Timothy Prickett Morgan covers servers, operating systems, virtualization, networking, data centers, big data and data warehousing, and high performance computing for The Register. He enthusiastically monkeys around with systems from time to time, but knows that he is a hack, not a hacker.
For more than two decades, he has been an editor focused on these areas for publications on both sides of the Pond, including BusinessWeek Newsletter for Information Executives, Computer Systems News, IBM System User, Midrange Computing, Computerwire, Unigram, and The Four Hundred.
When not being a hack, TPM is an avid homebrewer, concocting strange beers, meads, and hard ciders for friends and family because, let's face it, we all need a drink. At the very least, and as soon as the work is done.Report: IBM, Lenovo x86 server deal hits the skids
Or, maybe the Great Wall of China
Only late last week, the scuttlebutt was that IBM and Lenovo Group were moving along at a rapid pace so Big Blue could offload all or part of its System x x86 server business to the Chinese builder. Now, the latest word is that the deal has stalled as the two companies are haggling about the price.
The first rumors about a …
MapR revs up HBase queries with M7 Hadoop distro
Solr search engine means elephants don't need to chew big data cud
You are not just imagining it. Every commercial distributor of the Hadoop system for storing and chewing through unstructured data has come up with its own a different way to deliver something akin to SQL query functionality while at the same time boosting the speed of ad hoc queries.
MapR Technologies is one of the earlier …
Arista monster switches fluff up cloud with 1 million virty machines
7500E mod box sports 100Gb/sec speeds and integrated optics on ports
Data center switch vendor Arista Networks is giving the incumbent peddlers of switchery heartburn again with the launch of its 7500 E Series modular switches.
The upstart company, which has Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim as its chairman and chief development officer, is taking switching up another notch on a few …
VMTurbo trousers $7.5m to bring Adam Smith's hand to more clouds
Gearing up engineering and sales for a future hybrid world
Adam Smith-loving cloud biz VMTurbo has secured $7.5m in C-round funding from venture capitalists Globespan Capital Partners.
That makes for $25m in funding in three rounds, with the second round hitting in November 2011 when Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners kicked in $10m. The company did not announce details …
SGI tax bennies push bigger profit in Q1
Wraps up LMDs of profit destruction, shows decent sales growth
Jorge Titinger, the CEO who was brought into Silicon Graphics last year to clean up the mess made by $87m in low-margin deals that wrecked the company's bottom line for a few quarters, is probably breathing a little easier now that the most recent quarter has ended. Not just because revenues were up, but because the remaining $ …
Cray peddles more iron than expected in Q1
Not enough to keep it from booking a loss, though
It is tough to find a choppier business than the supercomputer market, and Cray CEO Peter Ungaro had to remind Wall Street once again to not judge the company on a single quarter, and particularly on the first quarter that it has just turned in.
While the company's top line was a little better than expected, issues with the …
Cloudera revs up Impala SQL for Hadoop
Big-data elephant to pronk like a gazelle - or roar like a Chevy
Commercial Hadoop distributor Cloudera is first out of the gate with a true SQL layer that sits atop Hadoop.
It lets normal people – if you can call people who've mastered SQL normal – perform ad hoc queries in real time against information crammed into the Hadoop Distributed File System or the HBase database that rides atop it …
Fujitsu sells off microcontroller and analog chip biz to Spansion
Japanese giant books a loss in 2012, optimistic about 2013
It's been a busy day at Japanese IT giant Fujitsu, with the company reporting its financial results for its fiscal 2012 year ending in March (that's not a typo) and also announcing that it has spun off its microcontroller and analog device business to the flash-memory maker Spansion.
Back in February, Fujitsu announced a massive …
Azure is Microsoft's billion-dollar baby – maybe
More like a whole lot of software sold to partners
Curt Anderson, CFO for Microsoft's Server & Tools Business, was feeling chatty during an interview with Bloomberg, bragging that in the past year Redmond topped the $1bn sales mark with Windows Azure.
