Top 3 Benefits Of Using A Dedicated Server

Alright, so you and your company are just starting out, and you are currently using a server that is sharing hosting with other companies. Not a bad start, especially if you are just now coming up and starting to generate revenue and business. You might not be expecting to have a lot of heavy traffic since you are just starting out, and there is nothing wrong with that. Every company starts somewhere. But with that being said, owning or renting your own server for dedicated hosting might prove to be beneficial to you and your company instead of sharing with other companies.

First and foremost, is Safe Storage
Servers are not to be taken lightly, no pun intended. These machines are very large and bulky and can take up very large amounts of space that many companies that are starting out may not have. These machines are also very delicate. They are susceptible to extreme environmental changes. Moisture from condensation can fry a server. Extreme high or low temperatures can also directly affect the performance of them. By taking the chance and keeping the server in your office while not being aware of the conditions, you are potentially putting all of your back files, and web services at risk. By going with a dedicated server, you are able to relax knowing that the people you bought or rented the server from are keeping it in a temperature controlled environment.

Secondly, we have Reliability
It is never a bad thing, necessarily, to go with a shared server hosting service, but when you go for a dedicated server, you keep all of the resources. When on a shared server, the resources and power from the server are distributed and shared for all those who are using the server. If, for example, you are on a shared hosting server and another company is larger than yours and has a more intricate web design or more traffic than yours, your website and traffic will suffer due to slower speeds. By switching to a dedicated server through renting or buying, you are able to control all the resources from the server, keep all of the space, and all of the speed for your company.

And last but not least, there is the Advanced Technical Support
It is no simple task to operate these machines, and sometimes that is where we need help. When choosing a dedicated server instead of a shared server, you are giving yourself access to a great tool; the tech support of the people hosting the server. These people will be here to help you with troubleshooting and keeping your website up and running. Those hosting the server are trained in how to run, fix, and troubleshoot these servers. When you have an issue, the company you bought or rented from will be able to help you and give extra attention to the problems you may be having. You may not get that with a shared hosting server.

Getting your company's new website up and running can be exciting. Through that excitement though, make sure to analyze and predict the amount of traffic you may be getting. If you know for a fact that you won't be getting that much due to the early age of the company, go with the shared hosting. However, if you are for sure that your site will need extra care and attention due to the predicted heavy traffic, dedicated servers are the way to go. Remember, sharing may be caring, but don't let your site suffer from it!

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openSUSE 13.1 Linux Offers Better Open Source Quality

The openSUSE 13.1 Linux distribution is available now, providing it's users with improved performance and brand new features.

The new release follows the openSUSE 12.3 release by about 8 months, which appears to be right on schedule. The new release of openSUSE 13.1 stands in contrast to the openSUSE 12.2 release that came out in September 2012, which ended up being delayed by two months.

The on time release of the new openSUSE 13.1 is a result of the improvements in the development process that came from the openQA effort. It performs automated testing for openSUSE builds.

Agustin Bethencourt, the openSUSE team leader at SUSE, said that the improvements done in openQA worked much better than expected.

"We detected bugs earlier and our reports were more accurate thanks to the tool," Bethencourt said. "These improvements provided developers more time and better information to fix the problems"

Bethencourt also added that a amount of bugs that were reported and fixed are higher in 13.1 than in the releases before. The openQA effort aslo allowed the project to increase its efforts in other areas like real hardware testing, documentation and translations, and because of this, openSUSE is now more efficient than it ever was before.

"13.1 is the best release in a long time because, among other things, there has been no significant surprises during its development, integration and stabilization phases," Bethencourt said.

Features: At the core of the openSUSE 13.1 distribution is the Linux 3.11 kernel that first came ou in September of this year. The new kernel has the key focus on the ARM server architecture, which is seen in the openSUSE 13.1 release.

"openSUSE on ARM is not yet as mature as on x86/x64, though we are making good and steady progress," Bethencourt said. "We are working to bring those improvements and new ones to openSUSE 13.1 and will announce them when they become fully available."

The Btrfs filesystem benefits as well from the new performance and stability. Bethencourt said that Btrfs is already available for SUSE Linux Enterprise, so it is ready for production use-cases. SUSE has recently announced that it was raising the support length for its SUSE Linux Enterprise release from 7 years to ten years.

"What we have done in openSUSE 13.1 is include new Btrfs features," Bethencourt said. " Some of them are ready for production environments and some still need more stabilization effort; this is why Btrfs is not the default file system in openSUSE 13.1."

