Server spending drops in Asia

Spending on computer servers among Asia-Pacific companies has gone down indicating the negative impact of the current economic situation on technology spending, says Inquirer.net.

A report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that server spending for the fourth quarter of 2008 went down to 4.9% of total expenditure for the entire 2008. Among the countries that witnessed drastic declines in server spending are Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia.

Some countries were spared from the decline but slower server spending was still evident. These countries include Thailand, New Zealand, India, the Philippines and Indonesia. In the IDC report, only Vietnam showed an increase in server spending at 35%, but year-on-year growth is less than 1%.

Cisco Systems has unveiled its first blade server, which will serve as the centre piece of a system the company promises will make adding virtualisation to corporate data centres easier and less expensive, states Computer World.

The Unified Computing System includes the UCS B-Series blade server, a Cisco switch, VMware virtualisation technology, and other Cisco and third-party tools combined in a single rackable system designed to manage virtualised data centres, the company said.

Analysts said they expect the system and services package to be priced from about $100 000. The server will be used to manage and automate the movement of virtual machines and applications across data centre servers.

Microsoft has rolled out the latest update to Windows Home Server with the release of Power Pack 2 which comes loaded with fixes for known bugs, says Channel Register.

Microsoft has made improvements to remote access configuration, enhanced functionality for computers running Windows Media Centre and added better streaming support for its media player's Extenders as well.

According to Microsoft, users need to have Windows Home Server with Power Pack 1 already installed on their home server. Power Pack 2 will automatically install as part of Windows Update if Automatic Updates is enabled on the home server.