Archive for Technical stuff
April 15, 2008 at 12:09 am · Filed under Technical stuff, blades
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=841823
ORLANDO, FL–(Marketwire - April 9, 2008) - BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BNT) announced today that it is teaming with Emulex Corp. and NetApp at Storage Networking World to showcase the industry’s first public demonstration of a blade server-based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) unified fabric. The demonstration shows that the “loss-less” I/O required to carry Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage traffic within blade architectures is now possible using products based on the emerging standards for Converged Enhanced Ethernet™ (CEE), an enhanced version of Ethernet for data centers.
BLADE is working closely with Emulex and NetApp to deliver FCoE products that consolidate the number of networks in tomorrow’s data centers. The demonstration shows that BLADE’s CEE-capable 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, Emulex’s Converged Network Adapter products and NetApp Ethernet storage provide the loss-less I/O necessary to support FCoE in a blade server environment. BLADE is a pioneer in developing advanced high-performance Ethernet I/O infrastructure products and its CEE-capable switching products will enable widespread adoption of FCoE SANs and also greatly enhance Ethernet in the data center across a wide range of traffic types from networking and storage to clustering.
Very cool, any innovation in the Fibre Channel over Ethernet area has to be a good thing, the more vendors we have supporting the technology, the more innovation of the platform and choice for the consumer which has to be a good thing.
August 7, 2007 at 9:21 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201203738 and http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2007-0807/feature/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007aug07_ultrasparct2_webcast
Sun Microsystems(SUNW) on Tuesday is expected to introduce its eight-core, 64-thread UltraSparc T2 processor, flaunting its performance boost over the previous generation and the chip’s capabilities for supporting virtualization.
Code named Niagara 2, the server processor offers double the performance per watt of the first generation UltraSparc T1, and 10 times the floating-point performance, according to Sun. Other features include 4-Mbytes L2 cache, two on-chip 10-Gbyte Ethernet ports, and integrated floating-point units into each core pipeline.
The UltraSparc T2, in conjunction with Sun’s Solaris operating system, is being touted as having the most advanced virtualization technology, providing the ability to run up to 64 applications simultaneously on a single processor. “The combination of Solaris and UltraSparc is a very powerful virtualization platform,” said Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Sun Microelectronics, a division of Sun. “We believe it’s unequaled in the industry.”
The specifications and the performance metrics results look fantastic, the virtualization support sounds great; opening up their processor to new markets might bring further opportunities for revenue generation, and more choice in the market place which has to be a good thing. It will be interesting to see what operating systems are validated for it’s use, and what applications/roles solutions are compiled around this new processor, check it out!
June 26, 2007 at 9:45 am · Filed under Technical stuff, environment
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2007/06/hp_injects_powe.html
With many companies struggle with soaring energy costs as well as limits on getting the power they need to expand, or even run, their datacenters, HP today a new power-capping component for HP Insight Power Manager, part of the HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) hardware management platform.
Using Insight Power Manager, customers can measure the average and peak power usage of their HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers and cap power at specific wattages, according to HP. That, in turn, can reduce power and cooling costs. Moreover, it helps companies ensure that they don’t draw more energy from the grid than they’re allotted. Trying to draw more energy than is available to you can reduce in unexpected downtime.
This does sound very cool, and coudl be invaluable for those customers with HP systems in their data centers, my only concern is, is it a plug in? Ideally I wouldn’t be loading additional agents/drivers on the box to achieve this, the bigger the operating system/driver/layered component footprint, one might argue, the less capacity is being used to earn revenue.
Do I have to pay for it? Not that I’m against it, pricing it competitively will have an affect on its use, we’ll need to see.
June 5, 2007 at 11:29 am · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/06/04/224515/retailers-lead-rise-in-it-spending-growth.htm
Retailers and business services firms are leading the growth in IT spending in the UK, as organisations step up their investment in online commerce and knowledge management systems.
The latest Computer Weekly/Kew Associates research shows that retailing, wholesaling, hotels and catering firms increased their IT spending at a rate of 7.6% over the 12 months to the end of March.
These sectors are investing in IT at a higher rate than the rest of the economy, which saw IT spending increase by 5.5% in the past year, up from 5.2% a year ago, the research reveals.
With this can we introduce something? Can we link the back end to the store? Could we for example allow me to log on to www.johnlewis.com see if they have a washing machine so I can turn up collect it and move on? Sure I could phone but then I’d have to wait and besides, I could then compare everything online and work out do I want the £400 one with the extra bit or the cheap one for £300.. All those times I’ve turned up at a store, do you have this in stock, no 10-14 days, where’s it coming from? Mars? Come on guys, one branch will have the stock, and for some things, I just want it there and then, that my brothers’ Range Rover can fit it home, household appliances the washing machine etc being the prime example.
June 5, 2007 at 10:39 am · Filed under How IT works, Technical stuff, rackmounts
Got an email asking about what the equivalent is in the IBM server for the RIB/ILO card in HP.
I have to confess not having played much with the IBM servers ILO, but as I understand it, you have a IBM Remote Supervisor Adaptor which provides the same functionality:
- Around-the-clock remote access and system management of your server.
