Posts by apleszko

HP busts out new ProLiant rack mount based on Intel's new top o' line server chippery

What about DL980 Gen8 and x86 Superdome??

It seems HP delayed the development on 8+ sockets... maybe due to problems with the node controller...

What is Violin Memory's sacked CEO still doing on their board?

$

Simple, continuing paychecks until he finds another CEO job...

After all, being a board director seems a great job:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-30/board-director-pay-hits-record-251-000-for-250-hours.html

Exploring our way to the source of EMC's mighty VNX Nile

Cloud...

Maybe EMC will come out with a speech that the Exabyte capacity can be reach by combining a VNX on customer's Data center with a 995TB capable external cloud service...

Storage vendors: You're next over the cliff after the server salesmen

Re: @ obnoxiousGit

And what about the several clusters every company has that relies on centralized storage? A synchronous replication between 2 servers with Flash DAS may not be good for latency...

Bolivian president's jet grounded so officials can look for Snowden

Cabin not searched

BBC was wrong, other news agencies told the plane was not searched at all, they just "asked" the passengers to clear customs with their passports, the guy could be inside the plane at this moment, we will just be sure when it reaches its destination or somebody still sees him at the russian airport...

Play the Snowden flights boardgame: Avoid going directly to Jail

Mr. Scotty

Beam me up!

MacBook Air now uses PCIe flash... but who'd Apple buy it from?

Woz was always a genius technically speaking, not skilled on sales or marketing though...

Oracle's new T5 Sparcs boost scalability in chip and chassis

M5-32 is not the only one with 32TB RAM

@TPM, in fact, your own article about Fujitsu's SPARC servers mentions that a fully configured M10-4S can also reach up to 32TB within a single NUMA system, but with 1024 cores instead of 192 from M5-32.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/25/fujitsu_racle_athena_sparc64_x_servers/

Sure, Fujitsu M10-4S reaches 32TB RAM with 64 sockets instead of 32, nevertheless is 32TB within a single image.

"At the moment, Oracle is shipping only one box based on the Sparc M5, with 32 sockets, called the Sparc M5-32 (obviously). Fully configured, this big-iron box weighs in at 192 cores, 1,536 threads, and 32TB of main memory. No one has as much memory in a single image today – not IBM, not Silicon Graphics, not HP, and not Fujitsu."

Oracle's mighty Sparc plug fries Fujitsu, bigs up new processor

Re: Good for customers? YES!

David Halko, Oracle has a very different sales approach compared to Sun's, it won't be good for Fujitsu since they don't own Solaris, thus customers would not benefit anything at least when thinking about lower prices.

Sorry but Linux on SPARC is as good as Linux on POWER, Linux on Itanium or Linux on ARM variants... It is completely useless for enterprises since there is no binary compatibility with Linux on x86_64, where the developer ecosystem is. I could also mention Solaris on x86 as another example, nobody is using it for real for important applications (not even Oracle is releasing Exadata with Solaris x86, just Oracle Linux!!). For me, without Solaris, SPARC could only be useful for academic applications, not for business. And even for HPC systems, which usually don't worry about custom O.S. as long the performance is great, the trend seems to be for x86_64 and specially GPUs, since the price/performance is much better.

The questions are not hypothetical at all, that happen on the market all the time!! A recent example is Oracle position related to not supporting HP-UX anymore... That decision was clearly with the objective of taking a competitor out of the unix market. Considering this, wouldn't it be too naive believing they are in favor of keeping a fair competition with any other vendor?

Good for customers? NOT

@TPM, do you think having Fujitsu and Oracle to supply SPARC machines would be better for customers like it was during past Fujitsu / Sun competition? Do you think Oracle would be willing to loose margins on a sale competing against Fujitsu HW, which would need to buy Solaris licenses from them anyway?

Mr. Ellison doesn't hide he wants to have margins like Apple's iPhone for Oracle's HW, thus on most customers Oracle sales force tries to primarily push Exadata, since it is a product with a BoM of about $500K (some x86 commodity servers with some infiband gear within a rack) and that can be sold for $10M... Even during UNIX golden times margins were not that high! Customers who keeps relying 100% of their systems on Oracle DB should be aware they are heading for 100% vendor lock-in, choice means lower profits to Oracle, thus tends to be eliminated!

