A web site has now leaked out the latest beta candidate build numbers for both Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system as well as its companion OS, Windows 8 Server. Read more…

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One of Megaupload’s server providers, Cogent Communications, saw its stock go down over 18 percent in trading today after Megaupload was shut down by the US government on Thursday. Read more…

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Amazon Web Services is officially offering access to Microsoft’s Windows Server for its Free Usage Tier customers for up to 750 hours per month. This move could expand the use of Windows Server Read more…

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For anyone needing yet another data point to show that cloud computing is driving IT, check out new projections from IHS.

The researcher predicts that unit shipments of “cloud servers” — computers used to power public and private cloud computing infrastructure — will soar to 875,000 in 2012, up a whopping 35 percent from 647,000 units shipped last year.  This server segment has nearly doubled since 2010, when 460,000 such boxes sold, according to IHS, formerly known as iSuppli.

These numbers bolster other research showing that the cloud computing juggernaut continues to roll. For example, recent CB Insights data found that venture capital investment in cloud computing companies accounted for more than a quarter of all Internet-related deals and more than a third of Internet investment dollars last year.

Servers typically used to run cloud data centers have to be easy to maintain and configure, so they can be connected and disconnected with minor disruption as they fail or more need to be added as workloads grow.

That means, according to the IHS iSuppli Compute Platforms topical report, that “performance is not the key metric here; what counts instead is expandability, energy efficiency and low cost.”

The report went on to say that:

[B]ecause physical footprint is valuable in a data center, the type of equipment that will find the greatest adoption in the space likely will include both rack-optimized servers and highly condensed blade servers, with their modular setup made up of a single motherboard incorporating microprocessors, memory and a network interface.

For this report, IHS analyst Peter Lin included servers used to run consumer-oriented clouds  like Apple iCloud, Google services, and Amazon Web Services as well as more enterprise-oriented cloud platforms that target business applications. The problem for server vendors is that these huge cloud purveyors seek commodity boxes with rock-bottom prices as opposed to more pricey high-end offerings.

Lin does not expect this growth to be short-lived: He expects this cloud-server category to become the fastest growing segment in the server industry by 2015.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user The Planet

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News has hit the Internet that Windows Server 8 has hit build 8180, bringing with it a bunch of Metro style refreshes. This time around it appears as though Microsoft has opted for a darker look Read more…

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A new leaked screenshot shows the latest install screen from the latest beta build of Microsoft’s Windows Server 8 with the promise of more leaked screenshots to come. Read more…

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Popular SaaS startup New Relic made its name monitoring application performance, but it has added server monitoring to the mix to make the service more functional. It’s actually a natural fit for New Relic, though, as what’s going on with the servers can have a big impact on how an application is running.

The new server-monitoring information is displayed in context with application-performance data so that users can drill down to the cause of a problem once they see performance start lagging. On the server side, New Relic monitors CPU, disk and memory utilization, network activity, and processes, which SVP of Product Jim Gochee told me lets the company keep an application-performance focus while hitting the key metrics that affect system health.

However, the company might expand its server-monitoring capabilities down the road. New Relic isn’t looking to replace any software designed for server-monitoring, Gochee said, but it’s always looking to expand its capabilities. He doesn’t know how much deeper it will go with server monitoring, but said users will let the company know what they need. New Relic currently has more than 13,000 active users.

Even with the current capabilities, though, Gochee said New Relic has already seen some impressive results from eating its own server-monitoring dog food. It’s “what’s running on the box that you’re not watching,” some process spinning up at 2 a.m. while admins are asleep, that causes problems, he explained, and the new tools can help users track those down. New Relic was able to improve its performance by putting disk-utilization data over a time-series graph and pinpointing performance peaks and valleys.

New Relic has partnerships in place with numerous cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and GoGrid, and its new server-monitoring tools will work with virtual servers from these providers as well as on customers’ own local servers.

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HP breaks away, at least partly, from Intel-based processors as it announces a new low energy server project that will use ARM-designed processors from Calxeda as its basis. Read more…

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Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.

Calxeda, backed in part by ARM Holdings, is banking that the success that ARM chips found in smartphones and mobile devices will carry over into data centers serving large, scale-out workloads. In that arena, it is facing off squarely against chip giant Intel and its x86-based architecture, which dominates the market for chips running in commodity servers.

Said Calxeda in a statement:

Thanks to its mobile phone heritage and patent-pending innovations from Calxeda, the new processor consumes less than one tenth the power of today’s most energy-efficient server processors and is ideal for workloads such as web serving, ‘Big Data’ applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory databases.

EnergyCore targets web serving, big data apps

The small form factor and energy stinginess of EnergyCore, based on the ARM Cortex processor, suits an emerging and fast-growing class of web and cloud applications, but it lacks in terms of software support and currently won’t support the enterprise demand for 64-bit processors. Thus, for traditional data centers locked into the Intel x86 architecture and with lots of legacy software to run, Calxeda might be a stretch. But that might not matter.

