolution of Bright Cluster Manager,” said Matthijs van Leeuwen, Founder and CEO of Bright Computing. “In addition to continually enhancing Bright Cluster Manager with important features for our HPC customers, we are also expanding our product line to bring the power of enterprise-grade cluster management to OpenStack and Apache Hadoop customers.”