Archive for Technical stuff
May 17, 2007 at 1:42 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=5102&pubid=3&tab=Home&issueid=111
Microsoft Corp. and NEC Corporation of America today demonstrated a feature of Longhorn that will allow administrators to add and swap processors, storage devices and memory without needing to take the entire machine offline.
In addition, Longhorn has now been officially dubbed “Windows Server 2008,” even though it’s still scheduled to ship in the second half of this year, said Eric Jewett, a Windows Server product manager at Microsoft.
Depending on the server manufacturer’s implementation, a Longhorn-equipped server may also be able to spot hardware components that are about to fail and do a hot-swap on its own without human intervention, according to spokesmen from NEC and Microsoft.
The new version of Windows Longhorn (now Windows 2008) does look very cool, I wonder how many companies are going to use the next operating system as a driver for migration to virtualization or energy efficiency. The extra features do sound fantastic, but if we can retain the control please, these things are great but I need a large override button in case the need arises.
Check out the article it covers the whole topic, its very cool.
May 17, 2007 at 1:34 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601390
LOS ANGELES — In an effort to keep pace with multicore processors, Microsoft is just a few months away from completing a plan to revamp how it handles multithreading in future server operating systems. The work entails a significant redesign of some of the operating system kernel as well as getting support from third parties that design software drivers and applications.
At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here Wednesday (May 16), Microsoft detailed many of its plans for Windows Server 2008 set to ship later this year. But the new multithreading work is not likely to find its way into a release of Windows at least until a follow-on scheduled for 2009.
Nevertheless, chip designers say they absolutely need support for more threads in software to keep their multicore architectures busy.
This should enable Microsoft to make Windows see the benefits more from the new multi core processors, at the same time though we need to get the application guys geared up and thinking along the same lines, whether its the guys developing my in-house derivatives calculation engine or my Grid software, ensuring that they are coded correctly is important in getting the maximum benefit of the platform and the underlying porcessor technology.
May 17, 2007 at 1:27 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/113114/end-in-sight-for-32bit-microsoft-operating-systems.html
Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 will be the last 32-bit system it releases, for servers or clients, as it makes its way fully into the world of 64-bit computing.
Speaking at the WinHEC 2007 conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates outlined the benefits of 64-bit computing, such as the amount of information that can be crunched in one go as a data set and advanced memory technology.
However, Gates admitted there are still challenges to overcome on the road to full 64-bit support. ‘For the industry it does mean a change in drivers,’ he said. ‘We can’t have a 32-bit driver with 32-bit pointers able to put information anywhere into a 64-bit address space. And so although it’s not a dramatic change to create a 64-bit driver, there’s still work to be done. The industry I’d say is about halfway through getting all those pieces in place. So, we’re certainly pushing that, and trying to make that very straightforward for all of you.’
Time therefore to start looking at the server estate and starting the upgrade process, whether its refreshing the server estate to newer, faster and still energy efficient boxes, or considering virtualization (ideally you’d do both).
The 64bit operating system should bring advantages to the platform, but we’ll need the driver support, the right hardware and all the applications to be ported to fully benefit from the 64bit OS, and the 64bit technologies.
May 15, 2007 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=4418
Up to 5TB Cache offers 10 to 50 times better read/writes than mechanical disk
Seeking to alleviate the bottleneck woes of I/O-intensive apps, startup Gear6 today announced CACHEfx, a scalable cache appliance that makes as much as 5TB of cached data available to applications without having to retrieve it from storage.
The appliance, which is founded on what the company is calling “centralized storage caching,” pools together a vast amount of high-speed RAM in an effort to shrink the server-storage performance gap fueled in part by the server virtualization trend.
Sounds very cool off to read up on it, sounds like a great way of providing those high performance databases? Put them in RAM and make them near instant access? Check it out.
May 15, 2007 at 2:06 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, vmware
http://www.d-silence.com/story.php?headline_id=23954&comment=1 or http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~117440,00.html
AMD today announced broad availability of the latest version of its I/O virtualization technology specification, which is enhanced with stronger and more secure input/output connections. Together with AMD Virtualization Technology (AMD-V), the AMD I/O Virtualization Technology Specification revision 1.2 is designed to provide high throughput and scalability to improve overall system efficiency, reliability and security.
Excellent, anything the hardware vendors can do to aid the virtualization process has to be a good thing, AMD seem to have announced new features in this field, very cool.
May 10, 2007 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, vmware
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6182852.html
The company is changing three key features of the hypervisor technology to try to stick to its schedule of releasing the technology within 180 days of completing its Windows Server “Longhorn” operating system, due to be finalized before the end of the year. The features will be included in a future version of Viridian, formally called Windows Server Virtualization, the company said.
The first feature that is being taken out of the initial Viridian release is so-called live migration, which enables people to move a running virtual machine from one physical server to another. The initial release of Viridian also won’t support on-the-fly, or “hot,” adding of memory, storage, processors or network cards. And it will only support computers with a maximum of 16 processing cores–for example, eight dual-core chips or four quad-core chips.
Interesting, I’m waiting to see what Viridian will be like as a virtualization platform, removing some features need not be a show stopper, they can always be enabled through service packs, and at least it stops the launch date being delayed and brings new alternatives to the existing virtual platforms.
May 3, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under Bladesystems_insight_conference, Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.sys-con.com/read/369290.htm or http://www.teaktechnologies.com/
ST. LOUIS, MO — (MARKET WIRE) — 05/01/07 — Blade.org founding member, Teak Technologies, previewed its pioneering 10-Gb Congestion-Free Ethernet switching solution, the I3000, for the IBM BladeCenter platform at the IBM PartnerWorld 2007 event here today.
