The Inquirer

Sun serves up quad-core Opterons

Stewart Meagher — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:02:05 GMT

Stewart Meagher the Inquirer, Friday 16 May 2008. 10:48:00

Bandwagon rolling

SUN MICROSYSTEMS has announced a slate of six enterprise servers running AMD's quad -core Opteron processors. The firm is the latest heavy-duty outfit to adpoteron the Opteron in its quad-core flavour, after scratching about waiting for it for months. The line-up now includes the new Sun Fire X4140 (pictured below), Sun Fire X4240 and the industry's only 4-socket x64 Opteron based server in a 2U form factor, the Sun Fire X4440. In addition, the Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers are now available with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. The Sun Blade X8440 and Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers should be available by the end of June 2008....

IBM springs to life, denies death of x86 line

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:24:30 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 14 May 2008. 18:18:00

Makes Chile con carne (or mincemeat) of rumours

AFTER CHASING IBM for the best part of the day trying to get the firm to comment on rumours that the company would be discontinuing its x86 servers we finally got a resposne as soon as we published the article. According to Vineeta Durani, global communications manager for system X servers, the rumours of the X86's impending doom were "100 per cent inaccurate" and "definitely false". Durani noted that the "x86 market segment is an important component of IBM's portfolio", and pointed to a recent deal with Lenovo in January of this year to sell x86 servers specifically aimed at the small business market....

IBM may discontinue its last x86 line

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:05:19 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 14 May 2008. 15:40:00

Hot Chile rumours

SOUTH AMERICAN TECH NEWS site ChileHardware (CHW) has said that IBM will be discontinuing its x86 servers. CHW claims that this information comes from an inside source at IBM, but caution that it is only a rumour. If IBM does discontinue its Series X, it will mean that the company will be abandoning its Small Enterprise business altogether, and will stop selling servers with Windows. The rumour is that by dumping the X line, IBM would be free to focus more on two of its more lucrative business segments: services and higher-level servers in the P and Z series. The INQ contacted IBM for a comment, and after being fobbed off and ignored all morning, a UK spokesman finally told us: "It's IBM's policy not to comment on rumour and speculation." Must be true then....

AMD cuts quad core power

Sylvie Barak — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:38:19 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Monday 12 May 2008. 08:24:00

Opteron drops to 55W

TROUBLED CHIP FIRM AMD this morning launched five low power quad core server processors. The company reckons manufacturers will use its chips in both rack mounted as well as blade servers. AMD's x86 Opteron HE processors runs on only 55 Watts of AC power, and comes in 2300 and 8300 product lines for two, four, and eight way rack server blades. Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager for AMD said in a press release that AMD's new quad core Opteron HE processors "were designed to help data center managers who see power consumption and virtualisation as the keys to solving their overall performance equation"....

Sun open sources Mac OS X virtualisation tool

Sylvie Barak — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:15:26 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 9 May 2008. 14:04:00

Sun, see and open sauce

SUN MICROSYSTEMS HAS unveiled a useful little update to its xVM VirtualBox, open sauce desktop virtualisation, which now has support for both Solaris and Mac OS X. The update means that Sun is now officially the first firm to have launched open source virtualisation for those particular two operating systems. Sun is seeking a niche in the big-business virtualisation market. Its Virtual Box, which was developed by German company Innotek, bought by Sun this February, can run as an application on a host operating system, allowing several guest OSs to run on top of it. The software comes in a free, open sauce version as well as in a licensed version sporting advanced features, which is also free, but only for individual use....

Bank loses server stuffed with customer records

Mark Ballard — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:27:34 GMT

Mark Ballard the Inquirer, Thursday 8 May 2008. 17:56:00

Having a rummidge around the sofa

HSBC BANK HAS lost a server from a branch in Hong Kong that contained the records of 159,000 customers. It is almost exactly a month since the bank lost a computer disc with the details of 370,000 UK life assurance customers. The admitted today that it lost a server last month, said the the Chinese Xinhua news wire. The bank had tried to keep the news quiet, it said, but local news papers got wind of the loss. The server went missing during renovation work on a branch of the bank in Kwun Tong, Kowloon. Angry customers had been closing accounts, said the Finextra news service....

