Earlier Servers
Final call – free Hyper V training
When we do our broadcasts we’re often asked if we can show you how to use the abilities that our experts describe. So, tomorrow at 11:00 BST we’ve got 60 minutes of live training on how to take advantage of the improvements and new features of virtual machine migration with Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows Server 2012.
We’re teaming up …
ARM servers: From li'l Acorns big data center disruptions grow
The ARM collective doesn't just want to get into the data center. It wants to utterly transform it and help companies "manage down the legacy" of existing systems, as Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth put it during a live chat hosted by ARM Holdings to close out the Mobile World Congress extravaganza in Barcelona on Thursday.
"I …
One titsup server kills Brit-hosted Donhost websites for THREE DAYS
A fault in just one server at Brit web hosting biz Donhost took out thousands of websites and emails for more than three days.
The service slowly found its feet again on Wednesday afternoon after the company officially confirmed it fell over on Monday at 7am. Affected customers posting in a help forum put the start of the …
First, servers were DEEP-FRIED... now, boffins bring you WET ones
We've seen quite a few innovative engineers who have tried to bring down data centre cooling costs, including this mad crowd who dunked theirs in a deep fryer... Now boffins at Leeds University and British start-up Icetope have invented a super cooling liquid that could create a new generation of "wet servers". They say it could …
The server racket recovers from the Great Recession
Sales and shipments of servers are both approaching levels seen in the run-up ahead of the Great Recession in late 2007.
This was thanks in large part to the voracious appetite for iron of hyperscale data center operators such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and despite cautious investments by enterprises outside of the cloudy …
IBM skips BladeCenter chassis with Power7+ rollout
Even before IBM launched its Power7+ entry and midrange servers in early February, El Reg told you that it was suspicious, although not yet alarming, that no rumors were going around that Big Blue was working on Power7+ kickers to its PS7XX series of blade servers for its BladeCenter enclosures.
Well, it looks like the Power …
Unisys re-ups $650m deal to look after US taxman's big iron
National tax collection agencies were among the first organizations in the world to use IBM, Sperry, Burroughs, and other mainframes, and despite all the grumbling and grousing over the high costs of these venerable box, they have invested a fortune in COBOL applications and it is not so easy to ditch the mainframe as it might …
VCE collective takes integrated systems battle down to the midrange
It is safe to say that the effort by Cisco Systems to break into the server racket with its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers nearly four years ago has succeeded much more than its rivals in the business had expected.
And the Virtual Computer Environment partnership between Cisco, storage juggernaut EMC, and its …
Chinese search engine giant Baidu forges ARM servers
Chip maker Marvell has notched up its third public design win for an ARM server, this one at Baidu, one of the two big search engine giants in China.
Avi Liebermensch, manager of server products at the maker of ARM processors and other kinds of chips, tells El Reg that the Baidu server is based on the company's Armada XP MV78460 …
HP cranks up bandwidth on BladeSystem sheaths, adds pretty platinum stripe
When Hewlett-Packard launched the BladeSystem blade enclosures nearly seven years ago alongside its "blade everything" strategy, no one but Google was doing custom, high-density machines and it looked like blade servers would be the corporate platform of choice. And so HP built the c7000 chassis, and its smaller "Shorty" c3000 …
Tilera etches '*ss-kicking' 72-core system-on-chip for network gear
It is not just difficult to design and manufacture a chip for workloads that will be run many years in the future, it is damned near impossible. This is because so many shifting alternative technologies will materialize between the time you make your plan and when it is executed. Any chipmaker has to be both flexible and patient …
IBM forges Power7+ PureApplication appliance
IBM hosted a briefing earlier this week to talk about some new members of its PureSystems offerings, but only one of the lineup they introduced was truly new – and it took The Reg a couple of days of digging to uncover pricing information.
The "Troy" Flex System modular servers from Big Blue and their PureSystems stacks for …
LIVE NOW: Never mind Windows 8, speak your brains on Server 2012
Live Chat Windows Server 2012 was part of a Microsoft launch wave that included Windows 8 and Office 2013.
While the benefits of the latter two are debatable, on server Microsoft has delivered a solid performer that’s completely surpassed Windows Server 2008 and deserves attention. Among the biggest changes are advances in Hyper-V, giving …
VMware pulls more control freakage into vSphere stack
Sometimes, it takes a bundle to make a bundle.
Like most large software companies, VMware has two different customer sets: large companies that have enterprise licensing agreements with all kinds of deals, and SMBs who buy software occasionally and who don't usually get much of a deal.