Moving forward a bit, Bethencourt also explained that in the tech area, the next big topic will come in December when the openSUSE community will talk about the introduction of significant changed in Factory to improve on the current development process.

"The goal will be to evolve Factory into a bleeding-edge rolling development process that is, at the same time, usable by a wider range of developers," he said.

Asetek Debuts New Inside Server Air Conditioning Server Cooling

Asetek is planning on showcasing its patented ISAC, or Inside Server Air Conditioning, reference design at the upcoming SC12 Supercomputing Convention. ISAC completely eliminates the need for CRAC, or Computer Room Air Conditioning, in a data center. All the air inside the server stays inside the server and recirculates as opposed to exiting and heating up the data center. In addition to that, each CPU is liquid cooled with Asetek's proprietary liquid cooling while a liquid-to-air heat exchanger inside the server cools the internal server air. Each component inside the server also sees the same temperature and air-flow as it would in a standard data center install.

According to Vice President of Engineering for Asetek Ole Madsen, "While this may sound complicated on the surface, this is brilliantly simple. The demonstration server we are showing here is a 100% standard Intel H2216JFJR 2U 4 node server and besides installing our liquid cooling system, we have not changed a screw, this is just engineering at its best."

The ISAC server will integrate with Asetek's RackCDU, which will provide substantial cost savings in data center infrastructure. Due to the fact that 100% of all the server's heat is being transferred into water, users can expect to experience savings of at least 60% on their cooling power bill with immediate payback often occurring. In addition to that, because the hot water generated can be reused for a facility's heating or cooling, data center operators can now achieve EREs of <1.

The ISAC, in addition to saving data center power, also has a strong value proposition where dust and other environmental factors are a challenge. Areas like military operations, field operations, container data centers and even Formula 1 paddock data centers can benefit from this type of sealed design.

Andre Eriksen, Chief Executive Officer of Asetek, added, "Up until now, if you wanted to remove 100% server heat by liquid, you would have to invest in very expensive and proprietary technologies with large cold plates covering the entire motherboard, memory modules, etc. ISAC has the potential to revolutionize the data center cooling market. Instead of cooling an entire building, you are now only cooling the tiny volume within each server and the associated benefits are obvious."

Source: Xbit Laboratories - Asetek Introduces Inside Server Air Conditioning Cooling Solution for Servers

Top Companies Looking at ELE Servers

Some of the top names in the computer industry, including Dell, HP and SeaMicro (which is owned by Advanced Micro Devices), are looking into developing low-power servers for data centers. Recent reports have indicated that extremely low-energy servers will take up 2.4% of the market for servers that run on Intel chips by the year 2015.

The key thing that these companies are looking into is energy costs due to the power needed to cool large server farms. Some of the newer data centers that have been built recently pack in tens of thousands of computer servers that generate internet content and cloud services.

According to Kiyomi Yamada, an analyst for Gartner, "Currently, the extremely low-energy server market consists of small providers, such as SeaMicro, now under AMD, and Super Micro. Some major OEMs including HP and Dell have announced that they would enter the market, as well as smaller vendors like Boston Limited."

AMD was a rather surprising addition to the market when it acquired SeaMicro back in February for $334 million. According to a recent report from Gartner, the worldwide server market reached $52.8 billion in 2011. Profit margins, however, were thin, causing vendors to look into branching out to emerging categories like extremely low-energy machines.

Source: Investors.com - HP, Dell, AMD Target Low-Energy Servers, A Hot Market

Dell Debuts New PowerEdge C8000 Series Servers

According to recent reports, Dell has unveiled some new servers based on designs that the company will soon be putting into effect in an upcoming 10-petaflop supercomputer known as Stampede. The servers being implemented, which are PowerEdge C8000 servers, use Intel x86 CPUs and offer the flexibility to include graphics processors or even more storage, allowing you to improve performance on database, high-performance computing or cloud computing.

Users will have the ability to experiment with graphics processors, storage, memory and other elements inside servers depending on their computing needs. A lot of inspiration for these servers came from the Stampede supercomputer itself, which is still in development.

The servers will be using Intel's Xeon eight-core E5-2600 processors and coprocessors, nicknamed Knights Corner, which are expected to increase the speed of scientific and mathematical calculations. The Stampede supercomputer is a compilation of thousands of C8000-series servers that has a total of 272TB of memory along with 14 petabytes of storage.

