A Server Blog

Vulnerability in X Server Allows the Unlocking of Computer

2012-01-20T12:15:00.006-05:00

A very interesting, and potentially very harmful, vulnerability has been discovered in X.orgs's X Server that allows users to gain access to a locked computer. By pressing the Ctrl key, Alt key and * key simultaneously one can disable a user's screensaver and unlock the computer, a glitch discovered by French blogger "Gu1". The technique has already been verified to work on versions 1.11 and higher of X.org's X Server.

According to Gu1, the vulnerability is caused by something known as the "AllowClosedownGrabs" debug option. If this debug option is activated, pressing that key combination will cause any processes that calculate mouse or keyboard inputs to shut down. In the case of the key inputs above, the computer's screensaver, which usually prevents a locked computer from being accessed, is disabled.

Gu1 also says that this debug option had existed up until 2008, though at that time it was disabled by default and well-documented. It has also been mentioned that the developers explicitly pointed out the potential security problems that may arise when this is used in combination with screensavers. In addition to that, developers were able to use an API to disallow the function for their processes.

The function was re-introduced last year though was enabled by default and was not clearly documented and not easily configurable according to Gu1. Developer at X.org Peter Hutterer stated, "This was caused by a miscommunication within the development team." After the function was re-introduced, developers failed in removing the keyboard combination from the default keymap.

Gu1 also mentioned that any Linux distributions that use version X Server v1.11 are vulnerable and added that he was able to reproduce the problem with Debian and GNOME 3 and even with Arch Linux and GNOME 3 and Slock and Slimlock. It is also reported that KDE can also be unlocked this way.

Source: The H - X.org server allows anyone to unlock computer

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New Denial of Service Attack Takes Its Time on Your Server

2012-01-06T12:50:00.006-05:00

On Thursday a researcher published a proof-of-concept code that takes a new look on the slow HTTP Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack by simply dragging out the whole process of reading the server's response and, eventually, overwhelming it. Senior Software Engineer at Qualys Sergey Shekyan also added this modified Denial-of-Service attack, which he dubs a Slow Read attack, to his Slowhttptest tool.

As far as the attack goes, Slow Read basically sends a legitimate HTTP request and then takes an excruciatingly long time reading the response. By doing so, the Slow Read attack keeps as many open connections as possible and eventually causes a Denial-of-Service attack.

The Slowhttptest attack tool developed by Shekyan was inspired by related open-source tools Slowloris and OWASP's Slow HTTP Post. Slowloris keeps connections open by sending partial HTTP requests and then sends headers at regular intervals in order to prevent the sockets from closing.

OWASP's Slow HTTP Post Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) tool simulates an attack using POST headers that have a legitimate content-length field. This allows a web server to know just how much data is arriving. Once the headers are delivered, the POST message body is transmitted slowly and gridlocks the connection, as well as the server resources.

Slow HTTP attacks are becoming increasingly more popular, especially among hackers, as a way to quietly insert a Denial-of-Service attack due to the fact that these hacks are relatively simple to perform, require minimal computing resources and are often hard to detect until it is too late.

Source: InformationWeek - New Denial of Service Attack Cripples Servers Slowly

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Beta Testing Begins for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8

2011-12-23T16:39:00.005-05:00

Linux vendor Red Hat is fancying itself up with a newer platform but is by no means hanging its older customers out to dry. The company is currently in the process of testing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 release, which will provide customers with updates to the platform.

Red Hat first launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in 2007 and in the latter part of 2010 released Red Hat Linux Enterprise 6, which provided the next generation of enterprise Linux features. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was also recently updated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, which gave new control and storage features. The upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8, which is now in beta testing, will be getting its own set of updates, though resource control won't be among them.

The resource control functionality found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 is from the cgroups feature, which is also not present in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x series. According to Vice President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat Tim Burke, "cgroups was extremely invasive so you'll never see that in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. We continue to do minor feature enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5." Burke also added that the minor feature enhancements added to v5 must not be invasive or overly risky and that there is also the potential for additional hardware enablement in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Even though cgroups isn't going to be in RHEL 5.8, other types of enterprise controls are. Some of the new features support Power Management Quality of Service (QoS), a feature that provides power savings to enterprise via automated scheduling based on QoS policies. In addition to that, there is something known as "iotop" support. This is said to provide monitoring for I/O from a process perspective that will be helpful in troubleshooting performance issues.

According to Burke, "RHEL 5 is still getting development features so it's definitely not the end of the road for RHEL 5. Remember we have a 10-year product lifecycle. At this point RHEL 5 is only four years old, so we still have a long runway left for RHEL 5."

Source: Server Watch - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 Enters Testing

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Battlefield 3's PC Server Browser Gets Updated

2011-12-12T01:52:00.003-05:00

One thing that PC gaming has always had over console gaming (at least in terms of multiplayer) was the ability to buy your on server to host your favorite games online. In addition to that, you also had the ability to join any server you could find, dramatically increasing the chances of you finding a game. Battlefield 3 brought a little of this functionality to consoles upon its release, though the PC still does it better in my opinion. However, it appears as if PC gamers will have even more to brag about as DICE has made a plethora of "super charged" improvements to the Server Browser for the PC version of Battlefield 3.

The full list of all the changes is as follows:

Filter by Country - This allows you to search for servers by country (obviously). This is highly useful for any gamer looking to play with gamers from all corners of the earth or want to play on the server of your favorite country.

Server Queuing - This is sure to make a lot of gamers happy. Server queuing allows you to be added to a waiting queue if the server you want to play on is full. This is good if you are trying to play a specific map, game mode or with specific players.

New Navigation Icons - New quick links are available that take you directly to some of the more popular areas of Battlelog as well as easy access to things like stats and dog tags.

Easier Server Joining for Parties - The whole process of joining a server with a party of friends has been improved. The update allows everybody in your party to connect to the server asynchronously, without having to wait for your team to ready up.

Battle Report Sharing - You now have the ability to share your favorite battle reports on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, letting all your friends know just how much of a boss you really are (or aren't) at the game.

Improved Server Browser - The server browser has now been equipped with more search options like Kill Cam, Friendly Fire and 3D Spotting. This is sure to make finding specific things in a game much faster and easier.

That's the run-down of all the new features in DICE's update to the Battlefield 3 PC Server Browser system. Hopefully this helps make finding games, servers and parties a lot simpler. Battlefield 3 fans should also keep an eye out for the game's first set of DLC, "Back to Karkand", set to drop on December 13th. Owners of the Limited Edition game will already have free access to the DLC with everybody else having to pay for it.

Source: ComputerAndVideoGames.com - Battlefield 3 PC Server Browsers gets 'super charged' update

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Intel Debuts Pentium 350 Chip for Low-End Servers

2011-11-25T11:20:00.006-05:00

Intel, the most widely renowned and largest computer chip manufacturer on the planet, has just introduced a brand new, low-power Pentium 350 processor which is specifically aimed at low-end servers. The company had talked previously about its intentions to move into the low-end server market by producing "server versions" of the Atom processor which would support technologies like ECC memory.

However, Intel has taken that idea and done something that simply has most tech industry professionals scratching their heads. Intel has gone ahead and jumped right into the market, though with a Pentium branded processor instead of an Atom. The processor the company has decided to use? The dual-core 1.2GHz Pentium 350.

Even though the Pentium brand from Intel is extremely well known, the company has relegated it to cut down processors, effectively taking the place of the company's Celeron processors. Regardless, the Pentium 350 supports Hyperthreading and, most importantly, has a thermal design power (TDP) of only 15W.

What makes the Intel Pentium 350 processor a server-oriented chip is the complete lack of an on-chip GPU and support for ECC memory with the memory controller supporting two channels. In addition to that, there is support for Intel's Vpro virtualization technology, presumably meaning that the Pentium 350 chip was designed for very specific and traditional workloads.

The Xeon range of processors from Intel currently dominates the commodity server market, though the company needs to start producing lower power chips to compete with ARM-based servers in the future. It was expected that Chipzilla would serve the low-end server market with an Atom processor, but for now the 15W Pentium chip will have to take its place until 22nm Atom chips begin coming off of Intel's production lines sometime next year.

Source: The Inquirer - Intel outs 15W Pentium 350 chip for servers

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New SQL Server Licensing from Microsoft

2011-11-13T15:24:00.005-05:00

It seems that most people, on the internet at least, have come to accept some new changes to Microsoft's SQL Server 2012 licensing model which is a clear contrast to the anarchy that ensued over changes to VMware's vSphere 5.0 back in July. In that case complaints forced VMware to modify its pricing. Microsoft debuted SQL Server 2012 earlier in the month as the relational database management system upgraded from SQL 2008. However, it is still going to take some effort by customers to figure out what these new changes mean for them, as well as for their IT budgets.

On the other hand, Microsoft is attempting to make it as easy as possible with an SQL Server 2012 Licensing Datasheet. Microsoft explains, in a six-page PDF, the different licensing options, differences among the different editions and how to transition from SQL 2008 to SQL 2012 licenses. However, it is still recommended that users consult with a Microsoft sales representative, preferably one that is the most familiar with their account.

Last month Microsoft and HP jointly announced the development of HP Alliance which will be able to run SQL 2012. VMware landed in some hot water with more than a few customers when it introduced a new licensing policy with vSphere 5.0, specifically when the company switched from a hardware-based licensing model per physical server to a "vRAM metric", where the company billed the amount of virtual RAM per physical server.

A plethora of blogs and reports noted complaints about the limitation on the number of vRAMs per license and, after only three weeks of customer disapproval, VMware relented and increased the limits per license of vRAM. It is no surprise that the backlash of that business venture is on the minds of the people at Microsoft who are responsible for SQL 2012. Some of the highlights of the new release include a new license category called Business Intelligence (BI) Edition, which fits between the existing Standard Edition (SE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE).

The BI Edition is fine-tuned to manage databases that are tied to a business intelligence application, which just so happens to be a growing category of IT for companies that are looking to crunch petabytes of data in order to get a little insight into how to run their businesses. Each edition of SQL 2012 will offer two broad options, pricing based on computing power and pricing based on the total number of end users. This is known as the Client Access License (CAL). However, computing power in the Enterprise Edition will be based on the number of sockets in a server as opposed to the number of processors.

Pricing information is detailed in the datasheet that notes that in EE a license is $6,874 per core for mission-critical apps. The BI edition is $3,952 per server plus an additional $209 per CAL. The SE edition is sold on a per-server ($898) or per-core ($1,793) basis with the addition of the same $209 per CAL license. It's going to take some calculations on the customer's part to determine if it is financially better to go with a per-server or per-core plan. Regardless, SQL Server 2012 will be available sometime in the first quarter of 2012.

Source: Information Week - Microsoft Revamps SQL Server Licensing

ARM Enters the World of 64-bit with New ARMv8 Chip Architecture

2011-10-30T15:20:00.006-04:00

ARM has just introduced its very first 64-bit microprocessor architecture, known as ARMv8. This new architecture should enable wider use of ARM chips in servers as well as other enterprise equipment and also increase the competition the company currently has with Intel.

ARMv8 adds 64-bit addressing capabilities, which is an improvement over the ARMv7-A architecture. The ARMv7-A architecture is capable of up to 40-bit addressing, though this new architecture puts ARM into more direct competition with Intel and its 65-bit Xeon processors.

The new architecture will take time to show up, though. ARM expects to release its first ARMv8 processor designs next year with prototype consumer and enterprise systems not expected to arrive until sometime in 2014 according to ARM. In a speech by ARM CTO Mike Muller at ARM TechCon on Thursday where the new design was announced, Muller stated, "This is the beginning of quite a long road to 64-bit products."

The ARMv8 processor architecture will offer backwards compatibility as well as migration for existing software, ARM added. Most of the PC and server operating systems in today's market ar 64-bit. 64-bit allows computers to address larger amounts of storage and memory, something that is especially useful for data-intensive applications.

ARM licenses processor architectures and designs to mobile chip companies, like Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, and the company's processors are also used in most smartphones and tablets on today's market. However, the company has practically no presence in the server and PC markets, both of which are dominated by Intel and its x86 processors.

The new ARM architecture will be implemented in chips that range from tiny sensors to large-scale infrastructure equipment, according to ARM, who also stated that it will bring "energy-efficient 64-bit computing" to high-end servers. Microsoft has said previously that 64-bit applications run faster than 32-bit applications, and ARM's new architecture could make future chips with ARM processors capable of running 64-bit Windows applications.

Microsoft's Windows 8 will work on ARM and x86 processors, and devices like tablets have been demonstrated running on ARM's 31-bit processors. The lack of 64-bit capabilities was considered a drawback in ARM's efforts to enter the PC and server markets with most applications running 64-bits. ARM had previously stated that it would address 64-bit only when necessary, pointing out that it would not sacrifice power consumption in order to bring more performance. It looks like that time has come.

Source: Computer World - ARM goes 64-bit with new ARMv8 chip architecture

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Microsoft Announces HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server

2011-10-16T20:01:00.006-04:00

Microsoft, along with HP, has just announced that the HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server will be available this November. The hardware-software package is targeted directly at increasing the speed of deployment and simplifying the management of hundreds to thousands of database instances in a virtualized "private cloud" environment.

Microsoft has stated that the appliance will allow customers to deploy new database instances in a matter of minutes while also reducing the cost of operations by as much as 75% over conventional database deployments. This is accomplished via savings on floor space, energy usage and infrastructure.

Microsoft has also described the new appliance as an industry first due to its ability to consolidate a database with no application or database changes using built-in tools for database migration as well as management. However, the device is clearly the Microsoft-HP answer to Oracle's Exadata, which now claims to have more than 1,000 deployments.

The HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance is basically the transactional-side counterpart to the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance which was introduced earlier in the year. The HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance runs on Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.

The full rack consolidation appliance provides 58 terabytes of storage as well as 400 hard drives, 192 logical processors and 2 terabytes of RAM. If that seems like it may be overkill for what you need, you can always opt for a half rack option which, obviously, takes everything offered by the full rack and cuts it in half. Supporting software includes Windows Server Datacenter 2008 R2, new Microsoft Database Consolidation 2012 software to manage the appliance, SQL Server virtual machines and new appliance tools for configuration, testing and day-to-day management.

Source: Information Week - Microsoft Counters Exadata With SQL Server Appliance

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UTStarcom Debuts MS 3005 Blade Server

2011-10-02T22:02:00.004-04:00

UTStarcom Holdings Corporation, one of the leading providers of interactive IP-based network solutions in iDTV, IPTV, Internet TV and broadband for telecom and operators, has just announced the launch of its MS 3005 streaming media storage unit and blade server, both of which provide users with expanded storage capabilities as well as faster processing capacities.

The MS 3005 server allows operators of IPTV, iDTV and Internet TV to stream large amounts of HD content while also providing added-value services including video-on-demand and expanded recording capabilities. In addition to that, this new product also allows operators to manage and store different types of media data collected from TV, Mobile PC and other digital media more efficiently.

Environmentalist will appreciate the fact that the new MS 3005 server is also more energy efficient compared to the previous version, consuming less electricity per hour. As a result of this energy savings, operators will be able to enjoy energy and maintenance cost-savings. Improved technology as well as high storage density also help reduce costs in processing, storage, and spare parts while at the same time enhancing the operator's efficiency and scalability.

When combined with the new MC6098B HD set-top box, the MS 3005 blade server also enhances the experience of the subscriber while also improving not only the telecom operator's service capabilities but also the cable operator's service capabilities through UTStarcom's integrated Internet TV solution.

Source: Market Watch - UTStarcom Launches MS 3005 Server

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Security Flaw at Oracle Could Take Down Application Servers

2011-09-16T13:23:00.005-04:00

Oracle just released an emergency patch that is designed to fix a vulnerability that, according to the company, could bring down HTTP application servers sold by Oracle, ones that are also based on Apache 2.0 or 2.2.

