Intel’s New Xeon E5-2600 CPUs Boston’s 64-core Power 2U server Quatro
Now that Intel’s Xeon E5-series processors are finally out, in Boston, one of the largest resellers and partners of Super Micro has announced the new Quattro 1264-T server Which can pack no less than 64 processor cores inside its 2U chassis.
In order to build such a high-density solution, Boston went with Supermicro’s 2U Twin 2 ^ barebones server.
This integrates four dual-socket motherboard inside a compact 2U chassis Which, when combined with Intel’s new octo-core Xeon server processors E5-2600 can deliver a total of 64 CPU cores.
Bauer-Power iSCSI SAN v2
I posted the other day that I decided to give up on the network RAID configuration I did with my first iSCSI SAN setup using Ubuntu, iSCSI Enterprise Target (IET), ZFS and GlusterFS. The problem was in the data integrity after the LUN files were replicated to the passive node. If you take out the complication of GlusterFS though, the Ubuntu/IET setup is really easy and rock solid. The only issue with IET is that it currently doesn’t support SCSI-3 features like persistent reservations which VMWare likes, and Windows 2008 R2 server requires for failover clustering. I haven’t had an issue with VMWare, but I cannot get failover clustering in Windows 2008 R2 to work with it. The good news is that according to this thread, SCSI-3 should be available in the next version of IET.
Set up SSH Server to use Keys – (Lets passwords behind)
For those that are familiar with *nix environment such as Solaris, GNU/Linux, HP-UX or AIX, Secure Shell (SSH) is the protocol used to get a remote shell.
So far is not different from Telnet, right? nevertheless is quite different. Why??? because ssh encrypts the whole session and ensures that no one [in theory] could eavesdrop the connection.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services – Installation and Initial Configuration
In one of our recent articles published on this forum, we provided a comprehensive listing of new and enhanced features introduced in the Integration Services incorporated into soon-to-be released SQL Server 2012. In case you are interested in exploring them in-depth, we intend to examine each of them in detail in upcoming presentations. However, for the sake of completeness and chronological order, we will start by guiding you through the steps required to install and configure this product. Note that our discussion is based on the current (as of February 2011) SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate 0, downloadable from the Microsoft Download Center for both x86 and x64 platforms (as well as available in the form of an .iso file containing both versions).
RedGate Cloud Services: your SQL Azure backups as a service
Today I can finally speak publicly about a new cloud service that has seen the light and I had the pleasure of participating in CTP phase.
Since SQL Azure is available on the market, one of the main workhorses has been how to implement backups of our databases. Initially the only way I had was to make a copy of the database in another SQL Azure, which meant the cost of having to pay for the additional database. Later began to appear new tools that allowed the export/import the data and schemas through SQL scripts or through the new “bacpac” format. A good summary of them was made on this Luis Panzano’s blog entry, showing the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
A RAID primer for IT consultants
Takeaway: When planning 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 numerous decisions about chassis design, processor count and speed, disk capacity, redundant power supplies, disk speeds, memory, operating systems, and warranty replacement windows. It can be easy to overlook the specified RAID version, even though this detail constitutes a critical component of server architecture.