Channel Register

The Week’s Headlines

  1. Sunday, 8 November 2009

    Sun files $120m loss on the hush

    Only $120m. Well done

    It was a week later than El Reg expected, but the behavior was the same. After the stock market closed on Friday and everyone was heading home for the weekend, server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems snuck out its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010. Revenues fell 25 per cent to $2.24bn. Sale have …

    8 Nov 03:43

  2. Friday, 6 November 2009

    Fujitsu union confirms strike next week

    Outsourcer walkout imminent

    Fujitsu workers will walk out next week in what's billed as the first ever national strike at a UK IT company, following a dispute over pensions, pay and job cuts. Unite members voted by a three-quarters majority for a strike, and yesterday union bosses confirmed action on 12, 13 and 16 November. Fujitsu staff who are members …

    6 Nov 07:02

    Liquid Computing to float slushy Intel servers

    x64-commodity drip effect

    Liquid Computing is moving further away from its home-grown server design and more towards commodity x64 iron as it tries to ride the unified computing wave. At this month's Supercomputing 09 in Portland, Oregon, Liquid Computing will launch a cluster of rack servers using its variation on the unified server and storage fabric …

    6 Nov 07:02

    Texas snatches voter system from $863m IBM contract

    Fears for lost data

    Texas has pulled its voter registration system from a $863m data center consolidation project being overseen by IBM, saying it distrusts the giant's ability to recover lost data. IBM is merging separate data centers from 27 Texas state agencies into two facilities under a seven-year outsourcing contract, to cut costs and …

    6 Nov 07:02

  3. Thursday, 5 November 2009

    At what point do servers become HPC beasts?

    Tech Panel El Reg barometer survey. Your input needed

    From time to time, The Register commissions its own "barometer surveys", to gauge the impact of technologies on our readers' working lives Today, we launch a new barometer survey, to track high-end servers and HPC, or high performance computers, the name by which low- and mid-range supercomputers go by these days. We will run …

    5 Nov 09:44

    Could a hard drive dedupe data?

    Comment Manufacturers start looking for the next big thing

    Hitachi GST president Steve Milligan says one of the drivers affecting the hard drive industry is the need for efficient storage with technologies like virtualisation and deduplication. What is he on about? He presented at a recent Needham conference for HDD investors and said that the storage market was driven by three things …

    5 Nov 13:11

    IBM gives big discounts on Power engines

    Latent capacity a go-go

    The U.S. economy may look like it is coming out of the Great Recession, at least according to the economists who work for Uncle Sam, who said recently that gross domestic product in the States rose by a 3.5 per cent annualized rate in the third quarter. That is better than the 2.7, 5.4, 6.4, and 0.70 per cent declines that …

    5 Nov 15:59

    IBM parks beta cloud on development and test servers

    Big-Blue software diet

    IBM on Thursday kicked off a free public beta of a new cloud computing development and test environment that's hosted on Big Blue's machines. The company also added new tools and services made special for testing cloud-based apps in a private cloud. IBM Smart Business Development and Test on IBM Cloud (yes, they put the …

    5 Nov 21:52

    Toshiba attacks 2.5-inch drives from below

    320 gigs on 1.8-inch HDD

    By putting 320GB of capacity on a 1.8-inch drive, Toshiba has signalled its confidence in this micro-drive form factor. The new 2-platter MK3233GSG stores 160GB per platter and spins at 5,400rpm, optimising capacity over performance. The platters have an areal density of 516Gbit/sq in - impressive, given that most high- …

    5 Nov 10:15

    All-in-one PCs to replace desktops, claims Asus

    Three years and counting?

    Asus has forecast that sales of all-in-one PCs will soon overtake those of traditional desktop PCs. Eric Lee, Manager of Asus’ Eee Top all-in-one PC range, told Register Hardware today that the “all-in-one PC will replace the traditional desktop within the coming years”. Asus' Eee Top 2002: pushing aside mini-towers …

    5 Nov 10:28

    Mandriva flashes its small aggressive penguin

    It's Linux for 2010

    The end of year race to update product names has begun in earnest, with Mandriva becoming one of the first to launch a product with 2010 in its moniker. The Paris-based Linux outfit flagged up Mandriva Linux 2010 last night. If that's too much of a mouthful for you, you can just stick with the codename, Adelie. The big push …

    5 Nov 11:39

  4. Wednesday, 4 November 2009

    Blade servers are hot!

