IBM, Intel develop virtualization performance benchmark
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By this time next year, virtualization users may have their own industry-sanctioned benchmarking software for evaluating various virtualization environments.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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AMD Opteron servers prove more power-efficient than Xeon-powered servers in tests.
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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IBM (Quote, Chart) is looking to get a leg up on the competition with the October 15 launch of eServer 326, a rack-mounted server that supports AMD&#39;s (Quote, Chart) upcoming dual-core 64-bit processor.
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In a matchup between VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, our reviewer says they're both capable products and that the differences is "on the margin." Making the right choice is all about deciding what's most important to your infrastructure.
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(InfoWorld) - Middleware vendor BEA Systems Inc. will lay out its Java virtualization strategy later this week in China, an approach the vendor hopes will differentiate it from its competitors. At its BEAWorld user conference in Beijing from Wednesday to Thursday, the company will announce a product road map for software due out in 2007 and aimed at optimizing how enterprise Java applications run in virtualized environments. The move has been driven by customer demand, according to Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products at BEA. Users are looking for ways to improve on the more general-purpose server virtualization capabilities already provided by vendors such as EMC Corp., XenSource Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "Customers were running into challenges around efficiency, optimization and performance," he said. Come the first quarter of next year, BEA plans to release WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), a version of its Java application server that includes the vendor's new Liquid VM technology. Liquid VM is a BEA-specific Java Virtual Machine that enables Java applications to run directly on a hypervisor without requiring an operating system to be present. Initially, Liquid VM will work only with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor, but BEA plans to support other hypervisors in future including those from XenSource and Microsoft, Churchward said. Being able to run Java applications virtually without recourse to an operating system will enable users to substantially reduce the amount of computer power, enabling them to lower the hardware costs per application. Drawing a comparison betweenÂ VMware's current approach towards application virtualization and BEA's new take, Churchward gave an analogy about moving house. VMware's like a removal firm that comes in and packages up the entire contents of a person's house and transports it using massive trucks. "Once you open the boxes at your new place, you discover you don't need 60 percent of it," he said. BEA's approach resembles an individual taking the time to go through all their possessions prior to moving and throwing away what they don't need, therefore requiring smaller vans to transport their belongings. "BEA's approach directly targets Java infrastructure flexibility, which has not always been the platform's core strength," James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, wrote in an e-mail interview. He believes the vendor is the first among the major middleware vendors to go down this path, but points to smaller companies Cassatt Corp. and DataSynapse Inc., which are already pursuing what he terms "a virtualize/automate/WebLogic strategy." Due out in the summer of 2007 is Liquid Operations Control (LOC), BEA software to manage and control Java applications running on virtualized infrastructure. While users can combine LOC and Liquid VM to improve their WebLogic virtualization capabilities, BEA intends to widen LOC's scope so it can be applied to all enterprise Java applications, Churchward said, including support for the Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat technology. Moving to manage other Java application servers is a course BEA has already begun to pursue, Governor wrote. "It's the right strategy, which BEA could dramatically accelerate by purchasing Covalent," he added. Open-source company Covalent Technologies Inc. provides products and services for Tomcat and other Apache software including the Axis Web service framework and Geronimo application server. Â
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In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.
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Both new servers are designed to better support virtualization, HP says.
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InfoWorld - IBM still operates the fastest supercomputer in the industry, but rival Hewlett-Packard&#160;has more of them in operation, according to a closely watched global survey released Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Sales growth for x86 servers slowed in the fourth quarter of 2006 as buyers adopted virtualization technology and waited for quad-core processors, according to a Gartner report released Thursday. Hewlett-PackardÂ sold the most servers, but IBM collected the most money for them in 2006, the report said. Worldwide server shipments in the full year 2006 grew by 8.9 percent to 8.2 million units, but revenue grew only 2 percent to $52.7 billion, compared with 2005, according to Gartner. HP led the competition in server shipments, sending 2.2 million units out the door, up 8 percent from 2005. But IBM took the top spot on revenue with $16.9 billion, up 1.7 percent from the previous year. Shipments of x86 servers, the most widely deployed server platform, slowed in the fourth quarter, which held down full-year totals, said Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt. The growth was "slower ... than we have seen in most recent years," Hewitt said in a prepared statement. "Most of that slowdown seems to be attributable to a lengthening of the sales cycle due to the anticipated introduction of quad-core x86 processors, with some lesser impact from x86 server virtualization." Virtualization software increases the utilization rate for servers, so a company could buy fewer servers than without virtualization. The report also showed continued strength for Sun, which posted a 15.4 percent gain in server revenue in 2006 to $5.7 billion. Sun also increased its revenue market share to 10.8 percent, replacing DellÂ (10.3 percent) in the number three spot. IBM led with 32.2 percent of the market, followed by HP at 28.2 percent. While Sun was the only vendor to report double-digit revenue growth, it shipped just 368,000 units, about one-seventh the number of units that market leader HP shipped.