Oracle readies Exalogic 2.0 'engineered systems'

$7.4bn way too expensive to buy a x86 commodity server maker...

"...but rather bought Sun Microsystems two and a half years ago (yes, it has been that long since the $7.4bn deal closed) to create what it calls "engineered systems"...."

Since Sun's acquisition was obviously not about SPARC whatsoever (unless to kill it), it was a very high price for a commodity x86 server maker. Nothing on Oracle's Exa* appliances have any exclusive HW advantage, it's only software features that are exclusive only due to commercial purposes!!

At least $6bn of the total were only about Java software and patent assets...

IBM lets fly single-socket Power7 Penguin server

Not the same as Linux x86

Linux on POWER / SPARC / Itanium / IBM's Mainframe is similar to Windows 8 on ARM... not the same than x86 versions... After all, on most machines you have to install 3rd party Software and not all of them are from IBM. These 3rd party software companies won't invest on different Linux platforms other than x86 unless:

- The market share becomes relevant for their business, thus justifying the port to other processor architecture

- IBM give them some financial incentives... I remember Intel doing that to leverage Itanium, but after billions spent HP and Oracle are still fighting about its death.

At last: Violin to push out HANA appliance

So far SAP HANA 1.0 only runs with Intel Westmere 10-core processors, installed on quad or octa sockets servers... It is unlikely Xeon 5600 would be certified exclusively to Violin, even considering SAP's investment on the company. Maybe they are referring to another HANA based solution.

Revealed: Inside super-soaraway Pinterest's virtual data centre

2 billion dollars deal?

Probably the next Facebook target to be acquired... The price should be higher if they don't have any revenue at all...

WTF is... scale-in?

Since they are making up new terms...

What about scale-off? You turn off the servers and the application doesn't run at all... I bet all the issues would disappear, it is impossible to have downtime if you don't even have uptime!!

Ice Cream Sandwich gives Android mobes brainfreeze – Sony

When you can do it, make excuses...

Even if ICS is indeed slower and resource hungry, that seems to me an excuse from Sony so they don't need to develop for older models... "stick with the old O.S., we know it will be better for you" (and the company doesn't need to invest on old devices which are not making any more money...)

Samsung delayed the ICS update for Galaxy Note, but at least their excuse was that there was a new pack of Premium softwares delivered for free...

EMC registers mysterious new trademark

VSPEX = "VSP Extender" to compete against HDS high-end storage??

Since HDS's VSP high-end storage has embedded virtualisation and EMC's VMAX does not... until now it could be...

PCIe flash riddle of next-gen HP ProLiant record smasher

"#1 spot in the two-processor TPC-C performance benchmark"

There is a catch that was not explained well on the blog, DL385 G7 was indeed the #1 TPC-C, but only within two socket machines... There is a link to another blog on the right corner that explains where the blogger got the information about this benchmark in the first place:

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Reality-Check-Server-Insights/TOP-RATED-HP-s-ProLiant-DL385-G7-with-New-AMD-Opteron-6200/bc-p/105261#M557

Sad but true: Napster '99 still smokes Spotify 2012

Sad but true...

The title "Sad but true" is the name of a Metallica song, the band who lead the legal actions against Napster... Intentionally or not, I found it ironic...

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

I am one of the previous fans that sworn to never buy it a Nokia phone again after they ditched Maemo just a few months after releasing N900. I did made that statement as an emotional reaction and maybe I could betray the promise if Nokia had been back on track.

Then while I was pretty pleased with Android, I testify Nokia's continuous effort to burn all loyal base, both with Symbian and Meego platforms. Now with Windows Phone they think the customers and developers are magically coming back as nothing happened...

Thanks Nokia for helping me keeping my promise!! I still don't see me buying a Nokia phone in the long term future even if Microsoft somehow manages to buy into the iOS and Android market, which is very very very unlikely (to use just a few "very's").

Oracle fires Itanium countersuit at HP

x86-based Superdome = HP recognizing Itanium is DEAD

Nobody remembered that HP recently announced that will build a x86 Intel based Superdome besides their Itanium offering!!

It seems a recognition that x86 is the target platform for Mission Critical workloads. They can't admit it right now just because porting HP-UX AGAIN (remeber PA-RISC to Itanium migration...) would hurt even more their Unix business, and surely wouldn't be an easy and fast task to accomplish. It could even be a sign that HP-UX would be abandoned, given that UNIX market share is dropping and doesn't have great prospects for the future...

