Earlier Data Center
Easy rip'n'replace storage using cheap kit? Nooooo, wail vendors
Does your storage sales rep have a haunted look yet? If they work for one of the traditional vendors, they should be concerned about their long-term prospects.
If I was working storage sales, I’d certainly be wondering about what my future holds. Of course, most salesmen look no further than the next quarter’s target, but …
Cisco nearly ready with next giant router
Cisco is reportedly close to pushing the start button on manufacturing for a router to surpass its current CRS-3 core router.
According to Light Reading, which says it's seen a Cisco document outlining the as-yet-unannounced “CTR” router, the new iron will support 1 Tbps per 10x100 Gbps ports slot. That would put the per-slot …
WD shuns flash, plonks enlarged racks on shelf
WD has extended its unified storage Sentinel range into a 1U, Atom-powered rackmount shelf, a first for WD as it enters the rackmount storage market.
Up until now, the DX4000 Sentinel was an Atom CPU-powered desktop box with between 4 and 16TB of capacity from its 4 x 3.5in HDD bays positioned one above the other.
Position …
BOFH: Go on, beancounter, type DROP TABLE asset;
Episode 4
"Don't put that there," I snap - calmly, but firmly, as a Beancounter goes to drop a chunk of IT detritus on my desk.
"What?" he asks, feigning innocence.
"That. Don't put it on my desk, it doesn't belong there."
"But it's IT equipment!" he bleats.
"It's IT crap and it doesn't belong on my desk - any more that real crap …
Drobo makes 'reductions' ahead of Connected Data merge
SME storage hardware maker Drobo, which is in merger talks with Connected Data, has laid off some of its staff, in what Connected Data CEO Geoff Barrall calls an orderly "Reduction In Force" (redundancies).
Connected Data is a private cloud startup founded by Geoff Barrall in late 2011 and staffed by some of his old colleagues …
Mellanox forges fun-sized 40Gb/sec Ethernet switch
Mellanox Technologies is trying to milk its switch-hitting, hybrid Ethernet-InfiniBand SwitchX-2 chips for every dollar possible, and has just cooked up a baby switch that can run at 40Gb/sec or 56Gb/sec using the Ethernet protocol.
The SX1012 is a half-width switch that has a dozen ports in a 1U rack form factor, which means …
Rackspace floats virty router and firewall into its clouds
Moving to clouds should mean breaking free of all kinds of specific hardware devices and running as much software as possible on generic virtual machines – which is why Rackspace Hosting is partnering with Brocade Communications to bring its Vyatta vRouter software to its public and private clouds.
Brocade has been gradually …
Virtual machine high availability and disaster recovery
On the 18th of June at 10:00BST we're firing up our own Tim Phillips and QA’s Paul Gregory to dive into another feature of Windows Server 2012: using Hyper-V 3.0 to increase the availability of Virtual Machines.
During the hour we will show how the changes in failover clustering and the improvements in scalability, in the …
The good and the bad in Hyper-V's PowerShell
As the great virtual war between Microsoft, VMware and various also-rans has rumbled on, many column inches have been devoted to Microsoft's Hyper-V Server.
You can light up a cluster of 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines if you choose, it is said. Hyper-V server is free, you don't have to pay Microsoft a dime.
That's a great …
Pure says two of the four tiers of storage are set to disappear
Pure Storage is brutally flogging its FlashArray technology, driving it faster and faster. The pace of development in flash arrays is picking up with EMC and NetApp get involved, and startups have to hustle and bustle to stay ahead.
Pure's perception of the enterprise data centre networked storage market is that we are moving …
Server racket 'challenging' in Q1, says IDC
It is not a fun time to be peddling servers, but it is probably a great time to be buying them, according to the box-counting wizards at IDC.
Both server revenues and shipments were down in the first quarter, marking the fifth of the past six quarters where revenues took a dip. There are so many different kinds of transitions …
Cisco predicts massive data networking growth by 2017
There are three sure things in life – death, taxes, and the insatiable hunger of people for more and more bandwidth.
By 2017, over 1.4 zettabytes of data will be flowing over global networks, Cisco said in its latest Visual Networking Index forecast, which it released on Wednesday. The annual survey predicted faster broadband …
China rumored to rule impending Top500 supers list with 50-plus petaflopper
It looks like China is getting ready to scare the wits out of – or maybe some life into – the US and European supercomputing establishments and their sugardaddy governments once again by taking the top slot in the June rankings of the Top500 supercomputers in the world. And this time, it will be with an all-Intel ceepie-phibie …
Cisco gobbles cloud power meter biz JouleX for $107m
The cash-laden and ever-acquisitive Cisco Systems is at it again, and has snapped up JouleX, which has created a set of cloudy software tools to monitor and manage power consumption in the data center.
