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With new data showing a corporate refresh cycle in IT underway, the CRN Test Center demonstrated several new products and technologies during their sessions at COMDEXvirtual this week that showed opportunities for solution providers to drive new value into the enterprise that had previously never been possible.
Eddie Correia, assistant technical editor at CRN, provided a demonstration of ION Computer's SR-71 SpeedServer during a session at COMDEXvirtual, the online conference hosted by CRN parent company Everything Channel. The show takes place November 16 - 17, and sessions are available on-demand until May 17, 2011.
ION's SpeedServer is built with two dozen Intel Solid State Drives to provide nearly super-computer capable performance on I/O-heavy applications. Correia provided a step-by-step examination of the SR-71, which also runs its operating system on two, separate SSDs for additional speed.
ION, Hauppauge, N.Y., sells the SR-71 direct to system integrators and VARs. Its channel program provides, among other things, joint sales calls and custom training.
Correia said the server can reach about 400,000 I/O transactions per second, and about 250,000 writes per second. Using Intel's I/O Meter for test measurement, Correia showed the system could reach about 450,000 I/O transactions per second doing random reads.
Emulating a Web server, the SR-71 reached a performance of 240,000 I/O transactions per second. The benchmarking showed the server was one of the highest-performing ever reviewed by the CRN Test Center.
Additionally, Ed Moltzen, managing editor of the CRN Test Center, discussed the emergence of virtualization software and applications now available through the channel in this refresh cycle that had not been as powerful an option before in the enterprise. Those technologies range from VMware's VM Player, which is a desktop virtualization technology, Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, which is available on Windows Server 2008.
Moltzen demonstrated the quick and easy implementation of a Linux server running on a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machine -- a solution not available during IT refreshes three years ago.
Moltzen noted that during the last physical COMDEX show in Las Vegas in 2003, a typical, industry-standard server running a two Xeon processors at 3.0 GHz, with a maximum configuration of 16 GB of RAM in a 7u form factor list-priced at just under $6,000. Today, a server running two,Xeon 5500 CPUs with up to 6 cores each, and built to support up to 192 GB of RAM can be found for a list price of $1,315. The server can be found in a 5u form factor. That alone, Moltzen said, indicates the significant opportunity around technology refresh this year.
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