Server Problems Solved

The Green Grid, a leader in energy efficiency standards for data centers, has recently updated their PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metric that they came out with in 2007 and have outlined the new benchmarks in a white paper titled, “Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency“.

PUE is defined by the total data center energy consumption or power divided by the IT energy consumption or power. So, the lower the resulting variable, the higher the energy efficiency of the data center because more of the total energy is being used for its intended function – to power the IT equipment – rather than to cool the servers, provide lighting, support infrastructure, etc.

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Malfunctioning servers are more than a nuisance — they often result in upset customers, employees, and/or lost money. One of the most critical jobs of IT is to ensure that the servers are functioning properly and wonderfully and will continue to do so. IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) seeks to become the new standard for this task. Today, I’m going to go tell you about this marvelous technology which has enabled sys admins to remotely monitor their herd back at the server farm. And despite the variety of servers within their flock, they can effectively monitor all the beasts from a single interface. We will show its advantages over traditional diagnostic software and give a brief rundown of how it functions. I’ll also tell you a few of the drawbacks that this growing technology has.

Let’s begin.

Remote Server Management with IPMI - Read the Rest >

Intel’s Core i7 Unleashed

In the world of micro processors, we consumers don’t have many options to choose from because two companies have dominated this market since 1969. In the competition between Intel and AMD, the two competing chip giants, Intel has been in the lead since 2006 when it created the Core 2 Duo platform. Today, I’d like to introduce you to Intel’s new platform, the Intel Core i7 on the X58 chipset, and discuss what exactly is different, why it’s the fastest commercial processor to date, and whether it’s worth the upgrade or not.

Intel Core i7, Worth Your Money? - Read the Rest >