Earlier Servers
Council techie and top reseller talk Windows Server 2012
Join us on December 7 at 11:00 GMT, when we’ll be broadcasting live from our London studio with Reg readers Chris Losch, from Newham Council, and Gary Collins, from Intercept IT. Between them, they’re going to run through a raft of real-world projects and deployment scenarios where they’ve been using and abusing Windows Server …
UK server market lifeless: Customers just want fresh, young models
The UK server market was like the surface of the Moon in Q3 - there were no signs of life.
The value of the sector plummeted 10 per cent to $430m in the three months, led by declining legacy non-x86 systems - down 22 per cent to $100m. Even x86 systems experienced a 5 per cent decline - to $330m.
Giorgio Nebuloni, IT market …
IBM's PureSystems mod boxes bust kilo-customer barrier
Every market has its own psychological barrier, and for IBM systems the magic number seems to be 1,000. As part of the recent tweaks to its PureSystems line, Big Blue brags that it now has more than 1,000 unique customers worldwide using the new boxes.
IBM did not supply any numbers regarding the volume of server nodes or racks …
IDC: A year of server revenue declines
Server unit shipments may have increased for eleven out of the past twelve quarters, but what matters more are revenues and profits – and according to IDC, the world's server makers have endured their fourth successive quarter of revenue declines in the period ending in September.
The IDC box counters reckon that 2.1 million …
Server revenues decline in the third quarter
The server racket continues to be impacted by issues throughout the global economy and intense competition between incumbent players, upstarts, and those making their own hyperscale boxes.
Shipment growth is anemic, revenues were down, and it is very likely that profits were down even further, according to the latest data.
In …
Upping your game with Windows Server 2012
Join us on December 7 at 11:00 GMT, when we’ll be broadcasting live from our London studio with Reg readers Chris Losch, from Newham Council, and Gary Collins, from Intercept IT. Between them, they’re going to run through a raft of real-world projects and deployment scenarios where they’ve been using and abusing Windows Server …
China to strut eight-core Godson-3B MIPS chip in early 2013
People talk about Moore's Law as if server chip manufacturers had to obey it like some kind of cosmic speed limit. In reality, Moore's Law is an idealized goal, and one that is increasingly difficult to attain year after year for server microprocessors.
This is made clear in the just-released schedule for next year's first big …
Applied Micro shows off X-Gene ARM server prototypes
Applied Micro Circuits is not yet shipping its first X-Gene ARM-based processor aimed at servers, and it is going to be a while yet before it can get the processors into the field. But because there is so much at stake, Applied Micro can't afford to be left out of any conversations about ARM Holding's attack on the data center. …
IBM warns mainframe shops of 2013 price hike
When your customers pay millions of dollars for your machines and then spend many tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month – and sometimes much more – on monthly license fees for your software, you can't just spring a price increase on them one day. You have to give fair warning so they can budget for the price …
10 Gigabit Ethernet still too expensive on servers
It may not be entirely clear what is holding back the x86 server racket in the most recent quarter – round up the usual suspects – but networking market watcher Dell'Oro says it knows what isn't helping as it was expected: 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
In a report casing the 10GE server adapter market it is a bit hard to figure out which …
HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 beast masters eight coprocessors
If you have decided that you want to build a grunting number-cruncher that crams a hefty number of Tesla or Xeon Phi coprocessors into a single chassis, then Hewlett-Packard wants to talk to you about the new ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server.
The new SL270s Gen8 slides into the SL6500 "scalable system" modular chassis, which makes it …
Big Blue hands bulging $4bn suitcase to partners to grease IT sales
In the hope of pumping up sales of hardware, software, and services over the next 12 months, IBM is taking $4bn of its own cash and giving it to its Global Financing arm to originate leases over the next year.
Big Blue is hoping to clear the way for enterprises of all sizes to get financing, when the banks might be a little …
Can't wait for Nvidia? Try these Italian baby ARM clusters with GPU options
Nvidia has made no secret about wanting to be a player in the supercomputer racket both on the GPU and CPU sides of a hybrid system. The company launched "Project Denver" nearly two years ago to create a Nvidia-branded chip, which will see Denver ARM processors timed to market with the future "Maxwell" GPUs two years from now. …
Dell inhales Gale Technologies to blow away cloud rivals
Texan tech titan Dell is trying to turn itself into Big Blue, just like HP, Oracle, and Cisco Systems: its data center business was the one bright spot in its dismal third quarter financials reported last night.
As we said at the end of our report that with $11.3bn in cash and equivalents in the bank, we would not be surprised …
HP forges hyperscale ProLiants aimed at big data
Big data doesn't fit in normal servers, and so HP's engineers have gone back to the whiteboards and designed a new line of hyperscale machines called the ProLiant SL4500s.
