Earlier Servers
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 …
ARM server hype ramps faster than ARM server chips
Analysis If I didn't have to man El Reg's systems desk for a paycheck and had a little venture capital to blow, I might start a company called Leg Systems, headquartered on the Isle of Man – not because of its tax haven status (which is eroding), but because my company would sell ARM-based systems and say that we wouldn't charge an arm …
AWS stops some EC2 servers without warning
If you’re thinking about heading to the cloud for über-reliability and an environment in which anything that happens to hardware is someone else’s problem, think again: Amazon Web Services sometimes replaces the hardware virtual servers run on and switches those servers off without elegant or accurate notifications of what’s …
Ellison: Oracle will grow hardware biz soon
It is hard to watch the continuing decline in the Oracle systems business and not be concerned, but that is precisely what Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison wants you to do. Oracle is focusing on making the Sun businesses it has pruned (as distinct from the ones it has culled) profitable, and will worry about growth later …
AMD plunks custom Opteron into SM15000 microservers
AMD's SeaMicro microserver and fabric unit has started shipping the "Piledriver" Opteron server nodes for its new SM15000 machines, announced in September sporting quad-core "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3 processors as well as promising the then-impending Piledrivers.
At the time, AMD did not divulge what Piledriver part it would use, and …
Oracle upgrades Big Data Appliance with Xeon E5s
Database giant Oracle is trying to keep the myriad NoSQL and alternative data stores and big data munchers like Hadoop at bay by commercializing and integrating a bunch of proprietary and open source software onto preconfigured x86-based servers that it sells in appliance fashion. Oracle has not talked about how well or poorly …
Dell shoots for number one in servers, adds OpenStack to public cloud
Dell World 2012 It is Dell World day two, and company founder, chairman, and CEO Michael Dell took the stage a half-hour late to talk, once again, about the repositioning of the company that bears his name to be a bigger player in the IT racket.
He also invited former President Bill Clinton, who spoke for what seemed like about three hours …
Dell wants to be more than your box provider
Dell World 2012 If you are sitting around bored at work and you happen to keep a bottle of whisky in your desk, I have a new drinking game for you. In fact, you better switch to beer. The game is simple: log into the keynotes at Dell World 2012, which is being hosted by Dell this week in Austin, Texas, and every time one of the top brass says " …
Intel launches Atom S Series at servers
As expected, Intel is closing out the year in the server arena with the launch of its "Centerton" Atom S Series processor, what the company's top brass is billing as the first Atom-based processor aimed at servers.
The Atom S1200, as the first generation is known, is also the foundation from which Intel will build a bulwark …
A data centre that takes care of itself? It's...the dream
On paper the benefits of data centre automation are easy to see. But we don't build data centres on paper.
That is why our Regcast on 23 January at 11:00 GMT examines how to build a data centre and maintain it throughout its life in the private cloud environment.
What, if anything, has the cloud changed? What are the costs of …
Dell tunes up servers for high freaky traders
When you run a high-frequency trading operation, milliseconds are millions of dollars lost or gained. So speed is just as important as the algorithm you come up with to make your trades. That's why supercomputer makers Appro (just eaten by Cray), Silicon Graphics, and Penguin Computing in 2010 launched special overclocked …
Is 'activestor' Icahn circling sickly HP?
Active investor Carl Icahn – who has done more than his fair share of shaking up companies that he believes are not run properly – is rumored to be mulling a stake in HP. Hopefully not through its heart.
Icahn may or may not be interested in grabbing a big piece of the venerable IT gear maker, and if he were, he certainly would …
Intel prepping Atom bombs to drop on ARM microservers
To hear Intel Fellow Matt Adiletta tell it, Chipzilla not only invented the term microserver but saw the trend towards wimpy computing coming way ahead of the all this fawning over the ARM architecture and a half-dozen upstarts wanting to take big bites out of the Xeon server processor cash cow.
When El Reg says "fawn", that's …
Red Hat pushes out RHEL 6.4 beta
A day ahead of a set of announcements around optimizing IT operations that is scheduled for Wednesday, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is rolling out the beta for its Enterprise Linux 6.X distro for servers and workstations.
The RHEL 6.4 beta previews what is coming in the next point release of the current branch of …
AMD finishes its 'Piledriver' Opteron server chip rollout
AMD has had a wrenching couple of years, and its executives are wrestling with so many transitions in the processor market and inside AMD that they are just punting out the new Opteron 4300 and 3300 CPUs for entry servers without making a fuss with the press or analyst communities.
No briefings, no fuss, no muss, here's the …
