UC certificates, MX records and how to make a teeny bit of extra dosh
Sysadmin blog How do we migrate Exchange mailboxes into the cloud? A customer of mine has recently approached me with a request to move his mail hosting into the cloud, and it had to include BlackBerry support. After some discussion of the options available, a hosted exchange solution was deemed best, with Microsoft's own Office 365 emerging the winner.…
Hadoop, the distributed big-data processing system named after a toy elephant, now has a group of suppliers behind it. The tech giants are collectively aiming to develop the popular big data beast with a 1,000 node cluster – dubbed the Analytics Workbench – as a laboratory.…
Techies at Microsoft Research, the big brain arm of the software goliath, have taken the crown in the sorting benchmark world. The researchers are thinking about how to implement new sorting algorithms in the Bing search engine to give Microsoft a leg up on the MapReduce algorithms that underpin Google's search engine and other big data-munching applications.…
HPC blog With the introduction of VGX and the announcement of Nvidia's GeForce Grid offering, Nvidia and their partners are taking square aim at one of the biggest market opportunities around: gaming. Video games are big business.…
EMC's coming "Mavericks" Isilon software update aims to help it play nicely in the enterprise IT zone while keeping its scale-out NAS top gun title.…
There are plenty of ways to skin the server virtualization cat, and NextIO's means of doing so is to create a PCI-Express switch that links server nodes to each other and to Ethernet network, Fibre Channel SAN, and external peripherals such as flash drives or GPU coprocessors that are housed in an external chassis. Trying to convince data centers to converge their networks at the PCI-Express peripheral bus instead of in the Ethernet or Fibre Channel network takes a bit of work, and money. And that is why NextIO is happy to be getting $12.3m in Series F funding.…
Rolls out SmartCloud Enterprise+ for public consumption
IBM is gussying up its SmartCloud public cloud to make it more useful for enterprise-class customers, in the hope it can lure them away from Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others. Big Blue is also promising to put its System z mainframes on its cloud.…
System maker Oracle has upgraded its version of the Xen server virtualization hypervisor with its own variant of the Linux kernel to bring it in synch with its Enterprise Linux server operating system distro.…
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fattest of them all?
The IT universe is seeing a massive collision taking place as the worlds of high-performance computing, big data and warehousing intermingle. IBM is pushing its General Parallel File System (GPFS) further to broaden its footprint in this space, with the 3.5 release adding big data and async replication features as well as customer metadata and more performance.…
HPC blog My article about NVIDIA’s new VGX virtualised GPU being a potential holy grail for task- and power-user desktop virtualisation inspired reader comments that are well worth addressing. They also brought out a few details that I didn’t cover in the article. First, let’s address a few of the specific comments.…
Analysis Google has finally won approval from Chinese anti-trust authorities for its $12.5bn takeover of handset maker Motorola Mobility, removing the final major obstacle to the deal, but analysts believe the securing the long-term success of Android will be the Chocolate Factory's priority, rather than producing hardware.…
Google, Microsoft, can't explain how to get big data into the cloud, despite rivals' import services
Google and Microsoft don't offer formal data ingestion services to help users get lots of data into the cloud, and neither seems set to do so anytime soon. Quite how would-be users take advantage of the hundreds of terabytes both offer in the cloud is therefore a bit of a mystery.…
It's May and an time for HP to refresh its evergreen EVA storage line. HP said it would keep investing in the EVA when it bought 3PAR and has kept its promise, with two new models being announced, with larger drive support and better management SW.…
At the tail end of the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, graphics chip juggernaut and compute wannabe Nvidia divulged the salient characteristics of the high-end "Kepler2" GK110 GPU chips that are going to be the foundation of the two largest supercomputers in the world and that are no doubt going to make their way into plenty of workstations and clusters in the next several years.…
HPC blog Hybrid computing (using CPUs plus GPUs to accelerate processing speed/throughput) and necrotizing faciitis (a flesh-eating bacterial* infection) have more in common than is typically thought. Both exhibit high growth rates, and both are incredibly difficult to stop once they get started.…
Like everyone else on the planet, you want a rocketsled to do your work. The faster, the better. But if Dell has its way, it may not be on top of or underneath your desk, but sitting in a rack in a data center. And it may not be a rocketsled as much as a rocketbus, with multiple people using it at the same time.…
