The Week’s Headlines
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Thursday, 20 November 2008
Hitachi GST spots oyster, seeks HDD pearls
Comment Storage doesn't have to spin
When you are recovering from a long period of hard times and light appears at the end of the tunnel and gets closer and closer until you emerge into glorious daylight, you get a spring in your step and start making plans. Now you're back on your feet, the world becomes an oyster again, and you go off in different directions …
Nuke boffins plan Penguin petaflop cluster
Linux A-bomb sim rig could go commercial
America's Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb lab has teamed up with open-source computing heavyweights to build the next generation of Linux superclusters, ultimately scaling into the petaflop range. The project has been dubbed "Hyperion". "Hyperion represents a new way of doing business. Collectively we are building a system …
Project Hyperion: A super testbed for HPC apps and hardware
SC08 Freebie teraflops for ISVs
When it comes to parallel supercomputing, and indeed any kind of parallel processing, the hardware is the easy part. The systems software, including a tuned software stack and middleware for managing data, visualization applications for turning datasets into something human beings can use to make decisions or understand some …
SGI preps supers for future Intel chips
SC08 To Itanium or not to Itanium
Architectures can change quickly in the supercomputing space, and slow-moving vendors can get left behind or at least find themselves out of step with the next big wave of sales in the HPC area. This has happened in the past with Silicon Graphics, and the company is determined to not let it happen again. At the SC08 …
The madness of 'king cores
Opinion 80-core servers will add-up to nothing without hypervisors
Intel is pumping up its virility through proxies like Michael Dell reminding us of an 80-core chip future. It's impressive, but Intel is a company obsessed to distraction with Moore's Law. It's like watching a crack addict do anything to get the next hit, a doubling of processor performance every 18 months, whatever it takes, in …
Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime
What price systems integration?
Windows Vista is in more legal hot water and this time the ones getting wet are the companies who've rolled out the operating system, not Microsoft. A series of lawsuits have been brought against major US companies by staff claiming unpaid overtime based on the time it takes Windows Vista to start up and shut down. Mark …
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Wednesday, 19 November 2008
EU tables green CoC for datacentres
UPDATED: Regulating a uniform hue of greenwash
UPDATED: The EU is asking data centre owners and operators to "voluntarily" sign up to a Code of Conduct (CoC) which will include oversight of their energy efficiency in what could be green regulation through the back door. The European Commission has issued its Code of Conduct for Data Centres Energy Efficiency and invited …
IBM gets into server transit business
Goes Transitive for dynamic apps translation
Put a Big Blue wrapper around your legacy apps and cut data centre operational expenses, floor space and energy costs. IBM has bought a company so it can migrate applications from competitor's boxes onto its own mainframes, PowerPC and Intel servers. The company is Transitive and its QuickTransit technology can dynamically …
Super Micro super ready for Intel Nehalem Xeons
SC08 Boards galore, but still no chips
While there was plenty of talk this week at the Supercomputing 2008 trade show in Austin, Texas about the just-announced "Shanghai" quad-core Opterons, as well as GPU-powered personal supercomputers based on nVidia's Tesla co-processors, the hot topic at the show is Intel's forthcoming "Nehalem" Xeon processors, which will sport …
Nvidia pitches Tesla GPU-as-CPU tech 'personal supercomputer'
This time it's real, apparently
Nvidia has introduced a desktop computer architecture based on its Tesla graphics chip and it's calling the system the first "real" desktop supercomputer. The typical spec comprises an AMD four-core Phenom processor plus a trio of Tesla C1060 two-slot cards and a Quadro FX card to take the GPU total to four. The Quadro handles …
Judge dismisses Hackintosh maker's anti-Apple lawsuit
Setback for Psystar
Apple has successfully had the lawsuit brought against it by Hackintosh system builder Psystar thrown out of court - at least until its opponent can come up with a better case. So said California District Court Judge William Alsup yesterday in response to the Mac maker's request that Psystar's lawsuit - filed in response to …
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008
agámi sales VP casualty finds home
Nexsan gains from wreckage
Michael McGuire, described as an ex Sun VP for Americas storage sales, has joined Nexsan, where he becomes the grandly titled Chief Commercial Officer. In fact he joins from the data highway road kill that was once known as agámi. His title translates into being responsible for worldwide sales, marketing and business …
