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IBM expands Penguin-loving Power server lineup
Big Blue is adding to its Linux-only Power Systems server line, including a four-socket machine based on its Power7+ processors. These PowerLinux machines have a lower cost than plain vanilla Power Systems machines that are capable of also running its AIX Unix or IBM i proprietary operating system as well as Linux.
IBM is also …
All-flash Hitachi array grabs silver in benchmark race - by a whisker
An all-flash build of Hitachi's VSP array has claimed the second-highest SPC-1 benchmark, the highest for a traditional storage array.
The SPC-1 benchmark tests the performance of storage arrays doing random read and write I/O operations typical of business-critical applications. An all-flash VSP, using Hitachi's Accelerated …
Intel wants to reconstruct whole data centers with its chips and pipes
Analysis If Intel really wanted to, it could build your entire data center infrastructure with just about all of the components necessary excepting disk drives, main memory, and operating systems for the servers, storage, and switches. And with a stretch, its Wind River Linux could probably cover that last bit.
But that is not the …
NEC tag teams with HP on high-end x86 servers
Japanese IT supplier NEC has expanded its technology alliance with HP to cover its future Project Odyssey x86 systems, and also to kick in a little help with the development and testing efforts.
That's no surprise. Like HP, NEC still has a business peddling Itanium-based servers running the HP-UX variant of Unix, but it needs to …
Microsoft pledges Linux boost for Windows Server and Center R2 duo
Microsoft has vowed Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 will be the “best” platform for running Linux in the cloud.
Microsoft shops departing from the faith and running Linux will get a “consistent” experience on a par with its beloved Windows, Redmond promised.
The software giant made the pledge to persuade cloud- …
Flash slab lab blab: NVMe-friendly PCIe spotted on HGST's cards
Blocks and Files Samsung and Micron have announced NVMe-compatible PCIe flash storage cards - and now hardware from WD subsidiary HGST has been certified as conformant to the specification.
The emergence of the three products signals that new tech spec NVMe is becoming the standard way for software to control and efficiently access PCIe- …
Dear diary, new twirling models, $630m from WD, v. good day - Seagate
Seagate has announced its 2.5-inch enterprise drive with added flash steroids is now available to all. IBM uses this hybrid disk in its System x servers.
Meanwhile, Seagate has also won $630m from rival Western Digital in a battle over allegations WD misused Seagate's trade secrets: an arbitrator awarded Seagate the nine-figure …
IBM gooses 'business class' mainframes with z12 engines
IBM's System z mainframe business has recovered somewhat after stalling and not meeting expectations in the first quarter, and Big Blue is going to try to build some momentum by shipping a new line of midrange-class mainframes that sport lower prices than the current top-end zEnterprise EC12 machines announced last summer.
The …
Intel lifts veil on future 14nm Xeon, Atom server chips
Intel owns the data center, or at least a large portion of it when it comes to servers - and wants to not only keep it that way. Chipzilla also wants big chunks of the adjacent networking and storage businesses.
The company therefore hosted a day-long shindig with press and analysts today, complete with all the top brass from …
IBM taps ex-Lenovo and services exec to run PureSystems server biz
Several weeks ago, El Reg told you that Andy Monshaw, the long-time head of IBM's Storage Systems Division and more recently the general manager of the PureSystems modular systems business, had left Big Blue. Due to the Independence Day holiday in the United States, IBM was unable to confirm Monshaw's departure, but late last …
Intel's server chip biz holds steady ahead of Ivy Bridge Xeons
Analysis You might think that Intel would have been talking a bit more excitedly about the Xeon server chip lineup when it walked through its numbers for the second quarter yesterday. Particularly with the PC business on the skids.
The workhorse "Ivy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 v2 processors are slated for launch in the third quarter and the …
Dragged-out Lenovo server deal whacks IBM's earnings for 2013?
IBM has never admitted that it has been trying to sell its System x and BladeCenter server business to Chinese PC and system maker Lenovo, which also took its venerable and usually unprofitable PC business over at the end of 2004.
But in a conference call with Wall Street analysts going over Big Blue's second quarter financial …
Oracle gooses Exalytics in-memory appliance with flash, fat DDR3 sticks
Apparently the "speed of thought" that Oracle cofounder and CEO Larry Ellison was bragging about when Big Red launched its Exalytics in-memory applianceback in October 2011 is no longer fast enough. And so Oracle is gussying it up with a memory upgrade and a flash card boost until it can get a new "Ivy Bridge-EX" version of the …
Graphical front ends for PowerShell? Here's a couple for you
Sysadmin blog For many sysadmins Hyper-V Server is an area where Microsoft's TCO and ROI documents - built around the "Hyper-V Server is free" market-speak - fails to align with reality.
