This weekend I got a call from a local business that produces highlight reels from video game footage. Admittedly, I am not a big gamer (my PS3 was purchased at launch and has played games for less than four hours over the years), but I did think that this would be an interesting opportunity to do some troubleshooting over...
Over the past few months I have looked at a number of different CPUs including the Intel Atom Pineview D510 platform, the AMD Brazos E-350 platform, and a number of Xeon E3 series CPUs like the Xeon E3-1230. At the same time I have been playing with those CPUs and a lot of previous generation hardware with Microsoft Small...
This week saw some very interesting news with LSI announcing new milestones, EMC and NetApp jumping into big data analytics, Intel announcing the Z68 chip set and 22nm Atom, and Gluster announcing a bare metal appliance.
EMC and NetApp do Hadoop!
EMC this week was very cloud heavy in its announcements. Shortly after NetApp announced the completion of its purchase...
One question I get weekly is whether or not one should use Absolute or Relative mouse in the AMI MegaRAC-based IPMI 2.0 KVM-over-IP solutions. The answer is relatively simple: it depends.
For many users it is frustrating that AMI has not traditionally labeled the two options with appropriate use cases on the UI. Recently I started testing the Supermicro H8DG6-F...
When Amazon.com announced that it was releasing its cloud player, whereby users can purchase DRM-free MP3's and store them in the cloud, one question remained in my mind, could the service be the beginning of the end for home servers? After using the service for awhile, I think the answer at this point is no, but it is a...
As was recently seen with the Opteron 6100 4P platforms, moving to multi-processor systems can yield higher density installations. One challenge motherboard vendors face is that multi-processor designs require more complex traces that cost more to produce. While many users will want full-featured boards with SAS2008 and multiple expansion slots, others just need lower cost processing nodes. The Supermicro...
Previously we looked at how to install the Microsoft iSCSI Target software on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine and then setup the iSCSI target on the server. The next step is being able to connect a client system to the iSCSI target. For Microsoft Windows, there is a built-in iSCSI initiator software that is very simple to configure...
Two big technological advancements occurred this week, with Intel announcing 22nm 3D transistors and Seagate announcing 1TB 3.5" disk platters. Both announcements will yield power consumption savings will boosting performance of their respective devices.
Intel Announces 3D transistors for 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs
Traditional transistors work much like a highway with a bridge. Traffic (e.g. electrons) can travel atop the asphalt...
Recently I have been testing several AMD G34 and Intel 5520 series platforms. Each AMD G34 CPU requires four sticks of memory for full quad channel operation, and each Intel CPU requires at least three DIMMs for triple channel operation. With fourteen G34 sockets and dodeca core Magny cours CPUs in various stages of testing, the G34 platforms alone...
AMD's socket G34 platform currently supports up to four eight or twelve core Magny-cours CPUs. While having a dual socket G34 board is interesting, Intel's 2P platforms dominate most of the x86 DP market at the moment. One thing AMD does to combat Intel on price is specifically in the area of four socket servers. Whereas Intel CPUs must...