servers

Today, Toshiba announced an 80GB hard drive for automotive applications, doubling the capacity of current automotive hard drive offerings. Over the last year, we've seen an increasing number of cars with hard drive-based navigation and music servers, but the capacity topped out at 40GB, in the 2008 Cadillac CTS. An 80GB internal drive would likely reserve 10GB for map storage, leaving 70GB for music, video, and photos. The new 80GB automotive drive is 2.5 inches, similar in size to a laptop hard drive. Laptops have had drives well in excess of 100GB for some time now, but automotive … Read more

On Wednesday, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced a free open-source server virtualization and management platform dubbed Sun xVM. Sun says it will commit $2 billion in R&D spending to make Sun xVM a reality.

Hmm, good idea. The server virtualization market is on fire and it is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, it is maturing fast. According to ESG, of those organizations planning to deploy server virtualization, 28 percent of companies plan to deploy in the next six months, while 42 percent plan to deploy within the next year. That's a lot of deployment in the … Read more

The planned launch of Intel's Penryn processors on Monday is the first blow in a one-two punch that might stagger AMD heading into 2008.

Just a few months after the launch of AMD's quad-core Barcelona chips, Intel is hitting back with Penryn, now known as the Xeon 5400 family of processors. A total of 15 server chips are set to launch Monday as well as a new Core 2 Extreme desktop processor, with Penryn chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year.

Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core architecture … Read more

Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server to much fanfare at January's Consumer Electronics Show.

The energy seems to have dwindled some during the product's elongated path to market over the past year. Microsoft finalized the code back in July, but HP said it would wait for an update to the software before releasing its MediaSmart server, in what was seen as the biggest endorsement of the product.

On Monday, Microsoft announced "general availability" for the software, although HP's product will not be shipping to consumers until later this month. Some servers from smaller computer makers … Read more

TidBITS reports that Apple will allow virtualization of the Leopard version of OS X Server.

"Big deal. So what? Who cares?" you say. Well, this is the kind of thing that gets those guys who society rightly locks into server rooms all sweaty under their neck beards (neck beard jokes rule!). Now they can run multiple versions of Leopard Server on one box, alongside Windows and Linux. The Macalope, of course, knows several real Hydras (great dinner party guests -- all those heads and only one stomach), but this is the server equivalent.

Ben Rudolph of Parallels emphasized … Read more

Dell 1.0 was a religious company. I suppose you could refer to it instead as merely an intense focus on low costs in all matters of its operations, but it really went deeper than that. Low cost was an article of faith that was the deep guiding principle underlying essentially everything that the company did. Dell didn't merely tilt toward a streamlined supply chain and lean R&D, they were a fundamental part of what it was as a company.

This is not a pedantic distinction. Focus can be adjusted and tweaked; it's that much harder to change your core. Yet that's what Dell had to do. It had to respond to a world where "cheap boxes" was no longer the guiding mantra for server buyers, which made Michael Dell's public pronouncements suggesting that "Dell 2.0" was mostly about better execution so wrongheaded.… Read more

Updated Oct. 23, 11:50 a.m.; details at bottom.

What if you threw a World Series and no one came because they couldn't buy tickets?

That is the dilemma facing the Colorado Rockies on Monday after the baseball team suspended online ticket sales because servers were overwhelmed by traffic.

"We are as frustrated and disappointed as (fans) are," Jay Alves told The Denver Post, adding that team officials had no idea so many people would try to use the Web site.

The team said it would honor the several hundred tickets already sold but it's … Read more

Update: I added more detail about Microsoft's schedule for SQL Server 2005 support for PHP and about the use of PHP on Windows vs. Linux.

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Microsoft may make a habit of attacking open-source programming, but don't make the mistake of assuming the company has a monolithic loathing for the collaborative programming movement.

On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed some fruits of a partnership that that was announced a year ago with Zend, which develops and commercializes the open-source PHP scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. Bill Staples, a Microsoft product unit manager, announced four moves at … Read more

Enterprise Strategy Group's resident expert on all things server virtualization, Mark Bowker, tells me that there were 15,000 people at VMworld a few weeks ago. Not a surprise, the industry is gaga over server virtualization as more users look to turn physical servers into consolidated virtual partitions.

The irony here is that while the server virtualization chatter focuses on VMware, Xen, Citrix, and Microsoft, the venerable IBM zSeries (i.e. mainframe) will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this virtualization frenzy.

The reason for this is fairly simple. Server virtualization is all about rationalizing IT assets … Read more