Kalixa scores global MasterCard acquirer test cards gig

The card enables live testing of MasterCard acceptance - including online and PayPass transactions - to ensure a simple, seamless and secure integration process for every new acquirer joining the MasterCard network.

The global initiative further strengthens Kalixa's six year relationship with MasterCard on a variety of services.

"The importance of testing all aspects of an acceptance infrastructure and ensuring systems are working before rollout cannot be overstated," said Kamran Hedjri, COO at Kalixa Group. "We are enormously proud that MasterCard has selected Kalixa Pay to be used by acquirers around the world to test their systems. We look forward to helping support the efficient and smooth roll-out of acquirer services in markets across the world."

"The growing strategic partnership with MasterCard is a testament to Kalixa's next generation payment technology. The issuance of our prepaid card globally is an important milestone for Kalixa," continued Hedjri.

The Kalixa prepaid card, allows testing in live-mode across any kind of payment acceptance including POS, ATM, stand alone and integrated terminals. Foreign currency transactions, and Chip and PIN authentication capabilities can also be tested using the card. Additionally, the Kalixa card will be used during MasterCard's Acquirer-End-to-End-Demonstration (AETED) service, delivered by MasterCard accredited service providers to oil painting reproduction.

HP has been peddling preconfigured VirtualSystem hardware stacks that bundle XenDesktop atop its BladeSystem blade servers for some time. The reference architecture comes in two flavors, and uses Microsoft's Hyper-V server virtualization slicer to contain the PC images.

A single BladeSystem enclosure has sixteen BL460c Gen8 servers, three of which manage the virty PCs and 13 of which hold the desktop hosts. The blades have four D2700 disk arrays linked to them by 6Gb/sec SAS links for a total of 30TB of disk; it can support 1,690 users according to HP.

A full-rack configuration doubles up all the iron to support 3,380 users. If you want to have persistent storage for PC users, HP suggests using the LeftHand P4800 SAN, and if you do so, then you can only do 2,340 users in a rack setup with two BladeCenter enclosures. HP also has reference architectures that put XenDesktop on top of VMware's ESXi hypervisor.

At the Citrix Synergy customer and partner event last week, HP was showing off the ProLiant WS460c Gen8 graphics server blade, which the company previewed back in February aimed specifically at virtualizing high-end workstations with high-end 3D graphics cards from Nvidia. The feeds and speeds of the WS460c Gen8 workstation blade were not available a few months back, but now they are.

The WS460c workstation blade has two Xeon E5 processors and has 16 memory sticks for a maximum memory capacity of 512GB on the server node. The PCI-Express 3.0 mezzanine card slots on the blade can each accept an MXM-style Nvidia GPU, specifically a Quadro 500M or 1000M.

If you need a higher-end GPU, or you want to support more users on a blade with a higher ratio of graphics cards to compute cores, then you can snap an expansion slot onto the WS460c. The expansion slot supports one Quadro 5000 or 6000 series GPU card (like the kind you would really put into a workstation), or up to six of the MXM-style graphics cards that snap into the blade.

A base WS460c workstation blade costs just under $4,000, but that is a just silly configuration with one processor and 2GB of memory. With two eight-core Xeon E5-2670 processors spinning at 2.6GHz and a respectable 256GB of main memory, this baby weighs in at $14,989. A Quadro 500M graphics card for the blade costs $350, and the Quadro 1000M costs $550. The expansion blade can be configured with two Xeon E5s and real memory; with the same processor and memory configuration as in the base blade, the expansion blade costs $13,551. A Quadro 5000 card for this expansion blade runs $2,330, and a Quadro 6000 will cost you $5,100.

If you want more discrete GPUs rather than faster ones, then a six-pack of Quadro 1000 MXM cards costs $7,498 and a six-pack of the Quadro 3000 MXM cards is priced at an $8,498. So, let's go crazy and go all in here. With the top-end MXM cards in the base and expansion blades, that adds up to $38,138. But remember, this is shared infrastructure, and you can allocate more CPUs and GPUs to workstation users who need it and dial it back for those who don't.

With the latest round of announcements, HP is also pushing its 3PAR StoreServ disk arrays, and the usual services to help customers figure out how to make their PC applications mobile while at the same time virtualizing them using XenDesktop.

HP also announced some new thin clients in a blog post. One of these is the mt40 mobile thin client using Advanced Micro Devices' "Richland" APU chip, which also made its debut last week. The t410 thin client (not the same device, but a similar name if you are dyslexic like me) supports the latest Receiver and XenDesktop enhancements aimed at thin clients, too.