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Facebook had 22 Million active users in the middle of 2007; fast forward to 2011 and the site now has 800 Million active users, with 400 million of them logging in every day. Facebook has grown exponentially, to say the least! To cope with this kind of exceptional growth and at the same time offer a reliable and cost effective service requires out of the box thinking. Through a combination of software optimizations and a careful selection of hardware, Facebook set out to create a platform that would meet their needs, and then they open sourced the design to the world.

The Facebook Open Compute server design was ambitious: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” Even better is that Facebook Engineering sent a couple Open Compute servers to our lab for testing:

As a competing solution we have an HP DL380 G7 in the lab. Recall from our last server clash that the HP DL380 G7 was one of the most power efficient servers of 2010. Is a server "targeted at the cloud" and designed by Facebook engineering able to beat one of the best and most popular general purpose servers? That is the question we'll answer in this article.

The proliferation of mobile devices, multi-computer homes, broadband internet access, inexpensive mass storage, and the replacement of many other home electronics by the PC (such as media devices like DVD, BRD, and CD players by HTPCs) has resulted in ever-increasing interest in specialized file server computers.  Whether you're a typical home user with a desktop and a laptop or a power user with multiple desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablets who also has remote access to home systems from work or on the road, your computing experience could likely be enriched by shared data access.  Whether your budget and storage needs are modest or extensive, we have you covered in the latest builder's guide to file server systems.

Mac OS X Server costs 5% of what it cost just three years ago. Whatever your needs and whatever the software’s shortcomings, this is hard to ignore. Leopard Server cost 9 for an unlimited-client license, Snow Leopard Server cost 9, and Lion Server costs .

For this reason alone, Lion Server will (and should) attract the attention of people who have never been in the market for server software before – home users, in particular – but it has to do so without alienating the business and education customers who currently rely on the software. These are Lion Server’s challenges: is there a real point in having it at home? And as a comparatively-dirt-cheap App Store download, is it lacking in features and power compared to previous versions?

I want to clarify a couple of things before I dive into the review proper: First, just like previous versions, Lion Server is very much just OS X with server functionality laid over top of it. In appearance, performance, system requirements, and operation, it is mostly identical to OS X client. I’ll point you to our massive review of Lion if you need to know more about any of that.

Second, know that I’m approaching this review from a different angle than the Lion client review – while most people interested in an OS X review have at least a passing familiarity with the software, this review will be the first exposure to OS X Server for many of you. For that reason, among the descriptions of Lion Server’s features and comparisons with past versions of the software, I’m going to be going a little more in-depth about how to actually configure the services. Hopefully the newbies among you can use these instructions as jumping-off points as you explore the software on your own.

Last, OS X Server can do a lot of things – some (like mail and DHCP) can be handled by many different products, but others (like Open Directory, NetBoot, or the OS X and iOS management features) are pretty unique to OS X Server. I’m going to try to at least touch upon every single service and tool in OS X Server, but I’ll generally focus more on the unique stuff for the purposes of this review.

Got all that? Good! Let’s jump in.

FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP is suing Oracle because it said it will stop supporting HP’s servers that use Intel’s Itanium chip.

The complaint centres around Oracle’s decision to cease supporting HP Itanium servers in its database software, because it had heard that the chip will be phased out.

HP argues that Oracle’s decision will hurt its clients, because presumably they would like to run Oracle software on its servers, while Oracle has rubbished HP’s claims.

This is the latest in a continuing series of tit-for-tat exchanges between these two US information technology giants that was not helped when Mark Hurd, the expenses fudging ladies man, left HP in a cloud of severance pay and joined Oracle after Larry Ellison decided to defend him.

This kicked off a round of legal actions that probably lowered both firms’ bottom lines and no doubt put some lawyers into expensive sports cars.

Oracle has hit back at the lawsuit and said that HP is well aware that Itanium is on its way out, and that it is being unreasonable and untruthful.

“Today HP filed a lawsuit claiming that Oracle had breached an agreement to support the Itanium microprocessor. It just takes a few minutes to read the early drafts of the agreement to prove that HP’s claim is not true,” it said.

Oracle claims that HP knew about Itanium prospects a good six months before it found out about it.

“It is interesting, however, that way back in September of 2010, HP asked Oracle for a long-term commitment to support Itanium,” the statement continues. “At that time Oracle did not know that there was a plan already in place to end Itanium’s life. Oracle did not learn about that plan until six months later, in March 2011.”

Oracle has accused HP of asking it to guarantee long term support for Itanium with the prior knowledge that Intel would be discontinuing it. “HP was concerned about what would happen when Oracle found out about that plan,” it added, fingering Ray Lane and Leo Apotheker for their actions.

“What we know for certain is that Ray Lane and HP’s current board members and Leo Apotheker and HP’s current management team now know full well that Intel has plans in place to end-of-life of the Itanium microprocessor. Knowing this, HP issued numerous public statements in an attempt to mislead and deceive their customers and shareholders into believing that these plans to end-of-life Itanium do not exist,” it added.

“But they do. Intel’s plans to end-of-life Itanium will be revealed in court now that HP has filed this utterly malicious and meritless lawsuit against Oracle.” µ

We can not say that we are dazzled by the amount of new products at CeBIT. Most demonstrations we saw and documentation we found of the tier-one OEMs were in German, a clear sign that CeBIT is getting a little bit less international each year.

As we also visited this event only for a few hours, we focused on a few extraordinary products of the more international oriented companies like Tyan and Supermicro.

Three totally different servers in one test: the dual Xeon X5670 HP DL380 G7, the quad Xeon X7560 SGI Altix UV10 and the Quad Opteron 6174 Dell R815. Three servers with a different platform and built from a different vision. Why place them in one comparitive article? Because they can all be used for the same tasks: virtualization building blocks, ERP server, or HPC number cruncher. Our focus is on the first task, as we went through a massive battery of performance and power consumption measurements.

Join us as we present you the first virtualized performance per watt comparison of real OEM server products.

Keeping an eye on power when choosing the hardware and software components is thus much more than naively following the hype of “green IT”. It is simply the smart thing to do. We take another shot at understanding how choosing your server components wisely can give you a cost advantage. In this article, we focus on low power Xeons in a consolidated Hyper-V/Windows 2008 virtualization scenario. Do Low Power Xeons save energy and costs? We designed a new and improved methodology to find out.

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The past couple of years have shown us a lot can be done with very modest CPU power thanks to Moore's Law. Everything from netbooks to smartphones rely on a new category of "fast enough" silicon that is more power than performance optimized. A number of companies are working on a similar approach to server hardware.

SeaMicro is one such company and today it is announcing its first product: the SM10000. A single 10U SM10000 houses 1TB of memory and 512 Intel Atom processors. The idea is to deliver similar total performance to dozens of power hungry Xeon/Opteron servers, but at a fraction of the total cost of ownership thanks to very low power requirements.

We recently had the opportunity to spend some time talking to SeaMicro's CEO about the technology and honestly, it's pretty interesting. Read on…