IBM's eX5 reduces server sprawl

IBM has released a eX5 server design, which the company says can help bring down the costs of existing IT infrastructure, and is ideal for demanding workloads, states TechWorld.

The eX5 line is the result of a three-year engineering effort in improving the economics of operating enterprise-sized, x86-based systems.

Using a highly virtualised environment, IBM says the eX5 systems give users a flexible, highly scalable system that can reduce the number of servers needed by half, cut storage costs by 97% and licensing fees by 50%.

Voltaire has unveiled software and hardware solutions that accelerate distributed application group communications in scale-out fabrics, says Market Watch.

The company says its Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) and Unified Fabric Manager provide an efficient, topology-based collective flow which ensures bottlenecks are removed at both the server and interconnect levels without requiring changes to the application.

"With Voltaire FCA, the IMB Allreduce & Barrier benchmarks ran seven times faster on a 512 core portion of our Intel Xeon E5520 based cluster," says Niclas Andersson, technical director at the National Supercomputer Center in Sweden.

HP's MediaSmart Home Server can store TiVo recordings and share them to any PC in the house, reports Digital Trends.

MediaSmart servers contain the MediaSmart Expander for TiVo which enables users to shuffle TiVo content over to a MediaSmart server for storage to free up space on the TiVo device itself.

HP's MediaSmart servers are based on Windows Home Server, and are designed to serve as a central storage resource for media, music, photos, and movies, as well as a network backup point for PCs and Macs on a home network.