Or, maybe not. The Bloomberg story doesn't quote whatever Anderson said directly, and if you read down a bit further into the …
HP mashes up ProLiant, Integrity, BladeSystem, and Moonshot server businesses
New appliance server group to peddle 'converged systems'
It's a time of transition in the systems business. And HP, the world's largest server maker in terms of volumes and possibly soon (again) in terms of sales if IBM doesn't stop the decline in mainframe and Power system sales or sells off its x86 server biz to Lenovo, is tweaking its server units and the executives who run them. …
Fat boxes keep Super Micro from slumping
Behemoths boost server ASPs in March quarter, working on Moonshot killa
Super Micro – king of the whitebox server makers – turned in a pretty good quarter ended in March, the third quarter of its fiscal 2013, not by pushing more iron, but by peddling a smaller amount of much heftier iron.
In the quarter, sales were down a bit sequentially – which was no surprise at all, given the traditional bump in …
Eucalyptus clones more AWS features for cloud control freak
Auto scaling, elastic load balancing, and CloudWatch for the private cloud
Amazon Web Services will not build you a private copy of its own cloudy infrastructure for your own use, and it believes, as its top brass reiterated again last week, that there is no such thing as a private cloud.
But don't tell Eucalyptus Systems that. The company was founded to try to clone AWS, and with its 3.3 release, it …
Lenovo deal to buy IBM x86 server biz moving along fast
Time for Ginni to make a call to GloFo or TSMC for fab spinout
It is becoming increasingly clear that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is annoyed with the performance of the company's systems business. Annoyed enough to spin off all or part of its System x server business to China's Lenovo Group, according to rumors that surfaced last week.
The US channel trade rag CRN broke the story of an impending …
Citrix hits turbulence, cuts profit outlook
Order delays in Q1
Citrix Systems is the latest big IT vendor in the Q1 earnings season to report unexpected delays in closing orders, particularly with its key XenDesktop application and desktop virtualization product. The company has cut profit expectations for Q2 and for the full year, sending shares down seven per cent to just under $63 a pop …
Opscode cooks up deals to serve Chef automation from IBM, Joyent clouds
Already on AWS (sort of), Azure, Rackspace, and HP Cloud
Opscode's Chef configuration, change, and cloud management tool is spreading around the clouds and has been formally adopted on the heavenly infrastructure from IBM and Joyent.
The news comes as Opscode is hosting its ChefConf 2013 user and partner conference in San Francisco this week and is touting the uptake of Chef as a tool …
Mellanox boffins concoct chips for 100Gb/sec InfiniBand
Swings to a loss in Q1 as R&D, sales, and marketing costs rise
Mellanox Technologies reported its first quarter financial results today, and Eyal Waldman, chairman and CEO at the networking chip and switch maker, said in a conference call that the company had taped out its first experimental chip that would run at 100Gb/sec and support the future Enhanced Data Rate (or EDR) version of …
IBM CEO Rometty swaps heads of strategy and servers
Musical boardroom chairs – possibly related to x86 server and other spinoffs
Ginni Rometty, who has been CEO at IBM for a year and a half, is making two big changes in the upper echelons of her management teams; she is swapping the head of corporate strategy and the head of its Systems and Technology Group, and it is presumably to get better results than IBM showed in its first quarter of 2013 in its …
Juniper pushes up sales and profits in Q1
Data center switches, service provider routers start to pick up
The top brass at Juniper Networks are breathing a little bit easier as the company turned in numbers that show it is growing despite taking a big hit in sales of gear, software, and services to the US government in the first quarter.
In the quarter ended in March, Juniper nudged up revenues by 2.6 per cent to $1.03bn, and net …
Behold Ubuntu Server 13.04: Focus on hypervisors and OpenStack
A Raring Ringtail riding a Grizzly smoking a Havana
It is getting hard to see where Ubuntu Server ends and where the OpenStack cloud controller begins - and this is absolutely intentional on the part of Canonical, the corporate entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system.