“For big cloud companies that buy gargantuan numbers of servers and for whom the power and space issues get linearly nasty as they build up the number of nodes, this is a good solution,” said analyst Roger Kay, the founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

These sorts of transactions take on an almost consultative nature, where the server vendor works with the customer’s developers, he said.

EnergyCore is 32-bit only, a fact that Intel will no doubt trumpet. “High-performance computing [HPC] needs 64 bits to deal with larger address space, but that doesn’t mean that 32-bit [processors] can’t address certain data center applications,” Kay said. “This new chip is designed to handle very large databases that in turn handle lots of queries from many end points. Think Google Earth where there are lots of simple queries — ‘show me the bits in the X-Y grid specified.’”

HP estimates that those big scale-out web and cloud data center scenarios represent a healthy 10 to 15 percent of the data center market, Kay noted. That’s certainly worth fighting for. Intel pegs that segment at 10 percent of the overall market.

Richard Fichera, the VP and an analyst at Forrester Research, said Calxeda did its homework. “This looks to be at least three to five times more energy efficient than other chips and [energy use] is a growing concern for data centers.” Some of what Calxeda has done will be hard for competitors to replicate, he said.

Calxeda, like SeaMicro, which makes low-power servers running Intel Atom processors, also builds on a fabric that lets all the various SoC components communicate inside the box.

Skeptics point out that big data center buyers tend to be a conservative lot, not likely to gamble on a new chip architecture. “Many CIOs will go with the devil they know. They have software that runs on Intel so why move?” Kay said. But again, Calxeda and HP are seeking out the biggest of the big data center companies — those that have a lot of in-house development talent that are not as bound by legacy software concerns.

What’s in EnergyCore SoC?

• Multicore ARM Cortex processor running at 1.1 GHz to 1.4 GHz
• Supports FPU (scalar) and NEON (SIMD) Floating Point
• 4 MB of onboard shared L2 cache
• Integrated Memory Controller with 72-bit datapath, and ECC
• Typical maximum power consumption (running 100% CPU load under normal conditions) is 5 watts
• Typical idle power consumption is less than .5 watts

Calxeda and HP will start rolling out sample products later this year, with volume ramping up in 2012. Calxeda is not alone in this arena: Marvell Inc. is already in the market with its own ARM-based servers. NVIDIA is also building an ARM-based server, dubbed Denver, for HPC.

While Calxeda is tiny compared to Intel, it also doesn’t manufacture its own silicon, which could end up hurting it when comparing it to Intel, one of the last silicon vendors to own its own chip manufacturing. Fichera notes that Calxeda has no control over the distribution and sales of what it designs: The server partner has all the leverage. If someone else has a better SoC next year, Calxeda (or whatever SoC provider they use) could be gone.

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Mike Muller, CTO of ARM

Today there are two primary players making the brains inside servers: Intel and AMD. And really, many argue, AMD is so beholden to Intel that AMD can’t effectively steer the market or compete even when it does innovate with something cool. But that’s about to change if Thursday’s announcement from ARM has the impact the chip-IP-licensing firm is hoping for.

While only Intel, AMD and Via Technologies currently can make x86-based chips, Mike Muller, CTO at ARM, says the ability to license an architecture freely could expand the number of companies building server chips to around 10. Plus, unlike with Intel’s x86 architecture, any company getting a certain type of license to the ARM architecture can tweak it to its heart’s content, which could mean far more innovation.

“ARM partners can build very different-looking solutions that take that core and integrate in different parts of the system … and that can significantly change things,” Muller said. “Another thing that could be interesting is they can offer a $ 100 chip and still get good margins, because they may come from a world of making $ 10 chips.”

As Muller alluded to, there could also be cost innovation in addition to technological innovation. For example, AppliedMicro will manufacture chips using ARM’s next-generation architecture that will deliver up to 3 gigahertz of performance for far less power than a comparable Intel chip. And the AppliedMicro chips are projected to cost less than what Intel sells its comparable chips at today. It is one of those ARM licensees that is used to making products for the embedded world where chips cost much less than those found inside PCs and servers.

However, when everything will be connected and require its own compute, both the power efficiency and the economics will need to change. “What’s interesting is it’s as disruptive from a business perspective as it is from the technology side,” Muller aid. “We have a different business model and [chips using our IP] will be sold in a different way that enables innovation as well.”

One big question will be if the webscale market will welcome such a wide variety of hardware platforms for its applications. Vendors have come and gone in the specialty computing space for the last few decades, and even the most successful couldn’t make much of a dent in the x86 market.

At scale, where computing seems to be trending, it’s hard to justify a lot of specialty hardware, so even variations on the same ARM architecture might be suspect. But they may not, and the resulting years should prove anything but boring in the server space.

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