Two of the previous three posts I've made about our upgraded server infrastructure have focused on performance. In the second post I talked about the performance (and reliability) benefits of going with our all-SSD architecture, while in the third post I talked about the increase in CPU performance between our old and new infrastructures. Today however, it's time to focus on power consumption. Our old server infrastructure came from a time where power consumption mattered, but it hadn't yet been prioritized. This was before Nehalem's 2:1 rule (2% perf increase for every 1% power increase), and it was before power gating. Once again I turned to our old HP DL585 server with four AMD Opteron 880s (8-cores total) as an example of just how things...
Netgear NV+ v2 and LaCie 2big NAS: A Second Look
Last November, we reviewed the Netgear NV+ v2 and came away quite satisfied with the price to performance ratio. However, we had some reservations about the absence of NFS...
7 by Ganesh T S on 7/18/2012
Boston Releases Servers Based on Calxeda's ARM SoCs
Calxeda EnergyCore SoC Boston has released its Viridis server which uses Calxeda's ARM System-on-Chips (SoCs). Each SoC consists of four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and up to 48 SoCs can be...
4 by Kristian Vättö on 7/9/2012_carousel.PNG)
The Bulldozer Aftermath: Delving Even Deeper
It has been months since AMD's Bulldozer architecture surprised the hardware enthusiast community with performance all over the place. The opinions vary wildly from “server benchmarks are here, and...
82 by Johan De Gelas on 5/30/2012
LaCie's 2big NAS Review
The SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) / SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) NAS market is a highly competitive one. We have been reviewing a number of ARM-based 2-bay...
15 by Ganesh T S on 5/28/2012
Supermicro Updates X9 Platform for Intel's Latest Xeon Families
Intel introduced three new Xeon processor families last week. The Xeon E3-1200 v2 family is based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, while the Sandy Bridge based Xeon E5-2400 and...
5 by Ganesh T S on 5/23/2012
Lenovo Announces Their 3rd Generation Intel Core Laptop Updates
It’s been a couple weeks since Intel officially unveiled Ivy Bridge, and we continue to see plenty of product announcements from the major OEMs. Yesterday, while we were busy...
53 by Jarred Walton on 5/16/2012
Supermicro Updates X9 Lineup with GPU-Enabled Solutions
NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2012) is around the corner (May 14-17), and Supermicro has indicated that their GPU-Enabled X9 server and workstation solutions would be showcased at the...
6 by Ganesh T S on 5/9/2012
Thecus and McAfee Partner for Antivirus Technology in Intel-based NAS Systems
Thecus announced a partnership with McAfee at CeBIT 2012 to bring antivirus technology to their lineup. On April 16th, Thecus announced that that Thecus NAS systems would start shipping...
1 by Ganesh T S on 4/19/2012
Thecus TopTower Lineup: High-End Enterprise NAS Systems in a Tower Form Factor
NAS vendors in the high-end enterprise space often reserve the more powerful CPU configurations for their rackmount models. A case in point is QNAP's Xeon based 200TB+ storage rack...
12 by Ganesh T S on 4/12/2012
ioSafe SoloPRO: Disaster Proofing Your Storage Needs
Consumers understand the importance of keeping their documents and other material possessions safe from unexpected disasters. Towards this, many invest in fireproof and waterproof safes. However, as the digital...
34 by Ganesh T S on 4/9/2012
Boston Releases Intel Xeon E5-2600 Based Setups
Quattro 1264-T Intel's Xeon E5-2600 lineup was released last Tuesday and as expected, several manufacturers have released products based on these processors. Today we are looking at Boston's offerings, which...
8 by Kristian Vättö on 3/12/2012
Supermicro Launches 100+ Server Solutions Based on the Xeon E5 Family
The Sandy Bridge based Xeon E5-2600 processors were launched by Intel yesterday, and Supermicro wasn't far behind in launching a host of solutions supporting / based on these processors...
1 by Ganesh T S on 3/7/2012
Micron Announces 2.5" PCIe SSD for Enterprise
Micron has announced the first 2.5" SSD which utilizes PCIe interface instead of the more common SATA interface. The 2.5" form factor allows for easy serviceability because the drives...
12 by Kristian Vättö on 3/7/2012
The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
Eight improved cores, 16 threads, integrated 40 lane PCIe 3.0: the new socket 2011 Xeon E5-2660 manages to package it all in a very modest power envelope of 95W...
65 by Johan De Gelas on 3/6/2012
AMD Executes on Promise of Agility, Intends to Acquire SeaMicro for $334M
At its 2012 Financial Analyst Day, AMD mentioned a conscious shift towards being a more agile company. Wanting a bigger piece of the high margin server market, AMD is...
5 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/2/2012
Virtualized or Not? We've Got Numbers
We have had epic discussions with quite a few readers about the importance of virtualization in our reviews. In our six-core Opteron review we wrote: "Let there be no misunderstanding...
34 by Johan De Gelas on 2/15/2012
The Opteron 6276: a closer look
When we first looked at the Opteron 6276, our time was limited and we were only able to run our virtualization, compression, encryption, and rendering benchmarks. Most servers capable...
52 by Johan De Gelas on 2/9/2012
A Look at Enterprise Performance of Intel SSDs
For the majority of the history of AnandTech we've hosted our own server infrastructure. A benefit of running our own infrastructure is that we're able to gain a lot...
56 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/8/2012
Hitachi Releases Ultrastar SSD400S.B: 25nm SLC NAND Is Here
25nm MLC NAND has been in the market for roughly a year now and it is very common in today's consumer SSDs—there are only a few models using 3Xnm...
14 by Kristian Vättö on 2/8/2012
AMD's 2012 - 2013 Server Roadmap: Abu Dhabi, Seoul & Delhi CPUs
We've got a server roadmap update from AMD courtesy of its Financial Analyst Day here in Santa Clara, California. The changes to the 2012 - 2013 roadmap aren't all...
8 by Anand Lal Shimpi on 2/2/2012