Oracle on its side also doesn't seem to care that much to Solaris and SPARC, focusing on extremely high margin Exadata appliances, based on cheap servers with x86 processors...

The Secret of Monkey Island

I just felt old.... it seems too long ago I played it on a green display!!!

I am from Brazil and this game was the best I've had during the XT/286 era.... Adventures like this also helped me on learning some english since I was about 11 years old at the time!!

Until today I remember the damn forest labyrinth that I got stuck for hours!!!!!!!

Intel on Itanium: 'It's all about the OS'

The last nail in the cofin of Itanic...

Intel statement bellow seems to me like a "I am compromised with HP, but not so much... Xeon market is much more important to me!!":

"It's really now a choice of operating systems. Xeon's reliability is now equal – and in some cases better – than Itanium"

Intel sends 'Poulson' Itaniums to the shrink

Recompilation not needed? Are you sure??

Intel is arguing that applications and operational system won't need to be recompiled... That's true, instructions remains the same, but how about the improved 12-wide instruction pipeline from the 6-wide one?

Will the application be able to submit 2*6-wide instructions to the same core without any modification?? From what I understand EPIC architecture is mostly based on the fact that during compilation the code is optimized in order to submit parallel instructions, so I guess one application which was compiled based on 6-wide words will have about half of the performance compared to the same application recompiled to use 12-wide words!!

If my conclusions are right we will see again the principal weakness that affects EPIC architecture: binary compatibility. Customers will need to adopt the latest version of HP-UX and wait for ISVs like Oracle to certify its applications, which also will need to be the latest Oracle DB for example. We all know that the market has a considerable delay on certifying and adopting the latest version of anything... and for Mission Critical applications, the case for most Itanium servers, clients are even more conservative.

IBM tosses in freebie Linux with Power servers

Linux on Power, Mainframes, Itanium and x86 are not the same!!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/linux_32.png

I am not going to talk about HW RAS or the quality of the support from IBM or any other HW vendor... Think first about the issues of running Linux Red Hat on systems different from x86_64!!

IBM will tell you that Red Hat 6 running on Power and/or Mainframe is the way to open source and everything will be great, but what about the software that runs above the O.S.?? Does IBM mention on any time the term "binary compatibility"?? Go ask your software provider if they will support their application running at Linux RH6 on all these platforms... In order to do such thing they need to recompile, test and maintain the application on a bunch of different platform, which obviously costs a lot more! Just as an example, check when Oracle DB newest version was released for each platform. The last time I checked the latest version for Red Hat running on Mainframe was 10.2, and the versions 11.0, 11.1 and 11.2 were already GA, and guess for which platform these 3 versions were launched first, Red Hat Linux on x86_64!!

We just saw this movie a couple of months ago with Itanium... every software vendor were dropping support for Linux or Windows on Itanium, and then Microsoft and Red Hat announced they would drop the support for the OS as well. Who can guarantee the same thing won't happen for Linux on Power or Mainframe? Sure IBM will support the client, as long it runs Websphere, DB2, Tivoli, etc... but it can't force all the SW vendor to embrace its platforms.

IBM gloats over HP, Oracle takeouts

Marketing talks...

Competitors in fact are right on refusing to comment about IBM's takeouts propaganda. If they answered, it would just make its argument stronger.

The clients know well this is sales talk and thus not worth to listen too closely.

I would like to see Big Blue telling how much x86 systems they were able to convince to move into Power/AIX lock-in formula. It should be as unlikely as seeing Linux running on Power servers with no AIX system at all....

Intel plays Switzerland in the cloud wars

HW market history 101

Very interesting article. Besides the main subject about ODCA & Intel it was a great sum up of HW market history from the past decades.

But while I was reading the article, I can't avoid thinking TPM were getting it off his chest...

Fennec squeezes into Android users' pockets

Huge space eater...

I had to uninstall it right away... it consumes more than 30Mb of my HTC Desire app space even after moving it to the SD.

This app space is a known limitation for Android and specially HTC Desire (providing you haven't rooted your phone), so Mozilla should worry at least a bit about moving most of the files to the SD card. Most won't be willing to spend 30Mb of their app space if their included browser does the job, even if Fennec does it a little better.

