Servers

NSW's RailCorp has put out a call to third parties interested in keeping a watchful eye on its ICT outsourcing contract with Fujitsu.

Hewlett-Packard became the latest vendor to announce a "mini-data center" housed in a shipping container, which can provide a way for companies to add compute capacity when power and cooling systems in their existing data centers are maxed out.

Microsoft has released three bundles of fixes and new features for its server products.

Microsoft's Windows beat operating system rivals Mac OS X and Ubuntu in a three-month test of update server uptime, a Swedish uptime monitoring company said.

While Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor has shipped, the software to manage it the package won't be available until near the end of the year, according to the company.

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused scores of companies to reconsider their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, whether they were affected by those catastrophic events or not.

A Microsoft executive shared techniques the company has used, including new kinds of employee incentive programs and internally created automation tools, to reduce the energy consumption of its growing data centers.

It may look like Windows Vista. It shares the same code base as Vista. It even rolls in Vista's first Service Pack. But in terms of customer adoption plans, Windows Server 2008 is no Vista.

The Ontario Cancer Institute in Canada has deployed what it's calling Canada's fastest research supercomputer to help discover more effective cancer treatments.

More servers, more racks, more UPSes, more users -- the reasons for expanding a datacenter are the same everywhere. Today's datacenter projects, however, have the additional component of modernisation. Rebuilding takes place for tighter integration, greener power usage, greater redundancy, and especially more control. Datacenter administrators would control individual dust motes in their racks if they could.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

Station Casinos' CIO and vice president of technology, Marshall Andrew, has two big reasons to be nervous this weekend.

Lots of companies these days are stretching their hardware and energy dollars by consolidating print, file, DNS, and Web servers on virtualization platforms such as VMware. But not many companies boast of running their entire production infrastructure on virtual machines. An exception is Arvato Mobile, a division of Bertelsmann that builds mobile solutions for network operators, media companies, and Internet portals and delivers digital entertainment content to consumers around the globe.

For UPS, grid computing is not about how to get more horsepower for demanding workloads; it's about consolidating, streamlining and using technology to get an edge on the competition.

The Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers passed a milestone Wednesday with the first system to achieve peak performance of 1 petaflop/s, or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of global services and CIO at Dell, outlined his company's plan to deliver a hosted remote-management offering that it calls "IT as a service." In the following interview, Schuckenbrock spoke about the plan and what Dell is doing to polish its tarnished customer-service reputation.

Intel is embracing the trend to virtualize across a broad range of business facets, from security to multiple core CPU's. The company currently has teams working on hardware features to assist with virtualized environments, and is embracing an open approach to the technology by partnering with major ISV's such as VMWare and Microsoft, as well as open source communities.

Like the presidential seal that vanished without comment from a politician's press podium, the competitive marketing brickbat that Apple flung at BlackBerry -- that BlackBerry's push e-mail works only with Microsoft Exchange, as if Exchange were an onerous burden -- quietly vanished from Apple's campaign.

Last week, Microsoft released its virtualization product, Hyper-V, to manufacturing. Previously, the company had promised to make a production-supported version of Hyper-V available to Windows Server 2008 customers within 180 days of the official release of the operating system itself. By releasing Hyper-V in late June, Microsoft beat its self-imposed deadline by about a month, although delivering less than was originally promised.

Who should be responsible for your company's energy initiatives? Your organization may be grappling with the answer to that question. Controlling IT energy consumption has become a high priority for many companies as a way to lower costs, maintain business operations, and reduce their impact on the environment. It can be a rather daunting challenge, given that so many areas of a company's IT infrastructure -- from the desktop to the datacenter -- contribute to power usage, not to mention that various departments have vested and sometimes conflicting interests in those operations (for instance, users want might want more computing power -- but another department has to pay for it).

It's impossible to look at the x86 family of microprocessors without wondering if, after three decades of dominance, the architecture might be running out of steam. Intel, naturally, says the x86 still has legs, while hastening to add that its battles with competing architectures are far from over.

I've been relating the story of a professional colleague who, some months ago and under semi-voluntary circumstances, made the switch from Windows to the Mac. Her twisted arm now nicely healed, she has not only switched, she has an unshakable conviction that even the fastest, newest PC would be an embarrassing hand-me-down next to a mature Mac. If I were to swap her early model MacBook for a quad-core PC desktop, she'd accept it with the graciousness one brings to the gift of a fruitcake (or one from a fruitcake), and then covertly scan eBay for a PowerPC Mac. It is not the particular machine or its performance to which she has become attached; indeed, the hardware is, to her, invisible. The Mac platform is home to her now, not out of religious devotion or some wish not to disappoint me, but because it clicks with both halves of her brain in a way that Windows cannot.

The SilverBack folks introduced us to Servprise, a young company headed by a young CEO. But for all its youth, the Servprise WebReboot product line addresses an old sore spot in datacenters far and wide: Namely, the need to safely reboot server hardware via remote access. Typical server rebooting solutions, even from companies as experienced as APC, generally involve power cycling. That makes for messy reboots at the OS level and unsafe power outages at the hardware level. The WebReboot solution is literally like pushing the server's power button, allowing for pillow-soft power downs.

Avocent brought its industry-leading out-of-band management systems to our project, providing IP KVM for PC and Sun servers, service processor aggregation, serial terminal services, and the DSView management server. Because our new datacenter, HIG 319, functions like a multicompany colocation service, we ended up with a wide variety of equipment and at least three different flavors of service processors (Sun, Dell, HP) with three different management interfaces to juggle. Avocent's MergePoint 5224 appliance, a 24-port service processor aggregation system, gives the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology's IT group a single service processor management interface, while losing none of the functionality from individual dashboards.

One of the most important vendors behind our project's success brought no hardware to the party at all. SilverBack Migrations Solutions, based in the US, is a datacenter build-out and migration consultancy staffed entirely by large-stomached ex-corporate IT and facilities geeks. You may recall that, in the main part of this story (see "Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul"), we lamented our inadequate planning and stretched-thin human resources. Both of these are common problems for a project of this scope, and they are exactly the issues that a company like SilverBack can go a long way to mitigate.

It's funny. Sometimes the products that have the greatest impact are the most difficult to write about because they simply work. That's the case with Universal Electric's Starline Track Busway, a straightforward solution that takes an impressive leap forward in the basic task of providing electrical power to the equipment in the server room.

It may have come in the smallest box, but Lantronix's SecureLinx Spider KVM had an impact on our project that was far greater than its physical size would suggest. The Spider is a "zero U" KVM, meaning it takes the form of a USB or PS/2 KVM dongle on one end and a dual-port Cat 5e plug on the other. The whole ensemble is light enough to hang off the back of a server, saving you the rack space normally eaten by IP KVM switches and such.