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.HP's 'historic' Project Moonshot servers aim at hyperscale future
First Atom nodes, then ARM and others to 'change the server market'
HP didn't invent the rack-server business, but Compaq – the company it acquired more than a decade ago – did. HP can't buy its way into the next system era, which is why it is trying to create that era itself with its second-generation Project Moonshot servers.
The initial "Redstone" Moonshot boxes were development machines …
Network Goliaths and upstart Davids join in on OpenDaylight SDN project
Trying to pull a Linux maneuver for malleable networks
Linux is the dominant open-source operating system because of the strong community it has developed and the cross-platform nature of the OS. OpenStack is rapidly becoming the de facto uber-controller for infrastructure clouds, again thanks to a vibrant open-source community. And now, the established networking giants and the …
Upstart $3bn forex trader dumps Oracle JVM for Azul's Zing
A bad case of the jitters
Financial services companies were among the early and enthusiastic adopters of Java - but the jittery Java virtual machines from Oracle and IBM (and others before Oracle ate them) have been a pain for some.
Azul Systems is hoping to cash in on that grief among big banks, brokerages, high frequency traders, and others in similar …
Juniper future-proofs 'programmable' switches in Cisco battle
EX9200 40GE modular switches will ramp to 100GE later this year
Juniper networks has trotted out a new line of EX series modular Ethernet switches that will scale up to 100 Gigabit/sec links later this year – and its timing is spot on. With a resurgent Cisco Systems on its hands, Juniper Networks must work harder to get attention and peddle networking gear to the world's data centers and …
US jobs grew at slower pace in March, says gov
IT sector flatlines - who's got the defibrillator?
US employers worried about the sequester's effect on government spending didn't hire as many new workers in March as economists expected. Changes in the all-important IT sector were much less pronounced than in other industries, though.
While the unemployment rate decreased it did so for the wrong reasons, with an increase of …
HP chairman Lane yields to 'here's you hat, what's your hurry?' pressure
Two other beleaguered directors also exit, stage left
Succumbing to pressure to shake up the board of directors of HP, chairman Ray Lane is stepping down from running the board. However, he said in a statement, he will remain on the HP board – even if he doesn't run it.
Lane, a former hotshot at software giant Oracle and a managing partner at venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins …
Oracle gussies up Xsigo switching as Virtual Networking and SDN
Lashes new Sparc T5 and M5 servers to each other and storage
Oracle is ratcheting up the virtual networking wars with the relaunch of its Xsigo line of I/O director switches.
Sun Microsystems made it clear years ago that it thought the future of data center networking was InfiniBand, and Oracle has followed along on that path by investing in Mellanox Technologies, which makes InfiniBand …
OpenStack 'Grizzly' control freak puffs up clouds of vastness
Parity support across hypervisors, broader networking, other goodies
The OpenStack community is keeping faithful to its six-month spring-fall cadence for software releases: today, the world receives an OpenStack update codenamed Grizzly.
The project's update cycle allows the cloud controller to be improved at a fairly rapid clip, and is roughly in sync with upgrades for popular Linux operating …
IBM readies PureData Hadoop appliance for the summer
Bolts Big SQL query onto its BigInsights Hadoop distro
IBM wants to make it easier for companies to consume and use Hadoop, just like everyone else who is chasing that yellow elephant that likes to munch big data.
Big Blue hosted a big data shindig at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, the home of the RAMAC disk drive (really a disk drum) from 1956 and also the place where the …
ARM, TSMC tape out 64-bit Cortex-A57 chip on 16 nanometers
We have big ol' fat gates, too, Chipzilla
ARM looks set to take its high-end PC and sever chip down to 16 nanometers according to the latest tape-out, which should give it a boost against rival Chipzilla.
If the ARM collective is to compete against Intel in the server and in whatever might remain of the personal computer, then it is going to have to do more than beef up …
VMware teaches Serengeti big-data virt new Hadoop tricks
Probably shuffling off to Pivotal soon
It comes as no surprise that VMware wants companies to run everything virtually rather than on bare metal, and for several years it has pushed the idea of virtualizing the Hadoop stack to make it run better and easier to manage. The tool it created to do that, called Project Serengeti, now has some feature tweaks to try to …
Newvem enlists tech support friends to squelch AWS hiccups
No one likes AWS support – and they don't fix stuff anyway
Newvem, which has carved a niche for itself babysitting compute and storage capacity on the Amazon Web Services cloud with its Cloud Care service, is now brokering tech-support services with third parties to help get their AWS setups correctly configured and keep them that way.
Sometimes you create a new business, and sometimes …
HP fuels second-gen Moonshot servers for April 8 launch
Rocketing into the clouds and elite data centers with hyperscale iron
The next-generation of HP's "Project Moonshot" super-dense servers for hyperscale data centers, code-named "Gemini", are being prepped for their long-awaited launch next Monday.
