The Week’s Headlines
-
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 …
-
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 …
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 …
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 …
-
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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- …
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 …
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 …
-
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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" …
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 …
-
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
-
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Top stories
Popular Whitepapers
- Enabling the Agile Data Center
On-Demand: Audio Only - What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
On Demand Reg Webcast - The business value of SIP VoIP and trunking
Achieving a fully converged network using various communication services - Seven ways to lower storage costs
Using a highly integrated, feature-rich data storage solution - Thermal design of the Dell PowerEdge T610, R610, and R710 servers
Monolithic thermal design overview - Enabling The Agile Data Center
On-Demand: Audio with slides
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter
Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed
Managing Desktop Software for fun and profit
Intel's flash new SSDs hit by bugs