Sun Readies Dual-Socket Sparc T2+ Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that Sun Microsystems will launch the next generation of its Sparc T family of servers with the 'Victoria Falls' kickers to the Sparc T2 processors within the next month or so. With the launch of these machines, Sun will be able to gang up two Sparc T series processors into a single system image, thereby making the machines upon which they are based that much more useful. The 'Niagara' Sparc T1 and T2 processors have been limited to single-socket implementations. READ MORE >

IBM Readies Big Power6 Boxes, New X64 Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM may be mostly a services and software company, but most of the services and software it sells are still, despite all the changes in the IT industry in the past three decades, driven by its own server platforms and the operating systems that IBM creates for them. So in that regard, if you think of services as the extra goodies you used to get when you spent 10 or 100 times as much for a server than you do today and if you think of software as the stuff that used to come with the hardware more or less for free, than maybe Big Blue hasn't changed as much as the financial results might lead us all to believe. READ MORE >

HPC Sales Account for Most of 2007's Server Sales Growth
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The appetite for high performance server clusters, vector supercomputers, and a few exotic hybrid machines continued to outpace the growth rate in the overall server space in 2007, according to market research just completed by IDC. The so-called HPC market, which most of us old hands still think of as supercomputers, has always been on the cutting edge of technology, but in recent years, it has been one of the key drivers of the server market as supercomputing has become more mainstream. READ MORE >

Server Virtualization and Consolidation Require More Resiliency
by Bill Hammond

Server consolidation will be a top priority for many IT departments in the coming year. In a recent research study conducted by Gartner, 61 percent of the companies polled were already paring their server count, and 28 percent were planning to do so in the near future. The back story on consolidation is interesting. Life often smacks of irony and the renewed interest in centralization is certainly ironic for those of us who know the history of mainframes and minicomputers. READ MORE >