Servers: Opinions

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

There's a good deal that's special about AMD's new Shanghai server CPU. It's fabulous science, fun for those of us who get dewy-eyed over the prospect of a 25 percent faster world switch time and immersion lithography. It makes the x86 battle interesting again because it carries AMD into territory that it must fight hard to win--the two-socket (2P) server space--and where innovation is sorely needed. AMD beat Intel's next-generation server architecture to market while closing performance, price, and power efficiency gaps between Core 2 and Shanghai. Just as it did in the old days, AMD now claims that its best outruns Intel's best despite having a lower clock speed.

Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?

The high-end data warehousing wars are fast upon us. Vendors are launching ever more scalable DW solutions. And they're delivering them with more aggressive -- and slippery -- performance claims.

Give an administrator a command-line tool ... and watch how quickly that admin searches the Internet for a GUI counterpart. But what if the CLI (command-line interface) is the only way to accomplish certain administrative tasks? Well, you might balk. That is why I stick with Windows; it has plenty of GUI interfaces.

Intel Developer Forum has wrapped up, and there's no question that Nehalem owned the show. Intel's engineering crew was practically beside itself; finally, it had something new to say to software and hardware developers. It was hard to tell whether the phrase "most significant update to Intel's x86 in ten years," uttered often by Intel staff, carried a tinge of frustration, but Nehalem's specs elevate that mantra from marketing to reality.

I haven't viewed an Intel Developer Forum with anticipation for some years. I am looking forward to this one, because unless there is some surprise afoot, this is where the Nehalem architecture should make its silicon debut. Intel tipped this by announcing the name of its first incarnation of Nehalem, a desktop chip dubbed "Core i7." Desktop CPUs tend to leave out features touted in literature describing the most potent implementation of a new architecture, so I don't expect Core i7 to embody Nehalem as IT will come to know it. I do expect to see Nehalem in production ahead of schedule, and that suits me. Nehalem could mark a return to a strategy that takes competition into account, and which includes entry-level RISC in the scope of competitors.

While using an AMD Barcelona (quad-core Opteron) server to create a portable benchmarking kit for InfoWorld's Test Center, I discovered something unexpected: I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 per cent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release.

Did VMware sell out to EMC too soon? I try not to mix personalities with analysis because when I do, I sometimes get into trouble. But as I try to rationalize Diane Greene's abrupt departure from VMware, and EMC CEO Joe's Tucci's role in her demise, personalities keep getting in the way. While I've met both these powerful players, I can't say that I know them. All I really have to go on is my sense of their public personas. Diane has built a huge following, is perceptive -- even visionary -- and opinionated. Joe has taken control of a franchise that was head-strong to begin with and transformed it. In my view he's even handed, but a man who is very capable of pushing back when pushed. And no doubt about it, with VMware he acquired an equally head-strong organization.

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.