SOMERSET, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SHI International today announced that the SHI Cloud data center will help power the first-ever webcast of the planet Venus’ transit across the sun. SHI, an HP Cloud Agile Partner, will host the event in the cloud through its data center in Somerset, N.J., with solutions driven by HP networking, servers and software.
Sponsored by NASA and Columbus State University, the webcast presents an opportunity for observers around the world to watch a celestial event that won’t happen again until 2117. The transit of Venus will occur over seven hours on June 5 and 6, watched live by over one million scientists, students, and citizens around the globe from a webcast organized by the Columbus State University Coca-Cola Space Science Center (CCSSC) Mead Observatory.
"For astronomy fans, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” said Henry Fastert, SHI Chief Technologist. “SHI’s cloud technology will allow the entire world to witness this event for the first time in history. The webcast will aid the scientific community as well as the U.S. general public, which would otherwise see only a portion of the transit before the sun sets in the west. This webcast is a prime example of how our organizations can quickly scale through our Time-Boxed Burst Computing, which can support the high-volume web traffic this event will generate.”
Time-Boxed Burst Computing addresses seasonal or unexpected capacity spikes, which the SHI Cloud Center quickly handles without large capital expenditures. The SHI Cloud will store images of the Venus transit, then relay them to users via web-server access. The high bandwidth, secure applications, and dedicated performance of the SHI platform make it an ideal partner to help Columbus State University broadcast this event.
The transit of Venus will be similar to a solar or lunar eclipse and can only be viewed from certain locations and with the proper equipment, so the scientists have stepped in to help. Astronomers and staff of the university’s space science center will be stationed in North America at Bryce Canyon in Utah and Columbus University, as well as in Australia at Alice Springs and Mongolia in the Gobi Desert. They will be equipped with ruggedized HP EliteBook notebook PCs and will photograph, record, and stream the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.
View the webcast at www.ccssc.org/transit2012.html or through the partners at NASA's Sun Earth Day website at http://sunearthday.nasa.gov.
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Founded in 1989, SHI International Corp. is a $4 billion global provider of technology products and services. Driven by the industry's most experienced and stable sales force and backed by software volume licensing experts, hardware procurement specialists, and certified IT services professionals, SHI delivers custom IT solutions to Corporate, Enterprise, Public Sector, and Academic customers. With over 1,800 employees worldwide, SHI is the largest Minority/Woman Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) in the U.S. and is ranked 19th among Everything Channel's VAR 500 list of North American IT solution providers. For more information, visit http://www.www.shicloud.com.