Capita goes hunting in economic gloom
Plans to gobble up those less fortunate than itself
Capita Group Plc has issued a bright and breezy outlook for 2009 and said it expects the full-year results will be in line with predictions. The IT services company, whose contracts include payment collections from the UK’s TV licence holders and supplying newly launched websites for the NHS, issued an interim trading …
EMC launches Data Protection Advisor
Tape backup not enough
For EMC users, the tape backup world is not enough. These days, data is backed up to disk, deduplicated, and - horror of horrors - EMC shops might have NetApp and Data Domain boxes in them. So EMC has upgraded its Backup Advisor product to reflect these facts of life. It acquired WysDM in April 2008 so that it owned the code …
HP beats street on Q4 but reins in Q1 outlook
Uncommon currency hurts revs
HP made some rivals realise just how badly they're doing when it today announced preliminary fourth quarter results that showed it edging ahead of analysts' forecasts. At the same time it showed it was not entirely immune to the economic environment, as turbulence on the foreign exchange markets forced it to trim its outlook …
InfiniBand and 10GbE break data centre gridlock
Analysis Bandwidth bonanza in the data centre
Data centre network pipes are getting choked up. Imagine Germany minus the autobahns or the US without interstate highways and you get the picture - cities trying to send goods and people by road to other cities and the single carriageway roads jamming up, consigning everybody to gridlock. What were quaint little cottage …
Michael Dell heralds supercomputing fourth wave
SC08 Just like the third wave - with more marketing
The annual Supercomputing 2008 trade show kicked off this morning in Austin, Texas with a sales call keynote by local billionaire and sometime HPC player, Michael Dell. As chairman and once again chief executive officer of a company that's trying to make a more substantial run at the HPC area, he can be forgiven (perhaps) for …
Privacy watchdog issues guidance on FOI exemptions
Tips on keeping secrets
Public authorities who want to keep information secret to protect the commercial interests of companies they work with must explain exactly what damage will be done by disclosure, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said. The privacy regulator has issued three sets of guidelines on when public authorities can keep …
Sun measures HPC backorders in petaflops
SC08 Layoffs? Let's talk new iron
Hot on the heels of job cuts that will see some 5,000 to 6,000 company employees given pink slips, John Fowler, the executive vice president in charge of the newly constituted Systems Platforms group at Sun Microsystems, was on hand at the SC08 supercomputing trade show to give a preview of products that Sun will be rolling out …
Victoria & Albert overwhelms museum SAN
We are not amused
London's Victoria & Albert museum has overwhelmed its original SAN with digitised images of its collection and is moving to a new one with room to grow more than 50 times larger. The V&A has found that by becoming a museum without walls on the Internet, it has found there is a huge demand for on-screen access to its collection …
25 years of Macintosh - the Apple
Computerreport cardPart One What Steve hath wrought (from A to F)
In two short months, Apple's Macintosh will turn 25 years old. My, how tempus doth fugit. To mark the awesome inevitability of January 24, 2009 following January 24, 1984 after exactly one quarter-century, tech pundits will bloviate, Apple-bashers will execrate, and Jobsian fanboyz will venerate the munificence that flows …
Carphone Warehouse plans for split after pre-tax loss
Sprawling company still in 'good shape'
Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone has launched a "formal review of the group's corporate structure" which could lead to the breakup of the telecoms group. Dunstone confirmed a split was possible as the firm unveiled interim results which showed a pre-tax loss and "headline" profits falling across the company's businesses …
SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec finalised
Ten times the speed of USB 2.0
USB 3.0 is complete, the group of companies behind the project announced last night. The specification is now officially at version 1.0. Also known as SuperSpeed USB, the device-connection technology has a peak throughput ten times greater than USB 2.0's 480Mb/s. SuperSpeed uses new ports to deliver the greater bandwidth. But …
Intel Core i7 'Nehalem' CPUs go on sale
Old-gen 'energy efficient' quad-cores coming
Intel's first 'Nehalem' processors, the desktop Core i7 series, is now on sale, but that hasn't stopped it adding new Core 2 Quad chips to its roadmap. The 45nm four-core Core i7 line-up comprises the 2.66GHz 920, the 2.93GHz 940 and the 3.2GHz 965 Extreme. All three contain 8MB of L2 and L3 cache, and an on-board memory …
Gartner: open source software 'pervasive'
Here, there, not everywhere