Google designed its own servers not just because it has some serious motorheads in charge, but because the boxes available from the tier one server makers did …
Red Hat to mash up KVM hypervisor and Gluster file system
Red Hat bought its way into server virtualization by acquiring Qumranet and gave the world the KVM hypervisor, commercialized as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Several years later, it bought its way into clustered file systems by eating Gluster and commercializing its eponymous file system as Red Hat Storage Server. And now …
IBM plunks Power7+ processors into Flex System servers
Big Blue has trotted out the Power7+ processors in its p260 server nodes in the Flex System modular server lineup.
Back in October, when IBM debuted the first servers to use the Power7+ processors, the company put the new 32-nanometer chips in high-end Power 770+ and Power 780+ servers, then said that it would be next year …
HP revs up Integrity, Superdomes for Itanium 9500s
Now that Intel's "Poulson" Itanium 9500 processors are out and Oracle is supporting its database on HP-UX 11i v3 running atop those processors, HP CEO Meg Whitman has two fewer things to worry about. The life of Ric Lewis, the new general manager of the Business Critical Systems division who took over that job late last week, is …
Intel to slip future Xeon E7s, Itaniums into common socket
They may be coming a little bit later than expected, but the next generation of Intel's server processors, code-named "Poulson" and sold under the Itanium 9500 brand, are out. Intel has also finally disclosed its plans to more fully converge the Itanium and Xeon server platforms, giving Itanium a more secure footing in the data …
Lenovo ships first US-designed server
Sino-American server maker Lenovo Group established its Enterprise Product Group last week to design servers for itself and for OEM partners like EMC, and now the first product designed by EPG – the ThinkServer TD330. No, it is not a funky box aimed at hyperscale data centers, but a low-cost Xeon E5 tower server aimed at SMBs. …
ARM Holdings licenses big chunk of MIPS patents
Updated ARM Holdings has helped form a consortium that has bought the rights to the majority of the patent portfolio of rival RISC chip biz MIPS Technologies. MIPS could have been a contender for clients and servers but almost certainly won't be now.
MIPS chips have a minimalist, low-power design much like the various ARM processors do …
Brocade barges into virtual networking with Vyatta buy
Brocade Communications started out lashing servers to storage, but through its acquisition of Foundry Networks four years ago it jumped into the Ethernet switch and router business. Since then, it has been driving convergence across server and storage switches, following the lead of rival Cisco Systems. But convergence is not …
AMD revs Opterons up to 6300 for fat x86 servers
Customers using big ol' fat x86 servers didn't have much to jump for joy about this year. There just isn't a lot going on. But to make things interesting, AMD is now goosing the performance of its top-end parts with the launch of its "Abu Dhabi" Opteron 6300s, which sport the "Piledriver" cores that already debuted in the FX …
Facebook joins Linaro Linux-on-ARM effort
It has been more than two years since Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments formed a non-profit software company called Linaro to help focus the disparate efforts to get Linux running well on ARM processors and system-on-chip designs. A slew of companies, some new to the ARM racket, have …
What's new in Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 – "Cloud OS" as Microsoft sometimes refers to it, and "WS2012" as we'll call it for short – is the result of the deepest and broadest developer effort in the history of Microsoft server products: 10,000 engineers working for four years. Comments from testers and early adopters have included "jaw-dropping", " …
Oracle's mighty Sparc plug fries Fujitsu, bigs up new processor
Analysis Oracle and Fujitsu may be partners when it comes to Solaris, but they are going their own separate ways when it comes to processor and system development.
A year ago, a senior Oracle bod hinted to El Reg that the new Sparc M4 processor will be produced by Oracle rather than Fujitsu, which ordinarily builds the M-series of cores …
Nationwide to perform IT equivalent of 'replacing jet engine mid-flight'
Nationwide Building Society will become the first big UK banking firm to pull its core computing functions off mainframe computers and run them on SAP servers in the next few weeks.
It's an operation that an insider described as like replacing the engine on a jet plane, mid-flight.
The launch of the five-year project is slated …
Windows Server 2012: Microsoft's other Big Push
In 1985, Commodore held the UK launch of the Amiga 1000 at the World of Commodore Show at the Novotel in Hammersmith. Twenty-seven years later, Microsoft used the same venue to host the Technical Launch of Windows Server 2012.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 UK technical launch day
The Amiga was Commodore's response to the …
AMD, Samsung must be ARMed to the teeth to oust Intel servers
Analysis Let's start with the obvious. Everyone is spoiling for a fight to end Intel's hegemony in the server processor racket. But two decades ago we backed Intel to oust that arena's ruling silicon families kicking - and the chip giant successfully invaded servers around the world. The question we now face is this: can ARM do to Intel …
Cisco stretches UCS uber-control-freak across larger clouds
Cisco's software engineers have cooked up an uber-control-freak called UCS Central to manage server profiles, templates, and settings for up to 10,000 rack or blade machines.