HP has a lot a stake with Project Moonshot, not the least of which being the viability of high-volume server manufacturing for big data-center operators …
Ex-NASA OpenStackers launch Nebula cloud control freak appliance
Forget OpenStack software disties, says OpenStack co-founder Kemp
Chris Kemp, the former NASA CTO who helped build the wonking Nebula infrastructure cloud for the US space agency and the techie from the NASA side who spearheaded the development of OpenStack along with Rackspace Hosting, knows about as much about control-freaking clouds with OpenStack as anyone else on the planet – and that's …
World's first petaflops super dumped on scrap heap
Moore's Law, not Wile E. Coyote, brings down Roadrunner
Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break through the petaflops barrier and the first capability-class machine to demonstrate the viability of using specialized coprocessors in conjunction with processors, is having its plug pulled at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It's time to hack in and play Crysis while you still can. …
'Super' market tops $11.1bn, propped up by massive sales
But can high-end HPC keep growing like this?
The high-performance computing market did well in 2012, rising 7.7 percent to $11.1bn and by far outpacing the sluggish growth in the systems space overall. But the market is top-heavy and dominated by a relative handful of supercomputer shipments, and sales of divisional, departmental, and workgroup systems all shrank last year …
Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue
T5 takes the lead from Power and x86, Big Larry claims
Larry Ellison has launched the first mainframe-class machine that he can correctly say he made sure came to market, and now he is going to take a run at IBM's mainframe and Unix server businesses.
What's more, it looks like he will to be able to make some credible arguments as to why customers running Oracle software – and …
Oracle's new T5 Sparcs boost scalability in chip and chassis
Also aims brawny M4 – scratch that – M5 CPU at big-iron workloads
Oracle is launching its much-awaited Sparc T5 processors for entry and midrange servers, along with Sparc M5 processors to effectively replace the iron it currently resells from server and chip partner Fujitsu.
That Japanese supplier furnished Sun's and then Oracle's brawny-core Sparc Enterprise M midrange and big iron systems …
Oil giant Total shells out €60m for world's fastest private super
2.3 petaflops now, double that in 2015
Total Group wants to do a better job finding oil lurking in the Earth's crust, and these days that means getting more computing power to turn the jiggling of the planet into pretty 3D pictures that show where the Black Gold might be hiding. To that end, Total is paying Silicon Graphics €60m over the next four years to build the …
Dell buy: Icahn puts more cash on table than Blackstone or Mike D
Beat that if you can, Mikey baby
As El Reg expected, the deals offered separately by private equity firms Blackstone Group and Icahn Enterprises to take over IT giant Dell are not as generous as some have been arguing the company is worth. And, ironically, the company backed by activist investor Carl Icahn is offering considerably less than Icahn himself had …
Icahn and Blackstone to take separate runs at Dell
Time for Big Mike to pull an EMC and spin out Dell 2.0 cloudy biz
Those who wonder just how much Michael Dell wants to take control of the struggling IT giant that bears his name don't have long to wait.
Private equity firm Blackstone Group and activist investor Carl Icahn are both reported to have tossed in bids to take control of Dell, the company, before the "go-shop" period of the …
GE puts new Nvidia tech through its paces, ponders HPC future
GTC 2013 Hybrid CPU-GPU chips plus RDMA and PCI-Express make for screamin' iron
A top General Electric techie gave a presentation at the GPU Technology Conference this week in San José, California, and discussed the benefits of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) for InfiniBand and its companion GPUDirect method of linking GPU memories to each other across InfiniBand networks.
And just for fun, the GE tech …
Nvidia welds together ARM-Kepler ceepie-geepie system for the impatient
GTC 2013 Development board for CPU-GPU hybrid apps, or nodes in a parallel cluster perhaps
Graphics chip maker Nvidia is also an ARM processor maker, and it wants hybrid ARM-GPU chips just as much as you want them. And in the meantime, if you just can't wait, the company is working with Italian electronics manufacturer Seco to kick out another ceepie-geepie card that can be used for software development or to build a …
Nvidia gets into the server biz with Visual Computing Appliance
GTC 2013 Tier one server makers embrace Grid for their own appliances
If you want to virtualize workstations and run them on shared infrastructure, or build a giant renderfarm to make the next blockbuster movie or video game, then Nvidia has a server for you. It's called the Visual Computing Appliance, and as the name suggests, it is aimed at important workloads such as running Crysis, at least …
Nvidia to stack up DRAM on future 'Volta' GPUs
GTC 2013 Over 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth can definitely play Crysis
Nvidia wants to own an ever-increasing part of the computing racket and will be adding 3D memory stacking to its future graphics processors to make them more power-efficient and to boost their performance.
Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO at Nvidia, outlined the company's plans to used stacked DRAM on future graphics chips …
Nvidia stretches Tesla GPU coprocessors from HPC to big data
GTC 2013 'Anything a CPU can do, a GPU can do better'
Graphics chip maker Nvidia has barely begun to put a dent in the traditional high performance computing segment with its Tesla GPU coprocessors and it is already gearing up to take on new markets. The next target is big data, and as with parallel supercomputing, Nvidia is hoping to get the jump on rivals Intel and AMD, which …
Hadoop distie MapR trousers another $30m to take on big data rivals
Working towards that eventual IPO, if it isn't eaten first
MapR Technologies, one of the commercializers of the Hadoop big data muncher, has pocketed another $30m to help it ramp up its business and keep it on track for what the company hopes will be an initial public offering..
While Cloudera was out of the gate early commercializing the Hadoop big data muncher, MapR was close behind ( …
Nvidia, Continuum team up to sling Python at GPU coprocessors
GTC 2013 Teaching snakes to speak CUDA with forked tongue, but not forked code
The Tesla GPU coprocessor and its peers inside your Nvidia graphics cards will soon speak with a forked tongue. Continuum Analytics has been working with the GPU-maker to create the NumbaPro Python-to-GPU compiler.
We all call it the LAMP stack, but it should really be called LAMPPP or LAMP3 or some such because it is Linux, …
Rackspace: Why we're designing our own cloud servers
Exclusive Just what will it take to compete with Amazon and Google
Any cloud computing provider that wants to operate at scale and compete against its peers is under pressure to build some kind of custom hardware. It may, in fact, be necessary to compete at all.
That is what Rackspace, which is making the transition from website hosting to cloud systems, believes. And that's why the San Antonio …
Can VMware boost profits by expanding from data centers to clouds?
Analysis Gelsinger & Co. think so – and thus Virtzilla is born
Big cloudy startups build their infrastructure on custom – or, at the very least, cheap – iron, and they use open source software because they like to – and often need to – tweak the systems software to make their workloads hum. And that's a problem for VMware.
And it's a big problem, one that makes the company irrelevant except …
Report: EMC, IBM sniffing around hoster SoftLayer
A quick and virty hybrid cloud for VMware?
SoftLayer's public cloud business has IBM and EMC sniffing around for a reported $2bn buyout as both companies look to bolster their own networks.
IBM has made no secret of its plans to build up its cloud computing and storage business. And EMC's server virtualization and cloud controller minion VMware said earlier this week …
EMEA server market struggles to find its footing
Decline in Q4 not as bad as in Q3, at least
The austerity in Europe over the past several years is taking its toll on the server makers of the world and the companies in the region that most assuredly would love to be spending lots of dough on new software projects and the iron to support it. But they're not – and it's not just Western Europe that's putting a drag on the …
VMware NSX mashes up Nicira and homegrown network virt
Virtualizing entire data centers, including admins for systems and networks
Having let go of its aspirations to be a player higher up in the systems stack – now that application frameworks, caching software, and other elements of the business have been shuffled off to the new Pivotal group established by parent EMC – VMware is doubling down in the virtualization business, and its top brass were banging …
EMC launches its cloudy Federation with Pivotal big data spinoff
Just don't call it The Family, Wall Street tells CEO Tucci
Wall Street events can be pretty boring unless you like money and profits, but there was a moment of levity during EMC's financial analysts meeting that marked the birth of the Pivotal Initiative, the gathering up of big data and application framework assets from EMC and its virtualization minion, VMware.
Joe Tucci, EMC's CEO …
VMware and partners to build uber-vCloud to take on Amazon
Project Zephyr wasn't just whispers on the wind
Rumors have been going around since late last year that server virtualization juggernaut and cloud wannabe VMware was working on building its own infrastructure public cloud, said to be called Project Zephyr, and it turns out to be true. Mostly. Maybe.
In a financial analyst meeting held in New York by EMC, VMware's majority …
Dell, Canonical tag team on Ubuntu Server tune-up for PowerEdgies
Expanding official support from cloudy boxes to general-purpose workhorses
Enterprises don't want to just know that an operating system will run on a piece of iron, they want to know who they are entitled to yell at when it stops working properly. And that's why a new support agreement has been inked between Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Server distribution of Linux, and Dell, one …
Taiwanese giant Quanta sold one out of every seven servers last year
Exclusive 'Hyperscale serving came to us, and we own it'
Taiwanese server maker Quanta is sick of people misrepresenting or guessing about the size and might of its server business, and so it is setting the record straight. And as it turns out, Quanta has an absolutely huge and absurdly fast-growing server business that should make all of the server incumbents quake with trepidation …
Scalding clouds too hot to touch? Newvem adds heat map to AWS
Now you can see where you are wasting money and making Bezos richer
Not everyone thinks visually, but a lot of us do. And for those of us who think in pictures better than tables of data, Newvem - which has launched a set of monitoring tools for the Amazon Web Services cloud - has created a new heat map tool that rides on its cloudy service.