According to a statement released by Oracle, hackers have the ability to exploit weaknesses remotely without the need of a username or password for entry. There are multiple products that are affected by the bug, including Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1, versions 11.1.1.3.0, 11.1.1.4.0 and 11.1.1.5.0; Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3, version 10.1.1.5.0 and Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, version 10.1.2.3.0.

The United States Government's National Vulnerability Database has already assigned a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) rating of 7.8 to the bug, indicating a "complete Operating System denial of service (dos)", according to the company. However, Oracle did take issue with the assessment in its security alert.

According to the company, "A complete Operating System denial of service is not possible on any platform supported by Oracle, and as a result, Oracle has given the vulnerability a CVSS Base Score of 5.0 indicating a complete denial of service of the Oracle HTTP Server but not the Operating System."

Regardless of how you score it, the bug was, evidently, serious enough for Oracle to release a patch for it outside of the company's usual large quarterly update schedule, the next of which is poised to take place on October 18, 2011.

The hack at Oracle is just the latest in a series of hacks against large corporations, government websites and other companies from multiple hacker groups that like to be known as "hacktivists". These attacks have gotten so bad, actually, that the government has started an all out campaign against these hackers in an attempt to stop them before they cause any extremely serious damage.

Source: PC World - Oracle: Security Flaw Could Bring Down App Servers

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Microsoft SQL Server Switching to Open Database Connectivty

2011-09-01T19:50:00.005-04:00

Microsoft just announced on Monday a roadmap shift indicating that it will shift focus on supporting the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) approach for SQL Server application programming interfaces in the very near future. This is an important announcement for C/C++ developers who are writing applications for relational database management systems, especially if they are using other Microsoft-supported APIs like Object Linking and Embedding Database (OLE DB).

In addition to that, Microsoft has announced that it will be slowly cutting ties with OLE DB support. According to Microsoft, there will be a 7-year phase out period for OLE DB which will correspond with the life cycle support period of SQL Server code-named "Denali" after that product launches. Denali will be the last Microsoft SQL Server database management product to support OLE DB.

According to a blog post from Microsoft, "OLE DB will supported for seven years from launch, the life of SQL Server Code Name 'Denali' support, to allow you a large window of opportunity for change before depreciation. We encourage you to adopt ODBC in any future version or new application development."

Microsoft has yet to announce a release date for Denali though the common expectation is that Denali will be released in the fourth quarter of this year. In addition to that, it is also expected that details will come from Microsoft's PASS Summit 2011 event in October.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft is accepting that the OBDC open standard it developed with Simba Technologies back in 1992 has become the widely accepted standard for database APIs. ODBC has overshadowed the other attempts by Microsoft to improve on the standard with its OLE DB according to Simba's history of ODBC.

According to Microsoft, "This depreciation applies to the Microsoft SQL Server OLE DB provider only. Other OLE DB providers as well as the OLE DB standard will continue to be supported until explicitly announced." However, a Microsoft FAQ does indicate that ADO will also be affected by the phase out of OLE DB.

"Providers like ADO.net which can run on top of OLE DB will not support OLE DB once the latter is depreciated," says the FAQ. "At that time the clients using the underlying provider need to update their application to use a different provider."

If you are a developer, then you should consider moving to ODBC over the 7-year period in order to align with this general plan. OLE DB was the proprietary technology of Microsoft, however, Microsoft has now admitted that ODBC was a better choice.

According to the FAQ, "OLE DB was introduced primarily to provide uniform data access to non-relational data as well as relational data. But it is Microsoft's proprietary technology that worked only on Microsoft platforms. When it comes to uniform data access to SQL Server from different platforms, ODBC has always been a better choice and that was consistently quoted by all of our customers in various surveys, SDRs and forums. By fully aligning with ODBC, Microsoft will be focusing on one set of industry standard APIS that are widely used by many of our customers."

Source: Redmondmag.com - Microsoft Shifting To Open Database Connectivity for SQL Server

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Red Hat Virtualization No Longer Windows Exclusive

2011-08-19T15:05:00.007-04:00

Considering that it's a Linux Vendor, it isn't a surprise that Red Hat obviously wants its customers to run its technologies on Linux. However, when it comes to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management system, customers have always been forced to run the system on Microsoft Windows. However, that is all about to change.

According to Navin Thadani, Senior Director of Red Hat's Virtualization Business, "The management system has been re-written as a Java app that runs on top of a RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) server. So we've removed the Microsoft Windows server dependency."

Thadani did note that RHEV will still support Active Directory for authentication work. Now the system uses the open source PostgreSQL database as well. The new RHEV update is said to be a zero-downtime upgrade according to Thadani. In addition to that, the new Windows-free management piece will not cost anything extra other than that which Red Hat has previously charged for the RHEV versions that had Windows dependencies.

"The way we price RHEV is that we don't charge for the management system separately," Thadani added. "Ours is a single price for the management system and the hypervisor baked into a dollars-per-socket, per-year price." Thadani also added that enterprises just need to count the number of CPU sockets they will use and that is how much they will pay. Thadani also added that he believes that Red Hat's pricing can be 1/7 the cost of VMware. VMware recently changed its pricing model for vSphere. Pricing is now based on virtual RAM allocations.

In addition to the new management server, the other major change in RHEV 3.0 is a new version of KVM. KVM is the core virtualization hypervisor that powers the solution. According to Thadani, "We've replaced the underlying hypervisor to the new KVM that's going to be shipping in RHEL 6.2. With that, we've picked up performance enhancements, including Transparent Huge Pages for database performance, paravirtualized interrupt controllers, async I/O and an entire rewrite of the networking infrastructure."

Thadani also explained that the networking stack has also been moved from userspace to kernel space to deliver better performance to users. Now, the system can scale up to 128 CPUs with 2TB of RAM at the host level, providing for larger virtual machines.
In addition to that, Red Hat is making it easier to provision and deploy new virtual machines as well as create templates and make virtual machines. There is also a new built-in reporting infrastructure that leverages an embedded Jasper Reports engine.

RHEV is not all about server virtualization exclusively, there is also a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) component as well. "We've made improvements to VDI in the area of WAN optimization," Thadani added. The last major release of RHEV was when version 2.2 was released in 2010. When asked about number of customers, Thadani stated, "We've got many, many customers around the world and across industry segments." RHEV 3.0 is currently in beta testing with general availability slated for the end of this year.

Source: Server Watch - Red Hat Revs up Virtualization, Without Windows

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Raytheon Unveils Interoperable Server System

2011-08-06T13:43:00.005-04:00

Raytheon has just developed a new server-based system that links 4G LTE and P25 systems over the same network. When this happens, it ensures that public safety officials will be able to stay connected when they need to the most. It would allow firefighters using a legacy FM handheld, EMS with a P25 radio or a police officer with an LTE-linked mobile data computer in his squad car to stay connected, no matter what.

The new server from Raytheon is suitable for a wide variety of interoperability applications and is also scalable, making it usable in small towns or big cities, whichever is needed. The system uses gateways, like Raytheon's newly released ACU-5000, for local interoperability. It also uses these gateways to convert non-IP communications, like the ones from radios, telephones and the like, for transfer to the server. IP-based communications are brought directly to the server.

According to Director of Civil Communications Solutions for Raytheon's Network Centric Systems Business Bill Iannacci, "Interoperability in a large-scale disaster is critical. Raytheon's interoperable server solution promotes customer choice, as it integrates the existing equipment of each city and has built-in abilities to support next-generation communications technology. This allows municipalities to upgrade hardware, from their preferred vendors, as budgets allow."

Raytehon's Audio Connect Unit (ACU) technology initiated the radio interoperability gateway concept in the late 1990's and the newer server system assists its users by incorporating all the lessons learned since then. The understanding that during a disaster or other type of incident that requires inter-agency interoperability, most of the links will be local was one of the most prominent lessons learned. This new system maintains this local interoperability, as well as the means to control it, even if infrastructure failure breaks the network link to the server.

Source: PR Newswire - Raytheon Debuts an Interoperable Server System With Digital and Analog Interfaces for Legacy FM Radio, P25 and 4G LTE

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Apple's Lion Server Takes A Different Turn

2011-07-24T21:04:00.006-04:00

So Mac OS X Lion has just been released and the first app to hit the Lion app store is surprising many users. That app is Mac OS X Lion Server, which will cost you $49, a mere fraction of the $499 price tag that was on Snow Leopard's Server. With that the Mac OS X Server that everybody knew is no more. In addition to that, just to make the deal a little sweeter, Apple is giving you Xsan, the SAN software that the company used to sell for $999. With Mac OS X Lion Server you can turn a Mac Pro with a fiber channel card into a super fast bulletproof distributed storage server for Mac networks.

While you may already be drooling over these kinds of prices, it all seems a little odd, and it raises a few questions. Many critics will undoubtedly point the Lion Server drop in price, the abolishment of node-locked licensing, and simplification of the administrative GUI as a foreshadowing of Apple leaving the server market completely. The price of $49 does not mitigate the risk of implementing a server platform that appears to be in decline.

On the other hand, Lion Server doesn't really resemble a last ditch effort by a dying market. Instead it seems to signal a shift in mission. As opposed to trying to displace enterprises Windows, Linux and Unix servers, Lion Server seems to focus primarily on providing easily managed native network services to work groups of iOS and Mac users. Lion Server's Profile Manager is key to enterprise deployments of iOS devices. Profile Manager has the ability to configure a user-owned device that is connected to a company infrastructure for company services that include ones not hosted by Mac OS X or iCloud.

Mac devices, like iPads or iPhones, that are owned by the company can also be locked down with profiles that apply certain defined groups of users or devices. All you have to do as the user is visit a web portal that Lion has set up and hosted automatically. After the profile is loaded, updates can be pushed to a certain device over the air and so can emergency commands such as remote wipe and password change. And that is only one of the many services offered by Lion Server. $49 equips your network with any combination of file, email, calendar, Web, chat, podcast, VPN, directory or backup services. And you know how committed Apple is to standards, so you can rely on the fact that Lion Server remains a good candidate for everyday use.

Source: InfoWorld - Apple's radical new Mac server strategy

Microsoft Announces General Availability of SBS Essentials 2011

2011-07-08T15:52:00.006-04:00

Microsoft just recently announced the general availability of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials last week. The server, which was designed to support small businesses with around 25 users, is able to be purchased via Microsoft's volume licensing channels or from original equipment managers and retail outlets. Microsoft's volume licensing customers are also supposed to have had access to Windows SBS 2011 Essentials since May 1.

This announcement claims that most of Microsoft's OEM partners currently offer SBS 2011 Essentials server products. While that may be true, only HP's offering is easy to find at the moment. It's a little confusing because Microsoft provides links to six OEMs on its Windows SBS purchasing options page with most of those links leading to Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard offerings. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard is slightly different in that it supports up to 75 users. Microsoft released SBS 2011 Standard to OEMs as well as volume licensing customers back in March.

Microsoft's announcement did indicate that more OEM server products using SBS 2011 Essentials software will be available "in the next few months". Windows SBS 2011 Essentials is designed to rely on cloud-based services, more so than Windows SBS 2011 Standard that is. One benefit that SBS 2011 Essentials has over SBS 2011 Standard is that no Client Access Licenses are required to use the Essentials version.

Microsoft is planning a means for better integration with Office 365, the latest collection of cloud-based services from Microsoft. This integration will be carried out via a Microsoft connector known as "Office 365 Integration Module for SBS Essentials". Microsoft expects the release of this module sometime this fall.

IT professionals can currently create new users manually in SBS 2011 Essentials as well as Office 365 and they can also use the same alias name in both the premises-based Essentials as well as in the cloud-based Office 365 suite. The integration module will automate porting user aliases created in Essentials into the Office 365 cloud.

More improvements to SMS 2011 Essentials will be coming in the future, either from Microsoft or one of its many partners. Microsoft did state in the announcement that "many more solutions for cloud backup, hosted email integration and online productivity are already on the market or will be available soon."

In addition to that, there is also an experimental connector currently available for Windows 7 users that is able to assist them in remotely monitoring SBS 2011 Essentials servers via their smartphones. It also works with the Windows Home Server 2011 as well as Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. The connector is currently available as a release candidate test version and is not recommended by Microsoft for use in production environments.

Source: Redmondmag.com - Windows SBS 2011 Essentials Released Broadly

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Embotics Releases V-Commander 4.0

2011-06-24T02:13:00.006-04:00

Managing private cloud deployments is no small task. Virtualization is supposed to help enterprises consolidate server sprawl as well as realize operational efficiencies. However, it requires the right amount of management infrastructure in order to do so. Software vendor Embotics is looking to deliver on the promise of private cloud virtualization management with its new V-Commander 4.0 release. This new release is targeted specifically at the mid-market for enterprises that have between 250 to 2,000 servers. It also delivers provisioning and service automation features.

According to Founder, CEO and President of Embotics Jay Litkey, "It's infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and we also integrate virtualization management capabilities. Traditionally, people look at IaaS vendors that are just focused on the provisioning of virtual machines, we have all of that and have included the same product real-time monitoring and virtualization management."

The V-Commander 4.0 release includes a new service catalog as well as approval workflow and rapid provisioning capabilities. The approval workflow component allows an enterprise to have a system which lets administrators approve which users gain access to virtual machine assets. In addition to that, the system also tracks the workflow of a service requests allowing both users and administrators to monitor status.

The service catalog is built by the organization using a drag and drop form builder. Litkey also explained that a lot of companies make a template of approved services available. The service catalog portal can also be used in order to request changes to an existing service. The rapid provisioning component comes into play once the service catalog item workflow request has been approved. The V-Commander software is able to run on either a physical or virtual appliance, and currently Embotics doesn't offer the product in a hosted Software-as-a-Service cloud model.

"We don't do that today, it's a conceptual type of deployment, and we haven't seen strong demands for it," Litkey stated. "Clearly, as the world evolves and the world moves to more cloud driven approaches, you can expect that we'll see an uptick in more people asking for it."Litkey explained that a lot of enterprises are more comfortable having automated management software deployed on-site. "People want to first be comfortable with automation within the walls of their own private cloud first."

V-Commander is also currently limited to the management of on-site private clouds as opposed to some form of hybrid deployment which includes public cloud components. Litkey did, however, hint that this could change in the future. "Since we have monitoring of capacity and the automation for creation and destruction of virtual machines, we'll have more investment to tie that information together to make intelligent decisions."

Litkey also noted that in V-Commander 4.0, there is an intelligent placement feature that determines where a new VM should be provisioned. With an improved tie-in to monitoring, the placement feature can be enhanced with historical and compliance data as well. "In 4.0, we started the process and we have more planned in terms of tying this knowledge together to do provisioning in an intelligent, automated fashion."

Source: A Serve Watch - Embotics Takes Command of Private Cloud Servers

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HP Not Letting Oracle Drop Itanium Support Without A Fight

2011-06-11T16:00:00.006-04:00

So, if you haven't already heard, HP has no plans of letting Oracle off the hook for supporting Itanium. Oracle publicly announced back in March that it was officially discontinuing support of Oracle applications running on HP's Intel Itanium powered servers.

Jump forward three months and HP is starting to fight back by claiming that Oracle has a legal obligation to continue supporting Itanium. According to a statement made by HP, "HP believes that Oracle's March 22 statement to discontinue all future software development on the Itanium platform violates legally binding commitments Oracle has made to HP and the more than 140,000 shared HP-Oracle customers. Further, we believe that this is an unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms over to Oracle's own platforms."

HP has sent Oracle a formal legal demand letter telling the company that it needs to reverse its decision on abandoning Itanium. "HP believes that Oracle is legally obligated to continue to offer its software product suite on the Itanium platform and we will take whatever legal actions are available to us necessary to protect our customers' best interests and the significant investments they have made," HP stated.