The Ubuntu Server 13.04 release that is coming out this Thursday is not one of the …
Appliances are the new data centre onesie
It's all coming together
It has been a fun and very profitable couple of decades for upstart IT server and systems software makers.
They have thrown new server technologies at venerable mainframe and minicomputer systems and blasted the data centre into a thousand shiny metal bits. Then they lashed it all together with networks running distributed …
VMware profits flat-line even as services revenues grow
Virtzilla launches Project Zephyr vCloud Hybrid Service on May 21
Say what you will about VMware, but it has been brilliant about extracting the most amount of profit possible out of what used to be a virtual monopoly on x86 server virtualization in the data center. But competition from Microsoft and various open source alternatives, particularly the OpenStack-KVM combo, is putting the squeeze …
Mellanox adds VM-flitting to ConnectX-3 server adapters
Going Pro with VXLAN and NVGRE to stretch across Layer 3 nets
Switch and adapter maker Mellanox Technologies added support for virtual LAN overlays to its Ethernet switches late last year and now it is building in support for the two primary overlays into its ConnectX-3 server adapters to match.
Virtual LAN overlays make Layer 3 routing between networks invisible to those networks and look …
Nvidia Tesla bigwig: Why you REALLY won't need x86 chips soon
Interview Find out where Intel, AMD, ARM stand in GPU giant's roadmap
Life is what happens when you are trying to do other things, as the old saying goes.
Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia has been perfectly honest about the fact that the graphics chip maker didn't intend to get into the supercomputing business. Rather, it was founded by a bunch of gamers who wanted better graphics …
Cloudmeter pulls big data from the network, not the servers
Adds Insight app nanny to Stream data siphoner
Last year, Atomic Labs, the creator of the Pion web analytics tool, changed its name to Cloudmeter, raised some money, and set above to make its analytics tool more broadly useful for enterprises. Pion has been transformed into a broader tool called Stream, which runs on premises, and Cloudmeter has cooked up an adjunct …
The enterprise software gravy train stalled in 2012
Big data, analytics, and cloud build up a head of steam
The world spends about twice as much dough on enterprise software as it does on data center hardware, and that software is also where a lot of the profit for the IT sector comes from. So when enterprise software revenues don't grow as fast as they have in prior years, it has ripple effects on the IT industry as a whole.
The …
Platform clouds can make enterprises all teeth and no tail
Red Hat and VMware want to be your private parts
The cloud is at the same point in its history that proprietary minicomputers were at four decades ago.
Back then, everybody was trying to figure out how to use this new technology, which offered substantial economic and ease-of-programming benefits compared to the big iron systems they replaced.
At the time it was not obvious …
Fed up with database speed? Meet Big Blue's BLU-eyed boy
Analysis El Reg drills into 10TB/s acceleration tech
Like other system vendors with their own software stacks, IBM is trying to boost the processing speed of its database software so it can take on larger and larger data munching jobs.
The company launched its BLU Acceleration feature for several of its databases a few weeks ago as part of a broader big data blitzkrieg, saying …
IBM selling x86 server business to Lenovo?
Talks ongoing, likely only System x racks and towers, not FlexSystems
There are rumors swirling around, again, that IBM is looking to sell off all or a portion of its x86 server business to Chinese PC maker and server partner Lenovo Group.
US channel mag CRN caught wind of something going down between IBM and Lenovo on Thursday and referenced an anonymous source with knowledge of the talks now …
Big Blue misses Q1 targets big-time thanks to systems shortfall
$1.4bn in charges for "workload rebalancing" – aka layoffs – coming in Q2
Big Blue did not turn in the numbers that it expected in the first quarter thanks to more than $400m in mainframe systems, related software, and intellectual property licensing deals that rolled over into the second quarter. In the quarter ended in March, revenues were off 5.1 per cent, to $23.41bn, and net income fell by 1.1 …
Shuttleworth: Canonical is fast and easy with OpenStack clouds
You don't just build a cloud, you have to maintain it
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, has wanted to turn his creation into a cloud platform for years, he said during his keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday.
