Sun Makes Niagara Teaser Announcement, Servers Imminent
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When a server vendor has a leak the size of, er, Niagara Falls that lets out all of the major feeds and speeds, marketing pitches, and prices of a new generation of servers, and then has its top brass talk about moving up that processor announcement, and then sends out invitations to an announcement of great import for November 14 to all the members of the IT press, it is reasonable to expect an imminent server announcement. And that is what we all did. But Sun Microsystems did not, alas, announce its new "Niagara" servers this week, but rather had a coming out party for the Niagara processor itself. READ MORE >

Linux Clusters Continue to Expand in Top 500 Supers Ranking
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The number of parallel supercomputing clusters and the aggregate performance of these machines both continued their expansion in the latest Top 500 supercomputer rankings. The Top 500 list was announced at the SuperComputing 2005 tradeshow in Seattle, which is not exactly a coincidence. Microsoft, having seen Linux take off as the core platform on cluster supercomputers in the past five years, will debut its own Windows HPC variant at SC2005 this week. The question now is: Can Windows storm the Linux stronghold? READ MORE >

IBM Updates Virtualization Engine for Multiplatform Management
by Alex Woodie

Part of IBM's Systems Agenda is making it easier to manage groups of disparate servers, and one of the key deliverables in this area is Big Blue's Virtualization Engine technology. IBM last week announced updates to several Virtualization Engine technologies, including new capabilities for managing zSeries and pSeries servers from Virtualization Engine consoles, new workload management algorithms, and a new tool for visualizing the inter-dependencies of applications, even if they're not running on the same platform. READ MORE >

IBM Unveils New Midrange Storage Systems
by Alex Woodie

IBM last week unveiled two new network storage servers designed to help small and mid size businesses consolidate their storage. The N5000 range of devices can be equipped with Fibre Channel and SATA disk drives, can be clustered for high availability, and support multiple operating systems, including Windows, Unix, and Linux. The devices also support Linux and AIX partitions running on iSeries servers, but not i5/OS. READ MORE >

   But Wait, There's More

IBM Previews p5 575+ RISC/Unix Box for HPC Shops . . . IBM Inks Big Chinese Government Unix Server Deal, But Does Not Displace HP . . . OSDL's Patent Commons Ready for Grazing . . . Vendors Establish Open Invention Network to Acquire Patents . . . Sun, NEC, and AMD Partner for 50 Teraflops Opteron Cluster . . . Zend Studio 5 Ships with Commercial PHP 5 . . . Aberdeen Report Pegs Growth in Midmarket ERP . . . READ MORE >

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