BDPrime - Slashdot User

Submission + - University holds jazz funeral for its mainframe

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @10:50AM

BDPrime writes: "Server Specs has a story about The University of Manitoba holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its mainframe. The funeral included a full procession route on campus, "Amazing Grace" being played on the trumpet, and employees smashing a pinata made to look like a cartoon-y mainframe. Is the mainframe dead? Maybe not everywhere, but at The University of Manitoba it certainly is."

Submission + - Linux only on Antarctica?

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Wednesday December 05, 2007 @08:59AM

BDPrime writes: "SearchDataCenter.com produced a Google map listing the pros and cons of planting your data center in various locations around the world. The map goes with a story about international data centers. Click on the bubble above Antarctica in the map for an amusing pro and con."

Submission + - Demonstration of OpenSolaris on the mainframe 1

Submitted by BDPrime on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @11:33AM

BDPrime writes: Sine Nomine Associates, the company working on porting OpenSolaris to the mainframe, is demonstrating the technology at the Gartner Data Center conference this week. David Boyes, the president, is giving the demos at the IBM booth with the support of Sun Microsystems. He said it will be ready for mainframe users "soon," but wouldn't divulge more than that.

It's a five-part video series on YouTube that could take up some time, but the demo, which is mostly in the last video, is pretty cool.

Submission + - IBM: It's our mainframe and we'll do what we want (techtarget.com)

Submitted by BDPrime on Monday November 19, 2007 @01:56PM

BDPrime writes: IBM is now apparently making it harder for mainframe resellers to resell the mainframe. This according to a quarterly earnings call from a mainframe reseller, QSGI, who said IBM's restrictions on a reseller's ability to upgrade and downgrade a machine for a user are diminishing the benefit of buying a refurbished mainframe. From a story in The Register:

IBM has a colossal claim to the mainframe marketplace, and can largely dole out its own terms to customers. When another business starts using IBM's own hardware to compete, IBM has a tendency to roll up its sleeves.

Submission + - Server densities hampered by depths

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Thursday September 27, 2007 @11:31AM

BDPrime writes: "With all this talk about server density — fitting more power into the same box — there's one factor in the equation that some people forget about: server depths. Yes, it's a problem. While vendors build servers that can fit more processors and more cores into a 1U server rack space, the problem is that many of their products are so deep that they stick out the front of the racks, forcing data centers to space the racks farther away from one another, which takes up valuable floor space. Anyone else have this problem?"

Submission + - A solar-powered data center....on a dirt road?

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Friday September 07, 2007 @10:24AM

BDPrime writes: "AISO.net has an almost 100% solar-powered data center that sits on a dirt-road property where the owner's three dogs roam at will, catching shade underneath the solar panels when it gets really hot. The owner, Phil Nail, also despises the notion of carbon offsets, which allows companies to pretend they're green by paying someone else to be green in their place."

Submission + - EPA sends data center power study to Congress

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:00AM

BDPrime writes: "We've all been hearing ad nauseum about power and cooling issues in the data center. Now the EPA has issued a final report to Congress detailing the problem and what might be done to fix it. Most likely what will happen is the EPA will add servers and data centers into its Energy Star program. If you don't feel like reading the entire 133-page report, the 14-page executive summary is a little easier to get through."

Submission + - EPA issues data center power report to Congress (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:50PM

BDPrime writes: "The EPA has issued its final report on server and data center efficiency to Congress. The report includes details about how much energy data centers are consuming, how data center operators can fix the problem themselves, and what the EPA and the industry are doing to create benchmarks (like Energy Star) to compare the energy efficiencies of servers and data centers."

Submission + - Google to go carbon neutral?

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @01:19PM

BDPrime writes: "Bridget Botelho has a good interview with the guy who heads Google's conservation efforts. He talks about how the search giant is going to accomplish its goal of being carbon neutral by 2008. Some ways it's doing it: super-efficient power supplies, wind and solar power, high-efficient lighting, and offsets.

If Google can be carbon neutral, I think just about any company can get there (as long as they're willing to pay for offsets)."

Submission + - Bioengineered bacteria to stop radioactive plume

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Tuesday June 05, 2007 @08:41AM

BDPrime writes: "The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, is looking for a new supercomputer that can help the lab prevent a radioactive plume from leeching into the Columbia River.

The supercomputers are helping to bioengineer bacteria that make the radioactive plume insoluble, and thus incapable of traveling through the ground water and into the river.

The lab is currently using a 120-rack supercomputer from HP that includes 1,000 Itanium-based servers running a Linux distro provided by HP. But the system is starting to slow, and the lab expects to buy a new one by this fall."

Submission + - Power6 announced today

Submitted by BDPrime on Monday May 21, 2007 @10:48AM

BDPrime writes: Techworld, among others, is reporting today that IBM is announcing the Power6 chip today. The chip will first appear in its System p Unix servers running AIX. The chip has clock speeds up to 4.7 GHz, more than twice the Power5, while consuming about the same amount of power. It also doubles the cache to 8MB per chip.

Submission + - NYSE moving off the mainframe

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Monday May 14, 2007 @01:51PM

BDPrime writes: "The New York Stock Exchange today started its migration off the mainframe to AIX and Linux.

Francis Feldman, the vice president of the shared data center for Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC), the NYSE's technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn't detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is "serious financial savings, very serious."

AIX on System p will run the recompiled application code; Linux on HP x86 servers will run the FTP transfers."

Submission + - EPA seeking comments on data center power

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Thursday April 26, 2007 @08:00AM

BDPrime writes: "The EPA is seeking comments on its draft data center power consumption study that's due up to Congress by June. The federal environmental agency plans on putting it up on its Web site devoted to the subject, although it's not there yet:

The report came about as a result of a data center power consumption bill signed into law in December asking the EPA to undergo a six-month study on data center power consumption. The bill laid out nine areas where the EPA-led study needed to focus, including the proliferation of servers in federal government, how much energy they consume, the potential cost-savings of making servers more efficient, and how to encourage manufacturers to build energy-efficient equipment.
Deadline for comments is May 7. Given all the hype around power and cooling with servers and data centers, this story is also a good round-up of everything the industry has been doing on that front."

Submission + - Data loss calculator

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @08:37AM

BDPrime writes: "Wondering how much that security breach cost? Now there's the data loss cost calculator! Just input how many records were affected, and presto, you know how much it's going to cost your company. According to this Information week article, the calculator was created using complex "proprietary algorithms" by Darwin Professional Underwriters, a company that provides IT insurance. No doubt it's probably over-exaggerated given the company's business, but it's still fun to play around with."

Submission + - IBM System i to compete with x86?

Submitted by

BDPrime

on Wednesday April 11, 2007 @11:32AM

BDPrime writes: "IBM just came out with new entry-level System i boxes that aim to compete with x86 Windows and Linux servers. The smallest one starts at $7,995.

IBM has been trying to market to the young, "hip" crowd lately, most notably with its lame iSeries videos on YouTube that basically consist of a couple of punks smashing up server equipment.

My question: No matter how inexpensive or how "cool" IBM tries to make System i, will it ever catch on big or just continue to slowly leak revenues ?"

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