If you're a PowerShell guru – or willing and able to use Windows 8 – then Hyper-V server mostly lines up with the Microsoft pitch. If you're a PowerShell …
Sysadmin Day free give away
Sysadmin blog It's that time of year again: Sysadmin Day is upon us! July 26, 2013 is the international day of recognition for all those who toil in datacenter obscurity, fighting off cyber-ninjas so that videos of my cats flow unhindered through the tubes.
As is typical, contests are popping up like weeds to attract the valuable eyeballs of …
Unisys doubles up midrange mainframes for fault tolerance
If you are "truly paranoid" about system uptime and are running the MCP operating system on a Burroughs-class, midrange-sized mainframe from Unisys, then the system maker has a new Libra 4200 that has your name on it.
Last fall, Unisys refreshed its ClearPath mainframes with Intel's Xeon E5 processors, and is getting closer and …
Chin up, Intel heads - you can still lop legs off ARM's data-centre dash
Analysis A new CEO – Brian Krzanich – and president – Renee James – have taken the helm at chip giant Intel, although they have yet to articulate a grand vision for Chipzilla for the next decade.
But it looks like we may be getting some sense of Intel's long-term plans in the data centre at an event that the company is hosting on 22 …
Brit server maker Avantek puts its back into ARM servers
Tony Lees, managing director of Avantek Computer Limited, wants to sell you your first and then your next hundred ARM servers. "This is our current plan: to take over the world with ARM," Lees tells El Reg with a laugh.
At the same time, however, Avantek is dead serious about joining the ARM army and fighting against the …
Microsoft's cloud leaves manual transmission behind
When you write technology blogs for a living you end up sitting through a lot of WebExes, watching a lot of training videos and going to a lot of conferences.
A growing trend that emerges from all these presentations is the importance of autodeployment, something that has far bigger implications than a mere installation method …
It's alive! Shared-nothing migration puts the spark into Hyper-V
Shared-nothing live migration may be the most exciting feature to emerge from Microsoft's Hyper-V 3 virtualisation push.
Shared-nothing migration is the ability to move a virtual machine from one virtual host to the another where those hosts lack mutual access to centralised storage. The "live" part means the virtual machine …
Applied Micro, Mitac show off X-Gene ARM servers
ARM server chip upstart Applied Micro Circuits is bringing its eight-core X-Gene processor to market, and has launched a server aimed at developers with Taiwanese electronics and IT gear maker Mitac International for a microserver based on the impending X-Gene chip.
Whenever you launch a new processor, particularly one with a …
Oracle tunes up Enterprise Manager control freak for 12c database
As Oracle introduces new wares on the hardware and software fronts, it has to plug Enterprise Manager into this new stuff, and so it is with the 12c Release 3 update of the control freak, which was launched concurrently with the availability of the Oracle 12c "cloud-ready" multi-tenant database management system this week. …
Oracle cranks up SuperCluster with Sparc T5 engines
Software giant and hardware playa Oracle has launched its high-end SuperCluster T5-8 "engineered system" based on its sixteen-core Sparc T5 processor.
It seems that turning in a less-than-stellar quarter ending its fiscal 2013 year inspired Oracle to make as many announcements as possible in the hope of some positive press. …
Facebook reveals TAO - the data store for its social graph
USENIX Facebook has revealed details about Tao, its multi-petabyte data store for the company's social graph.
Though Facebook's social network may have little relevance for IT pros, its internal infrastructure does, because here the social network is dealing with quantities of information so vast that it has to come up with new ways to …
At last! Virtual domain controllers just work
Virtual domain controllers (VDCs) in Server 2012 – and now 2012 R2 – are awesome.
I have used domain controllers inside virtual machines since Virtual Server 2005 and have seen them fail in every way imaginable. VDCs address all of my issues and, considering the features they bring to the table, it is flat out nuts not to use …
Puppet gooses admin tool performance with Enterprise 3.0
Back in January, system administration tool maker Puppet Labs got a $30m equity injection from VMware, and the company has put some of that money to good use with a major revamp of its commercial-grade Puppet Enterprise tool.
With Puppet Enterprise 3.0, Puppet Labs is gutting the innards of the product to make it peppier and …
Eye spy future HP Moonshot server nodes
Pics HP was at the International Super Computing 2013 conference in Leipzig, Germany, last week, showing off its ProLiant rack servers as well as the SL6500 Scalable Systems tray servers that have been used to build some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. And, with no tongue in cheek at all, HP's server geeks were also …
Rise of the Machines: How computers took over the stock market
Feature Trading used to be limited by how fast one human could shout at another and agree upon a price. Now it's limited by the speed of an electron through copper wire. This has caused, to put it mildly, some changes.
In April 2013 bombs went off at the White House and Barack Obama was injured, the Associated Press reported. The news …
Can DirectAccess take over the world?