Blocks and Files STEC is touting its great CellCare flash endurance, and it is great, reinforcing a view that it and OCZ make natural flash market buy-in points for Seagate and Western Digital.…
Apparently, just adding a tincture of Tintri to your virtualised server-storage array pathway gets those VMs running like super-charged rockets. The firm says a European customer is running 800 virtual machines off one Tintri box, leaving a NetApp array chastened in the background.…
HPC blog Hybrid computing has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time. My first exposure to hybrids came at SC08 in the lovely city of Austin, Texas. Earlier that year, the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Lab had achieved two milestones: 1) It was the first system to break through the petabyte barrier; and 2) It was the first high-profile hybrid system.…
Vid We've seen heart monitors built into mobile phones and puck-sized Bluetooth kit, but now iMPak Health has got one down to the size of a credit card and used wireless technology to transfer the data.…
HPC blog What’s a “holy crap” moment? For me, it’s when I see or hear (or do) something that has far-reaching and previously unforeseen consequences. I’ve had at least two of these moments (so far) at the GTC 2012 conference. The first was when Jen-Hsun Huang, in his keynote presentation, tossed up a slide about Kepler and this new thing they’re calling VGX.…
Wants world+dog to know that it's also using E5-2400 two-socketeers
In the wake of Intel's launch of the entry Xeon E5-2400 processors for two-socket servers earlier this week, X86 server juggernaut Hewlett-Packard wants to keep its name in the mind of customers who might be shopping for systems from rivals Dell, IBM or Fujitsu.…
Greater Manchester police are appealing for help after a number of people who thought they were laying hands on a shiny new iPhone ended up with a sack of spuds instead.…
Japanese geniuses have maintained a 3Gbit/s radio link at 542GHz, opening up more of the electromagnetic spectrum to the voracious appetite of wireless data.…
Asian IT professionals are racing ahead of their global rivals when it comes to implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in their organisations, according to new research from BT.…
Podcast It's the eighth episode of our enterprise tech podcast – and it's a special one. The podcast is split up into two parts: in the first part, your hosts interview a journalist investigating the State of West Virginia's absurd purchase of drastically oversized Cisco routers – it's an incredible story you have to hear to believe.…
Vid Pure Storage is pushing the idea that its deduped flash array is cheaper than tier one enterprise disk array storage but miles faster and more reliable.…
HPC blog Here at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2012), you see a lot of things that you didn’t think were quite possible yet. Case in point: cleaning up surveillance video.…
Last big primary data array push before flash tsunami
EMC has gained top datacentre dog bragging rights with a coming 4 petabyte VMAX 40K storage array, storing 60 per cent more than HDS's biggest VSP array and 74 per cent more than IBM's DS8000. This is possibly one of the last massive primary data arrays before flash takes over the primary data storage universe*.…
Distie says Arduino sales 'overtaken in an instant'
RS Components, one of two distributors for the Raspberry Pi, says the 75,000 of the tiny computers are burbling through the manufacturing supply chain and will be ready for release “in July to August”.…
Memory-hungry fondleslabs and iPhones the culprits
Apple has taken a punt on bankrupt Japanese DRAM manufacturer Elpida, placing orders for a whopping 50 per cent of the firm’s production of chips at its Hiroshima facility, according to Digitimes.…
GTC 2012 You game-console makers who still want to be in the hardware business, look out. You console makers who don't want to be in the hardware business (this might mean you, Microsoft), you can all breathe a sigh of relief: after a five-year effort, Nvidia is adding graphics virtualization to its latest "Kepler" line of GPUs.…
GTC 2012 When Nvidia did a preview of its next-generation "Kepler" GPU chips back in March, the company's top brass said that they were saving some of the goodies in the Kepler design for the big event at Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference in San Jose, which runs this week. And true to its word, the Kepler GPUs do have some goodies that will make them considerably more useful for graphics and HPC compute workloads.…
The fat lady croons doom tune over hackintosher's corpse
The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher's request to review an appeals court's September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones.…
Profit halved in Q1, everyone wants a piece of TSMC
Supply shortages for 28 nanometer GPUs from fab partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp adversely impacted GPU chip and coprocessor maker Nvidia once again in its most recent quarter.…
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