- Remote management independent of the status of the managed server.
- Remote control of hardware and operating systems.
- Web-based management with standard Web browsers.
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/systems/support/system_x_pdf/43w7827.pdf - contains the pdf for the card.
May 31, 2007 at 5:28 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, blades
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070531005115&newsLang=en
ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The College of Computing at Georgia Tech today announced it will host the Georgia Tech Cell Broadband Engineâ„¢ (Cell/B.E.) Processor Workshop from June 18-19, 2007, focusing on applications for the Cell/B.E. processor, including gaming, virtual reality, home entertainment, tools and programmability and high performance scientific and technical computing.
The two-day workshop is sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), Toshiba and IBM and will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on Georgia Tech’s campus. Keynote speakers at the event include Bijan Davari, IBM Fellow and Vice President, Next Generation Computing Systems and Technology; Dominic Mallinson, Vice President, US Research and Development, SCEI and Yoshio Masubuchi, General Manager, Broadband System LSI Development Center, Toshiba’s semiconductor company. More information on the workshop may be found at http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/.
Very cool, this workshop is covering the Cell/B.E processor and looks very interesting, its got some great speakers and should cover some relevant topics, these to include high performance computing as well as virtual reality?
May 31, 2007 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, rackmounts
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4600/
Hi Martin,
We’ve just ordered our first Sun server, we’re going to use it with VMWare to consolidate our wintel servers, (we looked at the DL585G2, but we got a better deal from our reseller on the Sun boxes).
A quick question, the wintel guys are used to HP ILOs, what’s the Sun equivalent?
Thanks
Andy
Excellent sir, congratulations on your new Sun server! Very pleased for you and hope it works great with your virtualization project, good luck with it.
The ILO is referred to as the ILOM and should be fairly similar to the ILO in nature, the Sun site says:
Called ILOM, this separately powered controller monitors system and component status, supporting standard management standards (SNMP, IPMI, DMTF).
Lights out, remote visibility, full control
Remote management with full keyboard, mouse, video, storage (KVMS)
Remote media capability (floppy, CD)
Full DMTF CLI, a browser interface, IPMI 2.0 compliance for management and control
SNMP v1, v2c, v3 for system monitoring
The ability to monitor and report system and component status on all FRUs
If you check out http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/html/820-0280-10/ that’s the ILOM administrators guide, there’s a pdf available here: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/Servers/x64_servers/x4600m2/index.html including the documentation for it.
If you find any secret tips let me know so we can spread the word.
May 25, 2007 at 3:00 pm · Filed under Technical stuff
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.WindowsPowerShellWiki and http://it-dep-is-techmeet.web.cern.ch/it-dep-is-techmeet/TechMeeting/2006-10-09/2006-10-09%20Powershell%20overview.ppt
PowerShell is the new command line shell and scripting language for Microsoft Windows. It is available as a free download that runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. Starting with the April CTP, support for Click to read this topic
5/18/2006 1:53:12 PM - 00011147BCAA96A8PowerShell is built into Windows Server “Longhorn” (although no support for Server Core).
Got a phone call asking if I knew PowerShell, I have to confess at that point that I wasn’t sure what PowerShell was, as a result I used google and found this, looks like its a new scripting language which has been added to Windows 2003, Vista and the Longhorn derivatives, check out the site, it’s very detailed and the other link is Cern’s powerpoint presentation about it.
May 23, 2007 at 10:22 am · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/3679271
The computer giant today launched Power6, the latest and clearly the fastest in its Power line of microprocessors. At 4.7 GHz, the dual-core Power6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation Power5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it, according to IBM.
IBM said the Power6 has achieved an unprecedented first place rank for four benchmarks, including TPC-C transaction processing benchmarks and SPEC results that measure Java performance.
The Power6 processor does look very cool, check out this article which discusses it and has a response from Sun about performance testing, very cool.
May 22, 2007 at 12:25 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, blades, rackmounts
http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2190355/ibm-power6-set-unix-speed-king
….The dual-core Power6 chip will run at speeds up to 4.7GHz, a rate that is towards the upper end of expectations and twice the clock speed of the Power5. IBM said it already has 6GHz chips running in its labs so, together with the latest 65-nanometre manufacturing process IBM is using, headroom for faster speeds should be available. Server configurations up to eight-way, with 16 cores, will be generally available within two weeks.
To balance the system, Power6 has enormous processor bandwidth at 300 gigabytes per second and up to 8MB RAM caches on every chip. For now at least, the architecture will be enough to give IBM the speed crown across many key benchmarks and present an attractive target system for consolidation and virtualisation projects.
Very cool, the Power6 does sound really cool, there’s a blog with content about it, do check it out: http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/benchmarking?tag=POWER6 – is a blog on IBM all about the Power6 processor with links to the benchmarks, in the high performance computing arena the performance does look stunning: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/benchmarks/hpc.html
Whether they are right for your business, your applications will depend on you and your business, but couple the Power6 processor with the ability to run x86 Linux applications and you do have an interesting proposition, I wonder what the thermals are like for the blade edition though?
I wonder how this will challenge Sun, HP and the other vendors?
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