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May has been a pretty eventful month for AMAX, and we are excited to say the least!  To kick things off, on May 6^th, we announced our status as an official OCP solutions provider.  Now, that’s all fine and dandy…  “but where is the hardware that you speak of?” you’re probably asking.  Well, just two days after announcing that we would be one of but a handful of official OCP solution providers to serve the rapidly growing open compute community, we exclusively showed the actual hardware at the 2013 Interop IT conference & expo in Las Vegas!

Eli the Computer Guy did a brief video segment covering our OCP solutions at Interop. Thanks, Eli!

OCP is real, the technology & design principles for server technology are here to stay, and we at AMAX believe that it will truly revolutionize the way server hardware is designed & deployed.  Yes, OCP presents a great opportunity for AMAX (we wouldn’t invest if it didn’t make some sort of business sense, afterall), but it represents an even greater opportunity for our customers.  Previously, OCP hardware was reserved only for the big boys at Facebook, Google and others.  Why should the most efficient rack-level server solutions be locked away and kept only for the big guns of the industry?  After all, this is the OPEN compute project, right?  That’s what we said, too.  By heavily investing our engineering efforts and dollars into the open compute community, AMAX can now bring an even more efficient compute architecture to the masses!

Now, you could argue that opening up the hardware will lead to less differentiation in the market since everyone will be offering the same standardized hardware – but really, that’s already the case in the “whitebox” market.  And while it’s true that OCP efforts will further commoditize the hardware, the reality is that it takes an incredible amount of engineering expertise and know-how to integrate all of the individual pieces of open hardware as well as the corresponding software, no matter the application.  Many of our competitors may know how to build & test servers, and that’s great!  But that’s only the first step, and when it comes to deploying full turnkey, multi-rack solutions that power on and work as advertised (hardware & software), there are very few that can say with confidence, “it works!”  But AMAX can.  We’ve been in business since 1979, have always been at the forefront of technology, and have continued to push the envelope with new, open technologies that we can provide to the masses.

We hope you’re as excited about OCP as we are.

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Towards the end of 2011, you may recall that AMAX took one giant step into the Big Data market by engineering & manufacturing a complete turnkey Big Data platform, bundled with Apache Hadoop, to answer the call of the growing market demand in the research, development and integration of large scale distributed clusters for big data processing & analysis.  But Big Data isn’t just a buzz word – it represents an enormous challenge and an even greater opportunity!  Understanding the importance of harnessing big data, the Obama Administration has announced the Big Data Research and Development Initiative, aimed at improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data[1]!

AMAX’s PHAT-Data (Peta-Scale Hadoop Analytics Technology) was the result of immeasurable amounts of time and research into selecting the best components and tuning to maximize performance & efficiency of a Hadoop cluster.  The launch and introduction of PHAT-Data at popular tradeshows such as Interop & SuperComputing created an incredible amount of buzz throughout the industry and garnered significant interest from large enterprises and federal government agencies nationwide.  In fact, PHAT-Data was recognized as Best New Product of the Year in Computer Hardware in 2012[2]!

But technology never stands still.  Since 2011, PHAT-Data has further evolved with the release of PHAT-Data v2.0 and the implementation of the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software.  The PHAT-Data platform sports real-time big data processing and analytics, contains the core components of the Hadoop framework, and now simplifies the deployment of Hadoop clusters with integrated wizards and automated optimization tools, and secures data with multi-level access controls and Kerberos data encryption[3].  AMAX is one of the select few of Intel’s exclusive partners to offer this unique solution.  Be sure to check out the PHAT-Data v2.0 press release and our newly redesigned PHAT-Data v2.0 page!

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How AMAX’s 30+ years of Supply Chain Management Protects its Customers

AMAX has always strived to uphold its strong reputation by being proactive in identifying and capitalizing on industry trends and by providing the best performance and value of a wide range of products and solutions to our customers.  Part of AMAX’s success throughout over three decades of being in business can be attributed to AMAX’s strong, mature supply chain.  Lions, Tigers, Bears, natural disasters & economic downturns – AMAX fears not!  In order to remain profitable and champion the commitment we make to our customers, AMAX has had to be both strategic and selective about its partners that it chooses to do business with as a part of the AMAX supply chain ecosystem.

