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.Google slashes App Engine NoSQL data storage prices by 25 per cent
Amazon cuts DynamoDB costs, and Google follows suit
Amazon doesn't care much about profits and both Google and Microsoft have monopolies that give them deep pockets. And so it is no surprise that the three companies will be engaged in a cloud price war that will very likely leave a lot of smaller cloud providers dead by the side of the road in the coming years.
Google launched …
HP: Hey, it could easily have been so much worse
'Turnaround won't be linear' - did I really say that?
If you were expecting HP to bring good news to the IT industry when it reported its financial results for the fiscal second quarter, you are no doubt sorely disappointed. Well, unless you consider that in terms of profit declines it could have been a lot worse.
In the quarter ended April 30, HP was down on all fronts, and CEO …
Citrix halfway to Avalon with XenDesktop 7 desktop and app virtualizer
New edition just for app streaming
Citrix Systems is just as eager to cloudify its installed base of customers as is VMware. And so it has taken one step closer to accomplishing that goal with the launch of XenDesktop 7 at its Synergy customer and partner event in Anaheim.
Both companies have vast installed bases: VMware has 500,000 customers with around 38 …
Juniper, Seagate stuff cash down Cloudscaling's OpenStack trousers
Randy Bias's biz bags $10m in new round
The founders at Cloudscaling - one of the myriad companies trying to become the "Linux of the cloud" by enhancing and commercializingthe OpenStack cloud control freak - have just landed a second wad of cash from investors.
Cloudscaling was founded in the middle of 2009 by Randy Bias, the company's CTO, and Adam Waters, the COO …
VMware public cloud aims at ESXi customers, not AWS
And the prices will reflect that, don't doubt it
A few months back, when VMware let the cat out of the bag that it would be building its own public cloud, it said that it had 480,000 customers with an estimated 36 million virtual machines running in their data centers. On Tuesday it officially launched the the Hybrid Cloud Service at its Palo Alto headquarters and explained …
VMware taps ex-Ciscoer as channel chief
The channel is the key to Virtzilla's impending vCloud Hybrid Service
Just ahead of the formal launch of VMware's "Project Zephyr" vCloud Hybrid Service public cloud on Tuesday, the company has appointed a new channel chief. And the timing is not accidental, with VMware's channel being a key component of its hybrid cloud strategy.
It's easy to see why VMware wants to build its own public cloud …
Amazon cloud-watcher shows some love for Microsoft's Azure
Cloudy beancounter Newvem: 'We're not trying to do 50 clouds ... half-way'
Newvem has been peddling its Cloud Care monitoring and costing tools for virty public infrastructure since it uncloaked last November for Amazon Web Services.
Now the company is expanding Cloud Care so it can control-freak Microsoft's Windows Azure heavenly server and storage slices.
Support for Cloud Care plugging into Windows …
Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS
Let's all play find the secret hardware register
With new CEO Brian Krzanich and new president Renée James in control of Intel, all kinds of changes are very likely in store: the chip giant wants to expand beyond its dominance in PCs (a declining market) and servers (one that is profitable but not growing very much) to other aspects of the computing landscape.
And one such …
What IS the difference between Virt and Cloud?
Pin your ears back and we'll tell you
There's a lot of talk – some might say hot air – about cloud computing, what it is and what it is not. Ask 10 people and you will probably get 15 answers.
Take the formal definition of cloud put forward by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the section of the US Department of Commerce that for more than a …
Dell's server, net bizzes do well, but PCs slammed as expected
Wannabe software unit loses money in fiscal Q1
If Michael Dell and his partners had hoped to turn in a bad quarter to help justify the relatively low price the Dell & Friends consortium wants to pay to take the IT giant private, Dell's sales force in the enterprise server, networking, and services units did not do their part to help. The PC business did – but not as much as …
HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs
Sixteen Ivy Bridge-EX sockets and 12TB in a single image
HP has revealed a little more about its "Project Kraken" in-memory system that it is cooking up in conjunction with the engineers at SAP. It's talking about a future in which there are lots of scale-out servers like its Project Moonshot systems and big-memory systems like Kraken on the other end of the spectrum – with not as …
Cisco boosts sales and profits despite softness in switching and routing
Servers and video help fill in the gaps
Cisco Systems took a big bet more than four years ago when it jumped into the server market with its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers and started peddling converged Nexus switches at the same time. Those bets have paid off, and rising sales of these products are filling in the revenue gaps in the quarter ended in …
Google takes on AWS, Azure virty servers with micro billing and fat disks
Google I/O Compute Engine open for all
Google is done dabbling with raw compute and storage infrastructure and has thrown the doors wide open on its Compute Engine services, while at the same time offering finer-grained pricing and fatter persistent storage for its virtual machines than is available from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, and other public …
Fujitsu peddles three-way hybrid super to Nagoya University
Mash up to push up above 3.66 petaflops – eventually
Nagoya University is the latest academic institute in Japan to take a slice of the K supercomputer design - and put it on its campus to run applications on a monstrous 10.51 petaflops box. In theory.