Targeted at the innovative IT manager who is already considering the merit of data center simplification through adoption of 10-GbE in the BladeCenter, the I3000 offers a compelling alternative that combines best-in-class low latency switching with up to 16x price/performance advantage over comparable 10-GbE solutions.
The I3000 is the first in a series of a new category of scalable Congestion-Free Ethernet switching solutions for the New Data Center. These solutions solve the core problem of network congestion spread associated with state-of-art Ethernet switches used in short-haul data center networks.
Spoke with one of the guys from Teak Technologies at the bladesystemsinsight conference, their Ethernet solution does look very smart, I need to read up more on it, in the meantime do check out the article, and their site, it looks like an interesting proposition.
May 1, 2007 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/dell_linux_lives/
Dell has finally chosen a Linux distribution to offer on its desktop and laptop machines. Following news that Michael Dell was running Ubuntu on his personal laptop, the company has followed suit and from late May Dell machines will ship with Ubuntu 7.04 as an option.
There’s no official word from Dell, but several sources within the box-shifter have been talking to desktoplinux.com.
Very cool, its not yet official, but bringin Ubuntu to the desktop could increase the Linux userbase further, be interesting to see (if this is the case) how well the Linux desktops sell, will people use it because it’s cheaper or because they want an alternative to Vista?
As a platform Ubuntu does look very promising, and it comes with office type applications built in which means it is a real alternative, www.ubuntu.com, check it out.
May 1, 2007 at 11:39 am · Filed under Technical stuff, blades
http://www.electronicstalk.com/news/viu/viu102.html
Memory modules are designed with significant enhancements to the JEDEC standard, including registered functionality, reduced module height, advanced cooling features and densities up to 4Gbyte Virtium Technology has released its DDR2 Very Low Profile (VLP) and DDR2 Ultra Low Profile (ULP) blade memory modules for blade server systems.
Both types of memory modules are designed with significant enhancements to the JEDEC standard, including registered functionality, reduced module height, advanced cooling features and densities up to 4Gbyte.
Very cool, the more memory we can support in the blade form factor, the more applicable the technology can become whether for virtualization, grid computing or as an alternative to rack servers in volume. Will need to take a look, I know the main barrier was the cost of the memory chips being high, if we can support more memory slots and decrease the cost of the larger DIMMS, then this should bring more benefits to the platform, particularly for virtualization or high performance computing.
April 30, 2007 at 5:56 pm · Filed under Other things, Technical stuff
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/29/vista_end_dream/
Microsoft have managed to cobble together a new look and feel for Windows, but a lot of folks are scratching their heads wondering what other advantages there are in upgrading your graphics card and adding another GByte of RAM? What’s the reason? Unmaintainable.
In the long years since XP was launched, Apple have come out with five major upgrades to OS X, upgrades which (dare I say it?) install with about as much effort as it takes to brush your teeth in the morning. No nightmare calls to tech-support, no sudden hardware incompatibilities, no hassle. Why hasn’t Microsoft kept up? Unmaintainable.
An interesting article, do check it out. Obviously it will depend on your user experience, however I do feel that Vista has been getting a more than expected negative press/feedback? Is Vista bad?
No, it’s actually nice, it starts up relatively quickly, the interface is smooth, but at what cost, it makes my 18 month old laptop seem underpowered, the graphics get a bit too much for it with all the settings on; and crucially it doesn’t seem to give me enough benefits for me to deploy my VISA and get myself a new IBM/Dell bad boy.
The excitement that you’d have, the I MUST HAVE WINDOWS XP now, seems to have died, even more so than ME which I actually had and thought wasn’t that bad. How Microsoft can turn this around I’m not sure, getting people to upgrade who then have a negative user experience is marginal benefit, saying to the industry you need to upgrade again is of marginal interest, Windows Vista will sell, but I suspect its more a medium term thing, you know, my computers out of disk space, well I supose I could get one with SATA drives, a new one isn’t that much…
Equallhttp://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/04/29/vista_end_dream/
Microsoft have managed to cobble together a new look and feel for Windows, but a lot of folks are scratching their heads wondering what other advantages there are in upgrading your graphics card and adding another GByte of RAM? What’s the reason? Unmaintainable.
In the long years since XP was launched, Apple have come out with five major upgrades to OS X, upgrades which (dare I say it?) install with about as much effort as it takes to brush your teeth in the morning. No nightmare calls to tech-support, no sudden hardware incompatibilities, no hassle. Why hasn’t Microsoft kept up? Unmaintainable.
An interesting article, do check it out. Obviously it will depend on your user experience, however I do feel that Vista has been getting a more than expected negative press/feedback? Is Vista bad? No, it’s actually nice, it starts up relatively quickly, the interface is smooth, but at what cost, it makes my 18 month old laptop seem underpowered, the graphics get a bit too much for it with all the settings on; and crucially it doesn’t seem to give me enough benefits for me to deploy my VISA and get myself a new IBM/Dell bad boy.
The excitement that you’d have, the I MUST HAVE WINDOWS XP now, seems to have died, even more so than ME which I actually had and thought wasn’t that bad. How Microsoft can turn this around I’m not sure, getting people to upgrade who then have a negative user experience is marginal benefit, saying to the industry you need to upgrade again is of marginal interest, Windows Vista will sell, but I suspect its more a medium term thing, you know, my computers out of disk space, well I supose I could get one with SATA drives, a new one isn’t that much…
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