AMD revamps server roadmap

Charlie Demerjian — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:39:19 GMT

Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Wednesday 7 May 2008. 19:30:00

Twelve cores and a new socket

AMD HAS RESHUFFLED its roadmap and inserted a new product line in the middle. The new chips are six-core variants of Shangahi. You all know about Barcelona, and it is followed up by Shanghai, the 45nm shrink in Q4. It brings a 6M L3 and cHT-3 to the table with a bunch of minor tweaks. The official line is a 20 per cent clock-for-clock speed improvement over Barcelona. In the same timeline, Montreal, the eight-core two-die part has shuffled off this mortal coil. The new stuff starts a year later with Istanbul, a six-core version of Shanghai. There is nothing more to say about this one, same old same old +two cores....

VMware claims the virtual world is greener

Sylvie Barak — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:50:20 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Tuesday 6 May 2008. 21:17:00

Use less more

VMWARE RECKONS IT'S doing a grand old job of making the world a greener place, noting in a back-slapping press release that by using its vitualisation products, Vmware clients are slashing their C02 emissions, and cutting costs to boot. Vmware virtualisation means punters can combine over 10 physical machines onto just one server, which reduces power consumption and therefore also cuts costs by a purported 80-90 per cent, the firm said. It reckons moving from a 1:1 application-to-server ratio to 60:1 or more could result in millions of dollars in capital and operational savings over time. The company estimates that for every server a customer virtualises, they could be cutting 7,000 kilowatt hours (kWh), or approx....

Sandisk touts virtual desktop on a stick

Paul Hales — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:00:11 GMT

Paul Hales the Inquirer, Wednesday 23 April 2008. 16:30:00

Infosec London 2008 Checkpoint Charlie

FLASH STORAGE specialist Sandisk has teamed up with interweb security giant Check Point to deliver a secure, virtual machine on a USB stick. Securing the corporate workplace is the theme being tossed around the Olympian halls of Infosec this week. If there are two buzzwords fighting off thoughts of recession in the midst of tech firms looking for margin, they are security and virtualisation. If you can serve up both, you're swaggering into the bull-pit, lining up against established adversaries and all manner of new and colourful partnerships. Take Sandisk, perhaps the biggest brand in Flash, and Checkpoint, probably the most sophisticated snoops on the internet. These two new best friends have cooked up a way of running a whole corporate network that puts a virtual desktop on a USB stick. Remote users are updated and monitored automatically, with no sensitive data stored locally. Sandisk is echoing a common call here - that all network data be stored on remote servers. If you haven't got it you can't lose it and no-one can nick it off you. Sandisk reckons it takes the virtual concept a bit further by putting what it calls the secure virtual workspace on a secure flash stick. Virtual networks that can securely put an access point on any device are going to be big in 2008. µ FLASH STORAGE specialist Sandisk has teamed up with interweb security giant Check Point to deliver a secure, virtual machine on a USB stick. Securing the corporate workplace is the theme being tossed around the Olympian halls of Infosec this week. If there are two buzzwords fighting off thoughts of recession in the midst of tech firms looking for margin, they are security and virtualisation. If you can serve up both, you're swaggering into the bull-pit, lining up against established adversaries and all manner of new and colourful partnerships. Take Sandisk, perhaps the biggest brand in Flash, and Checkpoint, probably the most sophisticated snoops on the internet....