Oracle, back in March, made numerous claims that HP apparently disagreed with. Not only did Oracle announce publicly that the company was discontinuing support for HP's Itanium but they also claimed that Intel was hopping on board and doing the same thing. According to Oracle, "Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life."

The unfortunate thing, for Oracle at least, is that both HP and Intel are refuting Oracle's claims. According to HP, "HP remains committed to a long-term mission-critical server roadmap, including Intel's Itanium processor. Similarly, Intel has repeatedly reinforced its ongoing commitment to the Itanium roadmap."

While HP is going after Oracle for Itanium support, other vendors have already begun abandoning the platform. Microsoft announced back in April of 2010 that it was ending support for Itanium. Will HP win out over Oracle or will Oracle's claims that Intel is dropping Itanium as well come true?

Source: Server Watch - HP Demands Oracle Support Itanium

Asia-Pacific Server Market Experiences Growth

2011-05-30T14:22:00.006-04:00

The first quarter of 2011 saw strong growth in the Asia-Pacific server market. Shipments rose 21% compared to the first quarter of 2010, just one year ago. In addition to that, server revenue increased 29% year-over-year.

The Australian market also experienced growth, however, the market growth was modest. Server revenue in the Australian market increased by 10% this quarter despite shipments falling 5% compared to last year's first quarter.

According to Erica Gadjuli, Gartner Principal Research Analyst, "Enterprise spending on server consolidation using virtualization technology continued to be a key driving factor for server market growth in this region." x86-based server sales also grew 21% in shipments as well as 31% in revenue.

IT investments in key verticals like financial services and the public sector led to year-on-year revenue growth in mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix servers. Mainframe and RISC/Itanium Unix servers grew 137% and 15.3% respectively during the first quarter.

Blade Servers, which include x86 and non-x86 based, did better than the rest of the market by growing 38% by shipments and 68% in revenue year-over-year compared to other servers like rack mounted, rack optimized, tower and standalone.

The leader in the server market for the first quarter was HP with shipments with a 30% share overall in Asia-Pacific. IBM held the leadership position in revenue, accounting for 41% of the entire market.

Dell was second in shipments with 21.8%, followed by IBM with a 20% market share. Lenovo trailed in fourth with 5.1% with Huawei topping off the top five with 3.7%. All of these vendors in the Asia-Pacific region had their own moments of success during the first quarter of 2011 in both shipments and revenue, experiencing double digit growth year-over-year.

Source: ARN - Asia-Pacific server market on the rise

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Mon.itor.Us Introduces Free Server Monitoring as a Service

2011-05-13T17:11:00.006-04:00

Mon.itor.Us has recently announced that it has become the only cloud-based systems monitoring solution of internal servers for organizations at no cost. Mon.itor.Us is the free monitoring section of Monitis, Incorporated and has launched no-cost internal server and network monitoring as one of its services.

Mon.itor.Us has offered users, which consists of entrepreneurs, small to medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, government agencies, schools and non-profit organizations, free external website monitoring since 2005.

According to Founder and CEO of Monitis Hovhannes Avoyan, "The growing popularity of Mon.itor.Us proves there is a high level of demand among the world's companies for free cloud-based website monitoring to easily and accurately check their web servers' uptime and end-user experience, as well as to ensure that all runs smoothly. Our outstanding growth in transactions and users shows that today's enterprises (small or large) want it all - reliable on-demand monitoring tools that are hassle-free to set up and use and are thus more cost-efficient than even free monitoring software."

Mon.itor.Us has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary and extended its free monitoring as a service offering to include systems and network performance monitoring. Mon.itor.Us has significantly enhanced the monitoring services it provides by offering free 24/7 monitoring of internal servers' CPUs, memory, system processes and hard disk space as well as corporate Intranet applications through on-demand, hosted monitoring. This frees up system administrators from worries about poor performance on their IT infrastructure.

"Now consider hosted server monitoring," Avoyan noted. "Having a single small-footprint agent within the firewall and using HTTP(s) protocol for communication eliminates the need for system administrators to alter their firewall just so monitoring software can work properly. We enforce the best monitoring architecture at no dollar and time cost, and the whole setup may take just minutes with hosted monitoring solutions."

The main benefit to hosted monitoring is the fact that it frees up system administrators from long setups, configurations and continual maintenance on software-based monitoring systems. The benefits are pretty easy to spot, Avoyan added, "We are the first and only cloud-based monitoring solution to offer free all-in-one server monitoring."

Source: The Open Press - Mon.itor.Us Introduces World's First Free Server Monitoring as a Service (Monitis)

Amazon Makes an Apology for Server Outage, Offers Credit as Compensation

2011-04-29T14:18:00.007-04:00

Amazon.com has released an apology today for a data-center outage that brought down a bunch of major websites including Foursquare as well as Reddit. In addition to the apology, Amazon.com also offered customers of its Web services a 10-day credit.

Amazon isn't, however, disclosing how much the credit will be. Amazon Web Services accounts for only a small percentage of Amazon's total revenue. However ,the company does have high hopes for the business. The Web service rents out computer time by the hour.

The outage took place at a data center near Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. and was a major stumble for Amazon's service. The company is still trying to restore some of the computers brought down in the incident which started eight days ago.

In a post-mortem report that was released today, Amazon, which is based out of Seattle, stated that human error set off the outage. An automated error-recovery mechanism then went out of control causing many computers to become stuck in recovery mode.

Amazon set up the service in a way to provide redundancy by letting computers in a different zone of availability take over if another one fails. Amazon stated that customers who were set up properly to run their computing tasks over multiple zones were largely unaffected, however, that error made it difficult to switch zones on a whim. It is, however, making changes to prevent that error from recurring.

The 10-day credit applies to each and every customer using the zone that went down, despite whether they were directly affected or not. Amazon has also not revealed exactly how many customers were affected.

Source: Associated Press - Amazon apologizes for server outage

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Red Hat Linux Offered on a Per-Server Basis by IBM on Power Systems

2011-04-18T00:47:00.005-04:00

IBM, along with Red Hat, a commercial distributor of Linux, have teamed up to provide Enterprise Linux 6 on IBM's Power Systems that are sold by Big Blue along with first level and second level support provided by Big Blue. Obviously, that isn't very new news.IBM has been a huge OEM partner with Red Hat for years now. What is new is that in an announcement letter, IBM and Red Hat have revealed a per-server license price for Power Systems machines running RHEL 6 which started up back in November. With RHEL 6 out but not certified on the new Power iron, IBM began giving away a free RHEL license on Power Systems Express configurations. IBM has now worked with Red Hat in order to tune up RHEL 6 for Power6, Power6+ and Power7 servers. This includes integration with IBM's PowerVM hypervisor for Power iron. The new licensing for RHEL 6, which became available on April 15th, allows for every pair of sockets in the box to be licensed with 15, 30 or 60 logical partition ceilings per socket pair. A standard 12x5 business hour support contract for RHEL 6 for a socket pair on a Power Systems box costs $1,350 per year for a setup with a 15-LPAR ceiling. Now if you want to increase that to a priority 24x7 support, then your price will increase to $2,150 per year. Doubling up the LPAR ceiling to 30 on a four-socket Power System doubles your support costs and if you quadruple it up to a 60-LPAR ceiling on an eight-socket machine, you quadruple your prices to $5,400 and $8,600 for a 12x5 or a 24x7 coverage. IBM, just like Red Hat, does give discounts to customers who purchase a three-year contract. IBM did, however, stop selling the earlier RHEL 5.5 on April 12. Source: IT Jungle - IBM Offers Red Hat Linux on a Per-Server Basis on Power

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Windows Home Server 2011 Officially Released

2011-04-01T15:30:00.004-04:00

Microsoft has officially released its new Windows Home Server 2011. Windows Home Server 2011, with this release to manufacturing, is now expected to reach subscribers of MSDN and TechNet in early April at which point they can download the software through their subscriptions. This latest version of Windows Home Server should start to show its face on computers in May according to Microsoft. Microsoft also noted that manufacturers have already been working with the new home operating system. The official version of Windows Home Server 2011, which has been code-named Vail, comes to techies nearly one year after the beta was released and almost two months since the release candidate made its debut. Windows Home Server 2011 uses the same core operating system as Windows Server 2008 R2 but the new version is designed for people who need to balance multiple PCs, home networks and growing amounts of photos, music, videos and other heavy content. Running Windows Home Server on a dedicated PC allows users to set up network shares in order to access all of their data, back up their networked PCs, remotely access their files and stream their music and as well as their videos. The software offers a central dashboard in order for customers to run the various administrative tasks they will be doing. The previous version of Windows Home Server offered a feature known as Drive Extender which received much praise from users. The feature allowed people to extend multiple disk drives into a single large volume as they added new storage. However, Microsoft has claimed that the drive extender technology "was not meeting our customer needs," so they cut it from Windows Home Server 2011. However, Microsoft did add a feature called the Move Folder Wizard in order to move content between different drives. However, the loss of Drive Extender may turn away many potential users of Windows Home Server 2011. Microsoft has also lost one of their key Windows Home Server hardware partners. Late last year Hewlett-Packard, who was known for their robust Media Smart Windows Home Server servers, announced that they would no longer make computers for the Home Server operating system. The loss of HP only leaves a few key manufacturers, like Acer, who will be building dedicated boxes for Windows Home Server 2011. Windows Home Server 2011 will be released in 19 languages, according to Microsoft, including English, French, Chinese, Russian and Korean. Source: cnet - Microsoft releases Windows Home Server 2011

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Facebook Combines Microserver Technology with Server Virtualization

2011-03-18T14:31:00.005-04:00

Here's something interesting for you. Facebook is using a hybrid server virtualization as well as Intel's microserver technology in order to make the continued expansion of the social networking god more cost effective.

According to the Research Lab Director of Facebook Gio Coglitore, "The firm has already been trailing in new microserver technology and is interested in leveraging the benefits of the solution in its substantial data centers."

One of the keys to the popularity of the single-processor server hardware is the fact that it can be packed more densely which offers more processing power per square inch than traditional server solutions.

"We found in our testing that a realized environment brings efficiencies and the ability to scale more effectively," Coglitore said. "If virtualization was the right approach, we would be a virtualized environment."

Coglitore concluded that virtualization was, indeed, an excellent solution but can become very difficult to manage at a very large scale. Intel introduced their microserver technology back in 2009 where it received high praise from fans and users. The technology has also landed some big clients since then including Dell, Seamicro and Tyan.

Source: onestopclick - Facebook mixes server virtualization with microserver technologies

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Latest Version of Oracle GlassFish Server Launched

2011-03-04T20:32:00.005-05:00

Oracle has officially launched a new version of Oracle GlassFish Server as well as an update to the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 software development kit (SDK)distribution through the latest release of the Java EE 6 Reference Implementation.

Oracle GlassFish Server is based on the company's open source counterpart, GlassFish Server Open Source Edition, which allows customers to have more control over their product deployments via the publicly available roadmap of product features and priorities.

Oracle stated that Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 delivers on the roadmap laid out at JavaOne 2010 with a focus on new highly availability features specifically in load balancing, failover, state management and centralized administration. Key features of Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 include: new features for OSGi Enterprise like support for JDBC and HTTP Service; faster startup/deploy/re-deploy cycle; sophisticated tools integration with NetBeans and Eclipse and increased compatibility with Oracle WebLogic Server 11g.

This new release also features failover as well as load balancing capabilities and even built-in HTTP and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) state management. High availability messaging with GlassFish MQ is also available. According to Oracle, the new offering's centralized administration enables customers to monitor, and even manage, clusters and standalone servers securely from a single web-based console. This will help decrease operational costs as well as enabling users to respond to change quickly. It even allows centralized policy-driven management of GlassFish Metro Web Services from Oracle Web Services Manager.

Source: CBR - Oracle launches latest version of Orcale GlassFish Server

Zimbra Updated by VMware

2011-02-18T12:41:00.005-05:00

After being in development for over a year, Zimbra 7 is finally being released. VMware acquired Zimbra, an open source collaboration vendor, a little over a year ago from Yahoo, and the Zimbra 7 release is the first thing to come out of the company under the ownership of VMware. Zimbra 7 includes features that expand the usability and scalability of the platform even further than before.

According to Senior Director of Zimbra Products and Marketing at VMware John Robb, "The VMware Zimbra team worked closely with both Zimbra and VMware customers over the last year to prioritize the Zimbra 7 release. VMware is very supportive of open source, community based development, and Zimbra 7 demonstrates our commitment."

Zimbra 7 is the first release from the company since Zimbra 6 was released in September of 2009. Zimbra 6 was the final major release under Yahoo, who acquired Zimbra in September of 2007 for $350 million.

Zimbra 7 includes a lot of good stuff including improved file sharing capabilities that allow users to store and share files in the cloud via the Zimbra briefcase. If you are an administrator, this release includes enhanced delegation capabilities to control permissions and access. There are also new policies for load balancing as well as automatic recovery of Zimbra servers.

VMware virtualization-related enhancements are also included in Zimbra 7. "VMware Zimbra 7 includes support for VMware vSphere HA as well as support for NetApp NFS," according to Robb. "Additionally, the Zimbra Appliance leverages VMware Studio." Robb also added that Zimbra is an important product family at VMware and is part of the VMware End-User Computing Business Unit. "VMware Zimbra is completely integrated into VMware and it is available for all VMware partners to sell," said Robb.

As a part of the Zimbra 7 update, the desktop client is also being updated. Zimbra Desktop was released in 2007 as a way of bringing web-based email to the desktop. Zimbra Desktop was originally built with help from Mozilla Prism technology. Prism, as you know, was a project by Mozilla that targeted enabling web applications to run on your desktop. Mozilla has since moved the Prism project into their new effort called Chromeless.

According to Robb, "We are looking at all options for Zimbra Desktop and we are working closely with the Mozilla team, a Zimbra customer." Robb also noted that the future of Zimbra at VMware is definitely bright. According to Robb, VMware is looking at the future of end-user computing. It is a future where end-users access their data as well as their applications through a workspace that is available as part of their new mobile enterprise.

"VMware wants to provide IT with the ability to securely manage and deploy these workspaces. Zimbra is a key component of delivering on the future of end-user computing because it provides VMware a platform for delivering personal and end-user data and information," according to Robb.

Source - Server Watch - VMware Updates Zimbra

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Why Rent A Network Server?

2011-02-11T15:41:00.001-05:00

Server rentals are good for temporary needs such as data migrations, units out for repair, peak work loads, special projects, gaming, disaster recovery and more.

When you need a server rental to help recover from a disaster, contact a Tech Travel Agent from Rentacomputer.com. Oftentimes, in the event of an emergency, a Tech Travel Agent can get equipment on its way to you within just a few business hours. Call toll free 800-736-8772 to talk to an agent and set up an account, so you too can be ready for the next disaster. Everything you need can be rented. Below are some examples of equipment we have at the ready at all times.

Rack-Mount Server Rentals

Rack-Mount Servers are easy to use and highly reliable. These are desirable traits in a server when your company needs a temporary server rental to offset the stress on servers and machines owned by your business.

Server Peripheral Rentals

All server rentals need peripheral rentals. Server peripherals include routers, switches, cables, etc. A Tech Travel Agent can bundle all of these peripherals into a single quote along with your server rental.

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Dell and Ubuntu Team Up for Linux Cloud Computing Technology

2011-02-05T16:44:00.006-05:00

Canonical, one of the vendors of Ubuntu Linux, is expanding their cloud horizons thanks to a new cloud partnership they have formed with Dell. The partnership consists of Dell making the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) technology available on the Dell PowerEdge C2100 server as well as the Dell PowerEdge C6100 server. The UEC deal marks a huge milestone for Ubuntu as it moves from Dell desktops to Dell servers.