In its conference call with Wall Street …
Remember that Xeon E7-Itanium convergence? FUHGEDDABOUDIT
If you are an Itanium shop and you were hoping for a big upgrade in performance with the future "Kittson" Itanium processors around two years from now, it looks like you can forget it. It ain't gonna happen – and you can also delete from your memory the idea of a common socket for Xeons and Itaniums.
On January 31, on the …
Teradata rides big data wave in Q4, does better than expected
Systems vendor Teradata is riding the twin waves of traditional data warehousing and new-fangled big data munching, and is doing a pretty good job positioning itself to stay relevant in an increasingly Hadoopy world.
The company just turned in better numbers for the fourth quarter than Wall Street expected, but then Wall Street …
Data centers to go bonkers over microservers
Intel can't hold a press conference these days without being harangued about ARM-based servers and the potential for microservers based on low-powered processors to bite into its Xeon server-chip biz. And for good reason: there is a growing consensus that these baby servers are going to catch on because of the inherently …
Life after Cisco: I've got 99 problems but a switch ain't one
Test lab Pending network upgrades have reignited an old debate: what exactly makes a switch "good enough?" I have the opportunity to give two switches a truly thorough battering; my lab contains a Dell PowerConnect 8132F and a Supermicro SSE-X24S. Try as I might, I can't find fault with either unit.
10GBase-T, SFP+ and Fibre Optic ports …
Big Blue takes the fight to Xeons with Power7+ entry, midrange servers
The dateline for the Power7+ entry and midrange server launch says "Johannesburg, South Africa", and not just because Rod Adkins, general manager of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, is there meeting with about a hundred local CIOs. Big Blue also wanted to emphasize that its Power Systems business is doing better against X86 …
Opscode guts Chef control freak to scale it to 10,000 servers
Opscode is in a race with Puppet Labs to become a next-generation management tool, and its latest Chef product, which does configuration, change, and cloud management, is used by some of the name-brand hyperscale cloud application operators out there. As part of the launch of the Chef 11 tool, Facebook is outing itself as a …
Windows Server 2012 kicks ass: discuss
A little experiment from us: we are rounding up comments on a couple of articles - and turning them into articles. Some might call this stretching the material - social media types might call it amplification. But we think that not all of our commentards are mad - and many have very interesting insights to share. Yesterday we …
SGI not selling off NUMAlink – so forget that idea
Thanks to belt-tightening and the shifting of $50m low-margin deals out another quarter, supercomputer and dense rack server maker Silicon Graphics turned in a relatively decent second quarter of its fiscal year 2013.
Two weeks ago, when it was participating in the Needham Growth Conference, SGI released preliminary financial …
Dell control freaks its own hardware stacks, VMware and Microsoft hypervisors
The ownership of Dell, the company, may be in flux, but Dell's aspirations in the software business are clear, and with the launch of a new control freak for Dell Active Infrastructure integrated systems, Dell wants companies to use its system and hypervisor management tools instead of alternatives from hypervisor makers such as …
Speaking in Tech: 'ARM makes enterprise chips? Over my dead body!'
Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
It's another episode of El Reg's enterprise tech cast, with your hosts Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. Our special guest this week is Ian Ferguson, vice-president of Segment Marketing at ARM, who talks about the growth of the chip-design company from 12 people in …
Unisys watches ClearPath mainframe sales climb
The latest line of ClearPath mainframes from Unisys, launched in October and based on Intel's latest Xeon E5 processors, sold a bit better than expected in the final quarter of last year.
A mainframe selling better than expected is news by definition, and good news for Unisys in particular since the company's top brass has …
Three years since his Sun gobble, what hath Ellison wrought?
Analysis It is hard to believe that three whole years have passed since software giant Oracle instantly became a systems player by snapping up beleaguered Sun Microsystems for a cool $7.4bn – about $5.6bn net of Sun's cash hoard.
No one took El Reg up on our suggestion to start up a Sun clone we called Moon Macrosystems by grabbing all …
IBM fuels up more Power7+ servers for impending launch
The details are a bit sketchy, but we can smell the hydrazine and it looks like IBM is getting ready to launch the next wave of Power7+ systems.
Last week, in going over Big Blue's fourth quarter financial results, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said that it planned to roll out more Power Systems servers based on the eight-core Power7 …
Fujitsu launches 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers in Japan
Japanese IT giant and long-time Sparc partner with Sun Microsystems and now Oracle has let slip the details on its "Athena" line servers based on its own sixteen-core Sparc64-X processors, which bear the same code-name inside Fujitsu. And it looks like Oracle is going to be reselling them, too.