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A virtualization option will be available for the systems, which are based on 1.5- or 1.6-GHz Power5 processors. By Darrell Dunn. IBM on Monday introduced a new line of Linux servers intended to compete with
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A technology group working on faster data transfer between devices announced a new specification targeted at improving high-performance computing systems.
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Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. has released a test suite designed to enable IT managers to compare servers from different vendors on the basis of energy efficiency.
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(InfoWorld) - Later this year, Intel will help server network interfaces take advantage of the major recent advances in datacenters: multiprocessor systems, multicore processors, and virtualization. The company unveiled at Cisco Systems' Networkers user conference a pair of chips for server network cards or motherboards. The Intel 82598 10-Gigabit Ethernet Controller is set for production in September, and the 82575EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller is shipping now to system and component vendors. The company did not disclose pricing. New and emerging technologies are boosting datacenter processing power and helping enterprises take advantage of the systems they've invested in, but network connections are still catching up. They have become the bottlenecks of new, faster datacenters, said Sunil Ahluwalia, a product line manager in Intel's LAN access division. The chips introduced Monday include multiple queues, virtualization capability, packet prioritization, and new storage networking features to break that bottleneck. For example, until now, the chips Intel makes to handle communication between servers and storage or the LAN have essentially just had one path in and out of the system. Sorting out which packet goes to which processor or core, for example, has been a job for the CPU itself, and a strenuous one, Ahluwalia said. It can take all of the CPU's processing power at times. The new chips have multiple queues and software for placing packets in those queues. With 32 transmitting and 64 receiving queues per port, the 10-Gigabit chip can move packets in and out of all the server's processors and cores, balancing the workload and taking advantage of the server's power, Ahluwalia said. The Gigabit Ethernet chip has four transmitting and receiving queues per port. Using the queuing system, the chips can also give certain packets priority so thatÂ important functions can take place quickly over the network. With the chips, Intel also introduced Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) to allocate packets to different virtual machines on a server. For this feature to work, virtualization software vendors will have to make their softwareÂ cooperate with VMDQ. Intel is working on this with VMWare, XenSource, and Microsoft, though it does not expect those vendors to have compatibility in place by September, said Steve Schultz, an Intel product marketing manager. In addition, the controller chips can work natively with iSCSI storage networks. The 10-Gigabit card also has some features designed for use with emerging FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) technology, Ahluwalia said. An FCoE standard is still being worked out, and the chips don't have FCoE itself, Intel said. With the 10-Gigabit controller, Intel upgrades from a PCI-X bus to the faster PCI Express bus for the first time on a 10-Gigabit Ethernet product. With the new performance features to offload tasks from server CPUs, the chip will be able to achieve full 10Gbps throughput while taking up on 10 percent of CPU cycles, Ahluwalia said.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard launched a server based onÂ Intel's new Tigerton quad-core Xeon processorÂ Thursday, battling IBM for customers who run data-intensive business applications like enterprise resource planning and virtualization software. HP announced the rack-based ProLiant DL580 G5 and the blade-shaped ProLiant BL680c G5, each using four of Intel's Xeon 7300-series chips. Compared to HP's current ProLiant servers with dual-core versions of the Xeon or AMD's Opteron chips, both new servers are designed to better support virtualization, allowing users to handle their applications with a smaller number of servers than they need today, the company said. The announcement comes less than a week before AMD is expected to launch its own quad-core server chip, called Barcelona. HP, SunÂ and other vendors are expected to use that processor in a range of new platforms for similar markets. In the meantime, Intel is enjoying increased popularity for its Tigerton chip. IBM also chose the Xeon 7300 chip to upgrade its server lineup, combining the processor with its own X4 chipset instead of Intel's Clarksboro chipset. IBM announced the System x3950 M2 server on Wednesday, also touting its virtualization abilities. IBM designed the server for fast-growing businesses so it can easily scale up for larger deployments, such as data centers and ERP or CRM applications from providers like SAP and Oracle, said Jay Bretzmann, manager of product marketing for IBM. Compared to systems based on its X3 chipset, IBM will add memory and an internal USBÂ interface for loading embedded virtualization software. "As cores started multiplying, the need for memory started growing, particularly in the virtualization space. So we offered a low entry price point and head room to grow," Bretzmann said. Together, those improvements will allow users to get greater utilization out of their servers instead of having the computers sit idle while waiting for new jobs, he said. "There are so many applications that really scale. Databases are the flagship; if you write a database that doesn't scale well, you're not going to be in business for long. But virtualization allows you to load multiple OSes and achieve the flexibility and utilization that are key for quad-core technology," he said. IBM intends to keep its X4 chipset in the market through 2009, then offer a fifth-generation version by 2010, he said. IBM plans to launch the System x3950 M2 server at high volume in the fourth quarter. HP is selling the DL580 for $9,219 and the BL680c for $9,669. IBM will announce pricing for the System x3950 M2 when it is shipped, in the fourth quarter.
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Both VMWare and Parallels update their virtualization software.