    That's a good thing, right?

    Whitepapers Against a backdrop of awful server revenues and shipments, Blade server sales continue to grow, accounting for 20 per cent of server shipments today, according to the industry body Blade.org. The blade server is the 'pile 'em high , sell 'em cheap' box du jour for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up …

    4 Nov 14:02

    Conservatives promise 'lights on, lights off' IT policy

    Budgets to go from 100w to 40w

    Government systems spend is about to be seriously slashed, with future emphasis being on small, open source, user-friendly projects. That was the message from key speakers at the Conservative Technology Forum on Monday, with a warning to consultancies and major systems developers grown fat on over-complex and excessive IT …

    4 Nov 11:02

    Dell schools net 'dolphins' in ways of Microsoft 'whale'

    Lessons in custom iron

    Cloud computing has helped Dell carve out a healthy business building customized servers for the biggest and most fashionable web properties. Feeding services like Bing and Azure, outfits like Microsoft have had Dell build them machines for their data centers that are smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less power then …

    4 Nov 06:37

    HP launches Acadia counterattack

    Returns fire at Cisco/EMC/VMware alliance

    Just one day after Cisco and EMC's love-in with VMware, HP is going to answer that blast with one of its own, one with integrated components from just one company and not three. According to an early report, which has appeared before HP's announcement, HP is announcing an Infrastructure Operating Environment which puts apps …

    4 Nov 13:22

    HP to throw Matrix tech beyond x64 blades

    Neoview data warehouse ported to Unix blades

    Like the rest of the IT industry, Hewlett-Packard was apparently expecting Cisco Systems and EMC to announce their Acadia joint venture and Vblock virtualized data center infrastructure on Wednesday. Hence the timing of a hodge-podge of system announcements that HP is stacking up against the Vblock stacks and whatever …

    4 Nov 16:50

    Large Hadron Collider team flicks switch on Xeon grid

    But hurry up with octo? We switch on tomorrow

    CERN today unveiled the upgraded grid that will support the Large Hadron Collider when the titanic particle-punisher finally kicks back into life. Sverre Jarp, CTO at CERN OpenLab supporting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, described the network, powered by Intel Xeons, as …

    4 Nov 12:30

    Open University talks clouds with MS and Google

    It's a learning process

    The Open University is in negotiations with Microsoft and Google about cloud computing services for students and staff. Niall Sclater, the OU's director of learning innovation, told GC News that the university will shortly be taking a decision about whether to deploy Google Apps or Microsoft Live@edu. He said that not only …

    4 Nov 08:02

    Parallels 5 skins Windows

    Win7 support added

    Parallels' annual update to its eponymous virtual machine software is out today, looking a bit smarter, and promising to be even more seamless than before. A new Coherence mode sees Windows applications skinned with a Mac-like scheme. Dialogues look like Windows dialogues, and there's easier keyboard mapping - so your Windows …

    4 Nov 11:42

    ScaleMP cuts InfiniBand out of virtual SMP clusters

    Fake SMPs for SMBs and clouds

    ScaleMP, a maker of virtualization and aggregation software that allows a cluster of x64 servers to look like a big, bad, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared-memory system to operating systems and selected classes of applications, is going downstream to target SMBs and upstream to chase cloud infrastructure providers. While …

    4 Nov 21:35

    STEC booms but shares are falling

    Wall Street worries low hanging disk fruit plucked

    A twenty-fold profit increase for solid state drive supplier STEC in its third 2009 quarter was followed by a share price drop on worries that its golden growth years are coming to a close. STEC recorded revenues of $98.3m in the quarter, 13.8 per cent up on the second quarter and a solidly satisfying 54.3 per cent higher than …

