Articles about Server

Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, summed up on the concept of cloud computing very succinctly. "All it is, is a computer attached to a network." Ellison and Oracle have gone on to embrace both open source and cloud technologies including OpenStack, but the basic premise that it starts with a physical server and a network still holds true.

The server industry is going through massive change, driven in the main part by advances in open source software, networking and automation. The days of monolithic on-site server rooms filled with rack-space, and blinking lights and buzzing air-con, are gone. However, the alluring simplicity of this concept is not quite how it works in the real world.

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Fujitsu and Oracle have teamed up to deliver new, ulta-fast servers, as they give cloud computing and digital transformation another push forward. Named SPARC M12, these servers come equipped with an all-new SPARC64 XII processor.

Fujitsu claims this processor allows the SPARC M12 server to "achieve the world's highest per CPU core performance."

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For anyone looking to stream music and movies around their home to various devices, Plex is a solid media server solution that won’t hurt your pocket; it's free! But things are about to get even better for Plex Pass subscribers thanks to the arrival of the Plex Pass Perks hub.

Depending on where you are in the world, you might be able to bag yourself a discounted external hard drive or NAS to use with your server, and there is the promise that new deals will be added all the time.

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After the successful launch of its new Ryzen processors last week, AMD has announced the first details of its upcoming Naples CPUs intended for servers and data centers.

These processors were designed around the same Zen architecture as Ryzen though they will be a great deal more powerful. AMD has described them as having "superior" memory bandwidth and some models will even feature up to 32 cores in order to handle a more demanding workload.

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Server downtime -- it happens. Most large companies have at least once experienced the frustration that is having their servers down, whether it’s for a few minutes, hours or even days. It’s regarded as a part of life, something that happens that you can’t quite prevent, but in fact, server downtime costs companies millions of dollars yearly, either in lost business or in the distraction and psychological toll it takes on employees who have to deal with the problem.

But actually, these can be prevented by avoiding common server issues, implementing agile working practices and creating a plan should emergencies happen.

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The first question that businesses are likely to ask when considering virtualization is: what exactly is it? In IT terms, hardware virtualization refers to the act of using virtual, rather than physical computer resources. Practically speaking, this means that there is an abstraction layer between the physical hardware and the IT resources that the business consumes. For example, virtualization software will enable a single, physical machine to deliver multiple workloads simultaneously, with each workload only accessing the specific physical resources that are allocated to it.

In its most simple form, virtualization may refer to the partition of a hard drive, as this makes a single, physical storage device behave as if it is two hard drives. However, IT virtualization examples also come in much more complex forms. The core concept to remember is that to the end user, virtualization makes it appear as though they are accessing a single IT component or resource, regardless of the underlying hardware. Virtualization enables businesses to consolidate IT resources, such as network, CPUs, memory and storage and provision them as they see fit, usually via a network connection.

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New research has revealed that despite increased server sales, revenue has continued to decline for the companies responsible for manufacturing and shipping servers worldwide.

The analyst firm IDC brought this information to light in its new Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker report, which covered server market share and revenue from April to June 2016.

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IBM introduced a series of new servers dubbed "x86 killers". The devices, designed to give a significant boost to artificial intelligence, deep learning and advanced data analytics, were picked up by the Chinese telecommunications company Tencent, and IBM claims the results are basically out of this world.

"A large cluster of the new IBM OpenPOWER servers was able to run a data-intensive workload three times faster than its former x86-based infrastructure", IBM says in a press release. "While reducing the total number of servers used by two-thirds".

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Intel has just announced a series of new 3D NAND SSDs, aimed at PCs, data centers and Internet of Things devices. The company says the new array offers a "cost effective replacement for traditional Hard Disk Drives".

From the consumer side, there are two new devices: Intel SSD 600p Series, and Intel SSD Pro 600p Series. It uses PCIe Gen3x4, NVMe interface, resulting in a 17 times faster performance over HDD, and three times faster performance over SATA SDDs.

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There’s a new type of server memory which might speed up backup restore and recovery, as well as help with salvaging any data left unsaved during a power outage.

Memory and storage upgrade company Crucial has announced its Nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) server memory. The company says this type of memory is a better choice for servers because it offers better read and write speeds than HDD or SSD disks, allowing for speedy backups and recoveries.

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Pssst! Hey, kids, wanna buy a remote desktop protocol server, cheap? I guess I should say "Вы хотите купить сервер?"

Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab say they’d found a global forum, run by a Russian-speaking group, where hackers could buy access to compromised servers for as little as $6 (£4.25) per server.

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Dell has announced that it has upgraded its 13th generation PowerEdge four-socket server portfolio. The new servers, designed with big-data and real-time analytics in mind, offer more flexibility, scalability and manageability.

This includes four new offerings: the PowerEdge R830 and PowerEdge R930 servers, PowerEdge FC830 -- a full-width, four-socket compute node for the Dell PowerEdge FX architecture -- and PowerEdge M830 blade server.

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Microsoft has announced the general availability of its SQL Server 2016 product, after releasing a preview build late last year. The offering comes with a couple of novelties, including the updateable in-memory column stores and advanced analytics through deep integration with R Services.

SQL Server 2016 also offers advanced analytics and machine learning models in the database, which Microsoft says will have a hundred-fold speed-up in time to insight, compared to similar deployments outside the database.

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At this year’s Computex show in Taiwan, Intel announced that it is adding new chips to its Xeon E3 1500 line of server processors to help service providers handle the massive amounts of online video-related traffic created by the "visual cloud".

Webcasts, video-conferencing, digital TV broadcasts, cloud gaming, video transcoding and even the delivery of remote workstations all make up what the company and other chipmakers have begun to refer to as the visual cloud. The new chips that Intel is adding to its Xeon E3-1500 line have been created with extra capabilities that aid in accelerating video and multimedia workloads.

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New research from Gartner suggests that the worldwide server virtualization market is very close to reaching its peak.

In 2016, the x86 server virtualization market is expected to reach $5.6 billion. This is an increase of 5.7 percent compared to 2015. However, this growth is not attributed to new software licenses which have declined for the first time in more than a decade. Instead this increased growth has been driven by maintenance revenue which is a clear indication of how the software market has begun to rapidly mature.

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