Clustercorp Rocks(R)+HYBRID dual boot solution

Today Clustercorp introduced their new hybrid solution, ROCKS(R)+HYBRID, for supporting Windows HPC Server and Linux on the same hardware. They've pulled together a Rocks-based deployment solution that is consistent with both Windows HPC Server 2008 and Rocks philosophies. I think it will be welcomed by our customer base and that it greatly eases the burden of deployment and management of dual-boot clusters. Many of our enterprise customers have expressed a desire to get more out of their cluster hardware by being able to use the same hardware for both Windows and Linux workloads. This new solution will be an important milestone for how easily those use cases are deployed and managed.

While the devil is in the user and admin experience details, it looks like the combination of Rocks and the Hybrid Roll deployment is consistent with the Rocks Philosophy of shoot the node and redeploy. Importantly, this offering also uses existing Windows HPC Server 2008 deployment features to deploy the Windows OS to compute nodes. It really looks like the best of both worlds.

This Rocks+Hybrid solution looks like it could be a win for both administrators and users. I've got to set aside some time to bring it up on my test cluster. Big fun and thanks Clustercorp.

 "Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou." Hank Williams, 1952

Frankie