    4 Nov 14:00

    USB 3.0 thumb drive pops up

    Super Talent goes SuperSpeed

    Flash vendor Super Talent is leading the pack again and has come up with a USB 3.0 thumb drive. Its SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAIDDRive comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities and works with current USB 2.0 ports, but obviously at USB 2.0 speed. Plug it into a proper USB 3.0 port and it transfers data much, much faster, at up to a …

    4 Nov 09:56

    Google opens up OAuth to tackle password chores

    Cleverness to dispose of onerous task of logging in

    Google has opened up a technology designed to cut back on the number of passwords users need to access multiple websites to web developers, effectively moving the technology into the mainstream after a restricted beta lasting almost a year. Plaxo, Facebook and Yahoo! signed up to support so-called "hybrid onboarding" …

    4 Nov 15:54

    Jobs go at Novell

    And pensions suspended

    Novell is cutting jobs in various departments and in various countries. The Linux vendor, which has spent recent weeks cutting its UK distributors, will trim between 100 and 130 jobs from its total headcount of 3,900. The cuts come across geographies and departments and staff are getting severance packages based on length of …

    4 Nov 09:11

  5. Tuesday, 3 November 2009

    3Leaf makes big SMPs out of x64 clusters

    Shared memory trumps virtualization

    Everybody is looking to shake up the server business this days, it seems. But everyone had better get in line behind 3Leaf Systems, which is launching its much awaited "Aqua" system pooling and virtualization chipset and an intriguing x64 system to match. A little more than two years ago, 3Leaf Systems came out of stealth mode …

    3 Nov 14:33

    Adaptec CEO on the ropes after dreadful results

    Company steels itself for doomed proxy fight

    Adaptec's November 10th AGM runup has been bespoiled by dreadful quarterly results and the company is facing the likely ejection of its CEO from the board. The results for its second 2010 quarter showed a 42 per cent revenue decline year-on-year and a $3.8m loss, compared to a $3.3m profit a year ago. To increase Adaptec …

    3 Nov 14:21

    Arkeia digs deep for dedupe technology

    Pockets Kadena Systems

    Backup supplier Arkeia is buying Kadena Systems and its deduplication technology for an undisclosed amount. Kadena is a startup which has developed block-level deduplication, using what it calls sliding-window technology. The size of this window can be adjusted to match the type of content in a file and, to that extent, the …

    3 Nov 15:56

    Cisco, EMC, and VMware join hands and plunge into cloud

    Acadia, the power of three

    Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware this morning announced the formation of a new joint venture called Acadia and a stack of data centre servers, storage, networking. The venture will peddle the stacks, called Vblocks, for companies who want to buy preconfigured virtual and cloudy infrastructure. The three companies have been …

    3 Nov 16:27

    EMC/Cisco's V-Block faces the hard Cell from HP

    Comment Integrated stacks to face off

    EMC and Cisco have announced a plan to sell virtual blocks - or V-Blocks - likely to be integrated stacks of virtualised servers, storage and switches, either as products or services. HP's Cell technology could achieve the same end: IT stacks provisioned on demand in private or public clouds. A V-Block is, El Reg reckons, a …

    3 Nov 11:21

    Inside Acadia: the Cisco, EMC, VMware love child explained

    A chip of the old vBlocks

    As El Reg reported earlier Tuesday, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware announced a partnership to peddle integrated server, storage, and networking stacks to data centers that want to buy preconfigured and integrated x64 servers running VMware's vSphere 4.0 software. Cisco and EMC had already let the cat out of the bag before the …

    3 Nov 22:15

    Microsoft's SQL Server gets appliance of iron

    Test code challenges Oracle

    Near-final code for Microsoft's next SQL Server database is due today, wrapping in hardware from partners to help counter Oracle's proprietary Exadata appliance. A second SQL Server 2008 R2 community technology preview will be delivered for testing at Microsoft's Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in …

    3 Nov 17:02

    Red Hat pitches x64 virtualization with KVM rollout

    RHEVing up server hypervisors

    Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat today got its freestanding, bare-metal Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor, a hardened version of the KVM hypervisor it took control of last summer, to market. That makes Red Hat a player as x64 servers the world over are set for a massive wave of virtualization. Red Hat announced its …

