VPSmart. All about servers

8Mar/12Off

SuSE Linux Enterpise Server 11 Service Pack 2 – Caution!

Client Advisory

Recently, Novell released the latest Service Pack (SP2) for SuSE Linux endeavor Server 11. We urge fantastic caution before upgrading your existing production SLES servers to this new Service Pack.

Background

Under SLES 9 and 10, it was very safe to apply newly released Service Packs to production systems.  SLES 11 but broke with that trend (twice now) in a honestly major way.

14Feb/12Off

A RAID primer for IT consultants

Takeaway: When plotting a client server, this guide will help ensure the RAID version selected best fits the requirements.

Many IT consultants build and deploy new servers for clients on a very regular (sometimes weekly) basis. This requires you to make copious decisions about chassis design, processor count and speed, disk capacity, redundant power supplies, disk speeds, memory, in commission systems, and warranty substitution windows. It can be simple to overlook the specified RAID version, even though this detail constitutes a critical component of server architecture.

14Feb/12Off

Web Host Host Color Launches New Dedicated Server Plan with Free CDN

CloudFlare provides analytics in addition to security and website optimization

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web host Host Color announced on Friday that it has launched its new “Dedicated 100 Mbps Unmetered” server plot. The new dedicated server hosting plot is unfilled in Host Color’s US data center in South Bend, Indiana, about 90 miles from Chicago.

1Jan/12Off

Eaton 5PX UPS Offering Makes Going Green Easier

How green is your IT? That’s a question questioned by many business managers and IT staffers alike. The problem with developing a green strategy for your business is trying to rate your success when it comes to saving power, especially at the device level.

Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) manufacturer Eaton has taken a hard look at the greening of IT. The companionship has come to the conclusion that one of the best ways to rate greenness is by monitoring the power consumed at the outlet segment level–and there is no better house to do that than on the UPS that powers IT gear. After all, the UPS feeds power into the servers, switches, SANs and other devices that constitute a data center. The gear is also responsible for keeping power “clean” and unfilled if there are problems with the grid.

1Jan/12Off

Cisco UCS pricing: It’s complicated

As with any server product, there are lots of ways to configure UCS, including different levels of CPU, memory and storage. Cisco has a 29-page document to help you get it right, and 29 pages are not overkill. To get an thought of what this might cost, we configured two break systems: one with 40 dual-socket blades, and another with 80 of the same blades.

We picked Intel 5600-run (Westmere-EP) X5675 CPUs, each with six cores running at 3.06 GHz, an expensive but pretty common choice for enterprise virtualization workloads. We also packed in 96GB of memory for each system, and place in only a single small SATA drive for booting, logging and diagnostics.

1Jan/12Off

Cisco wants to build your cloud

Networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems place the word out on the road that it was making a huge cloud announcement now, but if you were expecting the companionship to launch a huge wonking public cloud and take a run at the Amazon compute cloud juggernaut, you can forget it.

What Cisco did do was introduce its CloudVerse initiative for building, managing and connecting clouds and spent more than an hour showcasing its telepresence capability and how "clouds" were driving the announcement itself.