It is a wise manager that does not make decisions based on the survey data put together by the major IT market researchers. But sometimes a skinny bit of survey data is all you have to start with, and that data is better than no data at all - particularly if you're trying to make a case to upper management either for or against …
Microsoft rolls out online Exchange and Sharepoint for the US
Just dollars a user a month
Microsoft added another rung to its online rope ladder yesterday with the general release of its web-based Sharepoint and Exchange products aimed at business customers in the US. Sharepoint Online and Exchange Online had been available in beta since early March as part of Microsoft’s long-winded hosted collaboration effort. …
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Monday, 17 November 2008
Atos Origin suffers boardroom coup
Chief exec shown the door
French services firm Atos Origin suffered a boardroom coup yesterday - chief executive Phillippe Germond was ousted as chief executive and replaced by ex-finance minister Thierry Breton. The Supervisory Board did not explain why it took the action and merely thanked Germond for his contribution. Thierry Breton becomes chairman …
EMC's preferred cloud architecture is Art Decho
We have a vision - but no CEO
EMC is creating a new cloud services business called Decho by joining Mozy (cloud backup) and Pi (personal information) together. It will use EMC data centres around the planet to store consumer and business files using Mozy's software front end to provide data ingest and access services and Pi's metadata software to manage …
Fujitsu follows Seagate with svelte 6Gbps SAS drive
Sealed cannister love
Solidifying the appeal of enterprise small form factor (SFF) SAS hard disk drives, Fujitsu is launching 10K and 15K rpm products, both with the 6Gbit/s SAS-II interface, twice as fast as 3Gbit/s SAS-I. Seagate was first into the fast higher capacity SFF drive space with its 10K.3 and 15K.2 Savvio drives, and the Fujitsu drives …
HP fine-tunes Opteron rack box for nonexistent servers
SC08 Boosts virtualized blade bandwidth
Who can tell why server makers do what they do sometimes? Instead of announcing its new Opteron-based DL385 G5p virtualization-tuned rack-mounted server last week, when Advanced Micro Devices debuted its "Shanghai" quad-core Opteron processors, Hewlett-Packard decided to wait and launch the box concurrent with the Supercomputing …
Microsoft and HP gun for Hyper-Victory with SMEs
Deep, down and dirty with the little guy
Microsoft has sealed a virtualisation deal with Hewlett-Packard that will see the computer maker deploy systems loaded with Hyper-V. Under the agreement, Microsoft has buddied up with HP to sell and market storage, server, networking tech and desktop virtualisation products to the all-important target market: SMEs. Small and …
Platform fires discount cluster tools into schools
SC08 A little kindness goes a long way - to future sales
It is a given in the computer industry that the things that compsci students learn at college or university has a dramatic effect on the products they use in their future careers as computer scientists, programmers, or managers. New technologies are created in academia, often funded by governments and corporations looking for …
Supercomputing past masters resurface with coder-friendly cluster
SC08
ConvexConvey boasts unified programmingThe Supercomputing 2008 show in Austin is going to be the occasion for a lot of flashbacks, and not just because there are countless nerds on hand who came out of the University of California at Berkeley. The event is hosting the debut of a new supercomputer maker, Convey Computer, and the company's brain trust includes Steven …
Top 500 supers: Big Blue Roadrunner outpaces Jaguar
SC08 Petaflops abound
The Supercomputing 2008 trade show kicked off this past weekend, and the centerpiece of the annual event, which is being hosted in Austin, Texas, is the Top 500 ranking of supercomputers that comes out twice a year. This time around, Cray's Jaguar has tried to catch IBM's Roadrunner and has come up with feathers in its mouth. …
UK govt cuts web shoppers a break
Customs Duty threshold raised
The banks may be unwilling to pass on their tax breaks, but at least the Government has one for internet shoppers importing goodies from outside the EU. From next month, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will only demand import duty on goods valued at £105 ($156/€123) or more. Currently you must – or should – pay the …
MS explains 7-year patch delay
Legacy networking problem cure as bad as disease
Microsoft has explained why it took seven years to patch a known vulnerability. Fixing the bug earlier would have taken out network applications and potential exploits alike, it explained. Security bulletin MS08-068 fixed a flaw in the SMB (Server Message Block) component of Windows, first demonstrated by Sir Dystic of Cult of …
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Friday, 14 November 2008
IQstor claims highest-density drive array
Is there room for another drive array manufacturer?
