Servers

Demand for the next generation DRAM chip, DDR3 (double data rate, third generation), has spiked recently as systems makers turn to it for increased power efficiency and performance.

The Queensland Health Quality and Complaints Commission (HQCC) is nearing completion of a $400,000 IT infrastructure overhaul that will see virtual servers and desktops used throughout the organisation.

The recession is driving green IT into data centres, and organisations that are facing continued pressure on their budgets and data centre resource, are now actively investigating software and outsourcing alternatives.

IBM is bundling its x86 servers with VMware's newest virtualization platform, and offering financing packages to lower upfront costs.

Computerworld gets an exclusive behind the scenes look inside Internode's Adelaide data centre with network guru Mark Newton

Making the most of natural resources of farms is critical in today’s environment, where rainfalls are becoming ever so scarce.

These products will make the data center more efficient by reducing power usage of existing hardware

The IETF last Thursday threw a birthday party for one of its most successful standards: Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

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.

Diana McKenzie, head of the information technology practice at Chicago law firm Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP, has specialized in IT contract law since 1987. On Monday, she spoke with Computerworld about what customers of IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. need to know about contract law as IBM pursues its reported US$6.5 billion bid to acquire Sun.

Today's datacenters are downright cramped, yet forced to continue absorbing more technologies and tapping into the latest trends, all while maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. The current recession makes now the time to glance back for a historical perspective to better understand how to not only survive in this different world but also to best prepare for the future.

Solaris has been Sun Microsystems's bread-and-butter Unix system since 1992. While Unix platforms such as Solaris now are up against the open source Linux juggernaut, Sun maintains it has the technological advantages and accommodations for open source to keep Solaris in the game. The company also cites important customer wins as evidence of the platform's continued strength. To hash out the state of Solaris in today's marketplace, InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill recently met with Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun, at the company's California campus.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.

The high-stakes, but still under-the covers battle by IBM to take over Sun Microsystems Inc. is still in play, but IBM may be rethinking what it is willing to pay for the enterprise vendor.

It looks like an old friend of mine, Sun Microsystems, may be going the way of the dinosaur. Sort of, anyway. Or maybe just transformed. We all have to wait and see.

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

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.

The Kingston SSDNow M series SNM125-S2/80GB solid state drive provides excellent performance for a 2.5in hard drive, but the very high cost and low 80GB capacity make it a very expensive storage option.

The noisiest new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 promises to be live virtual machine migration, as Microsoft seizes the chance to show that Hyper-V is closing the gap with VMware Infrastructure. But there are many reasons beyond server virtualization to take a close look at Windows Server 2008 R2. Important enhancements are spread across the board, ranging from IIS to networking to Terminal Services. There's even a story to be told about R2 and the upcoming Windows 7, which gains better virtual desktop integration and even secure remote access without requiring a VPN -- though the latter feature, called DirectAccess, requires the use of IPv6.

If you've ever been in the middle of a system build or component installation and thought to yourself, "I wish I could reach through the case but there's a panel in the way," then Antec may have a solution for you with its new -- and very unconventional -- Skeleton enclosure.

On Tuesday, Microsoft released to manufacturing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The final code will be shipped on November 1. The company bills the software as one-stop organization, allowing administrators to set up and deploy new virtual machines and manage hosts and other virtual infrastructure elements from one console.