He started the process with the Eucalyptus cloud controller, which is only partially open source and not really …
Project Savanna tames Hadoop big data muncher with OpenStack control freak
Mirantis, Hortonworks, and Red Hat pull out the whips and peanuts
Batman and Robin. Peanut butter and chocolate. OpenStack and Hadoop. These are things that go together, with the latter pairing being something that commercial OpenStack distie Mirantis, commercial Hadoop distie Hortonworks, and commercial KVM and Linux distie (and soon to be OpenStack commercializer) Red Hat are putting …
Data centers can't save Intel's first quarter
But they might save 2013 if Atom and Xeon chips take off
The "Sandy Bridge" Xeon E5 replacement ramp for servers is nearly a year old now and clearly hit its stride in the first quarter for Intel, which turned in some pretty sad figures for its PC chip and chipset business. It is a pity that the Data Center and Connected Systems business was not already twice as large, as Intel hopes …
Intel: Now THIS is how you forge physical, virtual switches
Chipzilla wants to take over data center and telco networking
Intel has x86 chips, switch ASICs, and tweaks to the Linux operating system that it says allow it to not only make better physical switches, but is also advancing the idea of using its chip and software tech to build a virtual switch for linking virtualized servers together and to layer network application services onto the …
OpenStack: Control freak is a platform, just like Android and iOS
And increasingly for enterprise users over cloud operators
The OpenStack Summit is underway this week in Portland, Oregon, and the top brass at the companies who have been building the cloud controller and selling it to customers want everyone to know that this is not some open source project with promise, but a real product that can be put to use in data centers today.
Jonathan Bryce, …
Cloudscaling licenses Juniper virty networking for new OpenStack distro
Getting ready for Grizzly with OCS 2.5 this summer
Cloudscaling, one of the upstarts trying to become the Red Hat of OpenStack, has unveiled OCS 2.5, the third major release of its Open Cloud System. While it prepares for the coming of "Grizzly" - the latest OpenStack release - Cloudscaling has also inked a deal with Juniper Networks to put Juniper's virtual networking software …
Verizon Terremark backs Xen-CloudStack combo for clouds
Can you hear me now, VMware ESXi and vCloud?
Hot on the heels of the open source Xen hypervisor being moved over to the Linux Foundation as an official collaborative project, Citrix Systems, which has controlled the Xen community as well as the open source CloudStack cloud controller that is one of the viable alternatives to OpenStack, has scored the Terremark cloud …
Teradata cranks appliance iron, adopts InfiniBand as cluster backbone
SQL-H to link Hadoop to both Teradata and Aster databases
Another database and data warehousing vendor has adopted InfiniBand as its backbone for data transmission. While upgrading the x86 iron inside its Active Enterprise Data Warehouse appliance and rolling out a new data mart server, Teradata said it was ditching its proprietary networking hardware and moving its homegrown Bynet …
Red Hat emulates Fedora Linux project with RDO OpenStack community
Gearing up for RHEL, KVM, and Red Hat OpenStack triple whammy for clouds
OpenStack is sometimes called the Linux for clouds, and Red Hat, the dominant Linux distributor, seems to be all over that. The firm is now working to bring its Red Hat OpenStack distribution into the ever-crowding field of companies that want to peddle supported distributions of this cloud control freak. Red Hat Open Stack, or …
HP uses OpenStack to glue CloudSystems to public clouds
Gradually rolling out Grizzly code on the HP Cloud
Before OpenStack was even an idea, HP had cooked up an all-blade system strategy and some utility computing control software that it merged together into the BladeSystem Matrix. The software in that automated cloud-in-a-box has now evolved.
BladeSystem Matrix now includes some elements of the OpenStack cloud controller and is …
Dell crams modular hybrid server and storage switch into 1U pizza box
Wraps switches in Active Fabric Manager v1.5
One of the bright spots in Dell's business these days is its networking unit, which doubled its sales last year thanks in large part to the acquisition of Force10 Networks nearly two years ago. Now Dell has to keep pace with its many competitors in the networking racket – which it has just done with the launch of a new modular …
Rackspace attacks Amazon with new cloudy clones
AWS spies clone army advancing on service provider, telco fronts
Look out, Amazon Web Services. Rackspace is cloning its own cloudy service – and to quote Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady, it's "comin' to getcha."
