Earlier Servers
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 …
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 …