Cisco is shelling out $107m to acquire JouleX, and said in a statement that this price included cash and retention-based …
CIA's sugar daddies shovel MEELLLIONS into Pure Storage
All-flash array upstart Pure Storage has received the blessing of the CIA after the spooks' venture capital arm In-Q-Tel made an investment in the firm.
In-Q-Tel is based in Arlington, Virginia, and was created in 1999 as a non-profit organisation. It invests in companies offering technology that could help the intelligence …
Beam us up! Upstart's Transporter whisks small biz from cloud madness
Connected Data has launched its cloud-free Transporter storage box in Europe. A second-generation version is due to go on sale in the US.
The upstart hardware maker, which yesterday announced a merger with file storage firm Drobo, is betting that not everyone is keen on doing backup and storage over a distributed network owned …
WD's new disk-flogging brainwave will bring you close to tiers
Disk drive giant Western Digital has announced a new five-tier data centre storage strategy, with a new Se drive targeted at scale-out NAS filers and cloud storage.
The industry leader's profits have been flagging of late, so it must be looking for ways to reassure shareholders and investors that it hasn't fallen behind trends …
No Dell, no EMC? Well, HP's storage champ then
A HP 3PAR system is top of the storage heap in the SPC-1 benchmarks for storage systems costing less than $200,000 and also achieved a top price/performance ranking. Of course, many of the big boys failed to make a showing, so we're not sure how valuable the crown is.
Out of all systems submitted to the Storage Performance …
Raspberry Pi puts holes in China's Great Firewall
A tech-savvy China-based Redditor has spotted a hassle-free way of ensuring he or she is always able to bypass the Great Firewall, even when out and about, using the Raspberry Pi to connect to a virtual private network (VPN).
VPNs are a necessity for foreigners living in the People’s Republic who want to access sites prohibited …
AMD takes on Atom S server chips with 'Kyoto' Opteron Xs
Given its full name, Advanced Micro Devices should be dominating in microservers, those densely packed, wimpy-cored machines that are good for all kinds of data center jobs. And with the launch of its "Kyoto" Opteron X processors, AMD is hoping to get the jump on Intel and its Atom S1200 Series chips, also aimed at microservers …
Savvis summons swarm of data centers
Enterprise cloud and colocation provider Savvis is going to build two new data centers and add racks in eight existing facilities around the world as the company tries to skim money off the rising tide of data that people want to store.
The buildout of the VMware-friendly infrastructrue was announced by the CenturyLink-owned …
How God and übergeek Ron Crane saved 3Com's bacon
Ethernet Summit Over 30 years ago, the company formed by Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, 3Com Corporation, was teetering on bankruptcy. What saved it was the monomaniacal perfectionism of one engineer, and his refusal to ship the company's most important product until he was damn well good and ready.
At the Ethernet Innovation Summit last …
ODMs and DIYs chomp x86 server racket
If the server market is an indicator of the health – or lack thereof – of the global economy, then we're not quite out of the woods of the Great Recession, despite the exuberance on the global stock markets.
According to the box counters at Gartner, server revenue worldwide were down 5 points to $11.83bn in the first quarter …
Transporter upstart Connected Data could will merge with Drobo
Updated Connected Data - the peer-to-peer, cloud-free, file sync 'n share Transporter-maker startup - could buy* Drobo, the supplier of the eponymous and absurdly easy to use protected file-storage devices. Both companies were founded by Geoff Barrall and he is currrently the CEO of Connected Data.
Barrall also founded Drobo, whose …
SoftLayer sticks with Super Micro servers, ponders Open Compute
Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are in a class all by themselves when it comes to the size and scope of their data center infrastructure, but hosting and cloud provider SoftLayer is no slouch, either. The company has created its own control freak and is not about to reflexively jump on the OpenStack or Open …
Missed the Hyper V Virtual machine migration training?
Free training Last week we had a record-breaking number of readers, more than 1,800, tune in to enjoy our free live training offer - delivered with aplomb by QA's Paul Gregory and our own Tim Phillips. Today you can watch the recorded version - all the fun, but with no live Q&A, obviously.
The virtual machine migration options have completely …
HP, Dell stack up back-end iron for XenDesktop 7 virty PCs
Companies whose staffers work from tablets and smartphones don't have to buy Microsoft's Surface tablets or Windows Phones to enable them to use the firm's Windows applications.
