Earlier Servers
Dell gooses HANA appliances, loads up SAP Business Suite
Enterprise application software powerhouse SAP is beside itself with glee that its HANA in-memory database is driving more business than expected, and server makers like Dell, which are building appliances that meet the very strict – and unmalleable – configurations prescribed to run HANA, are hoping that this turns into a …
Integration gets back on track with the vertical stack
What is the role of integrated stacks, in which compute, networking, storage and management are vertically integrated? And how do you avoid vendor lock-in?
Let's get the discussion started with three expert submissions, one from an analyst, one from an IT practitioner and one from a vendor. And tell us what you think in the …
Japan begins planning exascale super
Japan is plotting its return to global supercomputing dominance, with its science ministry seekings funds to design the successor to its K supercomputer, to be completed by 2020.
According to The Asahi Shumbun, the new project aims to create a super with 100 times the processing capacity of the Fujitsu-Riken Research Institute- …
ScaleMP: Use RAM plus vSMP, not flash, to boost server performance
There are hypervisors that chop a single server into virtual bits, and other hypervisors that take multiple servers and make them look like one big virtual one. ScaleMP's vSMP hypervisor is the latter kind, and can be used to create a shared memory x86-based system that runs Linux that would normally require special processors …
Penguin Computing to make Open Compute servers
Linux server and cluster maker Penguin Computing is a member of the Open Compute Project started by Facebook to create open source data center gear, and now it is an official "solution provider".
This means that Penguin now has OCP's official blessing to make and sell integrated systems based on the motherboard and system …
Fujitsu Integrated Systems stack up servers, storage, and switches
Japanese IT giant Fujitsu will roll out a bounty of new – and, of course, cloudy – hardware and software offerings next week at its annual customer and partner confab in Tokyo.
Fujitsu was the first and only Microsoft Azure partner that got a public cloud puffed up based on the Windows stack and its own iron that is compatible …
Nutanix getting traction with server-storage hybrids
The road to the present is littered with the rusty hulks of server companies that had great engineering and a new twist on an old systems idea, and yet were crushed by incumbents. But judging by its numbers for the past year and a half, upstart Nutanix – which is peddling a virtualized server cluster with a virtualized SAN …
Report: IBM, Lenovo x86 server deal hits the skids
Only late last week, the scuttlebutt was that IBM and Lenovo Group were moving along at a rapid pace so Big Blue could offload all or part of its System x x86 server business to the Chinese builder. Now, the latest word is that the deal has stalled as the two companies are haggling about the price.
The first rumors about a …
Lenovo deal to buy IBM x86 server biz moving along fast
It is becoming increasingly clear that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is annoyed with the performance of the company's systems business. Annoyed enough to spin off all or part of its System x server business to China's Lenovo Group, according to rumors that surfaced last week.
The US channel trade rag CRN broke the story of an impending …
Appliances are the new data centre onesie
It has been a fun and very profitable couple of decades for upstart IT server and systems software makers.
They have thrown new server technologies at venerable mainframe and minicomputer systems and blasted the data centre into a thousand shiny metal bits. Then they lashed it all together with networks running distributed …
Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?
Sysadmin Blog How should we design the servers and end-user computers of the future?
The construction of my testlab has given me the opportunity to play with technologies I normally wouldn't be able to get my hands on. The "advanced" features in them – standard fare by now for large enterprises – have caused a measure of introspection …
IBM selling x86 server business to Lenovo?
There are rumors swirling around, again, that IBM is looking to sell off all or a portion of its x86 server business to Chinese PC maker and server partner Lenovo Group.
US channel mag CRN caught wind of something going down between IBM and Lenovo on Thursday and referenced an anonymous source with knowledge of the talks now …
Big Blue misses Q1 targets big-time thanks to systems shortfall
Big Blue did not turn in the numbers that it expected in the first quarter thanks to more than $400m in mainframe systems, related software, and intellectual property licensing deals that rolled over into the second quarter. In the quarter ended in March, revenues were off 5.1 per cent, to $23.41bn, and net income fell by 1.1 …
Data centers can't save Intel's first quarter
The "Sandy Bridge" Xeon E5 replacement ramp for servers is nearly a year old now and clearly hit its stride in the first quarter for Intel, which turned in some pretty sad figures for its PC chip and chipset business. It is a pity that the Data Center and Connected Systems business was not already twice as large, as Intel hopes …
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 …
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 …
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 …
'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, …
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 …
ARM, TSMC tape out 64-bit Cortex-A57 chip on 16 nanometers
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 …
HP fuels second-gen Moonshot servers for April 8 launch
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 …
Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue
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
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 …
Nvidia gets into the server biz with Visual Computing Appliance
GTC 2013 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 …
Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?
Update The word “cloud” has become horribly over-used. Your correspondent has even heard hosted PABXs referred to as “cloud telephony”.
There's far worse abuse of the language going on among those attempting to describe highly virtualised and/or abstracted server fleets straddling on-premises servers and servers resident in third-party …
Reg readers reveal MIGHTY DOMESTIC DATA CENTRES
A few weeks back VMware’s Mike Laverick told this hack about his home lab and how he used it to further his career. Plenty of you revealed your own home labs in response, so we launched the servers’n’sofas challenge to report on the very best domestic data centres.
We’ve sifted through the responses and can now bring you the …
EMEA server market struggles to find its footing
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 …
Dell, Canonical tag team on Ubuntu Server tune-up for PowerEdgies
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 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 …
Fujitsu makes Windows Server 2012 see double
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 …
Review: Supermicro FatTwin
My testlab has a new arrival: a Supermicro FatTwin™ F617R2-F73. As always when something lands in my lab, I will valiantly kick the crap out of it on behalf of El Reg's discerning readership. There are already a few different systems in my testlab - let's see how this thing stacks up.
I'd like to kick off this review by pointing …
Cheeky Boston fires up x86-to-ARM porting cloud for server apps
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 …
Oracle revs Database Appliance to X3-2 – and nearly to Exadata
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 …
TI fuels up KeyStone II ARM for HP Moonshot hyperscale servers
Hewlett-Packard is putting more ARM server processor options into its next-generation of "Project Moonshot" hyperscale servers - the latest one coming from Texas Instruments, which has been relatively quiet on the server front but plenty active in the ARM chip market at large.
In a blog post, Tim Wesselman, senior director of …
Dell pours Fluid Cache into PowerEdge servers
RNA Networks got its start doing memory clustering across multiple server nodes, but since buying the company nearly two years ago Dell has been tweaking the memory-caching engine to speed up disk accesses. Specifically, the Fluid Cache software for PowerEdge servers that Dell is finally delivering converts Express Cache solid …
Pricey mainframes, hyperscale boxes boost Q4 server sales
For the first time in five quarters, the server business saw an uptick in revenues in the final quarter of 2012, mostly thanks to burgeoning sales of dense boxes used by hyperscale web operators and a sharp appetite in IBM's mainframe shops for its new System zEnterprise EC12 boxes.
Windows and Linux boxes (about half of the …
IBM runs OLTP benchmark atop KVM hypervisor
IBM has performed benchmark tests that provide some clarity on how transaction processing will perform in real-world virtualized environments – today's real world, that is.
One of the things that El Reg complained about when the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) trotted out its TPC-VMS server virtualization benchmark …
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 …