It is not clear if this is an …
Inspur's K1 marks China's high-end server debut
Little-known Chinese vendor Inspur has finally unveiled what it claims is the country’s first fully home-grown, high-end server.
The Inspur Tiansuo K1, which was actually showcased at IDF Beijing last year, has taken four years and 750 million yuan (£76m) to develop, according to Xinhua.
Its development was part of the “863 …
AMD to get dense about servers – but in a good way
Maybe SeaMicro, the upstart maker of low-power microservers that dragged Intel kicking and screaming into the market, should have bought AMD instead of the other way around. Or maybe after the AMD transformation is all done some years hence, it will look like that is what happened anyway so the difference will be moot.
There's …
VMware ponies up $30m for Puppet Labs partnership
VMware injected a little money into systems management software upstart Puppet Labs in its third round of funding back in November 2011. But now the server virtualization juggernaut has its hands firmly up the backside of Puppet Labs as it has become one of the bigger investors in the company after doing the fourth round of …
Rackspace to build custom servers, storage for cloud biz
Open Compute 2013 Rackspace Hosting is getting into custom server design, and it is working with manufacturing partners with the Open Compute Project to get its tweaked versions of servers, storage arrays, and racks created by Facebook to run the social network manufactured by multiple suppliers.
The hosting giant and cloud contender has made no …
Oracle reveals cloudy engineered systems
Oracle is rolling out private infrastructure as a service clouds, with capacity-on-demand (CoD) pricing, based on its various "engineered systems" setups.
Financial services organizations have very stringent – and significantly higher – capital requirements since the Great Recession. These days every million counts and any shift …
Facebook rolls out new web and database server designs
Open Compute 2013 Facebook, the company behind the founding of the Open Compute Project that is opening server, storage, rack, and data center designs, gave a sneak peek this week at some new models that it is working on and could donate to the OCP cause.
At the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara this week, Frank Frankovsky,vice president of …
Applied Micro ARM servers all over Open Compute Project
Open Compute 2013 ARM server chip upstart Applied Micro Circuits was all over the Open Compute Summit hosted by Facebook and its server and data center designing friends in Santa Clara, with several partners flashing devices based on Applied Micro's forthcoming 64-bit X-Gene ARM-based processor. Company president and CEO Paramesh Gopi also gave a …
Facebook friends bash servers, storage, and racks into bits
Open Compute 2013 When you are the company the size of Facebook, you get to dictate the terms of your server acquisitions to your vendors, and a year and a half ago, the social network did a remarkable and unselfish thing and opened up the hardware specs for its first data center and the servers that were built to run in them as the Open Compute …
AMD+friends forge 'Roadrunner' Open Compute server mobo
Open Compute 2013 Struggling server processor and chipset maker Advanced Micro Devices is getting some friendly help from the Open Compute Project, the open-source hardware effort started by Facebook in April 2011.
Or, conversely, AMD is being friendly with the Open Compute Project to try to boost sales of its latest Opteron 6300s now that the …
Dell PowerEdge boots up after Hurricane Sandy acid bath
It is not clear how many servers Hurricane Sandy wiped out, but at least one Dell PowerEdge box in the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens not only survived the flood sufficiently to allow for the company to boot up the box to get its data off, it managed to do that after being soaked in acid-laced salt water.
The server in question …
IBM scales down PureApplication cloudy boxes
If you are looking for a low-end pre-configured, automated, application-ready cloud in a box but you don't need a big behemoth of a machine, then IBM finally has a configuration of its PureApplication systems that might be appealing to you.
Everybody wants to peddle pre-configured, automated, application-ready systems. At Oracle …
First Swedish Pirate Bay server displayed by Computing Museum
The first server to host The Pirate Bay in Sweden has been cleaned up and put on display at the local Linköping Computer Museum.
"Stockholm, in the year of 2004. In the home of Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, at his parent's place, this ordinary computer is running day and night," reads an inscription on the glass side of the machine, …
IBM grafts old AIX 5.3 onto shiny new Power7+ servers
Big Blue stopped selling the venerable AIX 5.3 release of its Unix operating system nearly two years ago and pulled the plug on normal support nearly a year ago, but it lives on atop the new Power7+ servers that the company launched as 2012 came to a close.
AIX 5.3, which was probably the most popular release of AIX in the …
Stratus: Virtualization drives demand for ftServers
In some ways, server virtualization makes disaster recovery easier, less costly, and more approachable for a wider range of companies. And in others, it makes disaster recovery more important than ever because more virtual server eggs are running in a single physical server basket. No matter which way server virtualization cuts …
