Fujitsu-Siemens Finally Does Solaris on Primergy
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, this was a decision that has been a long time in coming, and one that probably should have taken maybe 35 seconds in a meeting maybe four years ago when it must have been pretty clear that Sun Microsystems would be backtracking bigtime and supporting Solaris 10 on X86 and X64 platforms. But, no matter how long it took, Sparc and Solaris insider Fujitsu-Siemens, the partnership of Japanese server maker Fujitsu and Germany partner Siemens, is now officially supporting Solaris Unix on its Primergy line of X64 servers. READ MORE >

The Top 500 Super Ranking Now Counts Watts as Well as Flops
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 31st edition of the semi-annual Top 500 listing of supercomputers in the world was announced this week at the International Supercomputing Conference 2008 event in Dresden, Germany, and the list will be noteworthy for two reasons. First, this will be the first time that a supercomputer of any make, vendor, or architecture has broken through the petaflops performance barrier, a feat accomplished by the 'Roadrunner' hybrid Opteron-Cell machine created for the U.S. government's Los Alamos National Laboratory by IBM. And second, and perhaps foremost, this will be the first ranking where watts are being counted for big machines in a manner that is as consistent as the Linpack Fortran benchmark that is the touchstone for performance. READ MORE >

Sysload Delivers Fine-Grain Monitoring for Virtual Servers
by Alex Woodie

Organizations concerned that the availability of critical applications is suffering as the result of hitting the physical performance limits of their virtualized servers may want to check out the SP-Analyst offering from the French company Sysload. With the capability to monitor a wide range of servers, including i OS machines, at one-second intervals, SP-Analyst may be a good solution for spotting sudden performance spikes in virtualized infrastructures, which other server monitoring offerings with longer sampling intervals may miss. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: iPhone Home
by Hesh Wiener

What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn't distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there's a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals. READ MORE >