Sandisk touts virtual network on a stick

Paul Hales — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:50:14 GMT

Paul Hales the Inquirer, Wednesday 23 April 2008. 16:30:00

Infosec London 2008 Checkpoint Charlie

FLASH STORAGE specialist Sandisk has teamed up with interweb security giant Centrepoint to deliver a secure, virtual machine on a USB stick. Securing the corporate workplace is the theme being tossed around the Olympian halls of Infosec this week. If there are two buzzwords fighting off thoughts of recession in the midst of tech firms looking for margin, they are security and virtualisation. If you can serve up both, you're swaggering into the bull-pit, lining up against established adversaries and all manner of new and colourful partnerships. Take Sandisk, perhaps the biggest brand in Flash, and Checkpoint, probably the most sophisticated snoops on the internet. These two new best friends have cooked up a way of running a whole corporate network that puts a virtual desktop on a USB stick. Remote users are updated and monitored automatically, with no data stored locally. Sandisk is echoing a common call here - that all network data be stored on remote servers. If you haven't got it you can't lose it and no-one can nick it off you. Sandisk reckons it takes the virtual concept a bit further by putting what it calls the secure virtual workspace on a secure flash stick. Virtual networks that can securely put an access point on any device are going to be big in 2008. µ FLASH STORAGE specialist Sandisk has teamed up with interweb security giant Centrepoint to deliver a secure, virtual machine on a USB stick. Securing the corporate workplace is the theme being tossed around the Olympian halls of Infosec this week. If there are two buzzwords fighting off thoughts of recession in the midst of tech firms looking for margin, they are security and virtualisation. If you can serve up both, you're swaggering into the bull-pit, lining up against established adversaries and all manner of new and colourful partnerships. Take Sandisk, perhaps the biggest brand in Flash, and Checkpoint, probably the most sophisticated snoops on the internet....

VMware virtually busts own expectations

Sylvie Barak — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:24:40 GMT

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Wednesday 23 April 2008. 13:59:00

We don't suck quite as badly as we thought

WITH ITS BETTER THAN expected first quarter results, Vmware seems to be back in favour with Wall Street and its fickle investors, after pulling off an unexpected 69 per cent revenue hike, when the company itself had only been predicting 50 per cent. Share holders couldn't get rid of stock quick enough back in January when Vmware slashed its growth prediction by half, but it seems that (mostly) all is now forgiven, with the company's net income being reported as $43 million, which translates into 11 cents a share. Analysts had been expecting revenues of only $421.3 million. This hasn't made Vmware any more bold in its future predictions though....

Intel customers demand answers on server IO

Mike Magee in Shanghai — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:02:02 GMT

Mike Magee in Shanghai , Sunday 30 March 2008. 22:18:00

IDF Spring 2008 Where's the business benefit?

FIRMS THAT HAVE committed to large blade commitments and " green" payoffs have told the INQ they want to know whether firms like Intel, AMD, Sun, HP and even IBM will put their money behind what they're promising by developing future tech. A senior datacentre manager told the INQ this evening that customers of chip vendors are being told over and over again about chip roadmaps, and asked to commit to buying tin, without the microprocessor guys giving any indication when the software makers will be brought into line. "IO," said one manager of a major datacentre, is the great big bottleneck....

Little Big Horn virtualisation report massacred

Ambrose McNevin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:02:01 GMT

Ambrose McNevin , Wednesday 9 April 2008. 07:20:00

Yankee Group retreats, circles wagons, ignores calls for pow wow

OH DEAR. A hard hitting report on the state of the virtualisation market turns out to have as much substance as a vegetarian's lunchbox and to have missed its target by an area approximately the size of Montana. The report compared Vmware to General Custer facing annihilation at the hands of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and their warriors is available to read on Microsoft's web site. This is despite Vmware saying it requested, and got, it pulled from the web site of its authors, analysts Yankee Group after claiming it is full of inaccuracies. The intro page of "Virtualisation Price War: Vmware's little big horn?" Is rather flowery: "In VMware's case, it's surrounded by rival vendors lusting for its business....

Barcelona appears in various different flavours

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:02:00 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk , Wednesday 9 April 2008. 09:10:00

Finally...

