One of the great new features in Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (SBS2011E) is the ability to backup the system drives easily. This was a feature that Windows Home Server v1 was generally lacking and is something that users have taken for granted at this point with newer, more full featured versions of Windows Server platforms. Microsoft has...
AMD's Zacate E-350 is the culmination of the AMD-ATI merger's synergy expectations. AMD rocked the press when it shared its vision of a unified CPU and GPU to attack at the heart of Intel's GPU market dominance. Several years and chief executives later, that vision has been put into a shipping product, only about a year after Intel did...
This week saw a few developments both in the SSD space and in the microserver space.
OCZ Purchases Indilinx
Early this week we learned that OCZ has reached an agreement to purchase the SSD controller designer, Indilinx, for $32 million. From what we know, Indilinx's next-generation controller will be released well after SandForce's and the company has been relatively quiet since...
Many users end up using external removable media for their server's important data. Oftentimes this can be done as part of a manual off-site backup process for important data or simply when moving sensitive data off of a server, for example with employee records, company records, litigation files, and mergers and acquisitions related documents that need to be used...
Supermicro contacted me about reviewing their SC842TQ-665B chassis a few weeks ago and I thought it would be a good departure from the pure storage chassis. Sometimes, a large 4U 20-24 3.5" bay enclosure is unnecessary. With today's 3.5" disk prices, adding a 4TB usable RAID 6 array plus hot spare and a few SSDs for caching in ZFS...
As part of its Q1'11 CPU roll-out, Sandy Bridge was perhaps Intel's biggest announcement. Intel also released the E5603, E5606, and E5607 CPUs which are quad core, non-Hyper-Threading parts meant for dual processor (DP) servers. I decided to look at the E5606 CPU as a successor to the E5506 previous generation (45nm) CPU and was very surprised with the...
Up for benchmarking today is the Intel Xeon E3-1280 Sandy Bridge based Xeon processor. Interestingly enough, this is the highest stock clocked Sandy Bridge CPU available today. After looking at both the Xeon E3-1220 and Xeon E3-1230 recently I decided to purchase a Xeon E3-1280, the fastest Sandy Bridge CPU (Xeon or otherwise) available to date, just out of...
This week was full of M&A news, but also saw some new features on ServeTheHome. Also, Fusion-io and Supermicro teamed up to create an IOPS powerhouse.
ServeTheHome's Forums Get New Resources
Forum moderator odditory has added a few great FAQs/ Wikis on the ServeTheHome.com forums this week. First is the PMC Sierra based HP SAS Expander FAQ/ Wiki which is a...
On tap for today is benchmarking the Xeon W3550 LGA 1366 UP server CPU. Recently I have been looking at the new Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1220 and Xeon E3-1230 CPUs. Most comparisons have come in the form of the new Sandy Bridge Xeons to the Lynnfield based Xeon X3440 and Xeon X3460 CPUs. I have received numerous comments requesting...
After today's markets' close NetApp announced the purchase of LSI's Engenio External Storage Systems Business for $480million in cash.The motivation behind this is that NetApp needed a high speed solution primarily for very high throughput (both bandwidth and IOPS) applications such as multi-stream video capture and playback as well as high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Also, NetApp 's V-series is...