Symbian Titanic heading for iceberg

RE: Wrong

I know the Maemo history and Nokia threw it on the trash when moving to Meego... N900 is a lousy phone and a good tablet, but in the end it competes with smartphones as well... the computer or phone discussion is just an excuse for not investing anymore on N900... root access?? well, although that's fun it is only for geeks, not for end users. The same root access which makes it a real open device is also the reason why Nokia failed terrible on attracting professional developer companies, most applications for N900/Maemo are developed by the open source community, and that's not a profitable business for who pay their bills by writing code...

Nokia is sinking with Symbian, Maemo and Meego won't change anything...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/dead_vulture_32.png

RIP NOKIA, soon their devices will be competing with Made in China cheap phones... I was a loyal consumer for years and at first there were no discussion that Nokia had both the best HW and SW.

Now the HW is getting worst each year compared to competitors, not even the battery life is the same anymore...

And in the SW area Nokia just lost its hand and now it is just too late to recover the time lost!! As the article says Symbian is not likely to catch up iOS and Android. Some may say Nokia is betting on Meego with Intel, but that was said also about that cr*p Maemo O.S. which didn't last even half a year with the Nokia N900 model. It was just born dead....

Meego may have Intel support but that's just because they are interested to sell Atom processors!! I wouldn't be surprised if Intel join Android ship in a couple of months... after all the smart decision is always to go with the winning team, and Nokia is now definitely on the looser side.

IBM launches zEnterprise 196 'data center in a box'

Marketing talk about the "System of Systems" jargon

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/stop_32.png

IBM's Mainframe was made to run z/OS and that's the only system it run effectively... not just due to HW or OS reliability, but largely because all the IT staff surrounding it.

Let's face it, for just one mainframe box running some LPARs for critical workload processing, there are dozens of IT high qualified (and well paid!!) professionals working to keep it healthy. Since they don't have to support thousands of different machines most even now in details the source code from a legacy COBOL application which supports their company business. Within the Unix and Windows environments the situation is not even remotely comparable... a support team productivity is often measured in terms of "hundreds of machines per employee", thus making impossible to provide the same effort for supporting a critical system....

The integration of POWER and x86 servers is being marketed as it is part of the mainframe technically speaking, when in fact is nothing more than normal racks interconnected through Ethernet... The advantage of integrated management using the HMC is basically software, so besides a strategic reason I can't see why it couldn't be done with Blade Chassis sold separately and connected in the same way...

By the way, the idea of the RAIM memory sounded very interesting at first... humm, a RAID of memory... but then I remembered that even a simple 2 socket Intel x86 machines already provide Memory Mirror for some time, isn't that similar to RAID 1 as well?? I couldn't find further details, so maybe it is something like a RAID 5, but then I also wondered... is there a RAIM controller for that or the processor has to spend cycles managing that? Would that controller have cache!?? Well, nevermind...

VMware scales up vSphere virt, rejigs prices

ESX 4.1 supports 128 logical processors, not 64

Hello TPM, allow me to point out that the information about ESX 4.1 keeping the 64 logical processors support for the host machine is not correct.

The hypervisor 4.1 release include, among other features, the support for 128 logical processors and specifically the Intel 7500 processor family. Check the links bellow for more details:

ESX 4.1 configuration maximum (page 2):

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf

VMWare 4.1 "What's New":

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_41_new_feat.html

Best regards,

Alex

Nokia updates N900 firmware

Consumers must know that before byuing again from Nokia

For those thinking about getting a N900, think twice at least.

As a loyal Nokia customer for years I bought the N900 right after was launched and spent more than 600 bucks on it.

Nokia already knew at the time that they were working on Meego with Intel, but they rushed to launch N900 with Maemo 5 and now confirmed it won't be upgradable to Meego. The promises of keep support for Maemo 5 is just an excuse while the next Meego device is not launched.

If you buy N900 now will received an about-to-be abandoned OS... If you are willing to wait for the Meego device I would advice to buy from another company besides Nokia, since their behavior with N900 customers is likely to happen again in the future. (For you to know, the first Nokia Meego device is an adaptation and not a fully Meego compliant, since it will use a different packaging schema for application installation, so it is even more likely that the customers will get abandoned again).