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...
Announcing: HP 4320t Mobile Thin Client
HP has announced their latest notebook, which they claim is ideal for business users requiring mobile access to server-based, virtual PC or blade PC computing. Dubbed the 4320t Mobile...
29 by Balraj Sandhu on 5/12/2010
HP Unveils Latest Spring 2010 Laptops
HP has unveiled their latest notebooks. This large launch features many new entries into both their business and consumer notebook lines. Perhaps the most eye-catching are the Arrandale equipped...
32 by Balraj Sandhu and Jarred Walton on 5/5/2010
Supermicro to expand their GPU servers to include Fermi-level Tesla
Supermicro have launched today their second generation of GPU computing servers, using NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs. This product line is an upgrade from their first generation servers, and...
23 by Ian Cutress on 5/4/2010
HP ProBook 5310m: A Slender Laptop for Business Users
HP's ProBook line targets the business sector, and the 5310m looks like the sort of laptop you'd expect a CEO to carry around. Of course, looks aren't everything, and...
10 by Jarred Walton on 4/26/2010
High-End x86: The Nehalem EX Xeon 7500 and Dell R810
We received Dell's latest R810 server for review, coupled with the Intel Xeon X7560. The R810 supports two or four octal-core Intel Xeon Nehalem EX processors, with the potential...
23 by Johan De Gelas on 4/12/2010
AMD's 12-core "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6174 vs. Intel's 6-core Xeon
This one may be a bit too subtle for most, but bear with me here. AMD's latest Opteron has a lot of cores, 12 per chip to be...
58 by Johan De Gelas on 3/29/2010
The Intel Xeon 5670: Six Improved Cores
The new Xeon “Westmere” 5600 series, has arrived.
40 by Johan De Gelas on 3/16/2010
Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling
The Dell Precision M6500 is what we expect from a mobile workstation: high on quality and low on fluff. It’s also very expensive, but the cost of the hardware...
41 by Jarred Walton on 3/9/2010
10Gbit Ethernet: Killing Another Bottleneck?
More cores (32 to 48) in medium-range servers results in 20 to 50 VMs on one virtualized server. We investigate if 10Gbit Ethernet is finally ready to solve the...
49 by Johan De Gelas on 3/8/2010
Dynamic Power Management: A Quantitative Approach
Performance per Watt rules the datacenter, right? Wrong. Join us as we investigate why there's more to it than just being green.
34 by Johan De Gelas on 1/18/2010
AMD's 2010/2011 Roadmap from the IT Professional’s Perspective
We tried to find out what the new AMD roadmap means for our IT readers: the professionals who actually configure and buy these servers.
34 by Johan De Gelas on 11/23/2009
Expensive Quad Sockets vs. Ubiquitous Dual Sockets
Should you bother with quad socket servers now that we have powerful dual socket platforms available? We check how the quad Xeon X7460, quad Opteron 8345, and the dual...
32 by Johan De Gelas on 10/6/2009
Testing the latest x86 rack servers and low power server CPUs
We test five different x86 rack servers that focus on reducing power requirements and keeping costs very low. At the same time, we show how the low power Opterons...
12 by Johan De Gelas on 7/22/2009
Optimizing for Virtualization, Part 2
This is the second part of our ESX optimization tips and tricks, diving into storage optimization and configuration options.
13 by Liz van Dijk on 6/29/2009
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...
10 by Liz van Dijk on 6/16/2009
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...
39 by Johan De Gelas on 6/1/2009
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...
66 by Johan De Gelas on 5/21/2009
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...
23 by Johan De Gelas on 5/8/2009
VMware announces vSphere
VMware takes its first official steps into true Cloud Computing territory; let's have a closer look at what to expect.
11 by Liz van Dijk on 4/22/2009
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...
44 by Johan De Gelas on 3/30/2009