Should you bother with quad socket servers now that we have powerful dual socket platforms available? We...
October 6, 2009
31 comments |
We test five different x86 rack servers that focus on reducing power requirements and keeping costs very...
July 22, 2009
12 comments |
This is the second part of our ESX optimization tips and tricks, diving into storage optimization and...
June 29, 2009
13 comments |
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blog post by Liz van Dijk
If you've been keeping up with our articles for a while, you might have picked up on vApus Mark I: the virtualized stress test we created for internal use at the Sizing Servers testlab.
As detailed in Johan's article, this bench consists of 3 separate applications, all of which we are very familiar with due to extensive optimization and stress testing...
November 17, 2009, 8 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
First of all, we were pretty excited to see so many comments and votes (5000!) on our last IT poll. It is good to see that professional IT is so much alive at Anandtech.com. So yes, we should have updated this blog quicker, to keep the momentum going. The reason why this update comes rather late is -once again - that we are working on the much delayed hypervisor...
November 3, 2009, 30 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
If you read our last article, it is clear that when your applications are virtualized, you have a lot more options to choose from in order to build your server infrastructure . Let us know how you would build up your "dynamic datacenter" and why!
...
October 7, 2009, 48 comments
IT
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 their vApus Mark I benchmark....
June 16, 2009, 10 comments
IT
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 at first. ...
June 1, 2009, 38 comments
IT
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 VMmark. Get a second opinion on how strong or weak the different CPUs are when they are running heavy-duty virtualized applications on ESX 3.5 Update 4....
May 21, 2009, 66 comments
IT
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 for the IT professional who is consolidating servers....
May 8, 2009, 23 comments
IT
VMware takes its first official steps into true Cloud Computing territory; let's have a closer look at what to expect....
April 22, 2009, 11 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
In our last article about server CPUs, I wrote:
"the challenge for AMD and Intel is to convince the rest of the market - that is 95% or so - that the new platforms provide a compelling ROI (Return On Investment). The most productive or intensively used servers in general get replaced every 3 to 5 years. Based on Intel's own inquiries,...
April 7, 2009, 23 comments
IT
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 server CPUs, but how much faster is it, and more importantly, does it offer return on investment? Find out as we run real world server applications on the newest Xeon....
March 30, 2009, 44 comments
IT
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 find out which configuration makes the most sense for different enterprise applications. OLTP in particular has our attention: are the expensive SLC SSD drives capable of outperforming SAS RAID...
March 20, 2009, 66 comments
IT
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 this is a better and more realistic approach to compare the best AMD and Intel Server CPUs....
December 22, 2008, 29 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
We have emphasized
it more than once: the Nehalem architecture is all about
regaining the performance crown in servers and HPC, desktop and mobile
use were sometimes a bonus, sometimes an afterthought. Today it becomes
almost painfully obvious. Just read Anand's
thoughts about the Core i7:
"The
Core i7's general purpose...
December 16, 2008, 29 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
The last post generated some very interesting comments and questions, which I wanted to address. Unfortunately, some people misinterpreted the post as a "the best scores Nehalem and Shanghai can get in Linpack" review.
So let me make this very clear: this and the previous blogpost are not meant to be a "buyer's guide". The Nehalem desktop...
December 1, 2008, 35 comments
IT
AMD's new 45nm Shanghai CPU launches today and we ran tests using database workloads. What changes, and what remains the same?...
November 13, 2008, 26 comments
More IT Articles
blog post by Liz van Dijk
If you've been keeping up with our articles for a while, you might have picked up on vApus Mark I: the virtualized stress test we created for internal use at the Sizing Servers testlab.
As detailed in Johan's article, this bench consists of 3 separate applications, all of which we are very familiar with due to extensive optimization and stress testing...
November 17, 2009, 8 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
First of all, we were pretty excited to see so many comments and votes (5000!) on our last IT poll. It is good to see that professional IT is so much alive at Anandtech.com. So yes, we should have updated this blog quicker, to keep the momentum going. The reason why this update comes rather late is -once again - that we are working on the much delayed hypervisor...
November 3, 2009, 30 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
If you read our last article, it is clear that when your applications are virtualized, you have a lot more options to choose from in order to build your server infrastructure . Let us know how you would build up your "dynamic datacenter" and why!
{poll 157:440}
...
October 7, 2009, 48 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
Take two Nehalem dies, turn them 90 degrees, add a lot of system interface logic and 8 MB extra of L3-cache and you get - very oversimplified - the impressive Nehalem EX, alias "Beckton". The new Xeon MP is an impressive monster, just like it's predecessor Dunnington. Dunnington consisted of 1.9 Billion transistors, the Xeon MP based on the "Nehalem"...
May 27, 2009, 8 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
We promised you a new datapoint, a new independent virtualization benchmark in "a few days". Those "few days" have become a week in good "IT at Anandtech" tradition. :-) But this wednesday, unless Murphy strikes us hard, the article will be online. It will offer a refreshing look at the virtualization performance, the result of months of work. Liz...
May 19, 2009, 0 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
In our last article about server CPUs, I wrote:
"the challenge for AMD and Intel is to convince the rest of the market - that is 95% or so - that the new platforms provide a compelling ROI (Return On Investment). The most productive or intensively used servers in general get replaced every 3 to 5 years. Based on Intel's own inquiries,...
April 7, 2009, 23 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
My last post generated quite a bit of discussion, some of it based on misunderstandings. In this post I'll try to make a few things more clear. In a previous post, I pointed out that there are a good indications that a dual Nehalem EP has a 40 to 100% advantage over Shanghai (depending on the application, based on the SAP and Core i7 workstation benchmarks).
If...
February 27, 2009, 18 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Now that the actual conference is behind us, and we've found our way back to the lab, it's time to finish what we started. First off, an apology for our radio silence on day 3: our schedule turned out to be quite a bit more packed than we thought it was, so finding our way to the quiet of the press room proved to be more of a hurdle than originally...
February 27, 2009, 2 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Here we are once more, blogging away after a very interesting second keynote by VMware CTO Stephen Herrod, delving a bit deeper into the actual changes being pushed into different levels of the software. At this point, the amount of information available might actually fill up an entire article, but alas, time constraints force me to keep this...
February 25, 2009, 7 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
The Istanbul cores are the same as those that can be found in the AMD's latest Shanghai CPU. But the "uncore" part of Istanbul is more interesting. By now, you have probably heard about AMD's "HT-assist" technology, a probe or snoop filter. Every time a new cacheline is brought into the L3-cache of for example CPU 1 on the current Shanghai Platform, a...
February 25, 2009, 40 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Seeming as how virtualization is a technology that is still expanding exponentially, and our research is not of the kind that drops a subject once the novelty has worn off, the Belgian IT department of Anandtech is once again attending VMworld Europe, with high hopes of greatly improving our knowledge on the vast amounts of fields virtualization has...
February 24, 2009, 1 comments
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