Binaryspiral

I love deliveries. Especially this time of year. UPS, FedEx, AirTrans, carrier pigeon… I don’t care – it’s usually something expensive and always something that is going to make my job easier.

Today, FedEx delivered a pallet of new HP servers and parts for our new campus. The pallet also contained a few parts for servers we had just got last week.

So I’ve got five new HP DL360 servers, sixth generation. HP just released their new line last month with the new Intel 5500 Xeon processors. I like to compare them like the pro version of the i7 consumer chips. Four hyperthreading cores with onboard memory controller per chip.  Yeah, and even though it matches clock speed with our existing G5 servers – it’s smoking fast.

Opening the little 1U server chassis, shows a lot of room for expansion – given the amount of gear this unit has already. It has an onboard raid control card that can address up to eight 2.5” SAS or SATA drives. It also has an IDE controller for optical media. It also includes a USB port and SD Card slot on the motherboard… great for those moronic copy protection dongles or emergency boot drives or utilities.

I’m not going sit here and try and sell you a server by just spewing specs… what HP really did to impress me is cut the noise and power usage so drastically I seriously thought there was something wrong with it.

These servers are usually so loud I can’t build them at my desk – I had to take them and bench build them in our staging room. Not anymore.

I actually had this DL360 G6 installing windows 2008 64bit from DVD on a bench next to a Dell OptiPlex 755 sitting idle. When I placed my head between the two to check if the fans were actually spinning on the HP – the Dell was louder. I have never actually heard an SAS drive until today… amazing.

After diving into the onboard monitoring systems, I found out how they are able to keep the fans spinning at 19% while keeping cool – 28 onboard temp sensors watching everything in the box… if a section gets warmer – only the fans dedicated to that area increase their speed and only as much needed to move more air to cool it.

With a single quad core processor, three 2GB memory cards, four 10,000 rpm hard drives, and a four port gig nic PCI-x card – this server only pulled 130 watts of power out of both power supplies at its peak. When it was idling it sat at 93 watts. The only time I ever heard the fans is when I started the server after that near silence.

Yes, I’m that impressed with this new line – I’m looking forward to the next year when we upgrade our ESX environment to G6 host servers… Maybe I won’t be able to hear the server room from down the hall.

Silicon Valley’s Next Big Innovation: Pay Cuts.

Cutting 5% pay or lay folks off… HP made the right choice.

Also an interesting quote from the story:

MIT economist Martin Weitzman suggested in the 1980s that instituting pay cuts instead of layoffs could make recessions shorter and less painful. By setting base salaries lower and making pay more variable with a business’s financial results, companies could avoid cutting jobs and increase workers’ rewards in good times. HP is trying exactly that, with a change to its bonus plans that could make up for the pay cuts if times do well.

I’d take a job where my sallary was more flexible but rewarded when the company was doing great – I’d also be willing to accept a pay cut to help retain the quality people I work with. It makes so much sense… far too simple to be implemented by anyone.

ZDnet reports that HP has stepped up and called Intel and Microsoft out.

Intel’s latest technology buzzword “Turbo Memory” is an extra 1GB of memory added onto the latest Centrino line of laptop motherboards. This memory is split into two 512MB partitions of space and used by Microsoft Vista to improve read/write access to hard drives and often used data that would normally be stored in RAM.

So what’s the rub? Intel is charging $50(US) more for this 1GB of storage. And add to the fact that it’s a Vista only technology. Linux and XP users are stuck paying for more crap they won’t use (or frankly – don’t need).

HP has gone on record by stating that a user can spend $5 on a 1GB SD Card or thumb drive and get the exact same performance. They also found, unsurprisingly, that if they add an additional 1GB of RAM to the system (at a similar cost to intel’s cost of Turbo Memory) – they exceed the performance of a unit without the extra ram and 1GB of readyboost.

I, for one, applaud HP for sticking up for its customers or at least saving them a few bucks on this wishy washy technology – unlike Acer, Dell, and Toshiba have already drank the kool-aid.