According to Nicolas Barcet, Ubuntu Server Product Manager, "It is the first offer that involves Ubuntu Server Edition at Dell so it's a major step extending the strong relationship we have had on Ubuntu Desktop and Netbook editions."

UEC has been a part of the Ubuntu Linux distro since Januty Jackalope was released in April 2009. Other releases by Ubuntu have improved the technology that is based on the open source Eucalyptus project. Ubuntu stated back in April 2010 that it had 12,000 active deployments of UEC with as many as 200 being added each day. This deal with Dell also involves a fair amount of money but an exact amount is unclear.

"Dell receives a share of the UEC Assist contracts it sells; details are not public. Dell does the entire sell, which includes the reselling of UEC Assist contracts," said Barcet.

There were some questions raised as to why Dell has decided to make UEC available now, and Barcet noted that Canonical and Dell have been working on making a simple yet stable deployment methodology. This methodology is reflected in both reference architecture documents as well as a set of pre-configuration files.

Barcet noted that UEC is not certified or integrated with other hardware from major system vendors other than Dell as of right now. UEC offers Ubuntu the ability to enable their infrastructure to run as either a private cloud deployment or a public cloud deployment. While the price utility of cloud computing has made it a good business investment for some companies, there are still challenges that need to be tackled.

According to Barcet, "Novelty of infrastructure as a service is the strongest barrier. We believe that seeing trusted partners join forces to provide an end-to-end solution will help establish the solution."

Source: Server Watch

Zero Client Virtual Desktop Gets Updated by Pano Logic

2011-01-21T15:23:00.006-05:00

Pano Logic, a leader in the world of virtual desktop vendors, is updating its zero client hardware and desktop virtualization software with a new release. The Pano System 4.0 update gives users improved hardware which enhances USB device support and adds Xen hypervisor support. Pano Logic technology has been in the market since 2007 touting itself as an alternative approach to thin client or traditional desktop deployments.

According to Pano Logic co-founder Aly Orady, "Effectively the way we accomplish our zero client is by stretching the system bus across the network." Orady went on to explain that in a normal desktopPC there is a system bus which is connected to I/O ports used for keyboards, displays and USB devices. Pano Logic has taken everything that normally represents the PC and transfered it to the data center as a virtual machine. Orady also stressed that the Pano Logic device is not a typical thin client machine.

"A thin client is basically a stripped down PC with memory, processor and an operating system and is running on some kind of software," Orady noted. "What we did is we built our system from the ground up with a device that is extremely secure and has no management burden or software on it."

Orady added that zero client doesn't have a traditional PC processor in it. All the drivers for operating the device are on a virtual machine that runs in the data center. Even though the zero client does not have a CPU, it does have some silicon in it. Orady added, "What is in the Pano device is a chip that we designed and in that chip is the data path for moving data off the system bus and onto the network. We have a little bit of hard coded logic in there that is just intelligent enough to get an IP address using DHCP."

The chip isn't actually a chip but a field-programmable gate array FPGA. The system also has onboard memory. Orady explained that the system has a DRAM chip for local frame buffer storage though most of the RAM is allocated dynamically on the back end virtual machine server. The management piece of the virtual desktop solution is called the Pano Manager. This talks to all the Pano devices and pumps out login screens, authenticates and associates desktops with users.

Prior to the release of the Pano System 4.0 only VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V were supported by the Pano Manager. Now the Pano Manager supports Citrix XenDesktop, the latest addition to the group. The Pano System 4.0 also includes new hardware that has DVI ports in addition to the VGA output that was supported in earlier versions of the device. An additional monitor is now supported, and the system also includes support for isochronus USB devices. These types of devices include webcams, headsets and other devices that require real-time requirements for data transfer.

According to Orady, "We'll continue to expand the set of use cases for which the solution is applicable. So you'll see software updates from us over the next 12 months that will include things like better performance and management which will allow folks to run the device in more types of scenarios and run more rigorous types of applications."

Source: Server Watch

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New Data Center from Microsoft in Washington

2011-01-07T14:09:00.005-05:00

Very soon, Microsoft will be unleashing a state-of-the-art data center in Washington after receiving a tax cut from local politicos. Microsoft has promised to open up what it is calling "one of the most innovative new data centers" in Quincy, Washington in the early part of this year. There aren't a whole lot of details, but it is said that the center is expected to host services like Microsoft's Azure cloud.

This new data center is based almost entirely on pre-assembled computing models that are designed to give you a greater scale as well as greater flexibility. The center also uses server cooling techniques that were developed at the Dublin and Chicago data centers of Microsoft in order to help cut running costs. The data center will open up next to Microsoft's existing 500,000-square-foot data center facility in Quincy, which was opened back in 2007.

General Manager of Microsoft's Data Center Services Kevin Timmons wrote in a blog post that the expansion takes new ideas that were forged in Dublin and Chicago one step further, using modular building blocks for electrical, mechanical, server and security subsystems. At Microsoft's other data centers the modules were capable of scaling from 400 to 2,000 servers.

According to Timmons, "Our modular design enables us to build a facility in significantly less time while reducing capital costs by an average of 50% to 60% over the lifetime of the project."

This new design means that the Quincy extension will be housed in a steel and aluminum structure instead of the concrete building that is the existing Quincy center. A report from Data Center Knowledge back in May said that the building will completely lack side walls. This news comes following an eight month experiment where Microsoft ran five HP servers in an outside tent with absolutely no failures.

"The Structure," according to Timmons, "is virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions, allowing us to essentially place our servers and storage outside in the cool air while still protecting it from the elements. The interior layout is specifically designed to allow us to further innovate in the ways that we deploy equipment in future phases of the project."

This is all very exciting stuff, but it almost didn't happen. Back in 2009, Microsoft released news that they were closing the existing Quincy data center and moving operations to San Antonio, Texas. This news came as a Washington tax exemption that favored data center providers was set to expire. However, local politicians responded with a 15-month sales tax exemption on the purchase and installation of computers and energy for new data centers in 32 rural counties in the state of Washington, the place where Microsoft has called home for 32 years.

This tax break was backed by the political pressure group Washington Needs Jobs who has members including Microsoft, Yahoo and VMware as well as the Washington Technology Industry Association and the town of Quincy. It was also said that, along with Microsoft, Yahoo and VMware are also planning on producing data centers in Washington.

Source: The Register

VMware to Bring Virtualization to Your Smartphone?

2010-12-27T16:32:00.005-05:00

Virtualization first struck on the workstation, then came server virtualization, and then virtual desktops. By now, virtualization is seen as ubiquitous in data centers and is also fairly well understood. However, it is not widely used on the desktop. But it seems that virtualization doesn't want to stop there because VMware, last week, announced that it had partnered with LG to enable virtualization on its Android phones which would make smartphones owned by employees palatable to companies conscious about security.

Where the consumer market is concerned, LG's presence is strong and continuously growing. However, the company is overshadowed by BlackBerry in the enterprise market. That is why LG is working with VMware to integrate its end-user computing technologies into the company's smartphones. According to VMware, this will "enable users to adopt the mobile device of their choice, while allowing corporate IT departments to manage sensitive data on those devices with enterprise-level security and compliance."

The first application of this technology is supposed to be available on smartphones in 2011. Unfortunately, there has yet to be any exact release date or pricing mentioned. This virtualization will, however, enable LG smartphones to run two operating systems like Android and BlackBerry, for example. It will also allow them to run one account in isolation from another. What this basically means is that a user can securely run a network account separate from his account on the same mobile device.

This is a great tool for companies who want their IT techs to have the ability to have access to everything they need whenever they need it. Look for a lot of companies implementing this into their IT departments when it releases in 2011.

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New Server Rental Services from Rentacomputer.com

2010-12-17T11:23:00.001-05:00

Network Server Storage Solutions and peripherals are available for rent from Rentacomputer.com. Great for server migration projects. Here is a summary of the products available for rent.
Rack-Mount Server Rentals
Rack-Mount Servers are easy to use and highly reliable. These are desirable traits in a server when your company needs a temporary server rental to offset the stress of your owned servers and machines during peak times of business.

Storage Solutions Rentals

Server rentals are very ideal if your company needs an extra storage unit for company information while you are testing various types of storage solutions. Whether you need a short-term rental, or a long-term lease, our agents can get you the right kind of server for your storage needs.

Server Peripheral Rentals
All server rentals need peripheral rentals. Server peripherals include routers, switches, cables, etc. A Tech Travel Agent can bundle all of these peripherals into a single quote along with your server rental.

For more information visit the Server Rental Page

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Oracle's New SPARC Supercluster

2010-12-12T15:50:00.004-05:00

When the Sun SPARC microprocessor first came out, many people thought that it would be a dead end. Well, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, is on a mission to prove all of those naysayers wrong.

Oracle announced a plethora of new servers powered by SPARC as well as an outline for future development of SPARC. Among the new servers there is an SPARC based Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the newly unveiled SPARC Supercluster. It seems that the new SPARC servers are being optimized for the upcoming Solaris 11 Unix os as Sun's hardware and software portfolios undergo an update from Oracle.

According to Ellison, "For all our competitors that have been enjoying their Sun down and Sun set programs, this is the end of that. The Sunrise program is all about SPARC and Solaris, those two foundation technologies are going to lead the industry into the next generation of engineered systems."

One of the new SPARC systems announced by Oracle is the Exalogic Elastic Cloud server which is powered by SPARC. Back in September, Oracle debuted an x86 based Exalogic server at OpenWorld. The Exalogic server is a middleware enhanced cloud-in-a-box solution that is specifically designed for Java applications. On the flipside, the SPARC version is powered by a 16 core T3-1B SPARC processor.

Oracle is also making a general purpose computing platform with the new SPARC Supercluster while Exalogic is focused on Java middleware performance. "The Supercluster is a general purpose server that will run your middleware, your customer apps and your database extremely well," Ellison said. "It runs your database faster than anyone has run any database before."

Aside from talking about the new SPARC T3 processors in the Exalogic and Supercluster platforms, Ellison also talked about the benefits of InfiniBand, which is used in both systems in order to approve overall performance. InfiniBand is typically seen in high performance computing systems and offers lower latency than your traditional Ethernet configurations.

According to Ellison, "We think InfiniBand is dramatically better for linking servers to other servers and servers to storage than Ethernet. We certainly have Ethernet connectivity to these boxes, but when these servers are talking amongst themselves and talking to storage, they're going through a high performance, reliable and guaranteed delivery network called InfiniBand."

Oracle is continuing to move ahead on SPARC performance beyond the current generation of T3 processors. According to Ellison, "The T4 is alive in the lab delivering a lot better single-threaded performance than the T3. In T3 we focused on adding more cores, and in the T4 we're trying to make our single thread performance better and it looks very good right now."

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5 Awesome and Free Server Tools

2010-11-27T16:09:00.007-05:00

Servers are one of the most important things for any company, but what is more important is making sure that your server is running as it should. In order to do so, however, you need two things: a good IT tech and the right tools. A good IT Tech isn't really hard to come by, especially in today's business field where it seems like everybody and their mother are going to school to learn about computers. Tools, on the other hand, are a different story. While the tools themselves may not be hard to come by, knowing which ones to get can be.

There are many different types of tools you can download off of the internet in order to help with your server management. Some are good, some are bad, but the best ones may even be free. Take a look at some great server tools your company needs that are completely and utterly free.

Nagios
Nagios is an enterprise infrastructure monitoring suite. Besides being free, Nagios is also mature and commercially supported all around. The tool has grown from being a simple software project to a major contender in the contemporary network management field. Companies like Domino's Pizza, Ericsson, ADP, Wells Fargo, Citrix and even the United States Army are all avid users of Nagios.

Apache
If you think the Apache project is just simply a web server, then you are wrong. The project, which goes by the formal name of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), consists of nearly 100 unique projects which are contained under Apache.

PSTools
If you want a suite of very useful command-line Windows tools which are considered essential to survival in a Windows-infested network by IT professionals, then PSTools is the tool for you. PSTools provides incredible automation tools, not to mention that it is considered to be the single best free toolset for Windows available. You can grab this handy tool for free directly from Windows.

Wireshark
Wireshark is a must have tool for anybody who runs a network, regardless of size. Wireshark is a network packet capture and analysis program that is here to assist you in achieving a trouble-free network. Network problems will not be prevented by Wireshark, but the tool will allow you to analyze your problems in real time and, hopefully, avoid future problems.

SharEnum
Most people will consider SharEnum a little obscure, but for those who use it the tool is very useful. SharEnum shows you all the file shares on your network as well as their associated security information. This tool is a very valuable security tool and is also free from Microsoft.

So there you have it, five incredibly useful and incredibly affordable (come on, they're free) tools that every person should have for their servers. IT professionals from all over use these tools and ones like them every day in order to keep their servers working as well as possible, so why shouldn't you? If you are in need of some good server tools, then start downloading these five freebies now!

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IBM Cancels Irish Server Works

2010-11-14T13:06:00.005-05:00

In a recent report from the Irish Times, it appears that IBM is cutting off what is left of the server manufacturing jobs at the company's Emerald Isle factory. The reason for the loss is said to be due to the fact that IBM is shifting its server-making to factories the company owns in Shenzhen, China.

With this cutback IBM has lowered its overall workforce in Ireland to around 4,000 employees. This number does include the 190 jobs that IBM just cut as well as 200 employees that the company recently added back in March for a Smarter Planet research center and an additional 100 added to the company's software labs around the country.

IBM released in a statement not too long ago that they were moving their high-end server manufacturing for the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions to factories in Singapore. IBM did note that they were keeping a "foot in the door" in the European Union by keeping entry and mid-range server manufacturing in the factory IBM has in Mulhuddart, which lies just outside of Dublin.

IBM has also shut down and outsourced all of their x64 server plants located in Scotland aside from very high-end System z and BladeCenter platforms. The Power Unix manufacturing that IBM had in Austin, Texas was also recently moved to Rochester, Minnesota.

Due to this recent cut in jobs, Ireland will be out of the IBM server manufacturing business completely. This also raises questions as to when IMB's mid-range Power Systems will be shifted to China as well. IBM said that they will try to find jobs for as many of the 190 employees as possible. IBM said that all of the 190 employees will receive five weeks of severance pay for every year they served with the company.

According to IBM, "This change will place us closer to our growth markets and suppliers while providing greater operational efficiency and cost savings." The shipping costs to get Power and z10 processors to China or Singapore are fairly small. However, the expensive shipping costs it takes to transport finished Power Systems and mainframe servers to European and African customers is definitely offset by the lowered labor costs of China and Singapore.

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10 Reasons to Virtualize Your Infrastructure

2010-10-29T11:52:00.005-04:00

There are many reasons out there why virtualization is big right now. Virtualization can save you money, lower the number of physical servers you need, and it is environmentally friendly. However, there are a lot of other reasons you may want to virtualize your infrastructure, especially if you work with virtual machines.

1. Common Management Interface
While it is very awesome and useful to have all of your servers available in a single application, it is even better to have the ability to control those servers from that single interface. Virtualization offers access to virtual machine hardware, consoles and storage, and your entire network of systems is at your disposal.

2. ILO Not Required
If your technicians don't set up your Integrated Lights Out (ILO) interfaces, then virtualization removes that burden for the better. With virtualization you can boot VM from a powered-off state without any need for physical access to the system.

3. Easy Hardware Changes
Most companies dread upgrading their systems and changing their hardware. Getting into all the nooks and crannies of your infrastructure is no picnic. And if your hardware doesn't work, then you have to repeat the process all over again. No thanks. With virtualization you can upgrade memory, increase the number of CPUs or even add new hard disks to a VM with some simple mouse clicks.