Businesses can instead slice up a bunch of servers into virtual PCs and stream them out to workers' fondleslabs or smartphones using either VMware View …
HP's plunging storage revenues could yet be saved
The good ship HP is being held back by many things and storage ain't helping, yet. The one brightspot there - 3PAR - can't overcome plunging revenues elsewhere.
The company reported its second quarter of its financial 2013 revenues yesterday. Within the overall Enterprise Group, the storage segment declined 13 per cent year-on- …
CloudEthernet Forum formed to scale networks into virtual age
Nine of the majors in the Ethernet market have joined up to create the CloudEthernet Forum which they say will help the venerable networking protocol adapt to the challenges of large-scale cloud services.
The forum is being spun out of the Metro Ethernet Forum – MEF – with the initial cabal comprising Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, …
Fibre boosters trip the light fantastic with 800G BPS LINKS
It's been quite a weekend for fans of fast fibre, with Ciena and BT demonstrating 800 Gbps superchannels, and Bell Labs offering a glimpse of higher speed submarine cables.
Announcing the deployment at BT, Ciena noted that while laboratory speeds are far faster than 800 Gbps, the UK deployment covered an already-deployed 410 km …
Industry execs: Network admins an endangered species
Ethernet Summit If you are a network administrator, be aware that there are a lot of industry movers and shakers who want to put you out of a job.
Mike Banic, marketing VP for HP's networking division, exemplified that goal when speaking on a panel at the Ethernet Innovation Summit, held this week in Mountain View, California, to celebrate …
Hey, you, dev. What do you mean, storage is BORING?
Storagebod Many years ago, as an entry-level systems programmer, I decided there were two teams that I was never going to join: the test team and the storage team - because they were boring.*
A fellow blogger has a habit of referring to storage as snorage and I suspect that is the attitude of many. So why do I keep doing storage?
Well, …
The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings
Episode 3
"I just need you to go through it for me once," the user whines down the line at me.
"You mean once more?" I reply.
"Once more?" he snivels.
"Yes, as I already went through this with you a few weeks ago. You said you understood, you even wrote something down."
"Really - are you sure that was me?"
"Positive."
"How can you …
Grim outlook for Big Storage as revenues dip across board
Mainstream storage vendors seem to be in trouble as Dell, HP and IBM's storage revenues have tanked over the past two years.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers created a spreadsheet comparing his records of how these vendors' storage revenues changed quarter by quarter. El Reg's storage desk charted the numbers:
Vendor …
Oz shared services collapse looks bad for NetApp
Opponents of shared IT services in government have a new case study they can point to, and NetApp's busy executives have another tricky item to consider after a major Australian shared services organisation failed.
That agency is CenITex, created in 2008 by the government of Australian state Victoria. CenITex's original vision …
Joyent cuts prices on cloudy infrastructure
Joyent, one of the upstart cloudy infrastructure providers that is taking a custom software stack to market to peddle virty server and storage, has done a major revamp of the way it carves up slices on its Joyent Compute Service cloud.
With the rejiggering of its cloud, Joyent is not only cutting prices, it is also forging …
Internet2 superfast-boffinry network peers with Azure cloud
Ultra-fast US academic network Internet2 is going to peer with Microsoft's cloud to give researchers from over 200 institutions high-speed reliable access to Azure at a discounted rate.
The peering arrangement with Microsoft was announced on Thursday and will initially see Internet2's 220 plus member institutions gain "enhanced …
Google slashes App Engine NoSQL data storage prices by 25 per cent
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 …
Samsung flogs slim, flashy new model: Protection included
Samsung has upgraded its SM843 server-level SSD, doubling its capacity and tripling its endurance.
The new SM843T SSD also has power-loss protection for the most recent data and AES-256 bit encryption.
This is a 2.5in form factor SSD using 2-bit MLC flash. As server and data centre SSDs, the SM843 has capacities of 120GB, 240GB …
What's that Dell? You're out? HDS punts pay-per-use cloud storage
Hitachi Data Services will begin offering pay-per-use cloud storage services to its customers and for use by service providers to build their own services as part of its Cloud Service Provider programme.
This move by HDS comes as Dell withdraws from public cloud services and after its cancellation of its DX6000 object storage …
Backup bods Veeam quietly gobbling up ever-greater market share
Backup software supplier Veeam is quietly doing extraordinary things; it's growing its backup business while touting their latest software as a means to continue growing its market share.
Veeam is privately-owned and focusses on virtual machine backup. It has no venture capital funding as far as we can tell. Despite that, it's …
Citrix halfway to Avalon with XenDesktop 7 desktop and app virtualizer
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 …