AND SO TODAY is Barcelona day. AMD has finally announced the broad availability of its quad-core server chip, some six months after it was officially launched and never have the fortunes of a company been so dependent on a single sliver of silicon. "We're off to the races now, and the product is out," John Fruehe, worldwide market development manager at AMD appears to have told Dow Jones. "All of the fixes are in place, and everything looks wonderful," he said. Barcelona's launch back in September 2007 acquired the aura of a farce when for months afterwards samples of the chip failed to appear....

IBM water cools supercomputer

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:01:59 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk , Friday 11 April 2008. 10:46:00

Water palaver

IBM HAS resorted to using water-chilled copper plates to keep its new Power 575 supercomputer cool. The plates are located above each Power 6 microprocessor in the beast to remove heat from the electronics. The Power 575 boasts 448 processor cores per rack. A single rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-GHz cores of Power6, 3.5 TB of memory. But IBM still claims it is more energy efficient than traditional air-cooled designs. In fact, at 600 GFlops per node, the Power 575 is three times more energy-efficient in GFlops per kilowatt than the Power5 generation of air-cooled processors , IBM said....

With Barcelona out, it's do or die time for AMD

Paul Hales — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:01:59 GMT

Paul Hales , Thursday 17 April 2008. 10:23:00

Analysis The chips are down

THE BARCELONA DEBACLE hit AMD where it really hurt - in the coffers. Having lashed out money it didn't have on buying ATI, the chip maker needed to pump up the revenue streams to keep its bankers happy while the huge task of stitching both firms together began. There can be no doubt that the ATI acquisition gives AMD technologies that are a natural fit with its core business in the longer term. In the shorter term, the alliance is in deep do-do. The non-appearance of Barcelona - the quad-core Opteron - at any time last year deprived AMD of one of its most lucrative revenue streams....

With Barcelona out, it's do or die time for AMD

Paul Hales — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:10:04 GMT

Paul Hales the Inquirer, Thursday 17 April 2008. 10:23:00

Analysis The chips are down

IBM water cools supercomputer

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:23:59 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Friday 11 April 2008. 10:46:00

Water palaver

Barcelona appears in various different flavours

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:57:34 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Wednesday 9 April 2008. 09:10:00

Finally...

Barcelona appears in ten different flavours

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:59:59 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Wednesday 9 April 2008. 09:10:00

Finally...

Barcelona appears in eight different flavours

INQUIRER Newsdesk — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:32:25 GMT

INQUIRER Newsdesk the Inquirer, Wednesday 9 April 2008. 09:10:00

Finally...

Little Big Horn virtualisation report massacred

Ambrose McNevin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:40:19 GMT

Ambrose McNevin the Inquirer, Wednesday 9 April 2008. 07:20:00

Yankee Group retreats, circles wagons, ignores calls for pow wow

Intel customers demand answers on server IO

Mike Magee in Shanghai — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:35:11 GMT

Mike Magee in Shanghai the Inquirer, Sunday 30 March 2008. 22:18:00

IDF Spring 2008 Where's the business benefit?

Chipzilla improves low-power server offering

Mike Magee — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:19:45 GMT

Mike Magee , Tuesday 25 March 2008. 07:38:00

Yes, we Hafnium no bananas

CHIP BEHEMOTH Intel said it has released two quad core 45 nanometre low voltage processors for servers and workstations that each consume 50 watts, or 12.5 watts a core, as the firm has it. The processors - the L5420 and L5410 clock at 2.50GHz and 2.33GHz, with each having 12MB caches and using a 1333MHz system bus. They cost $380 and $320 when you buy 1,000 of them. Intel said it's got support from a clutch of server vendors that include Dell, HP, Big Blue, Tyan and Verari. Chipzilla promised that it would ship a low dual core voltage processor in the next quarter which will have a 6MB cache, consuming 40 watts, and clocking at 3GHz....

Chipzilla improves low-power server offering

Mike Magee — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:14:47 GMT

Mike Magee the Inquirer, Tuesday 25 March 2008. 07:38:00

Yes, we Hafnium no bananas