Earlier Datacenter
Workloads? It's not just what you do, it's where you do it...
Regcast Reg research shows that you are going to be mixing your platforms and deployment models in the future. So, the next question is, which apps and workloads run on which platforms? You have never had more choice.
Our next Regcast examines how you make those decisions.
You're constrained by resources, technology and politics, but …
How to introduce modern architectures and best practice to the data centre
We asked three experts, an analyst, a sysadmin, and a vendor consultant, to give us their views on how best to introduce major changes to data centre operations. Their contributions are below.
Tony Lock, programme director, Freeform Dynamics
It is a standing joke in IT that the answer to the question of how to arrive at the …
Cisco ports Nexus 1000V virtual switch to Microsoft's Hyper-V
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 …
Intel demos inexpensive 100Gb/sec silicon photonics chip
Intel has demoed what it says it "believes" is the world's only silicon photonics module that uses a hybrid silicon laser – a breakthrough that should allow such advances as vastly improved system-to-system interconnects in the data center.
The demo of the 100Gb/sec module was presented via a video during Intel CTO Justin …
Software defined networking works up a head of steam
Software-defined networking (SDN) represents a revolutionary tide flowing through the fusty, slow-moving halls of data-centre networking, bringing speed and dynamism to network connectivity management..
The idea that computer data network connectivity can be automatically set up to have its characteristics changed as needs …
BizNAS at the front, party at the back: Tandberg adds Dropbox to NAS crate
BizNAS is Tandberg Data's latest offering - a small business NAS box with iSCSI block access and integrated Dropbox support plus backup to removable disk.
The system, available in 1U rackmount and desktop configurations, is powered by Debian Linux running on dual-core Intel Atom processors. It boasts four drive bays and provides …
Sanbolic reveals flashy server goodness with Melio 5
That's right: storage software supplier Sanbolic is shipping server-side scale-out services supporting SSDs. But what does it mean?
Sanbolic's Melio 5 software turns a server's directly-attached flash, SSDs and HDDs into a SAN, combining multiple server's storage resources into a single resource pool.
Sanbolic says it " …
Industry upstart: You know what high-end HPC needs? More DAY-GLO
HPC blog One of the best things about industry events like the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2013) is walking around the trade show floor. It gives me a chance to talk to smaller, niche companies who don’t get the media coverage given to the titans of the high-performance computing industry. (Or to Titan the supercomputer, for that …
Oracle embraces NetApp and Cisco's FlexPod
A couple of weeks back, Gartner told The Reg that Oracle has more room for growth in virtualisation than just about any other player, perhaps including Microsoft.
That prediction looks a little sounder today, after LarryLand let it be known it has teamed up with NetApp to create an Oracle-centric of the storage vendor's FlexPods …
Oracle cuts down Big Data Appliance to make pilots cheaper
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 …
Speaking in Tech: Facebook's BETTER than Twitter ... for stalking your ex
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Facing another tedious commute home with only the dead-eyed grumblings of your fellow passengers - or the blaring radio of other motorists - for entertainment? Download this banter-packed episode of El Reg's one-and-only podcast and you could be catching up on everything …
Oracle to resell Fujitsu 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers ... worldwide
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 …
The Register guide to Windows Server 2012: Hyper-V
In February we published the The Register Guide to Windows Server 2012 as a free ebook. (You can get it here via our ebooks page.)
To date there has been about 8,000 downloads. To give you a flavour of the book, co-written by Trevor Pott and Liam Proven, we are publishing our third and final extract, about Hyper-V - but to read …
How to decide when to pass on PaaS
Most forms of cloud computing are starting to find a place in mainstream IT delivery. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), for example, is providing greater flexibility and better economy for those wanting to grab server or storage capacity from the cloud.
It might not be totally replacing other forms of infrastructure hosting …
EMC dishes up 8 times more cache to hungry Isilon PAN
EMC is adding more performance grunt to its Isilon scale-out cluster Performance Accelerator Node (PAN) by replacing it with a new box featuring eight times more level 1 cache.
The 256GB of L1 cache in the forthcoming A100 PAN means more data can be held in memory. The aggregate throughput per node is 1,100MB/sec.
It's not a …
GE shows off tank-tough tech
GTC 2013 Do you have employees who habitually bust up perfectly good tech? These are the people who have a different problem every other week, and they always say, “I don’t know what happened, it just suddenly stopped working. It’s just so weird...” Then they show you a desktop with a motherboard swimming in Coke Classic or a notebook …
HGST unveils 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs for bankers, gamers and cloud-pushers
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has slapped 12Gbit/s SAS interfaces on three solid-state drives - which it claims is a storage industry first - and they fly, with one model boasting prolonged endurance as well.
The SSD800 and SSD1000 drives store up to 800GB and 1TB respectively, using enterprise grade 2-bit multi-layer cell …
US spies' crazytech branch asks chip firm for 8-BIT-PER-CELL memory
The blue-sky researchers who work for the US intelligence branch have handed a contract to magnetic semiconductor firm Crocus Technology to develop memory that stores a whopping 8-bit-per cell memory to help keep the United States' intel secure.
IARPA, the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, has commissioned …
Two new supers go live in Oz
The Pawsey Centre in Western Australia – which among other things will carry the computational burdens of the country's contribution to the Square Kilometre Array Telescope – has begun commissioning its 69 Teraflop Sandy Bridge-based Cray machine due to go live in July 2013.
