Keeping servers cool is a challenge, even in a purpose-built data centre. Imagine for a moment the difficulty of doing so as part of an oil pipeline in the Australian outback, or as part of a military command post in the deserts of Afghanistan. I can tell you from experience that cooling is a serious issue even during a …

The value of enterprise management associated with modern blades has been made apparent to me. At the same time, I understand the value that "unblade" systems, such as the Supermicro Twin series or Open Compute systems, can bring. Cost, and what you plan to do with the things, are, as always, the determinant, but there are no …

Even before IBM launched its Power7+ entry and midrange servers in early February, El Reg told you that it was suspicious, although not yet alarming, that no rumors were going around that Big Blue was working on Power7+ kickers to its PS7XX series of blade servers for its BladeCenter enclosures. Well, it looks like the Power …

Ericsson is going with OpenStack, and in fact joined the consortium that is steering its development a year ago. The company and now previewing a tweaked version of OpenStack that will run on its network iron. Network equipment providers created carrier-grade versions of Unix and Linux operating systems, or worked with …

Server giant and networking player Hewlett-Packard and networking giant and server player Cisco seem to have buried the hatchet. Admittedly, it is a pretty small hatchet and they are still brandishing pikes pointed at each other's guts. But they are not fighting. That's because there are plenty of customers that have HP for …

Everybody wants to sell preconfigured virtualized servers with integrated management. Otherwise known a private infrastructure cloud. Now Oracle does too, only it calls them Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure. Presumably, this is not meant to be abbreviated to OOSFECI. At the Cloud Expo 2011 in New …

For the past several years, virtualized blade server pioneer Egenera has been making a transition from a maker of the BladeFrame blade systems to a software peddler tuning its PAN Manager software to run on other blade boxes. Egenera has finally bagged the big game, now that PAN Manager has been certified on Hewlett-Packard's …

IBM this week made good on its promise of delivering another appliance server for the blade chassis bolt-on for its System zEnterprise 196 mainframe, while also slapping some labels and new prices on the top-of-rack switches that it controls through last year's acquisition of Blade Network Technologies. IBM is also offering a …

IBM is rejiggering its hybrid mainframe-blade "system of systems" that was announced last July and that began shipping in the fall. Big Blue is also providing details of the hypervisors, networks, and operating systems that will be supported on the hybrid configuration, which marries a System zEnterprise 196 mainframe with …

Server wannabe and networking juggernaut Cisco Systems turns the crank on its Unified Fabric converged networking and Unified Computing blade and rack servers today with a new half-width blade that sports lots of memory capacity, the first in a revved lineup of Nexus switches, and virtualized server appliances to run on the …

It looks like someone didn't get the deal done in time for the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza last week. Today, server wannabe and networking giant Cisco Systems and virtualization player Citrix Systems will announce their first partnership, bundling up the XenDesktop Swiss army knife of desktop and application …

Toshiba has caught up with Samsung and launched its own 640GB notebook drive spinning at 7,200rpm. Samsung announced its SpinPoint MP4 in April. General notebook SATA drives spin at 5,400rpm, whereas the MP4 rotates at 7,200rpm, delivering faster disk I/O for high-end notebooks and gaming applications. It used the 3Gbit/s SATA …

The System z11 mainframe announcement date has been set for July 22, as expected, and Rod Adkins, general manager of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, and Steve Mills, general manager of Software Group, will host a shindig in New York debuting Big Blue's so-called "system of systems." As El Reg already reported, the System …

IBM's Systems and Technology Group finds itself at the center of controversy again, this time as it is being sued by one of its Big Blue's partners, Devon IT, for allegedly running what the thin client maker calls "a wide-spread Ponzi scheme" over a period of five years. In the complaint, which you can read here and which was …

One of the blade servers using IBM's new Power7 processors got lost in the shuffle last week. The single-socket Power Systems 701 and the dual-socket, double-wide Power Systems 702 were launched together, but there was another baby blade in a separate announcement, the Power Systems 700. While the PS701 and PS702 blades have …

IBM seems to finally be getting serious about Power-based blade servers. Today's launch of the Power Systems 701 and 702 blades, which use the new eight-core Power7 chips, offer about twice the performance of their predecessors, the JS23 and JS43 machines that were delivered using dual-core Power6+ chips last April. The use the …

IBM has killed off its QS21 two-socket Cell blade server, the second generation of Cell blades sold by IBM, which were announced in August 2007. The move comes several weeks after IBM murdered a future Cell-based blade server, the QSZ2, that would have given Nvidia's Tesla and Fermi as well as Advanced Micro Devices' FireStream …

Everybody is talking up the idea of integrated stacks these days, but some customers just won't listen. They think they can just pick and choose any technology they want, like in the old days. Take Swedish on-demand movie and TV show streaming service Voddler, which launched last July. The company put together a mix of Windows …