4. Snapshots
VMs have the incredible feature of having a snapshot capability built-in. A snapshot is an exact copy of your working VM prior to doing something to it that has the potential to make it not work. However, with snapshot you can revert to the snapshot and remove the faulty VM.

5. Prototyping
Using a standard VM, you have the ability to prototype an application, database or operating system enhancement without spending hours trying to rebuild the physical system in your head before the unsuccessful attempt.

6. Fast System Communication
Host-to-guest as well as guest-to-guest communications occur without any standard physical hardware restrictions. Private VLANs create a system-to-system communication that is secure as well as fast. By using a private VLAN for a group of VMs you can create a multi-tier application with limited outside network exposure and without a lengthy set of allow and deny network rules.

7. Easy Decommissioning
There is a lot that goes into decommissioning a physical system. You have to turn off network ports, wipe the disks, unplug the system, remove the system from the rack and then dispose of the system. A VM's decommissioning process does basically the same thing only you do not have to be at the actual data center. There are also no systems to remove or return. Removing your VM from inventory will take you a mere couple of seconds.

8. Templating
It takes one gold disk for every new type of hardware that you incorporate in your network to support a data center. With VM it takes one Windows Server 2008 R2 VM for everything. You only need one template that contains everything needed for deployment.

9. Fast Deployment
VMs do not require shipping, do not require installation, do not require power hookups, do not require network drops and do not require SAN cabling. By using templates or staged ISO images, a VM's deployment can take only minutes or at most a few hours.

10. Dynamic Capacity
With a traditional system you will have to plan far in advance to scale-up for a major marketing campaign that requires new physical computing capacity. However, virtualization allows you to rapidly respond to changing business conditions. You can scale-up whenever you need the extra capacity and even scale back whenever you don't.

It seems that virtualization can do a lot for your company's infrastructure by making things a whole heck of a lot easier. If it is within your company to do so, maybe virtualization is the perfect next step for you. Just make sure you do all your research first.

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4 Data Center Migration Mistakes You Need to Avoid

2010-10-17T21:47:00.008-04:00

No matter what part of business you are in, there are going to be some mistakes that you can potentially make along the way. Some of these will sneak up on you and are completely unavoidable. However, there are also some pretty big mistakes that CAN be avoided and need to be if you want things running smoothly.

In the world of Data Center migration, there are four big mistakes that you can make that are fairly common and potentially career damaging. Thankfully though, these mistakes, if caught soon enough, can be avoided. If you can identify these mistakes and avoid them before they happen, then your data center migration will go a lot smoother and so will your job.

For most companies moving a data center is a huge ordeal. In addition to that, a successful move can also act as a nice resume booster for any IT professional. A move that goes according to plan can showcase an IT professional's skills in large-scale project planning, project management, technology integration and even interpersonal communications. Migrating a data center provides a chance for exposure across the entire company considering nearly every department is touched by the IT organization, as well as affected by a data center move in some way or another.

The only problem is that a data center move can be littered with problems. Not just problems but potentially career-ending failures. There isn't an IT professional out there that wants to be on the receiving end of memos and discussions describing lost orders, missed deadlines or customer dissatisfaction that occurred because of something that got disrupted by a data center move that didn't go as planned.

There a four key mistakes that can occur in a data center migration that could spell doom for your job: Ignoring the Data, Combining the Move with Other Projects, Failing to Plan Appropriately and Not Creating an Inventory of Equipment, Applications and Processes.

Taking the time to address these issues one by one up front will significantly improve your chances of successfully migrating any company's data center. By having success, the personal recognition that is sure to come afterward is one of the best payments you could receive, aside from your actual paycheck.

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Yahoo Computing Coop

2010-10-07T13:01:00.004-04:00

Recently in Lockport, New York something strange was built. Reminiscent of barnyards, the newest building by Yahoo is not really for chickens but in fact is a data center. Yahoo plans to change the game when it comes to designs of data centers with their new coop design that is very environmentally friendly while at the same time saving themselves some big bucks.

Huge and metallic, the data center looms over the fields in Lockport, but for once the presence of a huge data center doesn't mean a drain on power or tons of money spent to keep it running. The Yahoo Computing Coop is built similarly to a chicken coop, hence its name, with slatted walls that take advantage of the year-round cool weather in Lockport. The cool air flows through the open-air data center and cools the servers without the presence of a chiller for cold water cooling. This design eliminates one of the most costly and energy-intensive factors of a data center.

To power the center the Yahoo Computing Coop doesn't rely on the usual method of coal-burning electricity but instead relies on the local hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls. While it costs a bit more for Yahoo initially, using hydroelectric power is an environmentally friendly concept that should pay off in the long run. Yahoo isn't doing it all for the environment, however. By using only 10 percent of its power for cooling Yahoo can expect to cut its electricity bills dramatically.

The Yahoo Computing coop consists of three data center halls connected to a central operations center with two more halls being built. When the two additional halls are finished, the center will have 36,000 square feet of space, enough to house 50,000 servers. Yahoo hopes to eventually house up to 100,000 servers at its Coop with the addition of more halls.

It seems like no wrong can be done with this data center. It is green, efficient, cost effective, and is also opening up close to 125 jobs for the area. While Yahoo scrambles to patent its design, similar centers are being built by Hewlett Packard and Google. The Yahoo Computing Coop will run applications like Yahoo Mail and Flickr and will hopefully start a new trend in green server housing.

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Server OS Landscapes Going with the Flow

2010-10-02T12:27:00.005-04:00

The world of UNIX and Linux server operating systems right now is anything but boring. However, that may not be the best thing, especially for enterprises that want a background of stability and certainty when they choose a server OS to power their business.

If you use Sun UNIX, then you know all about this. The OpenSolaris project just recently disintegrated into nothing after a long run of uncertainty and was replaced by something probably based on the Illumos project like the OpenIndiana spork. Users of Solaris weren't greeted with such a rude awakening though. Their enterprise OS hasn't actually gone away. They have, however, come to terms with the fact that UNIX is now a product of Oracle which means it is being developed along a very, very different style then it was under Sun.

The Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is under Novell and is also one of the two leading open source server distributions. The server itself runs just fine but, being owned by Novell, which is known for being a little chaotic, has cast a shadow over the product.

On a lighter side, if you are a Red Hat shop, you can rest assured that you are running the number one open source server OS from a dependable and stable company. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is respected so highly that Oracle uses it as a basis for its own Linux offering.

But how long will this last? Oracle has decided to drop Red Hat compatibility in its Oracle Linux Product after announcing the Oracle Unbreakable Kernel for Oracle Linux at Oracle OpenWorld last week. According to Oracle, it is a "fast, modern, reliable kernel that is optimized for Oracle software and hardware." Oracle also promises that the new kernel will offer a 75% performance gain demonstrated in OLTP performance tests over a Red Hat compatible kernel, a 200% speedup of Infiniband messaging and 137% faster solid state disk access.

It is rumored that VMware may buy Novell's Linux business, and if that does happen, then Red Hat is going to be a minnow among sharks in the server OS market going forward. To put it into perspective, Solaris is a part of a $140 billion Oracle Corporation while SLES would be a part of a $36 billion VMware. As for Windows, AIX and HP-UX, they are each owned by corporations worth some $220 billion (Microsoft), $166 billion (IBM) and $90 billion (HP) respectively. Red Hat is definitely the odd one out with only $7 billion.

That leaves IBM, HP and Microsoft. All these companies are fairly predictable and boring, but they are also huge. However, with all that is going on in the enterprise operating systems market at the moment, big, boring and predictable may be the perfect thing for many potential customers.

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HP ProLiant MicroServer

2010-09-22T16:02:00.006-04:00

Small businesses today are becoming more and more technologically based, and with the switch from paper and ink to computers the need for electronic storage and organization grows. Hewlett Packard's new ProLiant MicroServer is the newest solution for small but growing businesses to stay connected and organized without a large unnecessary server.

Usually setting up a server can cost a massive amount of money that an up-and-coming business just doesn't have. With the HP ProLiant MicroServer a business can have a central server without spending much at all. At $329.99 a ProLiant MicroServer costs about as much as a desktop PC.

The basic specs for the Proliant are as follows:

Processor
Processor family-AMD Athlon™ IIhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5274578954195612960

Number of processors-1

Processor core available-2

Memory
Maximum memory-8 GB

Memory slots-2 DIMM slots

Memory-PC3 DDR3

I/O
Expansion slots- 1 half-height, half-length PCIe x16 Gen 2, 1 half-height, half-length PCIe x1 Gen 2

Network Controller-1GbE NC107i 1 Port

Storage
Maximum Drive Bays- 4 LEF SATA

Supported Drives- Non hot-drive 3.5 inch SATA

Storage Controller- Integrated 4 port SATA RAID

Small, efficient, and easy to use the HP ProLiant MicroServer caters perfectly to the needs of businesses with around ten clients. Though it performs well on a small scale, the ProLiant MicroServer is strictly a starter server. Bigger businesses that need more power would do better to spend a little more and buy a server that can handle a bigger workload. The HP ProLiant MicroServer is made for ease of use in smaller environments, and performs perfectly in this niche.

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KVM: Your Gateway to Open Source Server Virtualization

2010-09-17T16:07:00.005-04:00

The thought of switching to a virtualized infrastructure sends a shiver down the spines of most CIOs. Things like security concerns, performance uncertainty, and scalability questions are many examples of things that make the physical-to-virtualization fear so prominent. However, the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) from Red Hat is poised to put an end to those fears.

KVM runs along the same lines as Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX/vSphere. Just like all of these, KVM is a full virtualization technology. What that means is that virtual machines (VMs) built with KVM fully abstract computer hardware allow the operating systems to run believing that they are running on physical hardware. Memory, CPU, disk, peripherals, NICs and graphics adapters compose VMs using full virtualization technology.

The biggest thing talked about when thinking of moving to a virtual infrastructure is definitely security. Virtualization, as well as cloud computing, have received negative remarks from techies and industry participants. However, VMs are not less secure than your physical machine nor are they any more secure. Just because they are virtual doesn't mean anything is changing on the security front.

If you switch to virtual, you must still take the same security precautions that you would with a physical machine. You will need to cut out unneeded services, throw on some anti-virus protection, install a few security fixes and provide firewall protection for all of your VMs.

Performance is another issue people bring to the table. People seem to think that going VM means you have to sacrifice performance. Untrue. Red Hat boasts that the highest computing workloads (Excahnge, SAP, Oracle and Java) experience performance that is at least 90% better than that of physical machines on KVM. Some workloads, like LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) workloads, experience up to 140% greater performance on KVM.

Probably the last thing people throw into the virtualization debate is scalability. KVM's multi-core technology exploitation makes it exponentially more scalable than adding a bunch of under-utilized physical machines to your data center matrix. VMs are able to handle workloads with ease in stressed environments.

KVM gives you anything and everything you could need with the familiarity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Now I know a lot of people out there are like me, a "try before you buy" type of person. Well, for people like us, you can download and use KVM as Promox, which is not affiliated with Red Hat. This combines containers and KVM into a single hypervisor package.

KVM is definitely a major contender in the enterprise virtualization market. It is capable of holding its own against VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. KVM has good performance, security and scalability which should quash any fears you may be having about switching to virtualization technology.

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Supplies To Build A Server

2010-09-08T20:46:00.005-04:00

Servers can be bought, but for the tech-savvy it may make more sense to build one. With a few essential pieces of equipment and a decent internet connection a person can save quite a bit of money going the do-it-yourself route. Here are a few things someone would need to get started.

Dedicated Computer
While a server can be used as a computer, a server is more open to the internet than a dedicated computer would be. With good security software a dedicated computer can be locked down and much more secure than using a server as a desktop computer.

Server Software
Server software comes in a lot of flavors, and to run a server most efficiently it is important to choose the right software for what the server is being used for. If the server is being used for gaming, the software will need to be obtained from the gamer's publishers, while if serving a website, an open source program such as Apache can be used.

Internet Protocol (IP) Address that remains static
IP addresses are used to identify computers when they are logged on to the internet and usually are dynamic, changing every time the internet connection is reset. This is fine for servers simply being used to connect multiple computers or for gaming, but if the server is hosting a domain name (www.____.com), then it will need to have a static IP address. Having a dynamic IP address when hosting a domain name can cause problems for people searching for that site.

Internet connection with fast upstream speed
The internet connection used for a server can either be dedicated to the server or shared among other computers, but a huge factor in choosing internet service is the upstream speed. Internet users typically do a lot more downloading than uploading, so most internet providers have changed their services to match these needs. People building their own servers should do a little research before choosing a provider to find one that has enough upstream bandwidth.

Security Software
Having a server opens up gateways to the internet that weren't there previously, as mentioned above, so it is crucial to have reliable antivirus software and firewall settings. Users need to be certain to have the security software on every desktop computer and laptop in the network to guarantee a safe connection.

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Intel's Xeon 5600-Series Server Processor

2010-09-03T16:06:00.005-04:00

A mere 5 years ago Intel completely took the way desktop computing was headed and turned it on its head when they introduced their first dual-core Pentium processors. However, Intel soon realized they were "going against the grain" by trying to push frequencies beyond 10GHz. So Intel shifted focus from surpassing to equalizing.

The only problem with this is that servers and workstations were already using multi-socket configurations to get things moving faster. At this point, Intel's Xeons were getting royally beaten by the Operton from AMD. The Xeons were single-core processors in dual-processor boards that were only slightly aided by the same Hyper-Threading technology we know of today.

It is true that the incorporation of threaded software has been slow for the desktop market whereas business-class workstations have been enjoying multi-core CPUs for quite some time. The cost savings of switching from a single-core, dual-socket system to a dual-core, single-socket box is intense.

As hardware gets more and more powerful, software changes to take advantage, necessitating even more capable hardware. Intel launched their Xeon 5500-series CPUs for dual-socket servers and workstations. The 5500-series was characterized as the most important introduction in more than a decade, and it definitely was for Intel.

AMD had an architectural advantage by using HyperTransport, which was especially pronounced in multi-socket machines. On the other side you had Intel, who still relied on shared front side bus bandwidth for processor communication. With the introduction of the 5500-series, Intel addressed their weakness via QuickPatch Interconnect which added Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost to help improve performance in parallelized and single-threaded applications.

But Intel wasn't finished yet. This year's switch to 32 nm manufacturing allowed Intel the opportunity to add complexity to their SMB-orientated processors without altering the thermal properties. This is where the Xeon 5600-series comes into play, which supports up to six physical cores and 12MB of shared L3 cache per processor all within the 130W envelope that was created by the 5500-series.

Intel has announced that the latest 5600-series is not a contender in the workstation market right now. In order to be competitive in that market, Intel would have to pair competent processors with no less than fairly-modern core logic. Regardless, there is still plenty of hardware to compare, including a Core i7-980X. The Xeon 5600-series Server Processor is on sale now for a hefty $1,700 and is definitely one of the best servers on the market today.

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Three reasons to consider Windows Home Server

2010-08-25T11:32:00.005-04:00

In homes today multiple computers are commonplace. The children may have laptops for school work while each parent has their own desktop. When it comes to storing files and media sharing among computers, a family may want to look into having their own dedicated home server. With Windows Home Sever, it is easier then ever to set up a server for a family home. Below are a few qualities of the Windows Home Server OS that make it desirable for home use.

File sharing made easy

With Windows Home Server every computer in the house can access the server, all the way up to ten PC's. The network administrator will have access to all of the files as well as a secure password protected folder for storing personal media and files. PC's will read the server as a regular network-formatted storage device, making it easy to clear out clutter on personal PC's.

Connect to an Xbox or PS3

The latest version of Windows Home Server includes Windows Media Connect UPnP, which makes it easy to connect to video game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and once connected, movies and other media can be streamed from the home server to the consoles. This makes it a breeze to watch a movie stored on the server on a television, or play a music play list without burning it to a CD. Window Home Server's Power Pack 2 update added support for MP4 files and metadata as well, so it is even easier to share among other devices no matter what the file format.

