A very interesting press release from Sandia Labs last week discussed results from their research into how processor core counts correlate to performance. Briefly, their tests showed that solid performance gains (around 25-50%) are achieved in moving from dual to…

It looks like a long-running rumor is finally being confirmed: Cisco is entering the server market very soon. Our pal Ashlee Vance at the New York Times published a story yesterday, and our other pal, Timothy Prickett Morgan of The…

Robert Moffat, IBM’s Systems & Technology (read: servers and other hardware) chief, laid the smack down on HP’s Mark Hurd in a recent ChannelWeb story. When the first word in an industry news story is “feisty”, your next thought usually isn’t, “Hey, this must be about IBM.” However, Moffat is the epitome of feistiness with quotes like this: “The stuff that Mr. Hurd said was going away kicked his ass…” and going on to discuss mainframe and System p Unix system sales growth. Moffat also owned up to weakness in IBM’s x86 server sales miss, explaining it was execution problems on IBM’s part rather than product problems, market trends, or anything HP did to blunt IBM’s efforts. While we’re not sure what Hurd did or said to prompt Moffat’s fiery riposte, we are certain that this will get HP’s attention and probably a return salvo.

Our pal Timothy Prickett Morgan (TPM) wrote a good story in The Register about how Rackable and Verari have recently added equipment leasing programs. I’m more than a little surprised that it has taken them this long to take this step; it’s not like these companies are still start-ups. If I’m running a company that sells big-ticket IT products, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy my products – cash sales, leases, trade-in deals, barter (including crops, farm animals, furs, etc.) While it doesn’t look like they are opting to add the rather wide range of buying options that I would provide, they do have more than the plain vanilla deals, including mid-lease upgrades and lessors that take an equity stake in the deal. It’ll be interesting to see how well these companies fare over the long term, what with the economic crisis and ever-increasing competition from much larger vendors. It’s much easier to make waves and money when you’re a plucky pioneer who is blazing trails and proving the value of a new product (like blades).

It’s rapidly becoming clear that the rumors concerning Cisco entering into the server market are probably true. Major news sources, ranging from The Register to The Wall Street Journal, have written the story, and Cisco’s ‘no comment’ is, at this point, the same thing as saying, “Yeah, we’re doing it, but don’t have the data sheets printed yet.” While the company may be positioning their servers as network-centric devices (and thus not directly competitive with their server vendor partners), I’m hearing that they will look more like enterprise servers with integrated switches. I’m not sure that we’re talking a blade form factor; I’m thinking that it’s more likely to be a rack mount server. Why spend all the money/time/engineering to bring out a new chassis when you can introduce a box that fits into a standard rack?

Another thought from our executive friend.. Well, considering that it’s all probable, it may very well taste like catfish.  Of course you have to drink with it some quantum latte with a rich ‘”foam” on top! I do like the…

Received the first response below from an executive at a large HPC vendor… (See previous “SC08 + Magic 8-Ball = Obsession” post below for background.) Must be the String Theory since this is very much quantum mechanics.  And a solution…

We’ve finally finished crunching the numbers and putting together the charts for our third annual x86 Server Preference Survey. In this version of the survey, 187 people who work with x86 systems in enterprise data centers gave us their thoughts…

While wandering the floor at tradeshows, I’m always on the lookout for interesting swag. I’ve been in the business long enough to become jaded – I don’t care about t-shirts, pens, or the normal run-of-the-mill stuff. I like the quirky,…

We spent a bit of quality time with Deepak Khosla, CEO of X-ISS, Inc., a Houston-based IT consulting firm. X-ISS has been around for 15 years and has done a lot of work with HCP clusters – installing more than 40,000 nodes in the last five years and more than 5,000 nodes since 2006. While this is impressive on its own, what really caught our attention is their new managed services offering for clusters. First, a little background…