Three reasons to consider Windows Home Server

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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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