Backups are simple for everyone in the house

Usually the main reason for having a home server is to be able to have all files backed up, and Windows Home Server makes it simple to keep all files from being lost. Daily backups can be scheduled for the whole drive on each computer connected to the server. There is also the option to exclude single folders from the backup. All files are stored as they were originally, not as backup image files, so a Word file will remain a Word file, and a jpeg will remain a jpeg. Windows Home Server also lets the administrator view the statuses of the firewall and antivirus on all computers linked to the server.

With these features, plus many more, Windows Home Server is something to look into for households with more than one computer. It helps keep all files backed up, in case of hard drive failure, and makes sharing and streaming very easy.

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Quit Dealing with Old School Server Management

2010-08-20T15:53:00.005-04:00

Hearing somebody talk about walking up to a server system to install an operating system may sound the same as somebody saying they had to get up and turn the channel on the actual television set instead of using a remote. To many, this concept may seem aged and outdated but it isn't, it is still going on today. It's actually more prevalent than you might think.

Contemporary data centers nowadays brag about high security with retina scanners, powerful magnetic locks and temperatures cold enough to make ice cubes. However, in a lot of cases these systems lack the necessary connectivity to manage all those systems remotely. Thankfully it isn't too late to fix this situation thanks to out-of-band management.

Out-of-band management involves using a dedicated server port connected to an IP network that allows administrators to work with a system regardless of the power state. To put it more simply, out-of-band management allows you to work with a system as if you had physically walked up to the actual console. You can power the system on and off, change BIOS settings and set up RAID devices using this remote management option.

It used to be that you packed up your collection of CDs, floppy disks and your laptop and headed for the data center in search of the needy server system. You would typically waste an hour gaining access to the data center floor and finding the system you needed. It also used to take a few minutes to figure out if the server you were working on was in fact the correct one and if it was cabled correctly.

Once you got started, it would generally take you around three hours, including reboots, to install the OS, patch it, configure it and ready it for remote access through VNC or Terminal Services. It was only after all of this that you could head back to your desk to finish the project that would most likely suck out the rest of your day.

Integrated Lights-out Management (ILOM) removes the need to walk to and physically touch every server system in the building. ILOM provides an integrated, free and powerful management method. ILOM comes standard with most contemporary racked and blade systems and delivers remote keyboard, video and mouse. This allows you to completely manage your system from power up, through the whole boot sequence and into the operating system.

Setting up ILOM is pretty simple although it does require a slight bit of planning. You will have to decide on a static or dynamic IP addressing for the service and if the ILOM network will be isolated or open. A static IP address requires more setup and more management but does have the advantage of having the IP address tied to a specific system for the life of that system. Dynamic addressing requires less management and setup on the system side, however, you will need a server dedicated to assign and track those dynamic addresses.

An isolated ILOM network prevents any unwanted connections by anybody who is not an administrator. If you isolate your ILOM network, it will also prevent IP addressing confusion with primary production, secondary production or backup interfaces. Data center management should only require the configuration of your server's built-in ILOM ports, so save yourself the physical trouble and get integrated lights-out management.

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China's Right on the Tail of Jaguar Supercomputer in Top500

2010-07-15T05:33:00.005-04:00

China’s ambition to become a major power in the supercomputing arena has become plainly obvious with the introduction of a supercomputing system nicknamed "Nebulae", which has earned the title of second-fastest supercomputer in the world with a Linpack performance of 1.271 PFlop/s. The Nebulae system itself is a hybrid design comprised of a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Despite being ranked #2 on the Top500, Nebulae is currently praised as being the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance which is rated at 2.98 PFlop/s, the highest ever seen in the Top500. For a quick reference at just how fast this system can crunch numbers, a single minute of calculations from the Nebulae system would take your home computer over three weeks to complete.

Currently the United States still dominates the list, holding the #1 spot with its Jaguar Supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee which has a peak performance of 1,750 trillion calculations per second. By comparison, the Jaguar System is over 33% faster than the Chinese contender but pales in comparison in theoretical yield which only reaches 2.3 petaflops. In addition to the Nebulae system, China has a total of 24 high performance systems on the Top500 with the Tianhe-1 supercomputer ranking in at number seven.

China is without a doubt rapidly becoming a major player in high performance computing and is seeking to solidify its holdings in the supercomputing world. Currently it is rumored that Dawning, the company responsible for the Nebulae machine, is currently developing an even faster machine for the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China. The main purpose behind this machine will be to model industrial research such as aircraft design, aerospace fundamentals, and petroleum exploration. In a stark contrast, many of the US machines which are owned by the government are used to monitor nuclear weapon stockpiles.

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Oracle Unveils New High-Performance Sun Fire Clusters

2010-07-02T19:54:00.008-04:00

Holding true to CEO Larry Ellison's promise that Oracle would primarily focus on the high-performance server market, last Monday Oracle expanded its line of x86 Sun servers with new rackmount, blade and network clustering servers. The newly released Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems are intended for massive server configurations and will deliver a smaller footprint than previous generations of Sun File Server hardware. The servers themselves will come equipped with Xeon 5600 and 7500 processors, the latter is aimed at mission-critical systems which must always run and never go down. In doing so Oracle is competing against Intels Itanium processor line and even Sun's own SPARC line which has raised a few eyebrows.

The Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems are designed for customers that run a mix of Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise workloads across a variety of systems. The cluster servers themselves consist of five rackmounted and two bladed servers that can hold two to eight processors and have been tightly integrated with Oracle software, middleware and management applications. Oracle has assured their customers that all Oracle software and middleware has been certified to run on these systems which have been optimized for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Oracle VM which supports Red Hat, Suse Linux, and even the KVM hypervisor.

In addition to optimizing their software and operating systems, Oracle has integrated Sun's Ops Center with its own Enterprise Manager providing a dynamic work flow for a single "lights-out" point of management. Blades, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and even powering the systems on and off can be handled all from a single web browser. Oracle has even included an Integration Assistant so you can configure and boot the systems straight out of the box within minutes. Even with no OS installed, the systems can reach out across the Internet to Oracle servers to check for firmware and BIOS updates and then download and install them.

"We claim we can manage a full blade ecosystem without requiring any network skills, because network virtualization is done in the silicon and through Oracle middleware technology," - Dimitris Dovas, director of product management for Sun hardware at Oracle

Oracle claims that this hardware will be able to deliver up to a 45 percent improvement in energy efficiency over previous generation systems and also the ability to run 70 percent more workload. They also claim that their new hardware can deliver the same performance in one-tenth the space with one-tenth the devices and one-fifth the number of network cables. The simpler cabling on the Sun Fire systems come through oracles Sun Blade 6000 10 GbE switches which are embedded within the blade itself or inserted through the top of the rack to connect the clusters. This improvement allows the server clusters to communicate to a network without having to connect though a networking cable and a switch.

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1 Petabyte Holographic Storage Coming Soon?

2010-06-07T04:14:00.004-04:00

Just a few years ago InPhase announced its revolutionary 300GB holographic disc which was supposed to change the way we store data in high volumes. Shortly afterwards Call/Recall announced their plans to develop a 1TB optical drive and disk with backwards compatibility with Blu-ray. Fast forward a few years to today and holographic imaging still hasn't caught on. Yet there is another holographic hopeful taking a shot at the ultra high-capacity optical disc market by the name of Storex Technologies and their Hyper CD technology. This time however its not a terabyte they are aiming for, but instead a whopping amount of 1,000,000 GB.

"The company holds patents on glass and glass-ceramics compositions as well as read/write mechanics and optics concept(s) applicable to high-density data storage. Using commercially available low power lasers and optics, capacities of more than 1,000,000 GB (1 PB) can be achieved using a CD size disk of 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick."

Storex Technologies was founded by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 2007 and is, in effect, nothing more than a technology demonstration group looking for a partner to invest in their intellectual property. Pavel is known as a reputable scientist and has been conducting research in the fields of fluorescent photosensitive glasses and glass-ceramics for many years.

The idea is based on glass-ceramic discs and laser diodes to record information inside the virtual layers of a CD-sized fluorescent photosensitive glass via 40nm-wide lasers. The layers are said to be 700nm apart - but we don't know how many layers per disc - and data access is said to occur at DVD-like speed. Storex claims a 5,000 year life for the disks, but this is merely a theoretical estimate since there is no physical product available for testing. The technology is still in the earliest stages of development and it may be a long wait before we see the concept in action.

With so many failed attempts to bring holographic disk drives to the market, we sincerely hope this concept doesn't fade into oblivion like the rest.

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AMD Processors Continue to Dominate Top500 Supercomputers

2010-06-02T00:34:00.003-04:00

If you recall last year, the Jaguar Cray XT5 Supercomputer topped the list as the worlds fastest supercomputer utilizing six-core AMD Opteron processors. Six months later, AMD continues to hold the reigning spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer List announced just a few days ago at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Jaguar continues to be the world's highest performing system featuring nearly a quarter million cores. The Cray XT5 was improved nearly 70% last year and continues to process 1.75 petaflop per second, up from 1.04 in June 2009.

Additional Top 10 systems based on AMD technology are:

#3: Roadrunner - Los Alamos National Labratory: A hybrid system from IBM utilizing BladeCenter cluster technology in conjunction with AMD Opteron processors and has a processing speed of 1.042 petaflops per second.

#4: Kraken - University of Tennesse: A Cray XT5 system similar to Jaguar which peaks at .83 petaflops.

#7: Tianhe-1 - National SuperComputer Center, China: Another hybrid system using ATI Radeon graphics processors from AMD and has a processing speed of .56 petaflops per second.

The number of AMD technology-based Supercomputers on the TOP500 now stands at 51 with systems that can be found across the globe including in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway. AMD technology currently drives more than 4.2 Petaflops of computing power in the TOP10 alone which is used by universities and national labs to conduct research in engineering, finance, climate predictions, and energy efficient designs. In addition, Cray has recently announced plans for its next-generation Cray XE6 supercomputer which will be based on AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and have the ability to scale to more than 1 million cores.

“Our customers are selecting AMD platforms for supercomputing because they provide the cores, the memory, the power savings and clearly the performance that the world’s leading research institutions require for their ground-breaking work,” said John Fruehe, director, Server and Embedded product marketing at AMD. “AMD has been a leader in delivering the benefits of x86 and open source computing to the HPC community and it will be exciting to see what further advances the AMD Fusion™ family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) will bring.”

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Bovine Powered Servers

2010-05-27T14:26:00.011-04:00

As our demand grows for computing power, energy efficiency, and data storage capacity, the ability to produce the power needed in data centers is simply not keeping up with the times. The notion of reducing energy consumption in data centers has led many vendors to pursue increasingly optimistic and sometimes downright quirky ideas. HP is one such vendor which hopes to use sustainable processes in order to build data centers that are self-sufficient. In other words, construct and design a data center whose electricity is generated from a sustainable energy source and whose heat output can be recycled and reused within that same data center. This model aims to give technology companies more options for powering their servers.

In India, for example, electricity is in such high demand that there just isn't enough electricity to keep many of the data centers that are being built there up and running. "In India they need diesel generators because the power grid can't keep up with the growth," said Chandrakant Patel, one of HP Labs researchers. Patel points out that an enterprising farmer with a few cows could be the solution to this energy crisis and even offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers.

So what exactly does a diesel generator have in common with a cow?

As odd as this sounds, cow manure could be a possible solution for small and medium businesses looking for cheaper real estate and electrical alternatives. With the advent of high-speed networks, there is no longer a need to locate data centers within the confines of a big city and can now be located on cheaper land, such as in the rural fields next to a dairy farm. Your average dairy cow will produces 55 kilograms of manure per day which would generate 3 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy. According to HP, a dairy farm with 10,000 cows would produce enough energy to power a 1-megawatt data center, or approximately 1,000 servers.

This recycling process works as follows. Farms already have manure collection systems which utilize anaerobic decomposition methods to breaks down the cow waste much like a sewage treatment plant would. In current systems the biomass goes into an anaerobic digester and after decomposition is released as simple methane gas. However, in HP's vision, instead of a farm burning off the methane gas for energy, which is one of the most volatile greenhouse gases, the chemical energy in that methane could be converted into electrical energy to power the data center. To complete HP's sustainable and self-sufficient vision, the heat given off from data centers will be reused as part of the energy needed to break down the biomass.

This chart provided by HP Labs shows how cow manure and server heat from data centers can be combined to create a sustainable energy alternative.

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Federal Agents Seize $143m in Fake Networking Equipment

2010-05-17T06:11:00.008-04:00

Over the past 5 years Federal authorities have seized more than $143m worth of counterfeit Cisco hardware and labels in a coordinated initiative called Operation Network Raider. The operation depends on the collaboration of several law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Immigration and Customs, and Border Protection Agencies which has so far resulted in more than 700 seizures and 30 felony convictions. Despite costing Cisco and other US networking enterprises millions of dollars in sales and technology, the real threat of these counterfeited routers and networking gear is on the level of national security.

In 2008, Ehab Ashoor attempted to traffic 100 gigabit interface converters that were illegally manufactured in China and contained fraudulent documents indicating they were genuinely produced by Cisco. The equipment was destined for the United States Marine Corps and was intended to be used as communication equipment in Iraq. This month Ashoor was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay Cisco $119,400 in restitution after being found guilty of trying to sell the counterfeit gear to the US Department of Defense. In January 2010 a Chinese resident was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay a restitution of $790,683 for trafficking counterfeit networking gear.

The prospect that our government and business networks may be at risk has propelled law enforcement agencies to work around the clock to crack down on these illegal distribution networks of bogus routers and switches. According to the Customs and Border Patrol there has been a 75 percent decrease in seizures of counterfeit networking hardware at U.S. borders from 2008 to 2009. Yet it is entirely possible that these scams could threaten national security as well as the financial well being of corporations by infusing critical networks with gear that is unreliable, or worse, riddled with backdoors and security vulnerabilities.

China has a well known reputation for doing whatever it takes to get the competitive edge and it has already been proven do–able by researchers at the University of Illinois that such vulnerabilities could be hardwired into a microprocessor. This hacked microprocessor could then log passwords and monitor networking traffic as well as other sensitive data passed through the equipment. However, Cisco has assured us that so far there is absolutely no evidence that such equipment has been tampered with on any scale to contain backdoors, but it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

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EPA Delivers Draft 1.0 for Data Center Storage

2010-05-15T02:19:00.006-04:00

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to soon establish the final standards for its Energy Star certification for data centers. Currently the organization is holding sit downs with various storage firms and looking for feedback so that it can move forward with more precise standards for data storage systems such as enterprise hard drives and solid state drives. So far the EPA has already established Energy Star ratings for servers but as you can imagine establishing energy standards for storage solutions is a considerably more complex task. Unlike appliances such as a personal computer or printer, the efficiency of a data storage unit can depend on a wide range of variables such as configuration, controllers in use, power supplies and even software.

The EPA has made steady progress since April of 2009 when it first announced it would be moving forward with the program. Most recently the EPA has been collecting data from December 2009 through March 2010 to gain a better understanding of the dynamic between hardware/software configuration and energy efficiency, active and idle state performance, and sensitivity to single-configuration changes. The EPA has released the results of the research at this stage, entitled Draft 1 Version 1.0 Specification, which can be downloaded for free courtesy of Energy Star. If you're technically inclined the report has some pretty interesting results and may be worth the read.