The chassis for the PowerEdge C8000 can have up to eight blade servers with each server having between two CPUs with 16 processing cores, two internal hard drives or other storage and networking options. The servers themselves are targeted towards hosting services, Web serving and other cloud applications, according to Dell's Product Manager Armando Acosta. There are two other versions of the server, the C8220X and the C8220. The C8220X is more advanced and allows for more RAM and storage, as well as an option to add graphics processors.

In addition to that, the servers can be hooked up to the new C8000XD storage box for expandable hard drive or SSD storage. The servers are also designed for deployment in highly parallel computing environments with their ability to fit graphics processors providing the capability to offer higher performance-per-watt and the internal hard drives offering more storage capacity. What's more is that the expandable storage box provides more long-term storage and caching for databases.

According to Dell, the new PowerEdge C8220 will have a starting price of $35,000 with eight blade servers in the chassis. The C8220X will start at $42,000 and the C8000XD somewhere between $25,000 and $27,000.

Source: Equities.com - Dell showcases new servers from supercomputer

Blizzard's Battle.net Servers Hacked

Battle.net, the huge game servers that house all the player information for Blizzard Entertainment's three major games (World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo), has officially been hacked the company has just confirmed. According to an update posted on Blizzard's official website from President Mike Morhaime, financial information, including real names, billing addresses and credit card numbers, seem to be safe, though a list of email addresses, personal security questions and "information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators" has been accessed. In addition to that, a list of cryptographically scrambled Battle.net passwords were also accessed.

Morhaime and Blizzard were quick to state that the information was not enough for any hacker to gain access to a user's Battle.net accounts, though users should still take precautions. This hack affects users outside of China and Morhaime is also recommending that anyone using North American servers change their passwords. This typically includes users in North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.

In the days following this announcement, North American server Battle.net users will be asked to change their secret question while Blizzard will also be issuing an update to its authenticator software, which is something that most players should already use. World of Warcraft accounts get hacked regularly with hackers trying to steal in-game currency and high-level items.

According to a statement from Blizzard, "We take the security of your personal information very seriously, and we are truly sorry that this has happened. Like all companies doing business online, it is not an uncommon occurrence to experience outside parties trying to illegitimately gain access to the operation's structure at some level."

If you play World of Warcraft, StarCraft II or Diablo III then I highly recommend changing your Battle.net information, mainly just your password and security question. With the amount of money that goes through these games from players, a hacked Battle.net server is something nobody wants to see.

Source: UPI.com - Blizzard reports hack of its game server
G4 - Battle.net Hacker, User Information Obtained

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Toshiba Developing Flash-Based Data Center Products

Toshiba announced on Tuesday that it has started developing a line of products designed for storing large amounts of data and that these new products would be based on the company's flash memory chips. Toshiba is working on a three-tier strategy that it hopes will spur in-house demand for NAND flash memory.

Toshiba will offer memory chips for use in storage hardware, data servers that combine hard disks, solid-state drives and flash and software services for analyzing and handling large amounts of data. According to Senior Engineer at Toshiba Masaki Momodomi, "Up until now we've sold mostly to outside companies, but we want to strengthen our own offerings."

NAND flash makers like Toshiba are in a constant race to out-do each other and create chips with finer circuits, ultimately offering cheaper storage and better efficiency. However, they are closing in on the physical limits possible with our current technology. Toshiba has, until recently, focused on out-shrinking rival companies and was the first to launch solid-state drives with 19-nanometer memory.

Momodomi also added that Toshiba will offer chips smaller than 19-nanometers, but will remain in the teens over the next two years. In addition to that, Toshiba stated that it is working on 3D storage, which could be a possible successor to the current NAND flash technology that stacks memory in layers, allowing for greater density. Toshiba also says that it will have prototype samples ready by 2013.

Toshiba announced this new effort as part of the company's new research and development strategy. Toshiba showed several upcoming products at its central headquarters in Tokyo, including quantum encryption and home lighting based on organic light-emitting diodes. Toshiba also announced that its strategy going forward is also focused on adding headcount outside of Japan.

70% of the company's new research personnel through the fiscal year ending in March 2015 will be hired outside of Japan and the bulk of the new hires will come from China, India and Vietnam, countries where projects will focus on technologies and products meant for the countries where they are developed. According to Akira Sudo, a Research and Development Executive for Toshiba, "We have to keep a firm grasp on the global trends."

Source: Computer World - Toshiba to develop data center products based on its flash memory chips

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