In this, the first full week back from the summer break, a number of life science IT and informatics vendors announced new products, enhancements to existing products, or partnerships that extend the products into new application areas. Among those making announcements were Sun Microsystems, Apple, Digipede, TurboWorx, and Ocimum Biosolutions.

Sun Microsystems Inc. used its quarterly Network Computing ’05 event (held in New York on Monday) to launch a new line of Sun Fire servers based on AMD Opteron multi-core processors. The servers, code-named Galaxy until the announcement, are aimed at high-performance computing, server consolidation, and Web hosting applications.

The initial products in the line include the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200. These servers accommodate, respectively, one, two, and four processors. All of the new servers can run the Solaris 10 Operating System, Linux, and Windows. Sun noted that future servers in the line will include systems designed to take up to eight multi-core processors.

Apple announced updated versions of its Xserve and Xserve RAID storage systems. The Xserve, a 1U (one data center rack unit) storage server, now can support up to three 500 GB drives, offering up to 1.5 TB of storage. The Xserve storage system has a starting price of $2,999.

The new Xserve RAID system is a 3U storage system than can include up to 14 of the 500 GB drives, offering up to 7 TB of storage.  The Xserve RAID comes in 1, 3.5, and 7 TB configurations with suggested retail prices of $5,999, $8,499, and $12,999, respectively.  The Xserve RAID system is certified to run in Mac OS X, Windows, NetWare, SUSE, and Red Hat Linux environments.

Digipede Technologies, which sells distributed computing software that taps the processing power of numerous Microsoft Windows computers for high-performance computing applications, introduced the Digipede Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Digipede Network.

Essentially, the SDK gives companies a way to grid-enable their compute-intensive applications so that they may run on a distributed computing system that includes Windows servers and desktop computers. The Digipede Network software is built on Microsoft’s .NET, which Digipede claims makes the software easy to install and use.

TurboWorx announced a partnership with IBM whereby TurboWorx’s workflow and distributed computing software will now allow researchers to incorporate IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer into computational workflows.

This partnership extends existing collaboration between the two companies. TurboWorx applications such as TurboWorx Builder and TurboWorx Enterprise already run on other IBM server platforms. (For an example of how a Blue Gene system might be incorporated into a computational workflow see “TurboWorx Ties On-Demand and In-House Workflows.”)

Ocimum Biosolutions announced that its Biotracker laboratory information and knowledge management system software has achieved GeneChip-compatible status with the Affymetrix GeneChip microarray platform. This means that Ocimum will integrate its regulatory-compliant Biotracker software with Affymetrix’s GeneChip platform.

The integration will make it easier for researchers to manage, track, and share GeneChip experimental data.