Review Microsoft believes that DirectAccess is such a critical feature of Windows that we will soon wonder how we lived without this fundamental part of network infrastructure.
Having played with it I think Microsoft is very close to being right, but there are some bugs to work out and misconceptions to dispel.
Internet Protocol …
When Apple needs speed and security in Mac OS X, it turns to Microsoft
Storagebod I was looking through the documentation for Mavericks - the next major Mac OS X release - to find out more about the tags and other extra metadata we'll soon be able to add to our files.
The feature was mentioned during the keynote at last week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in California. It made me wonder whether …
Tosh puts slim model on a single-plate diet to create new 7mm mutant
Toshiba has put its hybrid flash-disk drive on a diet - and a new, slimmer device has emerged with just one spinning platter.
Toshiba 7mm hybrid disk drive Toshiba's 7mm hybrid disk drive
The new MQ01ABFH is a single-plate version of the existing MQ01ABDH, and is available in 320GB and 500GB capacities. The earlier two- …
Brocade: People try to put us down, talkin' 'bout my (Fibre Chan) generation
Interview Is "fifth-generation Fibre Channel" marketing-speak or a useful term?
Earlier this year the "Gen 5 Fibre Channel" term popped up from Brocade, which used it to describe 16GBit/s Fibre Channel, the computer network technology's highest available speed.
And Brocade started using the Gen 5 term around the time Cisco finally …
Nutanix trims down and fattens up server-storage halfbloods
Still not acquired after bragging two months ago of an 80 per cent sequential revenue bump and an $80m annualized run rate as it exited the first quarter, virtual server-storage appliance maker Nutanix is widening its market appeal with new low-end and high-end configurations.
The former are aimed at SMBs and remote/branch …
Sneaky Seagate slips 'world's fastest' enterprise disk mutant into the wild
Seagate has quietly built an enterprise-class 600GB hybrid drive: it combines the capacity of spinning platters with a fast flash cache of hot data.
Up until now Seagate has only delivered notebook-computer-class hybrid disks, namely the Momentus XT and the Laptop SSHD product lines. Oddly it hasn't actually formally announced …
HPC server sales spike: Buyers get chops around juicy cheap flops
ISC 2013 The plain vanilla server racket may have struggled in the first quarter, but sales of machinery aimed at high performance computing workloads -both traditional simulation workloads and new-fangled "Big Data" jobs - bucked the downward trends in the first quarter, according to the latest research from IDC.
And, not even remotely …
Shrinking iPads, Ultrabooks will lead to disk boost: WD boss
WD showed a slide at its annual summit earlier this month that described the current computing market as "very chaotic". That would be a highly relative description, given the storage giant had booked the summit into Istanbul just as a sit-in at a park in the Turkish city had escalated into a three-day battle between protesters …
AMD lifts the veil on Opteron, ARM chip plans for 2014
AMD has unfolded its server-chip roadmap for next year, and the road ahead appears to be a sensible motorway with no hair-rasing hairpin turns or unexpected switchbacks – although there is one bright shiny new vehicle on the road.
You can forgive AMD for being somewhat cautious – heck, you should congratulate them for their …
SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
IBM's lawsuit with SCO over just who owns Unix has crawled out of the grave and seems set to shuffle back into US courts.
For the uninitiated, or those who've successfully tried to forget this turgid saga, a brief summary: SCO in 2003 sued IBM for doing something nasty to bits of Unix it owned. Or felt it owned. SCO also sued …
Array slinger X-IO jumps on Windows Storage Server filly, digs in heels
Array supplier X-IO will run Windows Storage Server 2012 inside its data vaults in hope of a Redmond-assisted sales boost.
The operating system software and X-IO's Integrated Storage Element (ISE) disk box have been brought together to power the new File Storage Controller (FSC) 2200: a sealed, five-year maintenance-free …
Facebook turns on frigid Swedish ice-maidens in new data centre
If you Like this post, some of the processing that spams it all over your Facebook wall could now take place in Europe, thanks to the opening of Facebook's new data center near the Arctic circle.
The social networking giant announced on Wednesday that its 900,000 square foot facility in Lulea, Sweden, is now "handling live …
IBM to port KVM hypervisor to Power-Linux iron
IBM announced at the Red Hat Summit in Boston this Tuesday that it will support the KVM hypervisor on its PowerLinux machines to help boost its competitive position against x86 iron.
In addition, since Big Blue wants and needs to sell more Power Systems rack and tower iron as well as their brethren in the PureFlex modular system …
HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers
CEO Meg Whitman said last month that HP knew it has some competitive weakness at the low-end of its x86 server line that rivals were exploiting, and at its Discover customer and partner shindig in Las Vegas this week, the company is rolling out three new entry servers that will help the company compete better against a very …
