Today it is time to look at a twelve core, twenty-four thread powerhouse of a system. After looking at the low-cost Westmere-EP based dual Intel Xeon E5606 configuration and finding it to be a power sipping dual-CPU setup, I noted that the E5606 is essentially a six core die with two cores that likely did not pass Intel internal...
The ASRock 350M1 is one of the least expensive AMD Zacate platforms available today. Packing an AMD E-350 APU in its mini-ITX form factor the ASRock for about $110 requires only a power supply, enclosure and RAM to get going. Previously, the Fusion E-350 APU was benchmarked using this platform so this review will be focused primarily on the...
On tap this week is the AT&T - T-Mobile proposed merger, a PCIe ultracapacitor and flash based cache card, and Glustre joins open stack (and yes I know I am 10 days late to the party on this one.)
AT&T and T-Mobile Proposed Merger
AT&T announced plans to purchase T-Mobile USA this week. Frankly, this is going to put U.S. regulators...
The ASUS P67 Sabertooth motherboard is part of ASUS' TUF series, touting enhancements for improved stability and reliability. Many of this site's users have, or are considering migrating to Intel's new Sandy Bridge Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K CPUs that offer multiplier unlocked overclocking alongside a bit of base clock tweaking. This has made the Core i7-2600K the current...
Supermicro is well known for producing solid server motherboards, chassis, peripheral cards, and accessories. At the relatively lower-end of the market are uni-processor (UP) servers and workstations. Unlike dual and quad processor systems that oftentimes require specialized platforms, UP servers can tend to be very similar to higher-end consumer platforms. For example, Intel's 5-series consumer chip sets were very...
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...