You can't sell customers a true cloud if your integrated control freak in your blade-network mashup only spans 160 nodes in a single management domain, and …
Guess who's still doing OK in PCs? Fujitsu, though it has troubles too
Japanese IT conglomerate Fujitsu has turned in its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2012: and the results were mixed, as has been the case for most IT suppliers wrestling with an uncertain global economy.
For the quarter ended in September, Fujitsu had total revenues of ¥1,114bn, up seven-tenths of a per cent …
ARMed warfare on the server: Intel versus AMD plus world?
Live Chat Underdog, disrupter and casualty – AMD’s been on a rollercoaster ride in its battle against Intel.
AMD rose on the strength of its 64-bit, x86-compatible server processors as Intel was penalised on Itanium; Intel re-bounded with the Xeon E5 as AMD got dragged down by IT spending cuts and problems with its Barcelona Opterons. …
ARM busts out server-to-superphone superchips
ARM TechCon ARM has rolled out a new series of processors – the Cortex-A50 Series – that it says will find their way into everything from smartphones to mega-data centers.
The beefier member of the two-chip series has already found at least one data-center home in future ARM-based Opteron server chips, as announced this Monday by AMD.
The …
AMD to partner with ARM for server CPUs by 2014
AMD and ARM have entered into a partnership that will see 64-bit ARM-based Opteron server processors appear from the Intel competitors, with release planned for 2014.
"We look to disrupt the status quo," AMD CEO Rory Read told reporters and analysts at a San Francisco briefing on Monday afternoon. "We look forward, to drive the …
Dell lends Apache ARM software efforts a hand
The hardware engineers at Dell's Data Center Solutions custom server unit have bent some metal around Calxeda's EnergyCore ARM server processors and donated a box to the Apache Software Foundation so it can tweak and tune the Apache web server as well as the Hadoop data munching stack and the Cassandra NoSQL data store to run on …
Rackspace to ride Hortonworks elephant into the clouds
Hadoop World Rackspace Hosting has spent the past two years helping craft the OpenStack cloud control freak and getting it running its public and private cloud services. And now, to get more of the IT wallet, Rackspace wants to peddle more services atop OpenStack, whether it is humming in your shop or in its own glass houses. And one of the …
MapR simplifies and extends HBase for Hadoop
Hadoop World Back before the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) came out of stealth mode in May 2011, Hadoop distie MapR Technologies didn't like the way it worked, so it rejigged it to look more like a Unix file system from the outside and beefed up its availability.
Now, MapR is taking aim at Hadoop's HBase distributed database layer, …
Penguin Computing muscles into the ARM server fray
Linux cluster supplier Penguin Computing is diving into the low-power ARM microserver racket and has tapped server chip upstart Calxeda – which has just rolled out its multiyear product roadmap for its EnergyCore processors – as its chip and interconnect supplier for its first boxes.
The new machine, called the Ultimate Data X1 …
Dell dream team fantasizes about flashy and easy infrastructure
The enterprise strategy event in San Francisco hosted by Dell on Thursday was not just a coming out party for a new line of converged systems from the Texan titan, but also a coming out party for a new executive team responsible for enterprise products.
That team includes top execs from Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, and IBM …
Teradata forges upgraded Aster, data warehouse appliances
Data warehousing and analytics pioneer Teradata has managed to keep rivals IBM, Oracle, and EMC/Greenplum at bay through product evolution and acquisitions, and is taking the wraps off upgraded versions of its eponymous data warehouse and Aster analytics appliance to keep its share of the big data turf it helped plant decades …
Enterprise servers go soft at Intel in Q3
Intel had a less than stellar performance in the third quarter, as El Reg reported yesterday, and the problem was enterprise servers as much as it was PCs.
In the quarter ended in September, overall sales were down 5.5 per cent to $13.46bn, and thanks to a spike in research and development spending, net income was down 14.3 per …
Calxeda plots server dominance with ARM SoCs
ARM server chip upstart Calxeda just bagged $55m in funding last week, and now we know what the company is going to do with the dough: plot a steady course to boost the performance of its ARM processors and the scalability of its on-die integrate Layer 2 distribute switch fabric until there is no reason to buy an x86 server chip …
