For those that did not see the article this morning, my Intel vPro article looking at the last three generations of Intel vPro technology went live on Tom's Hardware this morning. See Intel vPro: Three Generations of Remote Management! One of the big reasons I did this piece was to learn the ins and outs of working with vPro...
As some may have seen over the past few weeks, ServeTheHome has gotten relatively hammered. As a result, the site which was running perfectly well in June 2011 was seeing stability issues in late August. I decided to take the opportunity to see if I could speed things up a bit.
Fixing the Problem - Using More Resources
The first big...
With Seagate's recent launch of their 4TB drive, it is time to look at the cost per GB on the different drives. To be clear, this is still a somewhat futile exercise since there is one 4TB model shipping, and that 4TB model is only available in an external format. It is still a somewhat interesting exercise to look...
AMD finally announced that it is shipping its Bulldozer-based Interlagos CPUs to vendors through a press release. One may have missed the short press release, especially given that AMD still only lists the Opteron 6100 series Magny-cours chips on their product page. It appears as though the chips are shipping only to OEMs (such as Cray) and other partners...
The Corsair Force Series 3 120GB drive combines a Sandforce 2200 series controller alongside asynchronous NAND memory to provide a lot of performance at a relatively low cost. It should be noted that the earlier drives, specifically those starting with serial numbers before 1123 were recalled on June 7, 2011 due to firmware issues. Unfortunately, SSDs from all manufacturers,...
This is a super quick note of a conversation I heard at a local Silicon Valley food spot this weekend. From what I overheard it appears that, at least for the 4P AMD Interlagos motherboards, some vendors will re-spin their PCBs to allow for better memory and HT 3 traces to the CPUs. Rumor has it that the higher...
One of the most popular motherboard reviews on STH of the Xeon 3400 series generation was the Supermicro X8SIL-F. It was a micro ATX (mATX) motherboard with some of the mainstay server board features such as dual Intel 82574L Gigabit NICs and IPMI 2.0. Looking forward to this generation, Supermicro has a spiritual successor in the X9SCM-F which has...
For those that are accustomed to IPMI 2.0 for their servers, with KVM-over-IP and the ability to remotely reboot a PC, Intel's vPro platform provides some similar functionality. I have been working with vPro components quite a bit over the past few weeks and decided to try using my Apple iPad to reboot the machine.Admittedly, I am the kind...
As some readers know, a big reason for the slow content on the site is that I am busy writing a big piece on Intel vPro technology for a very big technology review site. As part of this, one thing I realized is that Intel's current model of offering it only with specific chip sets and its mid to...
One project that inspired some of my own work has been the Backblaze storage pod v1 which held 67TB in a custom 45 drive 4U chassis. It was essentially a lower cost and lower performance Sun Thumper that utilized commodity parts to achieve high storage densities at a very low cost per TB (or PB since that is the...