    3 Nov 21:42

    WD dives into SAS enterprise drive pool

    And then there were three

    Western Digital has jumped into the enterprise-class hard drive market with a 10,000rpm, 300GB capacity drive. The WD S25 is built on WD's popular Velociraptor drive base, having a similar 2.5-inch form factor, spinning at 10K and with a capacity of up to 300GB. The capacity points are 150GB, with one platter, and 300GB with …

    3 Nov 11:02

    Buffalo adds add-in card adaptor to USB 3.0 line-up

    PCI Express to the rescue

    Storage specialist Buffalo has re-announced its first USB 3.0 hard drive and this time it's also offering punters stuck in the USB 2.0 era - all of them, in other words - a PCI Express Card containing a pair of SuperSpeed ports. The USB 3.0 hard drive is the DriveStation HD-HXU3, a desktop unit that will ship in 1, 1.5 and 2TB …

    3 Nov 16:51

    AMD desktop rejig: six-core 'Thuban' set for Q2 2010?

    Phenom IIs out, Phenom IIs in

    AMD is reported to have rejiggered its phase-out and phase-in plans for various members of its Phenom II and Athlon II processor lines. According to a report on Monday by the Taiwanese market-watchers at DigiTimes, "sources at motherboard makers" say that AMD has stopped taking orders for the 2.6GHz Phenom II X4 910 and 3.0GHz …

    3 Nov 01:09

    Big business bullies EU into open source U-turn

    Definition replaced with dubious vagueness

    The European Union has long promoted open source software, but it seems that years of expensive lobbying by big software companies has finally worn down the bureaucrats' resistance. The latest version of the European Interoperability Framework - which aims to offer governments and businesses guidance on using open source …

    3 Nov 09:58

    Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

    Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't

    Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to …

    3 Nov 03:36

    Google wheels out Chrome, Wave updates

    Bookmark that, federate this

    Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform. "One of the fundamental concepts we discussed was the vision for wave as an open communications protocol. We …

    3 Nov 12:36

    Microsoft adds higher price to SQL Server's new features

    The rising cost of data

    Microsoft is bumping up the price of its SQL Server database for the first time in four years. The company said Tuesday that the Standard and Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2008 R2, coming next year, will see increases in the price you pay per processor. SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition will be available at a price per …

    3 Nov 23:17

    Microsoft chops cloud costs

    Hosted biz services cheaper

    Microsoft is cutting the cost of its hosted cloud business productivity bundle. This includes Exchange Online, which falls from $10 per user, per month, to $5. The business productivity bundle of Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online falls from $15 to $10. In public the company is insisting this has nothing to do …

    3 Nov 15:31

  6. Monday, 2 November 2009

    Cisco and EMC in joint venture blitz

    vBlock and tackle

    The long rumored partnership between networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems, server virtualization juggernaut VMware, and storage powerhouse (and VMware owner) EMC will be announced this week, according to various reports. The three companies have been rumored to be working on some sort of formal joint venture to …

    2 Nov 05:17

    Fujitsu UK workers vote to strike

    Government IT services could be hit

    Union members at Fujitsu Services have voted for strike action over pensions, pay and job cuts. The action is not yet decided. Senior Unite union reps are meeting today to decide the next move after 74 per cent of members who voted called for a walk out. Some 92 per cent agreed to industrial action short of a strike. A …

    2 Nov 14:33

    Quanta opens servers to 100-core Tilera

    Snipping out the Linux middlemen

    Upstart multicore, Linux-compatible chip maker Tilera don't need no stinking tier one server makers. That means no IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or Sun Microsystems. At least not yet. The company has just lined up $25m in its C round of funding, which includes $10m from Quanta Computer, the Taiwanese PC maker that is the volume …

    2 Nov 11:00

    Storage firm Drobo gets mysterious cash injection

    Ten million greenbacks for what exactly?