Newvem was founded in 2010 by Zev Laderman and Ilan …
Amazon makes EC2 stickier with default virtual private clouds
Software stacks jump across AWS regions, but still can't live migrate
The evolution of the Amazon Web Services cloud has proceeded at a steady pace since 2006, and while a number of companies have built up cloud businesses and close the gaps, Amazon keeps moving ahead. Two recent tweaks to the Amazon cloud make it that more useful, and therefore more sticky for the applications running upon it. …
Fujitsu makes Windows Server 2012 see double
Double-stuffed and clustered Primergy racker aimed at SMBs
Small and medium-sized businesses want high availability (HA) capability for their core applications, just like the largest enterprises do. But server clustering can be intimidating and expensive, so Fujitsu has rejiggered some of its Primergy hyperscale dense servers to support the clustering of Windows-based servers inside of …
Keep calm and carry on flogging: Dell soothes troops as buyout looms
Analysis Or unravels, depending on how you look at it
While IT, finance and private-equity barons plot the fate of tech giant Dell, its employees have to get on with making, selling and supporting the company's myriad products.
And in the past month, they have had to field a lot of questions from customers asking about the proposed $24.4bn leveraged buyout deal that company founder …
Ethernet switch pitch less of a b*tch as 2012 comes to a close
10GE starts to ramp and the 40GE shows some backbone
The Ethernet switch market picked up a tiny bit as last year came to a close, according to various box counters, and the prognosticators at Infonetics Research and IDC were projecting that 2013 would see stronger growth as the move to 10 Gigabit Ethernet begins in earnest in the data center and companies start contemplating …
US economy defies Fiscal Cliff, creates plenty of IT services jobs
Computer manufacturing hits the skids a bit
The US federal government's budget crisis at the end of 2012 did mess with America's economy and the jobs market in particular. But according to the latest employment report from the Department of Labor, companies were a tad more resilient in the face of the Fiscal Cliff than many had expected.
As El Reg reported a month ago, …
Cheeky Boston fires up x86-to-ARM porting cloud for server apps
Chuckles about 'ARM as a service' and AaaS all around
If you are a developer and you want to get a jump on the ARM server wave and port your applications from an x86 processor or another chip architecture – hey, the latter could happen – getting your hands on some of the nifty new server iron can be problematic. An ARM server is not exactly a volume product, and neither are …
IBM moves Power Systems manufacturing from Minnesota to Mexico
A return to Guadalajara, where the weather and supply chain are better
It is the end of an era – the minicomputer era to be precise – for the IBMers who work in the company's sprawling Rochester, Minnesota facility. Their jobs are moving to Mexico.
Big Blue had a meeting with the approximately 2,800 employees in the facility on Tuesday afternoon and told them it would cease manufacturing operations …
Heavenly networker Pertino pockets $20m to take on Cisco Meraki
Cloud Network Engine powers up for epic battle
If you want to take on Cisco Systems in the nascent cloud networking-as-a-service market, you are going to need money. Lots of money. And so plucky upstart Pertino Networks, which just uncloaked from stealth mode last month, has gathered up some new investors and hit up its existing ones to fill up its war chest.
Todd …
SGI gooses InfiniteStorage arrays with new NetApp controllers
More oomph in the brains means less disk needed in the box
Supercomputer and high-density server maker Silicon Graphics shipped over 600PB of disk capacity last year across its InfiniteStorage product line, and it is revving up its entry InfiniteStorage 5000 series to get a bigger bite of storage attachments for HPC and big data workloads that want cheap, fat, and fast disk arrays.
SGI …
Fund manager says Dell board has no skin in the buyout game
SAM wants a shareholder list, possibly for a proxy fight to kill the deal
Southeastern Asset Management (SAM), the largest shareholder of Dell outside of the company's founder, Michael Dell, is complaining about the leveraged buyout deal that was announced a month ago. And the special committee of Dell's board members has fired back, saying that the deal is fair and so is the process that is being …
Do you need to command an OpenStack cloud? Hello, Rackspace
All you'll need is OpenCenter and a dozen boxes to get going
Once you get a complex piece of software like OpenStack built, the next thing you have to do is make it easier for system administrators to use.
Then you have to integrate it with the various management tools they already have deployed in their data centers.
This is what Rackspace Hosting, one of the driving forces and probably …
Oracle revs Database Appliance to X3-2 – and nearly to Exadata
More CPU, memory, storage – and a virtualization option
If you are looking for a server appliance that is pretuned to load an Oracle database on, then Ellison & Co have a new Database Appliance X3-2 they want to introduce you to.
Not everyone needs an Exadata database cluster that can scale to petabytes of capacity, and that's why Oracle engineered the Database Appliance for small …
