Ben Freeman

Does HPC and SMB Penetration Preclude the Enterprise? Despite the Xserve’s relative newness, it has gained a foothold in some niche spaces, including high performance computing (HPC). One noteworthy example is the world’s third-fastest super computer, which is found at Virginia Tech. It is currently being upgraded from PowerMac towers to Xserve G5s. According to […]

He also noted the four vendors currently making the space profitable. From a sales perspective, F5 Networks leads the market with $40.6 million in second-quarter 2004 sales. It also has a long history of innovation with its “traffic management” solutions. However, F5 lags slightly behind on application optimization focus, allowing others room to challenge. Radware, […]

Mixed Client Base While Children’s Miracle Network’s video production and communications team runs Macs, most of the remaining Children’s Miracle Network users run IBM ThinkPads. Not surprisingly, moving back and forth between systems isn’t always fluid. Case in point: At last year’s Children’s Miracle Network Celebration at Disney World, presentations ran smoothly on Mac G4 […]

POWERful Regrouping: “From a server standpoint, IBM will continue to focus on all of its product lines,” Cal Braunstein, CEO/executive director of research for the Robert Frances Group told ServerWatch. “However, over time these lines are basically coming together.” Since the late January merger of Big Blue’s Server and Technology groups, POWER has taken center […]

UW Builds a POWERful Catalog While Alpine uses POWER systems to boost the volume on its business applications, the University of Washington (UW) directs them to more visual use: the development of a comprehensive catalog of films, videos, and other media. After securing funding from the Library of Congress, the Association of Moving Image Archivists […]

The Software Scoop While backup drives form a big piece of the equation, backup software is also a variable. Often, the software that ships with the drive is not an application an enterprise will want to deploy in a production environment. Fortunately, stand-alone software solutions are available. “The basic backup software included with backup hardware […]

POWER Struggle Sinharoy sees POWER5 competition in two separate spaces: “In the commercial market, we expect our competition to be Sun and HP.” He believes HP’s Unix systems will pose stiffer competition for Big Blue than Sun’s beleaguered SPARC servers. He also believes POWER5 will triumph here in performance and functionality. Meanwhile, “In the HPC […]

Industry Standard? HP continues to cling fast to its “industry standard” message. “You have this huge, huge installed base and continued growth, with our Proliant line, the world’s largest industry standard line,” Cox said, “If you also look at the new industry standard, which was just released in the last few years ר Itanium — […]

Bullish on Opteron 64-bit computing should be a boon for several of Townsend’s applications — most obviously SQL Server, for which Akeson is awaiting a version that supports the new architecture. HP’s release of Opteron servers generated much interest, as Opteron “has really good 32-bit performance and most of our software is 32-bit at this […]

The Downside of Infiniband “The real problem for Infiniband is: How good is good enough?” Gartner Research Vice President James Opfer told ServerWatch, “There’s a certain market available for clustering, and it’s arguably true that Infiniband does that better, but Ethernet may do it good enough.” Although Infiniband has generated increased interest in the past […]

The Virtual On-demand Grid As predicted, virtualization is found virtually everywhere in 2004. Speedy Infiniband reduces latency, enabling scale-out machines to be transformed easily into scale-up clusters. EMC’s VMware has consistently innovated to keep ahead of its fast-emerging market. Grid is also becoming more of a reality. Maria DeGiglio, an analyst at the Robert Francis […]

Bridge Over Troubled Waters COAS relies on Sun’s stalwart support organization to keep the relationship sailing smoothly. “If our support base were to have eroded anywhere down the road, in all these years, I think the overall relationship [we have with] Sun to build our solutions would have been gone a long time ago,” Sears […]