And in an interesting twist, the new machine is a hybrid Sparc64-Xeon-Xeon Phi cluster that will eventually push up into the …
Ten years on: How did that cloud strategy pan out?
How to avoid vendor lock-in
So the CEO is hearing all about clouds now and the financial director is looking at his pile of beans and as usual wants you to do more with less. And both think it is time for you to build or buy a cloud. Where do you start?
The answer is by being brutally honest with yourself and your bosses about everything around you.
A …
Financial firms start lining up for AMD Roadrunner systems
Open Compute makers could do for Opterons what tier ones didn't
For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not …
IBM to push Linux apps on Power iron in China, then elsewhere
If you want to peddle boxes, you have to sell the ISVs first
IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM's first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet …
Rackspace does tech support for popular languages on its cloud
Getting all fanatical about SDKs – for free
Rackspace Hosting has spent the past six months putting together a set of officially sanctioned software development kits and runtime environments for popular programming languages to run on its eponymous infrastructure cloud, and now it is ready to offer tech support for those SDKs when companies deploy applications on the …
Dell gooses HANA appliances, loads up SAP Business Suite
Looks ahead to those Ivy Bridge-EX machines later this year
Enterprise application software powerhouse SAP is beside itself with glee that its HANA in-memory database is driving more business than expected, and server makers like Dell, which are building appliances that meet the very strict – and unmalleable – configurations prescribed to run HANA, are hoping that this turns into a …
Icahn, SAM to give MickeyD the boot if they take over Dell
Dell board very politely says 'Put up or shut up'
Michael Dell wants to take his company the company that bears his name private, but he might be polishing up his resume instead in a few months.
Activist investor Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management made it clear last Friday that they were not happy with the proposed $24.4bn takeover of Dell by the company's founder, …
ScaleMP: Use RAM plus vSMP, not flash, to boost server performance
Partners with Big Blue, chases SGI UV2 shared memory systems
There are hypervisors that chop a single server into virtual bits, and other hypervisors that take multiple servers and make them look like one big virtual one. ScaleMP's vSMP hypervisor is the latter kind, and can be used to create a shared memory x86-based system that runs Linux that would normally require special processors …
Penguin Computing to make Open Compute servers
And apparently a lot more money, thanks to Zuck & Co.
Linux server and cluster maker Penguin Computing is a member of the Open Compute Project started by Facebook to create open source data center gear, and now it is an official "solution provider".
This means that Penguin now has OCP's official blessing to make and sell integrated systems based on the motherboard and system …
Fujitsu Integrated Systems stack up servers, storage, and switches
Anything Larry Ellison can do, we can do differently
Japanese IT giant Fujitsu will roll out a bounty of new – and, of course, cloudy – hardware and software offerings next week at its annual customer and partner confab in Tokyo.
Fujitsu was the first and only Microsoft Azure partner that got a public cloud puffed up based on the Windows stack and its own iron that is compatible …
Nvidia sales and profits rise despite PC slump
Gamers, high-end notebooks, and supercomputers fill the gaps
Graphics and ARM chip maker Nvidia is sailing smartly through the shrinking PC market, boosting both sales and profits – and doing so despite its transitions to Tegra4 and Tegra4i processors for smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2014 ended on April 28, Nvidia's overall sales rose by 3.2 per …
Nutanix getting traction with server-storage hybrids
The Global 2000 comes a-knockin' – and maybe an IT giant with gobs o' cash
The road to the present is littered with the rusty hulks of server companies that had great engineering and a new twist on an old systems idea, and yet were crushed by incumbents. But judging by its numbers for the past year and a half, upstart Nutanix – which is peddling a virtualized server cluster with a virtualized SAN …
Price cuts, OpenStack transition make Rackspace miss in Q1
Revenues and profits up, but Wall Street will freak out
Rackspace Hosting did not turn in the kind of first quarter it wanted for the period ending in March, so expect knee-jerk reactions and hyperventilating from investors who think it can't stay in the cloud game against the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Its results did not meet Wall Street's expectations, with only 20.2 …
Does a cloud have to be public, or can it be private?