Way back when, Rackspace Hosting teamed up with NASA to create the OpenStack community precisely to leverage the smarts and excitement of the open source community to take on the closed and …
SUSE updates Studio server appliance maker with native KVM
Prepping SUSE Cloud OpenStack for Grizzly attack
SUSE Linux, like everybody else, wants to build your cloud. And the German software company, which is part of the Attachmate collective, thinks the combination of its chameleon-colored Linux operating system, its SUSE Studio server appliance fabrication tools, its SUSE Manager system management tools, and its SUSE Cloud …
Cisco ports Nexus 1000V virtual switch to Microsoft's Hyper-V
Hooks UCS servers into Systems Center, fast-tracks Windows infrastructure clouds
Upstart server-maker Cisco is bounding around the Microsoft Management Summit this week in Las Vegas to talk about how it is plugging its technologies into Redmond's cloud stack.
First up, as it promised it would do back in the summer of 2011, Cisco has ported its Nexus 1000V virtual switch to run atop Microsoft's Hyper-V server …
Oracle cuts down Big Data Appliance to make pilots cheaper
Talks up zippier Oracle apps – and new apps – tuned for Exadata engineered systems
It is hard to imagine a rack of servers and switches being too much of a machine for a pilot Hadoop system, but that is exactly what prospective customers have been telling Oracle. And so it is offering a cut-down "starter" version of its Big Data Appliance with a much lower price point.
George Lumpkin, Oracle's vice president …
Oracle to resell Fujitsu 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers ... worldwide
The more Sparcs, the merrier, apparently
Solaris customers looking to upgrade their Sparc server iron will have a second set of choices now that Oracle has admitted that it will be reselling the Fujitsu "Athena" servers that use the Japanese company's Sparc64-X processor.
Oracle's launch today of the Fujitsu Sparc M10 server lineup is not really much of a surprise. El …
Intel hints at server processor plans for the rest of this year
New chippery all around, from tiny Atom to big bad Xeon E7
The Intel Developer Forum is kicking off in Beijing, China on Wednesday morning, and knowing that everyone can't make it to the Middle Kingdom to talk tech, Chipzilla gave El Reg a preview of what Diane Bryant, general manager of its Data Center and Connected Systems Group, would reveal during her keynote focusing on processors …
Piston ready to capture 'waves of customers' coming off AWS
Puts out Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 as bait
Many of the core OpenStack developers who worked on the Nebula cloud at NASA ended up at cloud controller appliance maker Nebula or at Rackspace Hosting, the other initial collaborator for the OpenStack project. But more than a few of them ended up at Piston Cloud, which has come up with its own twist on the OpenStack cloud …
VMware sells off Shavlik patch management tools to LANDesk
Forget hardware nannying, we're all about software-defined everything
With new sheriff Pat Gelsinger now running the company for the past six months, VMware is getting more focused on its software-defined data center product line, extending up from basic server virtualization to the heavens, and is spinning off anything that is not directly supportive of its goals for virtualized data center and …
'Til heftier engines come aboard, HP Moonshot only about clouds
Analysis And those engines will come – as will FPGAs, DSPs, GPUs ...
The HP Moonshot hyperscale servers are not even fully launched, and Intel and Calxeda are already bickering about whose server node is going to be bigger and better when they both ship improved processors for the Moonshot chassis later this year. Other engines will be coming for the Moonshot machines, too, HP execs tell El Reg, …
Dell ready to pay Icahn $25m to behave himself during buyout deal
Flashing cash all around to get a deal done quickly
The board of directors at Dell are so eager to look like they are doing their jobs selling off the company to the highest bidder that they are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to cover the expenses for due diligence that three different groups – one led by company founder Michael Dell, and others lead by Blackstone …