Here's a new storage array for channel players looking for an edge, a more-for-less product. It's a 52TB, 4U box with SAN software that can scale up past a petabyte and comes from a supplier - IQstor - most of us have never heard of, as it supplies smaller OEMs. Now it's looking to supply system integrators and VARs. …
Nuke plant reborn as 'green' data center
Server-plutonium swap
1&1 Internet - one of the world's largest web hosts - will build its next European data center inside an abandoned nuclear fuel facility. Built in the late 1980s, Hanau, Germany's 'New MOX' plant was supposed to process fuel for nuclear reactors, making mixed oxide rods from enriched Uranium and Plutonium. But thanks to local …
Shoden takes lego approach to de-duped mainframe VTL
SI builds acronym edifice
Better mousetraps selling for less money seem a good idea in straightened times. That's what a South African system integrator has built and is using to expand into the UK. The product is QuickRecover, a de-duplicating mainframe virtual tape library (VTL). Shoden Data Systems partners with Hitachi Data Systems, Luminex, Data …
Spare Backup signs Carphone Warehouse
Laptop cloud backup
You will soon be able to backup content on your Carphone Warehouse laptop to a data centre in the cloud, as Carphone W has signed a deal with Spare Backup. Spare Backup backs up a computer's content to its data centres in the cloud. It's a Nirvanix, Carbonite, and Mozy competitor, and it's been signing up consumer-facing …
Sun slashes up to 6,000 jobs
Something's got to give - and it did
Before the markets opened on Wall Street this morning, Sun Microsystems did what most of us expected it would soon do after years of flatline revenues and a lack of profits or losses in many quarters: slash the employee headcount again, and this time a little deeper to appease investors and to get back to profitability. Sun …
Logica jacks ups full year estimates
Still cautious and still cutting costs
Anglo-Dutch services firm Logica is upping estimates for the full year on the back of unaudited results for the third quarter ended 30 September. Revenue for the three months is up 7 per cent and the firm reckons growth for the year will top 4 per cent. Chief exec Andy Green said: "Although we are anticipating a tough …
Microsoft nobbled ‘Vista-Capable’ for Intel
Unlocked court papers show email trail
High-ranking Microsoft and Intel executives were involved in a plan to re-write the Windows Vista Capable program to save both companies - and OEMs - millions of dollars, according to unsealed court documents. Microsoft removed a key requirement from the Vista Capable program so PCs running old Intel chips suited to Windows XP …
Northamber confirms channel of misery
Who'd be a distie?
Hardware distie Northamber confirmed tough times in an interim statement to the Stock Exchange today. Back in June the firm's chairman David Phillips said: "Within an area of largely discretionary expenditure and a lack lustre start to the year, it is simply not possible to provide any guidance, beyond our determination to …
AMD readies 'Yukon' for netbook gold rush
Roadmap for mini-laptops revealed
AMD has, as expected, announced its plan to tackle arch-rival Intel's dominance of the netbook arena. But its efforts will centre on a new CPU: a 45nm dual-core part dubbed 'Conesus'. Due sometime next year, Conesus contains 1MB of L2 cache - 512KB per core, presumably - and a DDR 2 memory controller. That broadly matches the …
AMD 'Fusion' CPUs slip to 2011, roadmap reveals
More GPU-less CPUs coming in the meantime
AMD's first quad-core processor for notebooks will arrive in 2010 before being superseded a year later by a four-core part aimed at both laptops and desktops - and AMD's first, late 'Fusion' chip. The chip maker's latest roadmap lines up 'Caspian' as the successor to 'Griffin', its current top-of-the-line dual-core mobile CPU …
Reg Reader 'bitch of a survey' transformed into beautiful webcast
Reg Tech Panel Building applications for the 21st century
Earlier this month we polled you, our beloved readers, for your thoughts about application development and software platforms. We freely admitted that this was a "bitch of a survey". But more than 500 of you replied. We're very, very grateful to you. Armed with your responses, we are making a couple of webcasts aimed at IT pros …
AVG slaps Trojan label on Adobe Flash
Third false alarm follows upgrade offer
AVG, the popular anti-virus package, has falsely identified Adobe Flash as potentially malicious. The snafu comes just days after AVG slapped a bogus Trojan warning on a core Windows component. Users on AVG forums complained on Friday that Adobe Flash was detected by AVG's scanner as malicious, following a recent update. The …
Sun pimps out OpenOffice as Microsoft 'clarifies' Office for web
Under the influence
OpenOffice is being pimped out by Sun Microsystems, just as Microsoft takes Office online, if Sun's chief executive latest blog entry is anything to go by. Jonathan Schwartz has posted that an "auction's afoot...to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their business and brands into our binary product distribution" …
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