Ben Freeman

At first glance, Fujitsu’s U.S. server offerings appear easily dissected. They fall into two product lines split evenly between the x86 and SPARC realms. Historically, the vendor has a stronger market presence outside of the United States but is a relatively recent addition to the North American server scene: The Primepower and Primergy lines hit […]

Report after report has found both RISC and Intel servers to be grossly underutilized in many enterprises. In financially flush times, it’s often easier to purchase new equipment than to maximize what is already there. When the purse strings tighten, however, the IS department must make do with what it currently has. These days, one […]

The Gateway server snapshot featured in last week’s Hardware Today presented a vendor making waves in the commodity server market. Gateways’ servers run the gamut from low-end 1-way Xeon towers designed for small to midsize businesses lacking an IS department, to more robust 4-way Xeon MP racks suited for departmental use as multiprocessing servers with […]

There’s no denying server blades are on the fast track. Blade sales topped $583 million in 2003, according to the latest edition of IDC’s Quarterly Server Tracker. While this represents a small piece of the $13.7 billion 2003 server pie, it is a huge leap from 2002’s $90 million in blade sales. The server blade […]

At first blush,the landscape of Gateway server country looks much like Dell server country. Like Dell, Gateway offers Intel Celeron-based entry-level servers that straddle the line between servers and robust desktop machines. It’s been a little over a year since Gateway set out to be a disruptive force on the enterprise server scene. We look […]

The Apple server snapshot featured in last week’s Hardware Today described a vendor working to combine ease of use and robustness with commodity pricing as it moves into the server space. Its first two offerings are the Xserve G5 server and the Xserve RAID. The Xserve G5 server, a powerful dual PowerPC-based G5 running the […]

Previously, when we looked at server room components, we focused on storage. First, we looked at NAS and SANs and then at RAID controllers. This week, Hardware Today turns its attention to application delivery server components, which are typically called application switches. Application switches connect business-critical apps to the network, bolstering performance, security, and availability […]

The last time we looked at server room components, we examined NAS and SANs. This week, Hardware Today returns to the storage corner of the data center to focus on RAID controllers. Shopping for a RAID controller? We map out this complex maze, outlining some of the differences in SATA vs. SCSI and iSCSI vs. […]

Last week’s Hardware Today Server Snapshot focused on HP, a vendor attempting to consolidate disparate product lines onto x86 and Itanium architectures while still responding to market demands. We follow up last week’s HP Server Snapshot with a look at Townsend Analytics, a long-standing ProLiant customer that is bullish on the vendor’s Opteron upgrade path. […]

Two weeks ago, our Sun Server Snapshot determined the vendor to be charting various courses. Like the previous snapshot, we predicted the outlook to be partly cloudy with a chance of success. Oregon’s College of Oceanic Atmospheric Science first filled its data center with Sun systems 20 years ago. Today, the HPC infrastructure features Sun […]

The previous HP server snapshot, published in November 2003, highlighted the vendor’s attempts to tame its multiple lines, both the home-grown ones and those obtained through acquisition, by standardizing on Intel Itanium-2 and IA-32 offerings and gradually end-of-lifing other architectures. Recent Server SnapshotsIBMAppleGatewayFujitsuUnisysDellSun Microsystems In the past six months, HP has shifted its processor strategy, […]

Mainframes may not be the next big thing or front-page news these days, but they aren’t out of the running, either. Mainframes may not be the next big thing or even front-page news these days, but they’re still very much present. Hardware Today looks at three mainframe vendors and some of their recent deployments. The […]