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VMware sucks server and app logs into vCenter control freak
Server virtualization juggernaut and cloud builder and parts supplier VMware is bolting more capabilities onto its vCenter management tools with the launch of a new module called Log Insight.
As the name suggests, vCenter Log Insight is designed to ingest and analyze the operational data that is generated by servers, storage …
Which big rack should you splash out on at ISC’13?
HPC blog What would you get if you combined the World Cup and March Madness with computer science and HPC? You'd have yourself a cluster-building competition for students, and that’s exactly what’s on the docket beginning 17 June.
The venue is International Supercomputing Conference 2013 (ISC'13) in Leipzig, Germany, where we’ll see …
Google boasts of app tuning prowess on 'warehouse scale clusters'
The hot-shot techies at Google are schooling IT shops once again, and this time the company is discussing some tuning and testing it has done to boost the performance of its applications running on multiprocessor servers with non-uniform memory access (NUMA) clustering to lash together two or four processors together into a …
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Security researchers are complaining about collateral damage from the latest botnet take-down efforts by Microsoft and its partners.
The Windows 8 giant worked with financial service organisations, other technology firms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disrupt more than a thousand botnets.
The botnets in question …
Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard
Digital Compaq HP has announced the end of support for various flavours of OpenVMS, the ancient but trustworthy server operating system whose creator went on to build Windows NT.
OpenVMS started out as VAX/VMS on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minicomputers, then later was ported to DEC's fast Alpha RISC chips – before the …
Facebook's first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD
Facebook's first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.
Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a "humidity event" within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network's infrastructure king …
Lenovo sets sights on server, storage incumbents
Chinese PC maker and server and storage wannabe Lenovo Group has an appetite to buy itself some market share in the systems racket, say the company's top brass. In fact, it wants to double its market share in this space.
That seems like a less ambitious goal than acquiring IBM's System x and BladeCenter x86-based server business …
Students outraged: Computer refuses to do any work for entire week
Computer systems at UCAS - the UK's clearinghouse for university places - has been down since the start of this week, preventing students from confirming their admissions to uni courses online.
“We are currently experiencing some technical issues with our IT systems. Students who have already applied will find that they are not …
Live Reg TV: We tour Server 2012's Hyper-V 3 and high availability
Hands-on On 18 June at 10:00 BST we've got our Tim Phillips and QA’s Paul Gregory diving into another feature of Windows Server 2012: using Hyper-V 3.0 to increase the availability of virtual machines.
During the hour we will run through the improvements to system scalability, the failover cluster engine's ability to perform in-guest …
Calxeda lines up ODM partners for EnergyCore ARM server chips
Computex Upstart ARM server chip maker Calxeda has lined up three new ODM partners to make web servers and storage servers using its 32-bit, quad-core EnergyCore processors.
Calxeda says the fact that Gigabyte, Foxconn, and Aaeon have lined up to use the current 32-bit parts in machines they have crafted proves there is demand. Data …
AMD chalks up Opteron X design win on HP Moonshot hyperscale system
Hewlett-Packard is making no promises about when it will be delivered, but the company is showing off a multiple-node server cartridge for its "Redstone" Moonshot 1500 chassis using the "Kyoto" Opteron X processor from Advanced Micro Devices.
More precisely, Andrew Feldman, general manager of the server business unit at AMD, has …
Let's get graphical with Hyper-V
Review We recently had a good look at what it takes to get a Hyper-V failover cluster up and running using PowerShell. It isn't quite as scary as it is often made out to be, but like many command line interfaces it is the stuff of laminated cheat sheets for administrators who don't use those commands every day.
The alternative is to …
Oracle and Dell forge worldwide server alliance
Dell and Oracle are teaming up on x86 servers, and Dell is set to develop a new "infrastructure offering" specifically for Oracle's database software.
In other words, if you were planning on buying one of Oracle's standalone servers rather than a bundled system, you might want to think twice.
The worldwide alliance was …
Dell rejigs Active System stacks, wraps up HPC cluster for life sciences
Dell is finally getting around to updating its vStart virtual machine stacks, converting them to Active Infrastructure converged systems while at the same time cooking up a new stack aimed specifically at high performance computing customers.
They go by many names, but rack-level preconfigured systems with servers, storage, and …
Dell crams baby small-biz data center into a tower chassis
It is refreshing to see that someone pays attention in the server racket. It is also annoying that it has taken a top-tier server maker so long to get a true system out the door that is suitable for small and midrange businesses. But Dell may have finally done it with its PowerEdge VRTX.