For iVec and the CSIRO (which is acting as procurement …
Intel hints at server processor plans for the rest of this year
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
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 …
Amazon widens .NET to catch Windows cloud devs
Amazon has broadened the ways in which .NET users can fiddle with its platform-as-a-service cloud AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
The expansion of the technology was announced on Tuesday and sees Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now support Amazon's enterprise-focused Virtual Private Cloud technology. It follows an announcement by Amazon last …
VMware sells off Shavlik patch management tools to LANDesk
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 …
Mutant array upstarts feast on EMC, NetApp's leavings
Blocks and Files Mainstream storage vendors have a potentially huge blind spot in their product strategy and hybrid array startups are now eating away at their customer base. Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri, specifically, appear to be benefiting at the expense of mainstream storage giants EMC and NetApp.
When the storage array mainstream met …
Damn you, world! WHY can't I have an object store on my desktop?
Storagebod Another year, another conference season sees me stuck on this side of the pond watching the press releases from afar, promising myself that I’ll watch the keynotes online - or "on demand" as people have it these days. I never find the time and have to catch up with the 140 character synopses that regularly appear on Twitter.
I …
Avere releases FXT3800 speed filer
Avere has upped its accelerated edge filer game with the FXT 3800, which is 40 per cent faster on the SPECsfs2008 benchmark than the existing FXT 3500.
FXT products started out as filer accelerators and evolved into small (or edge) filers as well, relegating existing filers to be bulk file stores with hot files served from the …
Quantum spring-cleans StorNext for file-hungry arty small biz
Storage biz Quantum had made its StorNext product suitable for small and medium-sized firms with a new metadata appliance, disk enclosure boxes and a low-end tape library.
StorNext stores files on primary arrays, in slower-access object storage arrays, or even slower access tape vaults. Its users don't need to know exactly where …
Mm.. you like RAID? Ooh, you want flash. Try this super-Hadooper
Intel is integrating an LSI PCIe flash card and RAID adapter into its new RAID SSD Cache Controllers intended for caching data from direct-attached disks on servers.
LSI Nytro MEgaRAID card LSI Nytro MegaRAID card
LSI offers its Nytro PCIe flash technology in its WarpDrive flash cards and MegaRAID adapters, in effect adding …
Fusion slips 1.6TB solid wedge into Hollywood scribblers' slots
Fusion-io has fattened up its ioFX card that plugs flash storage into a workstation's PCIe bus: performance, we're told, is up fourfold and capacity is up from 420GB to 1.6TB.
The technology allows processors to access data at flash speeds, which is very much faster than disk transfer rates. Lower-capacity cards typically act as …
'Til heftier engines come aboard, HP Moonshot only about clouds
Analysis 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, …
Boffins say flash disk demands new RAID designs
Solid state disks (SSDs) are wonderfully fast, but every time you write to them, the semiconductors involved degrade just a little, a property that means you swap them into established storage rigs at your peril.
That's the conclusion of a new paper, “Stochastic Analysis on RAID Reliability for Solid-State Drives” from a pair of …
HP's 'historic' Project Moonshot servers aim at hyperscale future
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 …
What'll we do tonight, Kieran? Same thing we do every night, Tintri....
Hybrid VM-aware array upstart Tintri is adding array-side, per-VM replication in a version 2.0 VMstore product software release, hoping to enjoy the success established storage player NetApp has had in purpose-built storage systems for virtual machines.
CEO Kieran Harty says Tintri has been having phenomenal quarters, replacing …
Everything faster than everything, boast soft flash wizards
Caching software startup VeloBit came to our notice as a provider of server flash caching software that could turn bog-standard commodity SSDs into Fusion-io-class flash caches. Now it's using its software with added tweaks to turn ordinary servers into VDI drag racers with the highest-access VDI data, like master VM images, …
Whatever happened to self-service computing?
According to Gartner's Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle for 2012, cloud computing has passed the peak of inflated expectations and is heading for the trough of disillusionment at full speed. Cloud computing didn't live up to the overblown hype.
We have to get over the disappointment before we start to rationally accept the …
HDS CTO: Man, I could just throttle our array... er, in a good way
Hitachi Data Systems has bunged primary deduplication into its network-attached storage (HNAS) kit and Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) mid-range array. That's according to the company's chief technology officer Hu Yoshida.
HNAS is the hardware-accelerated filer HDS obtained when it bought BlueArc; the system relies on programmable …
Oracle reveals strategy for internet of things
Oracle has clambered aboard the bandwagon for the internet of things, outlining a strategy for handling the torrents of data the company assumes will shortly flow from myriad smart-ish devices on the network's edge.
The strategy was outlined last week at the Mobile IT Summit, where Oracle's Peter Utzschneider, a product …
Juniper future-proofs 'programmable' switches in Cisco battle
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 …
Xyratex tight-lipped over unimpressive first quarter
Comment As expected and following on from its board caving in to Baker Street Capital Management and ousting of CEO Steve Barber, Xyratex's quarterly revenues are down 34 per cent year-on-year.
Revenues for Q1 2013, ending 28 February 2013, were $195.6m, which contrasts badly with the $295.7m reported a year ago and the $265.4m reported …
Scality proudly unveils its RING to the world
Is it possible? Could a digital media company have a single storage system for rich media libraries that covers linear archiving, non-linear play-out and scales indefinitely?
Storage biz Scality says, using its object storage-based RING for Digital Media, it is.
Digital media storage can be a heterogeneous nightmare. Take …
C-round greenbacks for Greenbytes
VDI flash array HW and SW supplier Greenbytes has snagged $7 million in C-round funding.
The funding comes from existing investors Generation Investment Management and Battery Ventures. It will be used "to continue the expansion and acceleration of global sales, marketing and partner development efforts, and for ongoing research …
Google inflates infrastructure cloud
Google has taken another step toward opening up its Amazon-competitor Google Compute Engine to the general public.
The ad-slinger announced on Thursday that anyone who is paying the company $400 a month for "Gold" support for cloud services can now try out the GCE beta.
"Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine with …
