Earlier Data Center
Wireless mics to clear Oz 4G bands by end 2014
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has begun the groundwork for clearing wireless microphones out of the 700 MHz band, and hopes to get its new technical standard adopted by October this year.
The ACMA has issued a discussion paper (linked here) covering its plans to bump wireless mics from frequencies between 694 …
Cray cracks Oz military for super simulating silent subs
Cray has strolled off with a $AU2.27 million contract to provide a supercomputer to the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).
When installed, the machine will be used to run CFD (computation fluid dynamics) simulations for submarine design. The contract is solely for compute hardware – Cray will have to integrate …
HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers
CEO Meg Whitman said last month that HP knew it has some competitive weakness at the low-end of its x86 server line that rivals were exploiting, and at its Discover customer and partner shindig in Las Vegas this week, the company is rolling out three new entry servers that will help the company compete better against a very …
What's HP got under wraps? Looks awfully flash and tape shaped
HP Discover HP is indulging in a storage product-fest orgy at HP Discover in Las Vegas with an all-flash 3PAR, deduping VSA software, refreshed backup software, and a new tape library.
StoreServ all-flash array
HP is debuting the 3PAR StoreServe 7450, an all-flasher, with a tad more than half a million IOPS, 550,000 to be precise. We …
VMware sucks server and app logs into vCenter control freak
Server virtualization juggernaut and cloud builder and parts supplier VMware is bolting more capabilities onto its vCenter management tools with the launch of a new module called Log Insight.
As the name suggests, vCenter Log Insight is designed to ingest and analyze the operational data that is generated by servers, storage …
Buffalo herds DDR3 RAMs into DriveStation's spinning rust corrals
Storage hardware maker Buffalo has given its latest drives a hefty DDR3 RAM cache boost, putting them on par with flash memory's data access times, they claim.
The 2TB and 3TB DriveStation DDR models utilise a USB 3.0 interface. Buffalo says read speeds are up past 330MB/sec, with write speeds topping 400MB/sec. So 800MB of …
OpenStack: Is it open for business?
Live webcast Proprietary cloud threatens lock-in, higher cost and application silos. There is an alternative: OpenStack is the open source cloud operating system. Backers claim that it’s the disruptive technology that the cloud needs. but is it ready to deploy, and do you have the skills?
Don’t panic: the Reg is here to explain. Our next …
Which big rack should you splash out on at ISC’13?
HPC blog What would you get if you combined the World Cup and March Madness with computer science and HPC? You'd have yourself a cluster-building competition for students, and that’s exactly what’s on the docket beginning 17 June.
The venue is International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC'13) in Leipzig, Germany, where we’ll see …
Google boasts of app tuning prowess on 'warehouse scale clusters'
The hot-shot techies at Google are schooling IT shops once again, and this time the company is discussing some tuning and testing it has done to boost the performance of its applications running on multiprocessor servers with non-uniform memory access (NUMA) clustering to lash together two or four processors together into a …
QLogic brandishes axe over staff, seeks $20m cost savings
Some of the reasons for QLogic's ousting of its CEO have become clearer after the company issued a restructuring statement.
An undisclosed number of staff will be laid off; some engineering operations are going to be consolidated (presumably reducing overlap and costs); and the focus on product development is going to get " …
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Security researchers are complaining about collateral damage from the latest botnet take-down efforts by Microsoft and its partners.
The Windows 8 giant worked with financial service organisations, other technology firms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disrupt more than a thousand botnets.
The botnets in question …
Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard
Digital Compaq HP has announced the end of support for various flavours of OpenVMS, the ancient but trustworthy server operating system whose creator went on to build Windows NT.
OpenVMS started out as VAX/VMS on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minicomputers, then later was ported to DEC's fast Alpha RISC chips – before the …
'THINNEST EVER' spinning terabyte beauty slips out of WD fabs
WD says it is shipping the thinnest terabyte drive ever, giving thin and light notebook suppliers and users 143GB of capacity* per millimetre of drive thickness.
The WD Blue drive is 7mm thick (0.28in) and has, we understand, one or two 500GB platters inside it depending on the capacity levels offered – these range between 250GB …
Enter the Dragon: The Chinese superputer set to win the Top500 crown
The Chinese government can keep a secret probably as well as any organisation on the planet, but pride will get the best of anyone - at least some of the time.
And so it is that Xiangke Liao, the professor from the National University of Defense Technology has outed the details of the "Tianhe-2" massively parallel supercomputer …
Facebook's first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD
Facebook's first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.
Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a "humidity event" within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network's infrastructure king …
Lenovo sets sights on server, storage incumbents
Chinese PC maker and server and storage wannabe Lenovo Group has an appetite to buy itself some market share in the systems racket, say the company's top brass. In fact, it wants to double its market share in this space.
That seems like a less ambitious goal than acquiring IBM's System x and BladeCenter x86-based server business …
Presto: Facebook reveals exabyte-scale query engine
Facebook has revealed a query engine for data warehouses that blows the doors off Hive, and plans to publish it as open source this year.
The "Presto" technology is a query execution engine built for Facebook's vast data warehouse. It was announced on Thursday at a data analytics conference hosted at Facebook's HQ in Menlo Park …
Students outraged: Computer refuses to do any work for entire week
Computer systems at UCAS - the UK's clearinghouse for university places - has been down since the start of this week, preventing students from confirming their admissions to uni courses online.
“We are currently experiencing some technical issues with our IT systems. Students who have already applied will find that they are not …
Al Gore: Stop using the atmosphere as 'AN OPEN SEWER'
According to former US vice president and climate activist Al Gore, the world faces "a climate crisis of unprecedented proportions," and the data center industry can – and should – make a tremendous contribution towards averting climate-change disaster.
Speaking at Google's "How Green Is the Internet? Summit" at the company's …
Western Digital promises long hot summer of S&M products
Western Digital’s SME business will expand on its Sentinel range over the summer, as it looks to step up from the S to the M part of the market
The vendor will also refresh the Arkeia dedupe and backup software platform it bought in December and expand it in the similar direction, after completing the integration of the 17-year- …
Live Reg TV: We tour Server 2012's Hyper-V 3 and high availability
Hands-on On 18 June at 10:00 BST we've got our Tim Phillips and QA’s Paul Gregory diving into another feature of Windows Server 2012: using Hyper-V 3.0 to increase the availability of virtual machines.
During the hour we will run through the improvements to system scalability, the failover cluster engine's ability to perform in-guest …
The Cloud OS: PR fluff or tech awesomeness?
We asked three experts, an analyst, a sysadmin, and a vendor consultant, to give us their views on what, exactly, is the cloud OS, or cloud operating environment, and why would anyone need it? Their contributions are below.
Dale Vile, CEO of Freeform Dynamics
To answer this question we must consider the context. In a recent Reg …
OpenStack head unworried by Dell, IBM, reversals
Imagine for a moment that you head a large enterprise software effort and two major partners stiff you in quick succession.
First, one of those partners decides shut down a public cloud built on your software.
The second, despite public profession of mutual adoration and respect, buys a rival.
Now the reveal: the enterprise …
Big Switch Networks quits OEM-led SDN scheme
Big Switch Networks, a startup with everything to gain from adoption of its software defined networking (SDN) technology, has left an SDN group dominated by traditional OEMs who had much to lose, after the group went with Cisco's tech over Big Switch's as the base of an SDN spec.
Big Switch announced on Wednesday that it was …
Calxeda lines up ODM partners for EnergyCore ARM server chips
Computex Upstart ARM server chip maker Calxeda has lined up three new ODM partners to make web servers and storage servers using its 32-bit, quad-core EnergyCore processors.
Calxeda says the fact that Gigabyte, Foxconn, and Aaeon have lined up to use the current 32-bit parts in machines they have crafted proves there is demand. Data …
AMD chalks up Opteron X design win on HP Moonshot hyperscale system
Hewlett-Packard is making no promises about when it will be delivered, but the company is showing off a multiple-node server cartridge for its "Redstone" Moonshot 1500 chassis using the "Kyoto" Opteron X processor from Advanced Micro Devices.
More precisely, Andrew Feldman, general manager of the server business unit at AMD, has …
Dell's new Compellent will make you break down in tiers... of flash
Dell thinks its Compellent arrays will be more compelling with automated tiering extended to different types of flash, policy-driven deduplication and namespace expansion added to the filesystem, and more drives in a smaller space.
The storage boxes' new Storage Center 6.4 software can handle flash tiering and distinguish …
Let's get graphical with Hyper-V
Review We recently had a good look at what it takes to get a Hyper-V failover cluster up and running using PowerShell. It isn't quite as scary as it is often made out to be, but like many command line interfaces it is the stuff of laminated cheat sheets for administrators who don't use those commands every day.
The alternative is to …
Why SoftLayer can't lift IBM into the clouds
Comment There are only three major cloud companies, and try as it might, IBM isn't going to change that in the near-term with its acquisition of SoftLayer.
