IT Computing
Just over a year ago, NVIDIA announced its intentions to acquire Mellanox, a leading datacenter networking and interconnect provider. And, after going through some prolonged regulatory hurdles, including approval by the Chinese government as well as a waiting period in the United States, NVIDIA has now closed on the deal as of this morning. All told, NVIDIA is pricing the final acquisition at a cool 7 billion dollars, all in cash. Overall, in the intervening year, NVIDIA’s reasoning for acquiring the networking provider has not changed: the company believes that a more vertically integrated product stack that includes high-speed networking hardware will allow them to further grow their business, especially as GPU-powered supercomputers and other HPC clusters get more prominent. To that end, it’s hard...
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 3/8/2010Dynamic 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.
35 by Johan De Gelas on 1/18/2010AMD'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.
108 by Johan De Gelas on 11/23/2009Expensive 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 10/6/2009Testing 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 7/22/2009Optimizing 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 6/29/2009Optimizing 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 6/16/2009AMD'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...
40 by Johan De Gelas on 6/1/2009Real-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 5/21/2009VMmark 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 5/8/2009VMware 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 4/22/2009The 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 3/30/2009SSD 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...
67 by Johan De Gelas on 3/20/2009The 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...
29 by Johan De Gelas on 12/22/2008AMD 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?
31 by Jason Clark & Ross Whitehead on 11/13/2008An 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...
14 by Liz van Dijk on 10/28/2008Intel 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...
36 by Johan De Gelas on 9/23/2008Container-Based OS Virtualization
Taking a dive into the inner workings of another form of virtualization: Container-based OS virtualization.
3 by Liz van Dijk on 7/8/2008Sixteen 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.
0 by Johan De Gelas on 6/17/2008Sun 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...
0 by Johan De Gelas on 5/25/2008