Draft 1.0 comprises the idea of a "product family" certification, due to the fact that storage devices have a greater level of customization and configurability of products. The report also sharpens several key definitions. For example, the definition of a "storage product" includes components and subsystems that are considered an "integral part" of the storage product architecture, but specifically excludes products that are usually associated with a storage environment at the data center level. Only the storage product can be subject to Energy Star certification -- subsystems and components are not eligible for certification. The Draft also defines Active State, Ready Idle State, and Deep Idle State for those that want to take a look. If you happen to have comments about Draft 1, they're due to the EPA by May 21.

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Former Fujitsu President Sues After Termination

2010-04-27T21:13:00.005-04:00

The ex-president of Fujitsu, Kuniaki Nozoe, is now threatening to sue the IT services giant for damages over losses suffered by the company and has even asked the corporation to sue some of its own executives. What prompted the legal action from the former president was his forced resignation last September. This March he wrote the company asking that his resignation be nullified and reversed, a tactic which hasn't gone very well for the former president. In response, Fujitsu alluded that he had been forced to quit due to his ties with organized crime. In fact the board said it had previously warned Nozoe that such links were in conflict with "the Fujitsu Way".

Fujitsu first announced the resignation of Mr Nozoe in September 2009 citing health issues. However last month they admitted that the president had been forced out following an investigation into his business links. The investigation found that Mr Nozoe had a relationship with a third party company said to "have an unfavourable reputation" - a common phrase used in Japan to infer that one has ties to the Yakuza. Nozoe stated that his relationship was merely personal but upon being confronted with the allegations the board and Mr Nozoe agreed with one another to issue a statement attributing his departure to poor health rather than blame the unnamed third party. Although Nozoe did not break any laws Fujitsu maintains that he failed his duties as president.

The episode has since raised questions over the role of organized crime syndicates in big Japanese business. "The suggestion that a major Japanese company has been linked with the yakuza is not surprising," said Dr Seijiro Takeshita, a director at the Japanese bank Mizuho International "Associating with gangsters has often been a part of doing business in Japan - including even the banks." The Tokyo Stock Exchange has since given Fujitsu a strict warning over the issue.

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The Largest Cloud in the World is Dark, Shady, and Criminally Owned

2010-04-22T16:32:00.007-04:00

When thinking of the largest cloud computing network known to man, what companies come to mind? Microsoft? Sure they have alot of computers but not even close. Amazon? Getting bigger but still not even in the same ballpark. Google? As monstrous as their cloud is, its a mere drop in the ocean. The largest cloud in the tech world isn't controlled by a brick and mortar corporation, but rather it is a network of computers controlled by the Conficker computer worm across more than 200 countries in the world. So just how big is the worlds biggest cloud?

"Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally with more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth." said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar.

In other words the biggest cloud on the planet is controlled by an unknown criminal enterprise that rents out their botnet to send spam, perform a denial-of-service attack, hack computers, spread malware, and steal personal information and money. In fact, it is believed that much of the comment spam that plagues many blogs is spawned from a portion of the conficker cloud. Put simply, the cloud is "mobbed up."

In many ways, the Conficker cloud is much more competitive than legit vendors. The operators have experience with the virus dating back to 1998 and their footprint is bigger than any cloud previously seen. On top of that there are no moral, ethical, or legal constraints with the added bonus of zero costs. There is even an unlimited supply of new resources readily available as the conficker spreads far and wide to take over and steal more computing power.

Just like legitimate cloud vendors, Conficker is available for rent and can be found just about anywhere in the world a user would want their cloud to be based. Users can choose the amount of bandwidth they want, the kind of operating system they want to use, and even what kind of services will be installed into the cloud such as spam distribution, dos attacks, etc.

By the way, just in case you were wondering, the biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google which is made up of approximately 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Coming in second is Amazonwith 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth. The third largest legit cloud is owned by Rackspace, which offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps.

Although the last major attack performed by the Conficker cloud occurred over a year ago against the Manchester police department, the virus is still considered a very real and palpable threat. If you fear you are infected by the Conficker virus you can try out this Conficker Eye Chart which pulls images from three sites that Conficker is known to block and displays them in a box. If all the images show up you're in good shape, but if one or more doesn't display it could indicate a Conficker or other malware infection. Be aware that if you are browsing from behind a proxy, you may be able to see all the images and still be infected.

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x86 Server Market Directs Microsoft to End Itanium Development

2010-04-15T21:24:00.006-04:00

Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support development for Intel's Itanium processor effectively placing current Itanium products into maintenance status for the next three years with support ending entirely in eight years. Microsoft also stated that the current versions of Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and its developer tool Visual Studio 2010 will be the last versions to support the Itanium architecture. For those wondering exactly why Microsoft would make this move, Joe Clabby, President of Clabby Analytics, offers his thoughts on the decision.

"Here's what really happens: Microsoft has invested in x86 architecture. People don't want Windows on Itanium. They want HP-UX on Itanium and maybe some NonStop and OpenVMS, but they have not done jumping jacks over Windows on Itanium. Microsoft is saying its committing heart and soul to x86 multicore and that's what the market wants,"

While the move is yet another blow to the Itanium line, losing Microsoft is not as painful as one would think. Approximately 80 percent of Itanium sales are from HP, which runs HP-UX, NonStop or OpenVMS. Windows and Unix are merely a small portion of their business. However, the marketplace continues to gravitate towards the architecture proposed by Advanced Micro Devices, which added 64-bit extensions to the x86 processors used by many mainstream servers and PCs. Although Microsoft has offered 64-bit versions of Windows Server for both types of chips, the x64 versions have proven to be far more popular than the Itanium ones. Microsoft's reasoning for the decision seems to be sound.

"The natural evolution of the x86 64-bit ('x64') architecture has led to the creation of processors and servers which deliver the scalability and reliability needed for today's 'mission-critical' workloads," Reger said in a blog post. "Just this week, both Intel and AMD have released new high core-count processors, and servers with eight or more x64 processors have now been announced by a full dozen server manufacturers. Such servers contain 64 to 96 processor cores, with more on the horizon."

Despite waning mainstream support and the fact that Itanium has never been a big seller, the chip remains as an importance figure in the market seeing as its the processing power backing HP's high-end server line. In addition, Intel continues to develop new versions of the processor, most recently the Itanium 9300 which was introduced in February, and has promised at least two more generations codenamed "Poulson" and "Kitson". While the immediate future seems secure for the Itanium series of processors it remains to be seen just how far they will be able to go.

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AMD - "Welcome to the World of 12 Cores"

2010-03-29T07:59:00.005-04:00

AMD has kicked off this week by debuting its new "Magny-Cour" server platform series which includes the new Opteron 6100 8-core and 12-core processors. These are the world’s first 8- and 12-core x86 server processors and come with a host of new features including 4 memory channels, HyperTransport™ technology 3.0, a fourth HyperTransport technology link for better processor-to-processor communication in 4P servers, and new power management features that allow for increased performance when compared to previous generations. The chips themselves began shipping last month but AMD has waited until nearly the end of Quarter 1 to make them official so that Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) would be ready with Opteron 6100-powered machines.

The Opteron 6000 platform targets the 2P and 4P market and is aimed to be used for virtualization, database, and high performance computing applications. Apart from the new CPUs, the Opteron platform features the G34 socket and 5600 Series chipset with I/O virtualization capability, HyperTransport 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0. The Opteron 6100 processors are manufactured on 45nm technology and boast four HyperTransport links, a 4 channel integrated DDR3 memory controller, up to 12MB of L3 cache, and is up to 88% faster than the previous generation of processors.

In today's economic climate, AMD has decided to downplay maximum performance in favor of improved power consumption and a cheaper MSRP. Customers are simply looking for more, not less, in their IT dollar and AMD boasts maximum performance. When placed next to servers of comparable power, competitors fall short in pricing. Based on this graph, consumers are paying 42% more money for the honor of a slower processor. In the power consumption field, AMD clearly shows their efficiency by beating out an Intel 130W Thermal Power Design (TDP) part with their own 80W Average Power Consumpution (ACP) part in terms of performance. Effectively AMD has doubled the cores while staying in the same power and thermal range as previous generations.

In addition to AMD's aggressive 2P pricing, they have upped the value and stripped away the “4P tax.” Long gone are the days when customers are required to pay a premium in order to buy a processor capable of scaling up to 4 CPUs in a single platform. As of today, the 4P "tax" from AMD is effectively $0 but the same cannot be said for other competitors.

"As AMD has done before, we are again redefining the server market based on current customer requirements," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD. "The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform signals a new era of server value, significantly disrupts today’s server economics and provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for their real-world data center workloads."

The Opteron 6000 platform has already been adopted by HP, Dell, Acer Group, SGI and Cray with many more expected.

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Fujitsu Introduces Xeon Based Primergy System

2010-03-24T20:19:00.005-04:00

Following the release of Intel's next generation Xeon 5600 server processor, Fujitsu America has joined the ranks of server partners looking towards the cloud. The Japanese based Fujitsu plans to roll out its new Xeon 5600 equipped Primergy systems through its American counterpart specifically targeting cloud computing environments.

The Primergy CX1000 system can hold up to 38 of the 1U CX1000 rack systems which, according to Jon Rodriguez, senior product manager for Primergy at Fujitsu America, allows for a more efficient high-density computing system. In addition, the Primergy systems sport a new cabinet design featuring shared power distribution and new cooling components. The motivation behind this new design was to eliminate traditional "hot aisle - cold aisle" setups seen in many datacenters and to allow the Fujitsu cabinets to be placed back-to-back.

Rather than placing a power supply on each rack, Fujitsu chose to instead implement a central power supply that will feed each individual rack. Also, the backs of the cabinets have been sealed off and large fans and exhaust vents are now located on the top of the server. Like previously mentioned, these racks can be placed back to back allowing for a more efficient use of space in the data center.

According to Fujitsu, these cabinets are up to 20 percent more power efficient than other comparable server systems due to their Cool-Central design which dictates how air flows throughout the cabinet. Essentially this allows the system to separate heat from various components and dictates where fans are placed for optimum air flow. Target markets for the CX1000 are going to primarily revolve around cloud computing providers and hosts, businesses looking to reduce costs by deploying their own cloud servers, Web 2.0 environments, and high-performance computing markets.

The Primergy CX1000 systems will be available from Fujitsu America resellers by the end of march. A fully loaded rack with 38 servers, a single processor per socket, and 16GB of memory will run in the ballpark of $89,000 per rack. Of course, price will increase as more CPUs, hard drives, and memory is added.

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Netapp's New Cloud Computing Management Solutions

2010-03-13T21:39:00.007-05:00

Faced with today's increased economic pressures, many IT organizations are turning towards cloud computing as a means to help reduce costs and improve efficiencies in their data centers. Service providers play a very important role in this migration to the cloud by helping customers understand these benefits and by delivering a wide range of IT services via the cloud. Last week Netapp unveiled new design guides and capabilities geared specifically towards service providers with the goal of helping them deliver greater value to their cloud customers. Furthermore company officials said their new tools will fulfill the dual role of delivering cloud applications and services to their enterprise clients while also increasing functionality and security for service providers building their own cloud environments.

NetApp Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI): The SOI leverages NetApp storage and serves as a standardized and unified infrastructure. This gives service providers the ability to consume and deploy storage, bandwidth, and resources in a repeatable manner which helps speed time to market, improve flexibility, reduce costs, and increase service levels for their customers.

Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS): NetApp now provides a design guide that enables service providers to rapidly and effectively deploy archive and disaster recovery services. This includes NetApp technologies such as FlexClone for improved disaster recovery testing, SnapLock for compliance, and MultiStore for secure multi-tenancy. This DPaaS cloud design guide will help service providers reduce costs and complexities as well as increase flexibility.

Backup/Recovery as a Service (BRaaS): NetApp has teamed with Asigra, a leading provider of cloud backup and recovery software in order to quickly and efficiently deploy BRaaS solutions to providers. The Asigra Cloud Backup software runs on the NetApp SOI, combining to offer a truly scalable and secure backup recovery solution for the cloud.

NetApp Open Management: NetApp's open management capabilities now allow service providers to leverage NetApp's storage capabilities, regardless of whether service providers use NetApp or another IT service's virtualization framework. This enables service providers to link their IT service management and orchestration portals easily to NetApp's storage automation engine for seamless storage and protection services.

"NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's vice president of solutions and alliances, said in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."

For more reading see: Why Rent A File Server.

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Great Refurbished HP 380G4

2010-02-24T11:14:00.009-05:00

If you are looking for a dependable server that would be great for any SMB and can be purchased at a reasonable price, then the refurbished Hewlett-Packard 380G4 - Refurbished Small Business server may be just what you need. This HP comes equipped with 4GB installed/16 GB max - Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz - Hard Drive (3) 72GB SCSI HD’s 10k RPM.

When you compare the cost of a new system, which can be 3 times as much this is a great deal and a great fit for any Tax Service, small medical service provider, insurance offices etc. If you want to learn more about this Refurbished Hp 380G4 you can find it at the Tech-Army Organization

Looking for other Technology Rental information? Visit the Tech Travel Site Map for a variety of computer and technology rental ideas.

Information Technology Rental Equipment

2010-02-13T11:13:00.001-05:00

IT Rentals

Information Technology Rental Equipment

It's not my job doesn't apply to IT staff.

Information technology or IT departments are often enlisted to provide computers, laptops, file servers, network connectivity, display screens, projectors, sound equipment and more. Where do the best IT managers and administrators go to fill the gap between what they need and what they have? One place is Rentacomputer.com, the worldwide resource for all things IT. If you are in the middle of an IT project, contact a Tech Travel Agent at Rentacomputer.com for a fast quote on anything you could possibly need.

For an expanded list visit: IT Rentals from Rentacomputer.com

VMware Acquires Zimbra - Sights Set on Microsoft

2010-01-27T15:37:00.005-05:00

Earlier this month VMware set an interesting stage on the virtualization front through its acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo. For those unfamiliar with Zimbra, Zimbra is a very popular open-source collaboration software for companies of all sizes which provides calendaring, e-mail, and also offers mail services over the web for cloud and hosting providers.

What Does This Mean for VMware and The Cloud?

VMware's recent acquisitions of SpringSource and Zimbra is clear proof that they are aggressively moving up the ladder. Currently VMware, Microsoft, and Google are the three key cloud competitors in the market, but Google does not compete directly with VMware on the virtual plane. This leaves Microsoft as the primary concern for VMware and the acquisition of Zimbra has no doubt created even more friction between the two companies. Now it's no longer just a case of VMware vs. Hyper-V on the virtualization front, but also a case of Zimbra vs. Exchange on the collaborative applications front.

Scott Gode, vice president of Azaleos, a Seattle-based managed services company that specializes in Microsoft products stated that if VMware can make Zimbra part of a unified and seamless cloud platform, then Microsoft might want to sit up and take notice. "This acquisition signals to me for VMware that their gloves are fully off against Microsoft," he said. "All the major cloud players are similar in that they're making moves, from an infrastructure standpoint, so they're set up when the market moves."

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, wrote the following in an email to InternetNews.com concerning Zimbra and VMware. "VMware is clearly moving aggressively up the stack and is not content to be limited to virtualization or even infrastructure,". "With the Zimbra acquisition, VMWare is squarely positioning itself in the applications and collaboration space." "I would expect them to continue to make acquisitions in open source and at all tiers of the software stack: infrastructure and applications,".

Even VMware seems to have a sense of destiny between themselves, Microsoft, and the cloud. VMware Chief Operating Officer Tod Nielsen simply stated "Its going to come down to us and Microsoft." in an interview with eWEEK.

Looking for other Technology Rental information? Visit the Tech Travel Site Map for a variety of computer and technology rental ideas.

Google Data Centers in Shipping Containers

2009-12-07T13:53:00.003-05:00

This amazing video shows how Google utilizes common shipping containers in their data center strategy. This video was first presented at the Google Efficient Data Centers Summit, hosted at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA on April 1, 2009.