This is because the three major public clouds – Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, and Google Compute Engine – are each supported by a consumer internet giant.
These internet …
Oracle and Dell forge worldwide server alliance
Dell and Oracle are teaming up on x86 servers, and Dell is set to develop a new "infrastructure offering" specifically for Oracle's database software.
In other words, if you were planning on buying one of Oracle's standalone servers rather than a bundled system, you might want to think twice.
The worldwide alliance was …
Dell rejigs Active System stacks, wraps up HPC cluster for life sciences
Dell is finally getting around to updating its vStart virtual machine stacks, converting them to Active Infrastructure converged systems while at the same time cooking up a new stack aimed specifically at high performance computing customers.
They go by many names, but rack-level preconfigured systems with servers, storage, and …
Dell crams baby small-biz data center into a tower chassis
It is refreshing to see that someone pays attention in the server racket. It is also annoying that it has taken a top-tier server maker so long to get a true system out the door that is suitable for small and midrange businesses. But Dell may have finally done it with its PowerEdge VRTX.
A typical branch or SMB data closet A …
Whiptail whips out SME-friendly flash array
Enterprise flash array fettler Whiptail has announced a flash array for the rest of us: the WT-1100, aimed at branch offices and small/medium enterprises.
It's a diminutive 1UK rack enclosure holding up to 4TB of flash which delivers 100,000 IOPS with a latency less than 0.1msecs. The device runs the same RACERUNNER software as …
Dell's Compellent beats Isilon with 85 per cent fewer nodes
Dell has beaten a 56-node Isilon system's file-serving benchmark performance with just eight nodes - and flash file access punch.
The benchmark is the SPECsfs2008 NFS file-serving one and Dell's Compellent system achieved 494,000 IOPS with 8 nodes, each having 12 fast SLC flash drives and 120 slower MLC flash drives; an all- …
No one ever got fired for buying enterprise storage, right?
Storagebod The concept of enterprise storage - kit sold by large companies who charge very high margins for providing hardware and support services - is more or less done.
Sound like a rash statement to you? I'll explain what I mean. Pretty much all the functionality that you might expect to be put into a storage array has been done and …
Buy a new flashy sTec storage box, get a Blue Screen of ... Metro
Flash! Bang! Wallop! sTec is going into the flash-chip filer appliance business with a Windows Storage Server 2012 box - pretty much a first for any mainstream solid-state-drive (SSD) vendor - with its s3000 product.
Typically, SSD vendors supply flash components to array manufacturers. This vertical upwards integration by sTec …
South African cluster kids represent ENTIRE continent at HPC battle
HPC blog The 2013 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’13) Student Cluster Challenge (SCC) in Leipzig will be a truly global competition, with universities from Europe, China and the United States vying for HPC bragging rights and, yes, glory too.
Student teams will race their home-built clusters to see who can achieve the …
Haswell Xeons bring brawn to microservers, media servers, more
Computex There are a lot of different ways that Intel could have deployed its 22-nanometer wafer-baking process to cook up the "Haswell" variants of the Xeon E3-1200 v3 processors, but the tactic they chose was to bring the low-power benefits inherent in the Haswell design to bear for entry servers, workstations, and the emerging media- …
Petascale powerhouse cracks important HIV code
The Blue Waters petascale computer at the University of Illinois' National Centre for Supercomputing Applications is being credited with cracking part of the code of HIV – and possibly helping point the way to new treatments.
Simulations carried out on Blue Waters allowed researchers to determine the precise structure of the HIV …
EU-US nets get 100 Gbps Atlantic connection
The European educational network community is feeling pleased with itself, switching on a single 100 Gbps link across the Atlantic.
While submarine cables these days routinely have aggregate capacity in the Terabit range, this is the first time Europe's educational networks have had a single 100 Gbps link to play with. The test …
Microsoft: Our clouds don't bleed you to death
TechEd The battle in the data center a few years back was VMware's ESXi hypervisor and its vCenter console versus Microsoft's Hyper-V and cloudy add-ons to its System Center control freak. And now, the battle is moving out into the cloud.
Microsoft has deep pockets and a vast installed base of Windows Server shops to leverage: …
Oi, small biz! Attach our Syncro to your storage, says LSI
It sounds a paradox but LSI says its Syncro technology can make direct-attach storage (DAS) shareable - and it's doing just that to provide high availability for Windows Storage Server 2012.
Traditional SME and remote office/branch office (ROBO) high availability (HA) server setups have each server in a pair replicating storage …
