Channel central to Cisco success

Servers, and especially volume x64 machines, are by and large sold not by the companies whose brands are on the boxes, but by a handful of master distributors who in turn sell them to legions of resellers that actually do the peddling to IT shops, writes The Register.

And if Cisco Systems wants to get into the x64 server racket, it is going to need channel partners who can walk the server walk as well as they talk the network talk.

Luckily for Cisco, it has been in the data centre since the Internet went mainstream in corporate computing, and its engineers know as much as what is going on inside of the glass house as the server and storage people do.

The previous generation of servers were arguably groomed to meet businesses' seemingly insatiable demand to have as much processing power crammed into as small a space as possible, according to InfoWorld.

Many organisations neglected to consider the associated costs to power and cool their legions of high-powered machines. Similarly, they overlooked the prospect that their local utility would not be able to provide all the electricity necessary to keep those jam-packed data centres humming.

Times have changed. Energy prices have shot up. Electricity supply hasn't kept up with data centre demand. Meanwhile, companies have become increasingly concerned over the state of the environment. These shifts have spawned a new generation of servers: machines that deliver more performance per watt and are built in a more environmentally responsible manner.

Trillian Astra, which has been in development for nearly three years, is now available to users as a public beta, says CNET News.

In announcing on the Trillian blog this week that the beta is now public, Cerulean Studios also said the latest build of the multi-protocol chat client fixes bugs related to server-based problems.

The company clearly has confidence in the beta, though, since they've made it the featured product on their download page. Users can still grab Trillian 3.1, the latest stable build, but only from a link off to the side.