It is precisely this reason that AMAX partners ONLY with stable and financially sound suppliers.  This not only protects AMAX, but protects our customers from serious supply chain disruptions – much like what occurred with the Thailand floods and the Hard Disk Drive supply situation, during which AMAX pledged to hold prices constant on ALL products where AMAX had secured availability of the drives and tightly controlled the supply chain, buying drives from ONLY qualified official channels rather than drives with questionable quality or origins.

But don’t take it from us, how about a word from one of our esteemed suppliers, Emulex?

“Our partnership with AMAX is a great example of how channel partners are doing more than just reselling, they are developing real solutions to solve real customer problems,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and business development, Emulex. “We share AMAX’s dedication to quality, performance, reliability and customer commitment, and address customers’ needs for high performance computing, big data, virtualized and cloud environments, with a broad range of I/O connectivity solutions that take enterprise data centers to the next level, while reducing OPEX.”

A global manufacturing footprint, combined with extensive knowledge and understanding of the global supply chain system, has given AMAX and our customers a distinct advantage in the market.  But most importantly, AMAX’s strategic, selective supply chain operations enables our customers to remove “supply chain disruption” from their vocabulary.  AMAX = more than meets the eye?  You betcha.

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A grand housewarming ceremony was held on June 6 2012, to celebrate Amax Information Technologies Suzhou Inc. moving into a new building. AMAX CEO Mr. Jerry Shih, General Manager of AMAX Suzhou Mr. Dennis Huang, and a few of AMAX partners and clients presented at the ceremony.

Mr. Jerry Shih and Mr. Denis Huang cutting the ribbon at the ceremony

AMAX CEO, Mr. Jerry Shih delivered a passionate speech, giving thanks to all the partners for their continuous support and to the staff for their hard work. He also encouraged everyone to innovate bravely to reach new heights and contribute to the company growing.

AMAX CEO, Mr. Jerry Shih delivering his speech

AMAX CEO, Mr. Jerry Shih painting the eyeball of the dancing lions

General Manager of AMAX Suzhou, Mr. Dennis Huang said in his speech that it was a milestone of AMAX Suzhou moving into this new building. “Moving into this new building is solid evidence of AMAX Suzhou development. AMAX is gathering the best talents and delivering upgraded services to our clients. Meanwhile, AMAX is continuously improving the working environment for our employees and encouraging innovation. We’ll continue our high spirits and work hard to provide the best products and services to our clients!”

General Manager of AMAX Suzhou, Mr. Dennis Huang was giving the speech

Ride on the crest to success

The size of the new building is 70,000 square feet, which brings the total manufacturing capacity of AMAX China to roughly 100,000 square feet.

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AMAX teams up with Mellanox (www.mellanox.com), STEC (www.stec-inc.com) and Zettaset (www.zettaset.com), leading IT corporations in the Storage and Ethernet/InfiniBand Interconnect market, to provide a complete Hadoop solution to simplify Big Data Analytics deployment and management. Combining Mellanox’s 40GbE solution, STEC’s 960GB PCIe SSD, Zettaset’s installation and management tools for Big Data, with AMAX’s Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 based servers evolved into a newer generation of AMAX’s Hadoop clusters known as the PHAT-Data 40G (Peta-Scale Hadoop Analytics Technology; A.K.A the FrankenDoop)

The PHAT-Data 40G is part of AMAX’s Big Data Solution providing a complete turnkey solution for Apache Hadoop. The PHAT-Data offers a highly scalable, tunable and easy to deploy platform bundled with Apache Hadoop to solve Big Data acquisition, storage and analysis problems, and is thoroughly tested and certified production-ready to be deployed on large scale. Visit our PHAT-Data Hadoop based Big Data Analytics Solution page for more details.

The PHAT-Data 40G was officially launched during Interop 2012 (www.interop.com), one of the largest IT Expo and Conference, earlier this week which was displayed at Mellanox’s booth and caught the attention of various attendees following the flow of today’s latest solutions in the IT field.  Brian Beeler, Editor-in-Chief for StorageReview (www.storagereview.com) has written a very compelling review about the PHAT-Data 40G and highlighted key features which the article can be found here.

AMAX has also recently released a press release coverage of the PHAT-Data 40G, highlighting the collaboration between our technology partners that we could not have made it happen without their generous support!