servers

Intel launches E5 Xeons, a faster mainstay of the server market

HANOVER, Germany--Intel launched its E5 family of Xeon processors today, a tremendously important product line for the chipmaker that brings new performance to Intel-based servers and workstations.

The E5 line now comes in two varieties, Intel announced at a launch event here at the CeBIT tech show. First is the E5-2600 series for the mainstay of the server market, systems with two processor sockets. Second is the E5-1600 series chiefly for single-socket workstations.

The Xeon chips are a very important part of Intel's business. For one thing, servers are a growing market because of cloud computing, Internet businesses, and … Read more

Synology five-bay NAS server gets more power and USB 3.0

The top-notch NAS server DS1511+ that won CNET's Editors' Choice award has just probably become top-notch no more. But that's good news.

Synology announced today the brand-new successor, the DS1512+ NAS server, which shares the same five-bay design as the DS1511+ as well as most of the features. On top of that the new server now supports USB 3.0 and has a faster processor to promise the performance of up to 192MBps write and 194MBps read.

Similar to its predecessor, the new DS1512+ can natively host five SATA hard drives to offer up to 20TB of storage … Read more

Synology DS1812+ NAS server: More TBs than you can count with your digits

Synology announced today its first eight-bay DiskStation NAS server, the DS1812+.

This is one of the first, if not the first, consumer-friendly NAS server on the market that offers eight native hard drive bays. This means that when populated with all 4TB hard drives, the server can offer up to 32TB of storage space.

Most computers have just about 1TB of storage space, which is enough (and then some) for most users. The DS1812+, by itself, can host 32 times that much, more TBs than you can count with your fingers and toes.… Read more

Meet a retired World of Warcraft server

A game like World of Warcraft requires several thousand servers to operate the hundreds of online realms within its ecosystem. Earlier this year, Blizzard Entertainment auctioned off several of those server blades "used during World of Warcraft's early days."

A Reddit post brought up the subject again recently, and contains a few pictures of a server blade used for the European server Sunstrider from February 27, 2005 to August 24, 2010. There's little doubt that countless gamers spent thousands, if not millions, of hours playing during that time frame. A special clear enclosure reveals the innards of the server, which contains 6 gigabytes of RAM (DDR-400MHz). It did not come with the original hard drives. … Read more

Google Public DNS prevails as the world's largest service

Handling more than 70 billion domain name system (DNS) requests each day, Google is now the largest public DNS service on earth, the Web giant announced today.

"We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone," software engineer for Google Public DNS Jeremy K. Chen said in a statement. "Today, we're no longer an experimental service."

According to Chen, the way DNS works is it acts like the phone book of the Internet. "If you had to look up hundreds or thousands of phone numbers every day,&… Read more

What's different about storage for virtual desktops?

It is often said that data center-level server virtualization projects created a renewed demand for networked storage, both NAS and SAN.

If that's true, then efforts to virtualize desktops--aka virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects--will create renewed demand for high-performance storage, both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN).

Storage performance is a major determinant in successful deployments of VDI. Why? VDI is a storage input/output-intensive environment.

When you lift the hood to find out what's going on inside a disk array that's supporting virtual desktops, you see the following:

The typical virtual desktop running Windows … Read more

Nginx tries converting Web-server popularity into money

Nginx, a Russian startup that has succeeded where others have failed at challenging the dominant Apache software for housing Web sites, has begun trying to convert its popularity into actual money.

Nginx (pronounced "engine X") yesterday unveiled corporate support offerings for the product, a traditional business model for open-source software. It offers three grades--Essential, Advanced, and Premium--with three- and twelve-month contracts for services including installation, configuration, performance tuning, and maintenance.

"Subscribers to the Advanced and Premium options receive design, implementation and optimization assistance, as well as prioritized development. Premium subscribers will have access to an additional set … Read more

Tech spending was strong in 2011, despite sluggish economy

Spending on technology around the world managed to rise last year, despite economic woes in Europe and a severe hard-drive shortage, research firm IDC said yesterday.

Overall, IT spending rose just 5 percent in 2011, but that proved to be a healthy gain in the face of worldwide challenges.

The 5 percent figure was calculated using constant currency, a method that does not take into account fluctuations in the exchange rate. In U.S. dollars, the picture was even rosier, with tech spending rising by almost 9 percent last year.

A surge in demand for smartphones, tablets, and software kicked … Read more

Free Windows servers float onto Amazon's cloud

Anyone can download Linux for free, so it was no surprise that Amazon offered the open-source operating system on the free tier of Amazon Web Services.

But now the company has added a free version of Windows Server to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, too.

"We are excited to announce that starting today, the AWS Free Usage Tier will now include Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server," Amazon told EC2 customers today. "Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of t1.micro instances running Microsoft … Read more