Enterprises and Rackspace Hosting disagree with Amazon
Is "private cloud" an oxymoron? Or just plain moron?
The top brass at Amazon Web Services have been very clear since the launch of the e-tailers public cloud in 2006 that they do not believe in private clouds running in corporate data centers, and that to be a cloud, by definition, means being a shared public utility and not …
Teradata boosts DRAM on appliances for in-memory queries
You don't need no stinkin' HANA or Exalytics
If it were as simple as adding more main memory to a server to crank up the performance of a parallel database, Teradata would have done it by now. But with memory capacities going up on x86 servers and memory prices coming down, now is the time to add more in-memory processing to data warehouse appliances – and that is …
Cray descends to midrange HPC shops with baby XC30 supers
An air-cooled chip off the relatively new 'Cascade' block
Supercomputer maker Cray had been hinting that it would deliver a new cut-down version of its "Cascade" XC30 system, and the machine is being unveiled on Tuesday at the Cray User Group meeting in Napa Valley, California.
The XC30-AC machines go into more standard cabinets like those used with the XE5 and XE6 predecessors to the …
Dell snaps up Enstratius for cloud wrangling
Big Mike is getting agnostic about heavenly infrastructure
Having bought a slew of management tools for server virtualization and clouds either directly or through its acquisition of Quest Software, the last thing you might think IT giant Dell needs is another cloud management tool. Wrong. Dell has just inhaled Enstratius to give it a SaaSy cloud control freak to complement its existing …
Report: Icahn spoiling for a proxy fight with Dell over buyout deal
Enlisting Southeastern Asset Management as ally against Big Mike
Activist investor (we hesitate to use the term vulture capitalist because it gives vultures a bad name) Carl Icahn has said that Michael Dell and the consortium of partners he has put together to take his eponymous company private for $24.4bn is not paying enough for the company. According to reports, Icahn is now getting ready …
Platform clouds: The hot battle for developers' hearts and minds
Analysis Open for business
It has been a decade since Microsoft announced its .NET framework and the Common Language Runtime - where C# and other languages do their frolicking on Windows systems. And thanks to the proliferation of open source programming languages and frameworks, which are the foundations of emerging platform clouds, this could very well …
Juniper betas Contrail control freak for software-defined nets
Interop 2013 Getting into the encrowdening field earlier than expected
Juniper Networks is fast-tracking its Contrail software-defined network control freak to try to blunt the advances of myriad other players that have crashed onto the SDN bandwagon from all angles of attack. The JunosV Contrail Controller, which was not expected to be commercially available until sometime in the first half of …
Dept o' Labor says US created more jobs than it thought this spring
Unemployment rate hits four-year low, thanks in part to the IT dept
The US economy has been humming along a little more strongly than the Department of Labor originally thought over the past few months – US companies added a lot more workers than expected in February and March, and did better than expected in the shiny new report for April, too.
The first Friday of every month is when the Bureau …
HP revamps FlexFabric fixed and modular switches
New carrier-grade router and a virty one, too
The Interop networking extravaganza kicks off next week in Las Vegas, and Hewlett-Packard's Networking division is trying to get a jump on all of the chatter by previewing its latest FlexFabric fixed and modular switches as well as rolling out a new carrier-grade physical router and a virtual one.
The first new box that HP is …
Dell tweaks Foglight virty management to control freak VDI, storage
Slaps Foglight brand on VKernel wares, sunsets vOptimizer
Quest Software ate Vizioncore and VKernel, and Dell bought Quest. Now their products have to be rationalized, so in conjunction with the launch of what would have been a rev of the VKernel Operations Suite, Dell has decided to put the Foglight brand on its server, storage, and network monitoring and management tools, and thus …
Stackdriver fluffs up cloudy management tool
It takes one to know one
Stackdriver, yet another entrant into the increasingly crowded cloud-monitoring racket, has uncloaked from stealth mode and fired off its Intelligent Monitoring tool to babysit applications running on the Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services heavenly infrastructure.
Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri formed Stackdriver in June 2012, …
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 …