What is shown in this video? Power systems, transformers, cabling, cooling towers, water filtration system, thermal storage tanks, container hanger bay, containers, personal transportation device (scooter), service technician, hookups for water and electrical, cable inputs, breakers PUE, safety features, emergency off, and more. 81 degrees is the temperature inside server rooms so techs wear short sleeve shirts.

Looking for other Technology Rental information? Visit the Tech Travel Site Map for a variety of computer and technology rental ideas.

Server Markets Downward Spiral Begins to Slow

2009-12-05T07:52:00.006-05:00

After a dismal first half of the year for the server market involving a large decline in sales and average selling prices (ASPs), it seems things aren't quite as bad as they could be. A third quarter server market survey from Gartner states that worldwide server revenues have continued to fall by 15.5 percent to $10.7 billion, and unit shipments are falling at an even faster pace down to 17.1 percent to 1.92 million units. At first glance these numbers may look bleak, but there is room for cautious optimism as we head into the fourth quarter and 2010.

The bright side of it all? The descent in sales and Average Selling Prices have begun to slow. Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, expresses his optimism for the server market. "It is important to put the yearly declines into perspective," said Hewitt in a statement. "Looking at the third quarter results from the sequential perspective, they showed an increase of 13.8 percent in shipments and 10.2 percent in revenues when compared to the second quarter of this year. That suggests that the market as a whole is showing signs of stabilization as we move toward the end of 2009." And indeed these numbers are a considerable improvement over the second quarter which was painful across the board. The second quarter showed a 30.4 percent plunge in unit shipment year-over-year which makes the 17.1 percent decline in quarter 3 seem like a large improvement.

Current Server Market Standings

In the third quarter, Gartner placed IBM at the top of the list once again with a total market share of 31.7 percent and $3.38 billion in total server sales, which are down 12.3 percent. IBM Mainframe sales and Power Systems sales were down while System X sales were up. Coming in at number 2 is Hewlett-Packard with a revenue decline of 15.1 percent to $3.22 billion and a market share of 30.2 percent . Dell came in third, with $1.42 billion in sales, down only 5.1 percent, and currently holds 13.4 percent of the market.

Sun Microsystems continues to suffer the worst of the losses with sales down 32.3 percent in the third quarter to $784.6 million. Sun's market share has dropped from 9.2 percent to 7.4 percent in just one year. Fujitsu, which sells servers using Sun's UltraSparc processor as well as x64 and Itanium processors, was down 10.8 percent to $550.2 million in revenue. Other niche vendors, such as Intel Itanium-based vendors and x86 providers have dropped a combined 23 percent year over year to $1.3 billion in sales.

Currently x86 servers account for 97 percent of the sales, which totals to 1.86 million units. Overall x86 unit sales have fallen by 16.2 percent while revenues fell by 11.4 percent to $6.32 billion. The Server Market was much harsher for RISC vendors - which are primarily Sun, Itanium and IBM Power-based servers. These RISC servers accounted for just three percent of total unit sales, but contributed 25 percent of overall sales revenue. This 3rd quarter RISC server sales fell by 37 percent on a unit basis year-over-year and 34.8 percent on a revenue basis. What's more, the defections to IBM and HP are really starting to show.

In the third quarter of 2008, Sun dominated 55.1 percent of the RISC market. However in Q3 of 2009, Sun only holds 44.0 percent. IBM on the other hand is up from 28.3 percent market share in 2008 to 33.6 percent in 2009, and HP saw an increase from 12.8 percent in 2008 to 17.8 percent share in 2009.

The Worlds Fastest SuperComputer

2009-11-27T12:58:00.010-05:00

The worlds fastest land animal may be the cheetah, but when it comes to supercomputers, the fastest cat of them all is the Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar", which has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world. Previously sitting at the No. 2 position on the Top500 list of supercomputers in the world for more than a year, the Jaguar was able to overtake IBM's "Roadrunner" after a big leap in processor upgrades.

Under the Recovery Act, the Jaguar was funded with $19.9 million to upgrade from 2.3GHz quad-core Opteron processors to 2.6GHz six-core Istanbul processors. This upgrade nearly doubled the processing power of the Jaguar which soared the supercomputer from a one petaflop system to a 1.75 petaflop system in only six months. Unsure of how fast this really is? A computer capable of processing a single petaflop will compute a quadrillion calculations every second. The Roadrunner supercomputer which took the title of 2nd fastest supercomputer in the world is capable of processing 1.04 petaflop per second.

The Jaguar began its life in 2005 with a peak speed of 26 teraflop/s (trillion calculations per second), but through a series of upgrades over the past years has gained nearly 100 times the computational power it originally had. The upgrade of the Jaguar XT5 to 37,376 six-core AMD Istanbul processors in the last 6 months has increased its performance 70 percent over that of its previous quad-core predecessor.

While these servers are something most companies will never own, as their size alone could fill up a basketball court and the energy bill that comes with them would probably make your head spin, their use could potentially impact each and every one of us. Researchers anticipate that this recent unprecedented growth in computing power will help facilitate improved climate predictions, fuel-efficient engine designs, better understandings of the origin of the universe, and creation of advanced materials for energy production, transmission, and storage.

Scientists and researchers in industry, academia, and government have already requested more than 2 billion processing hours on Jaguar for 2010.

Intel Partners with EMC on Cloud Storage

2009-11-10T18:21:00.007-05:00

Intel and EMC have announced a joint effort to improve the energy efficiency of EMC's Atmos cloud storage system which is expected to be available in the latter half of 2010. EMC's Atmos system is a hardware and software platform that is used to spread data storage across several different datacenters on a large scale. This concept has already taken off, as earlier this year, EMC announced its first customer for the Atmos data distribution system. AT&T's Synaptic pay-as-you-go hosting service.

In order to reduce the power consumption and improve overall power management, EMC has decided to upgrade the Atmos with Intels next generation and energy efficient Xeon servers codenamed Nehalem. Other steps for reducing energy costs include intelligent power management, which will turn off hard disks when not active, as well as software improvements provided by Intel's Node Manager tool to reduce power consumption during idle periods. The overall strategy of this partnership is to reduce the cost per megawatt of these petabyte scale storage systems.

More details and information about these upgraded Atmos servers are expected to come forth as their release date approaches.

Windows Server 2008 DFS Share Replication for Redundancy

2009-08-06T16:19:00.003-04:00

The DFS (Directory file Service) File Services Role ships on all editions of Windows Server 2008 except for the Web and IA editions. You install the DFS role on Server 2008 using the “Server Manager” and you install the “File Services” role using the “Add Roles Wizard”, be sure to choose DFS Replication under the File Server role. Next install the DFS Management Console this feature can be installed using “Server Manager” by selecting “Add Features” and then choosing “Remote Server Administration Tools” in the list of available features.

The DFS management console is used to configure the DFS replication. This is the tool that will allow us to setup a DFS namespace and configure the replication of files between multiple shares. A DFS namespace is a place where you have a list of all your file shares in DFS and is basically a folder structure of a list of file shares. As far as users are concerned they have no idea they may be navigating across multiple server to access files.

There are two types of namespaces, domain based and stand alone, if you are running Active Directory you should use a domain based namespace. This will store the namespace configuration in Active Directory and will be redundant across all domain controllers. Create the namespace in DFS Management Console. Click on the right to add a namespace and launch the wizard, name the namespace, then choose domain based in 2008 mode click to create, and then close.

After you create the namespace you will need to add folders to it, click “new folder” on the right and enter a name such as “Sales”. Click to add an associated folder (This will be a preconfigured share on a server). You can also add folders with no targets just to help create a hierarchy in the namespace for organization purposes.

Now the whole purpose of this is to have multiple targets, which is multiple copies of the same data stored on multiple servers, (maybe in separate physical locations) in order to have fault tolerance or to speed access to data across slower WAN links. It is very simple to add multiple targets just make sure you provide the multiple targets for the namespace when you are configuring it. So if we are using a domain based Active Directory integrated DFS the clients will be automatically redirected to the location that is physically closest to them.

Now the only thing left is to setup a DFS replication group so that our data is synchronized between all the servers. We are going to use DFS-R or Distributed File System Replication, this will work for both domain based and stand alone DFS. We need to create a replication group, only changes to the files are sent across the LAN/WAN not the entire changed file this helps save bandwidth. Start the “Replicate Folder Wizard” type the name of the replication group and the name of the folder to replicate, in our case “Sales”. Chose the servers you want to replicate between and chose which server will act as the primary member, and then choose the topology, I prefer Full Mesh as I prefer each member to replicate will all other members of the replication group. Next if you wish you can limit the bandwidth and schedule replication times.

The end result is you have multiple servers with “mirrored” shares in multiple locations that update each other in real time as a user changes a file in a single location. This is also very useful for fault tolerance in a single location…

*If your domain is in Server domain functional level, the system uses DFS-R for SYSVOL replication. If your domain is in any other domain mode, there might be non-Server 2008 domain controllers, a server may replicate with a non 2008 server that does not support DFS-R. Therefore, the system uses FRS on all domain controllers.

What is VMware?

2009-07-02T15:53:00.007-04:00

VMware is one of the best virtualization software solutions on the market. VMware software is able to split up a server into multiple portions making essential mulitple computers. These virtual computers that VMware makes are then accesible by guest operating systems. With multiple guest being able to access a single server via virtualization an IT administrator is able cut down on cost by needed less hardware.

VMware is also compatible with almost every guest operating system including: Windows 7, Vista, XP, 200 NT, Me, 98, 95, MS-DOS 6.22 or better, IBM OS/2 Warp, Mac OSX Server, Linux, Sun Java Desktop, SCO OpenServer, SCO UNIXWARE, Free BSD, Netware Server, Solaris 10 x86. That pretty much covers every OS out there.

VMware also comes with a great number of features inluding:

Virtual State Capture: Capture the state of your virtual machine so if a problem arises you can roll back to a previous state
Large guest operating system support: Nearly all versions of windows and linux are supported
Simple Installation: VMware installs like a standard application so no hassle
Web management interface: You can manage your VMware installation via web browser
Supports two-processor SMP: Allows your virtual machine to take advantage of multi-processing.
Easy migration path to other VMware products: All VMware products are made so that upgrading is hassle free.

The biggest downside of VMware is that there are other solutions out their such as VirtualBox, KVM and Xen that are free. The benefits of VMware though are much greater than from these other free solutions. VMware is much easier to use and comes with so many advanced features that spending the extra bucks on VMware is completely worth it.

Looking for for a service provider to help with your next convention or trade show? Then visit Convention Vendor and find your next favorite IT service company.

Used Server Sales

2009-03-05T15:53:00.006-05:00

In tough economic times like we find ourselves in, resourceful IT Managers are looking for alternatives solutions to upgrading, updating or simply maintaining their servers and networking equipment. The used equipment market for servers and networking equipment is emerging as an excellent alternative to the high price of new equipment. Depending on their IT needs and the age of your equipment, Off Lease or Off Rent equipment may be a cost saving source for IT professionals and small companies alike.

Companies in the Technology Rental Business such as www.rentacomputer.com often have specials on equipment when it is returned from a Desktop Rental, a Laptop Rental, Audio Visual Rental and other types of equipment as well.

At the moment the special offer is on Entry Level Dell Servers. They are priced at $995. A refurbished Dell server just back from rentals is the perfect solution for a small business looking for, among other things, an affordable solution for file and print sharing. Here are the specifications:

Dell Poweredge 840 Server
Dual Core Xeon 1.86ghz processor
2GB Memory
Dual 160GB Hard Drives – Raid 1
CDROM Drive
Powervault 100T DAT72 Internal Tape Drive
Symantec Backup Exec Software
Windows Server 2003 with 5 user CALS

Here is the link.

If you have a need for Networking/ IT or standard PC equipment, don’t overlook used equipment from Rental Dealers, solid equipment for a fraction of the price of new.

By Bill Schiering

IBM server bug may cause data loss

2009-03-03T13:26:00.003-05:00

IBM recently released a support article for their Blade Center and System X servers containing drives with the following model numbers:

ST31000340NS
ST3250310NS
ST3500320NS
ST3750330NS

The article states that the hard drives may become unresponsive after a power cycle when the drives attempt to create an event log event in an invalid location, and the drive goes offline. Once the drive goes offline, the data is inaccessible.

IBM is working on getting the firmware update for the hard drives to solve the problem, but until then IBM advises to power cycle the affected servers as little as possible.

To check if your server includes one of the affected drives, view the list of models in IBM support article H194623.

Hardware for Standard Edition and Enterprise MS Office Communications Server 2007

2009-01-15T16:32:00.002-05:00

Hardware requirements vary according to server role, configuration, and storage requirements. This topic summarizes the requirements for the following server configurations. Server roles not listed in this section are addressed in subsequent sections for the following server configurations.
Standard Edition Server configured as one of the following:
• Front End Server, Web Conferencing Server, and A/V Conferencing Server
• Director
• Web Conferencing Edge Server or Access Edge Server
Enterprise Edition Server configured as one of the following:
• Consolidated Enterprise Edition Server (Front-End Server, Web Conferencing Server, A/V Conferencing Server, and IIS collocated on server)
• Front End Server in expanded configuration (conferencing servers and IIS installed on separate computers)
• Web Conferencing Server in the expanded configuration
• IIS Server in the expanded configuration
• Archiving and CDR Server

CPU
Dual processor, dual core 2.6 GHz +
Disk
2 x 18 GB
For collocated Standard Edition Server, add:
2 x 36 GB, 15K RPM, RAID 0, for database log files
2 x 36 GB, 15K RPM, RAID 0, for database data
Cache
1 MB L2 per core
Memory
2 GB (4 GB for Standard Edition Server or Consolidated Enterprise Edition Server)
Network
GBit NIC

For more information about MS Office Communication Server 2007 visit the Tech-Army.org Forum

Server Sales Down

2008-12-16T09:50:00.004-05:00

It is becoming harder and harder to close server sales in this economy. Client are trying to hang on to their capitol until the economy improves.

We are pushing leases so our clients can preserve their capitol.

Here is some info on falling server revenues for the last quarter.

5 Reasons to Lease File Servers:

1. Leasing improves your cash flow. The main advantage of leasing is that it frees up cash. Equipment leases rarely require down payments, though you may have to set aside some cash for a refundable security deposit. By contrast, loans to finance the purchase of equipment typically require down payments of up to 25 percent or more.
2. Leases are easier to finance than purchases. Before extending a capital equipment loan, banks will usually want to see two to three years of financial records — which most new companies do not have. Leasing companies, on the other hand, usually require only six months to a year of credit history before approving a furniture or office equipment lease.
3. Leasing makes it easier to keep pace with technology. Leasing is especially attractive if your business relies upon cutting-edge technology such as the latest computers, communications devices, or other equipment. A series of short-term leases will cost you less than buying new equipment every year or two. Some office equipment leases even have yearly computer upgrades built into them — eliminating that difficult decision of whether you can afford to upgrade or not.
4. Leasing allows you to afford more. While you might not be able to afford to purchase those pricey ergonomic chairs your employees are asking for, you may be able to lease them. Better furniture and equipment can create a more professional image and boost morale and productivity.
5. Leasing has balance sheet benefits. You may be able to exclude some leased assets and related obligations from your balance sheet. Such moves might improve financial indicators such as your firm's debt-to-equity ratio or earnings-to-fixed-assets ratio. Bear in mind, however, that accounting rules do require your balance sheet to report assets leased under certain types of agreements.

Welome to Our New Server Blog

2008-12-15T12:03:00.000-05:00

Welcome to our newest blog and our newest attempt to add value to the world of Information Technology. We hope this Server Blog will do just that and as always feel free to contact us if you would like to contribute or have a suggestion for a topic you would like to see posted.

Andy Wendt
web@xponex.com