    Drobo, the supplier of stylish 4- or 8-bay add your own drives external storage boxes, has raised $10m in an E-round funding exercise. Quite why is not obvious, since the company is shipping product like a tropical storm. It had 100 per cent worldwide sales growth in the second quarter of 2008, and has had double-digit growth …

    2 Nov 13:48

    Tandberg bigs up removable media capacity

    Frankfurt gets first peek at DAT 320

    Tandberg Data showed off a 320GB DAT drive at SNW in Frankfurt and has upped its RDX removable drive capacity to 640GB. This is the first public sighting of a DAT 320 drive, the 7th DAT generation, and drives should write 43GB of raw data an hour to a DAT320 cartridge, that's 11.9MB/sec. Storage Newsletter reports that it's a …

    2 Nov 15:02

    The Meta Cloud gets more meta

    RightScale and the floating UNIX analogy

    RightScale has renewed its quest for The Meta Cloud. On Monday the Santa Barbara, California startup unveiled a new version of its Cloud Management Platform, an online service meant to grease the use of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other so-called infrastructure clouds, including GoGrid and Rackspace's Cloud …

    2 Nov 22:57

    Unigen plans enterprise flash by the bucket

    May the SandForce be with you

    Another vendor is chancing its arm in the enterprise flash drive stakes, and betting on SandForce's controller to turn flash chips into solid state drive gold. Unigen, headquartered in Fremont, Califormia, is the new entrant. It designs and builds OEM memory, DC-DC power converters, wired and wireless communication, and flash …

    2 Nov 10:45

    Unisys takes Secure Cloud private

    A chip off the virtual x64 block

    Server and services company Unisys launched its homegrown cloud computing service in the summer, and now it wants to sell companies a chip off the Secure Cloud block and let them install local versions of the Unisys cloud inside their own data centers. The Secure Cloud that debuted in late June can be thought of as a test bed …

    2 Nov 22:30

    Virgin America dumps servers, flies for the clouds

    Open-source payload

    For a start-up, Virgin America is acting pretty big these days. In the spring of 2007, the low-price airline wasn't even flying. It was still struggling for US regulatory clearance. But suddenly, Washington DC gave it the green light, and on August 8 that year, Virgin's first commercial flight took off from its base at San …

    2 Nov 14:02

    ZFS gets inline dedupe

    Switch it on and off at the dataset level

    Sun's Zettabyte File System (ZFS) now has built-in deduplication, making it probably the most space-efficient file system there is. There's a discussion of ZFS deduplication in a Sun blog, which says that chunks of data, such as a byte range or blocks or files, are checksummed with a hash function and any duplicate chunks will …

    2 Nov 18:37

    Chip sales upgrade from terrible to bad

    Still down from 2008

    Global semiconductor sales have improved from terrible to bad in the third quarter, as the industry continues to recover from its massive slide a year ago. Chip sales in Q3 jumped 19.7 per cent to $61.9bn compared to the second quarter when sales were $51.7bn, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. But Q3 sales …

    2 Nov 19:13

    IBM facelifts i/OS for midrange gear

    Power system nip and tuck

    It might have come out with a slightly different name and a little later than expected, but Big Blue has tweaked its proprietary midrange operating system for Power-based systems with the i 6.1.1 release. The word on the street a little more than a year ago was that Big Blue would be packaging up some feature enhancements and …

    2 Nov 10:02

    Novell tongue-lashes LA for Google cloud switch

    What savings? What security?

    Los Angeles has broken a lot of hearts in its history. You're on top of the world one day, then tossed into the heap the next when the new big thing arrives. That Sunset Boulevard moment came for Novell last week after the LA City Council unanimously voted to replace its existing Novell communications systems with the …

    2 Nov 20:58

    TalkTalk to fight net disconnection plan

    Speak to you in court

    A major ISP has promised a court challenge to Government plans to allow the cutting off of internet connections used by people accused of unlawful file sharing. TalkTalk said it will challenge the plans in the courts. The Government commissioned a report on digital policy, Digital Britain, which did not recommend the cutting …

    2 Nov 06:02

    Windows 7 busts the 3 per cent share barrier

    And that's not counting copies not installed yet...

    Microsoft's kind of make or break Windows 7 launch pushed the OS to a stonking 3.48 per cent market share by the end of last month, figures from tracker firm Net Applications show. The firm's figures showed Windows 7 popping up on 3.67 per cent of PCs it encountered on the 31st. While the figure might appear minuscule, it …

    2 Nov 13:32