A typical branch or SMB data closet A …
Haswell Xeons bring brawn to microservers, media servers, more
Computex There are a lot of different ways that Intel could have deployed its 22-nanometer wafer-baking process to cook up the "Haswell" variants of the Xeon E3-1200 v3 processors, but the tactic they chose was to bring the low-power benefits inherent in the Haswell design to bear for entry servers, workstations, and the emerging media- …
PowerShell daddy on Windows Server 2012 R2: Cloudy cloud cloud
TechEd “We don’t spend much time on our virtualisation competitors any more. We’ve moved beyond that,” said Jeffrey Snover, Windows Server and System Center Lead Architect, at a press preview of Windows Server 2012 R2.
“How many of you ever paid for a sorting library? Memory managers? TCP stacks? Now you just get it in the operating …
Microsoft opens kimono on Server 2012 R2 at steamy Orleans bash
TechEd Microsoft is hosting its annual TechEd developer and partner conference in a sticky* New Orleans this week, with a coming out party for the refresh of the Windows Server stack due later this year.
In the opening keynote on Monday, Redmond will be showing off Windows Server 2012 R2, an update to the flagship server operating …
EVE Online OFFLINE: Wannabe Capt Kirks clobbered in cluster-ruck
Updated Multiplayer spaceship game EVE Online has taken its systems offline after it was warped out of shape by a debilitating denial-of-service attack.
In a statement on Facebook, its developers at CCP Games explained that it disconnected its server cluster from the internet as a precaution while it reviewed the integrity and defences …
The good and the bad in Hyper-V's PowerShell
As the great virtual war between Microsoft, VMware and various also-rans has rumbled on, many column inches have been devoted to Microsoft's Hyper-V Server.
You can light up a cluster of 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines if you choose, it is said. Hyper-V server is free, you don't have to pay Microsoft a dime.
That's a great …
Server racket 'challenging' in Q1, says IDC
It is not a fun time to be peddling servers, but it is probably a great time to be buying them, according to the box-counting wizards at IDC.
Both server revenues and shipments were down in the first quarter, marking the fifth of the past six quarters where revenues took a dip. There are so many different kinds of transitions …
AMD takes on Atom S server chips with 'Kyoto' Opteron Xs
Given its full name, Advanced Micro Devices should be dominating in microservers, those densely packed, wimpy-cored machines that are good for all kinds of data center jobs. And with the launch of its "Kyoto" Opteron X processors, AMD is hoping to get the jump on Intel and its Atom S1200 Series chips, also aimed at microservers …
ODMs and DIYs chomp x86 server racket
If the server market is an indicator of the health – or lack thereof – of the global economy, then we're not quite out of the woods of the Great Recession, despite the exuberance on the global stock markets.
According to the box counters at Gartner, server revenue worldwide were down 5 points to $11.83bn in the first quarter …
SoftLayer sticks with Super Micro servers, ponders Open Compute
Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are in a class all by themselves when it comes to the size and scope of their data center infrastructure, but hosting and cloud provider SoftLayer is no slouch, either. The company has created its own control freak and is not about to reflexively jump on the OpenStack or Open …
Missed the Hyper V Virtual machine migration training?
Free training Last week we had a record-breaking number of readers, more than 1,800, tune in to enjoy our free live training offer - delivered with aplomb by QA's Paul Gregory and our own Tim Phillips. Today you can watch the recorded version - all the fun, but with no live Q&A, obviously.
The virtual machine migration options have completely …
Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS
With new CEO Brian Krzanich and new president Renée James in control of Intel, all kinds of changes are very likely in store: the chip giant wants to expand beyond its dominance in PCs (a declining market) and servers (one that is profitable but not growing very much) to other aspects of the computing landscape.
And one such …
HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs
HP has revealed a little more about its "Project Kraken" in-memory system that it is cooking up in conjunction with the engineers at SAP. It's talking about a future in which there are lots of scale-out servers like its Project Moonshot systems and big-memory systems like Kraken on the other end of the spectrum – with not as …
Financial firms start lining up for AMD Roadrunner systems
For more than a few large-scale data center operators and supercomputer centers in the world, AMD's Opteron processors are still an important part of their infrastructure. But over the past few years, as Intel has got its Xeon act together and AMD has had some issues (to put it politely) the tier-one server makers have not …
IBM to push Linux apps on Power iron in China, then elsewhere
IBM is opening a Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing, China, in the hopes of getting more local ISVs interested in its Power Systems iron and luring them away from x86-based systems. With the Power Systems business taking it on the chin in IBM's first quarter – revenues fell 32 per cent compared to a year ago – you can bet …
Intel Centerton server-class Atoms: How low can you go?
Review In late 2012 Intel launched Centerton: the first in its new line of Atom-based server processors. Hoping to cut ARM's invasion of the data centre off at the pass, these low-power CPUs are targeted at an emerging "Metal as a Service" movement that sees a return of unique workloads to individual processors.
I've finally gotten my …
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 …
