AnandTech: IT Computing Section

Optimizing for Virtualization

Want to gain the upper hand on your colleagues by getting the very best performance out of ESX? AnandTech IT shares its best practices uncovered in the development of their vApus Mark I benchmark.

June 16, 2009, 10 comments

AMD's Six-Core Opteron 2435

AMD added 2 cores to the improved AMD quad-core “Shanghai”. Which applications can take advantage of these extra cores? The answer is more interesting than you might think at first.

June 1, 2009, 37 comments

Real-world virtualization benchmarking: the best server CPUs compared

We proudly present our newest virtualization benchmarking effort: vApus Mark I. The results are quite surprising on the latest server CPUs as it paints a very different picture than VMmark. Get a second opinion on how strong or weak the different CPUs are when they are running heavy-duty virtualized applications on ESX 3.5 Update 4.

May 21, 2009, 68 comments

VMmark Scores Investigated: should VMmark be part of your hardware decisions?

VMmark is supposedly the most important industry standard benchmark today. We investigate the confusing number of different Xeon 5570 VMmark scores and try to understand how relevant VMmark is for the IT professional who is consolidating servers.

May 8, 2009, 23 comments

VMware announces vSphere

VMware takes its first official steps into true Cloud Computing territory; let's have a closer look at what to expect.

April 22, 2009, 11 comments

The Best Server CPUs part 2: the Intel "Nehalem" Xeon X5570

Better hardware virtualization, a vastly improved server platform, and eight logical cores per CPU: it's no secret that the Xeon "Nehalem" X5570 is the Formula One car among the server CPUs, but how much faster is it, and more importantly, does it offer return on investment? Find out as we run real world server applications on the newest Xeon.

March 30, 2009, 44 comments

SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks

We compare RAID configurations of up to 16 SATA drives, up to eight SAS drives, and up to eight Intel X25-E SLC SSDs in different situations and try to find out which configuration makes the most sense for different enterprise applications. OLTP in particular has our attention: are the expensive SLC SSD drives capable of outperforming SAS RAID configurations at a lower price point?

March 20, 2009, 65 comments

The Best Server CPUs Compared, Part 1

This article is different from the previous ones, as we have changed the methodology we use to evaluate a server CPU. Read on, and find out why we feel this is a better and more realistic approach to compare the best AMD and Intel Server CPUs.

December 22, 2008, 29 comments

AMD Shanghai Launch - Database Testing

AMD's new 45nm Shanghai CPU launches today and we ran tests using database workloads. What changes, and what remains the same?

November 13, 2008, 26 comments

An Introduction to Virtualization

For those readers finding our in-depth studies of various technologies a bit too daunting, we've created an introductory piece that should allow anyone an easy entry into the fascinating world of virtualization. Did we mention it also plays games?

October 28, 2008, 16 comments

Intel Xeon 7460: Six Cores to Bulldoze Opteron

Despite the huge die size and 1.9 billion (!) transistors, the six-core Xeon 74xx is a wallflower, for both the public as Intel's marketing. If you've invested in a current Intel quad socket platform, the newly launched Intel 74xx series deserves a lot more attention. We compare the hex-core with AMD's quad-core Opteron and its predecessor.

September 23, 2008, 36 comments

Container-Based OS Virtualization

Taking a dive into the inner workings of another form of virtualization: Container-based OS virtualization.

July 8, 2008, 1 comments

Sixteen Cores, Four Sockets

The quad-socket market is extremely interesting and exciting as AMD's quad-core Opteron and Intel's quad-core Xeon MP are well matched. We show you our first sixteen core benchmarks.

June 17, 2008, 0 comments

Sun Fire X4450: Challenging the HP and IBM bastion

Sun challenges market leaders IBM and HP by claiming that the Sun Fire X4450 can deliver the performance and the functionality of their best 16-core 4U servers in a 2U chassis. Does Sun succeed? We try to quantify if you really save costs and how much.

May 25, 2008, 0 comments

Hardware Virtualization: the Nuts and Bolts

If you like to understand how binary translation, paravirtualization, and hardware virtualization work, this article is for you. We delve deep into the heart of VMware ESX, Intel VT-x, and AMD's nested paging to understand the impact on the performance of your virtualized server. Dig in!

March 17, 2008, 0 comments