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Monday 3 November 2008, 09:00am
Six cores gets thumbs up
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Fujitsu Siemens, the first to get the six-core Dunnington Intel Xeon processor into a server, has set a high standard, according to the first hardware review.
"The Primergy RX600 S4 is a good proposition for large businesses," concludes reviewer Dave Mitchell, in IT Pro. "A 24-core Xeon server for a shade over ten grand looks good value, it’s easy on the power supply and it offers plenty of room to expand."
The server should give AMD pause for thought, says Mitchell. His only hesitation is that some users might decide to wait for the Intel Nehalem processors due out in 2009.
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RedditFriday 31 October 2008, 06:52pm
vPro backs Lenovo's green revolution
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Lenovo has launched its greenest, most secure and most manageable desktop PCs ever - and they rely on Intel's vPro.
IT managers can control the amount of electricity used by the ThinkCentre M58/M58p remotely, thanks to Power Manager, a new Lenovo feature that uses vPro to monitor features on the desktop system.
The M58p has the lowest cost of ownership of any ThinkCentre Lenovo has ever produced - with vPro allowing the system to be shut down automatically at the weekend and overnight. It is also Lenovo's quietest and coolest system, running up to six dB quieter than previous machines, with a processor running 11 per cent cooler.
Early customers seem to be pleased. “The ThinkCentre M58 desktop will allow Bryant to support more secure and more energy efficient operations and enable faster information processing,” said Art Gloster, VP of information services at Bryant University, in Rhode Island.
The systems won a gold award from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool organisation (EPEAT), bringing Lenovo's total of EPEAT Gold certificates to 24. And stringent GreenGuard Environmental Institute testing shows the system does not contain 2000 potentially harmful contaminants.
They come in three boxes: tower, small form factor and ultra small form factor, and use Intel Core2 Duo or Quad processors.
Just to complete the green picture, Lenovo has an Asset Recovery service to get maximum value from retired PCs, and dispose of them safely. Users may even get money back towards future PC purchases when they dispose of PCs in this way.
Thursday 30 October 2008, 09:00am
Netop runs with vPro remote management
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Desktop management specialist Netop is one of the first to pick up the new version of Intel's vPro technology, and run with it. The company's Remote Control 9.2 makes full use of the "out of band" control it enables.
"Many companies already have computers equipped with Intel vPro and Active Management Technology, but are not yet able to take advantage of this new technology," said Kurt Bager, Netop CEO. Netop suggests those companies use its products to get the best out of vPro, and run their PCs more efficiently.
The latest version of Remote Control can switch on an iAMT-equipped computer and update it remotely. The new software also includes Netop WebConnect, software, which allows IT administrators to reach hosts over the web and through the firewall - but without using any third party servers, so IT managers keep control of their data and security. The software also has a HTTP protocol stack, which should speed data transfer by up to 10 times.
Wednesday 29 October 2008, 09:00am
Two servers in 1U?
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There are several ways to skin a cat, but there are probably even more ways to consolidate servers. VeryPC's way to get sixteen cores into a single one unit (1U) high rack mount module is to build two servers in the space.
The GreenServer Janus II gets an interesting review over at ITPro, which notes it packs four QuadCore Xeon 5400 processors into two proprietary motherboards from Supermicro, which fit into Supermicro's 1U Twin module.
Elsewhere, AnandTech looks at the underlying Supermicro box, and finds this approach of putting two servers in one box saves more than just space: "The second node increases power requirements by only 55 per cent, while a second server would probably double the power needed… It's not every day that we meet a 16 core server which saves you 100W of power and cuts rack space collocation in half... all for a very competitive price,” the site says.
Tuesday 28 October 2008, 09:00am
Solid state drives unlock chips
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Processors have kept on getting faster in recent years, as described by Moore's Law, but storage has not been keeping up. Hard disks keep getting cheaper but access to them is slower, leading to the situation where the current bottleneck in servers is all too often the disk drive.
Solid-state disks (SSDs) are becoming more common in laptops, where they improve battery life and allow the machine to boot up instantly, but they are still an expensive option there. It's likely we're entering an era where SSDs have a big impact on the data centre, where they will unlock performance.The Intel X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive has around 100 times the I/O performance of hard drives, at 35,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second) reading, and 3,300 IOPS writing. As there are no moving parts, it uses less power - having an active power demand of 2.4W.
Green-focused IT managers are now measuring storage performance in IOPS per Watt and the X-25E works out at 14,000 IOPS per Watt, and it can reduce the power use in enterprise storage by up to five times. It's available in 32GB capacities now, with a 64GB version coming early in 2009.
This sort of SSD will "change the economics of enterprise data centres,” Sun VP John Fowler said. "Sun expects to offer enterprise storage solutions that will exploit the breakthrough performance of Intel's High Performance Solid-State Drives and deliver significant performance gains while consuming a fraction of the energy of traditional spinning disk arrays."
Sun is understandably keen to get its hands on high performance storage, given its Intel Xeon-based servers' current position in the benchmark table. Its four-socket quad-Xeon servers can push out 845,000 IOPS on the server side, so they are seriously hampered by hard disks that can only do 1,600 IOPS. The X-25E should balance things out much better.
