Hyperscale data centres, hosted virtual desktop (HVD) workloads and extreme low-energy (ELE) servers-- three server market categories Gartner predicts will provide growth opportunities through 2015. 

As the control points of hardware infrastructures in data centres, the analyst estimates end-user server spending accounts for around 60% of overall data centre hardware, with a 2011 market worth $52.8 billion.

"Although [the server market] is mature, it will offer considerable growth opportunities in the coming years," Gartner says. "These opportunities will arise as demand for certain types of workloads increase and use of servers shifts to very large data centers, virtualization and energy-efficient products."

How come the three categories will rule the server market of the near future?  Read more...

AMD reveals the results the earlier SeaMicro acquisition with the SM15000-- a fabric-based server chassis offering storage capacities of up to 5 petabytes spread over 1408 HDDs or SSDs. 

The SM15000 uses SeaMicro's Feedom Fabric to build "micro" servers, allowing data centres to expand compute, networking and storage capacities independently. 

AMD says the system is ideal for software platforms such as Hadoop or Cassandra, which make use of multiple machines for the crunching of big data on the cloud.  

It has 64 "compute card" slots, each supporting Read more...

It is February 2012. An office at the town of Shelby, Iowa receives a mysterious piece of hardware. A label reads "Pluto Switch." Two workers at the office, baffled by the device, post photos on networking-forum.com, an obscure networking hardware forum.

The two men know a fair bit on networking hardware, but the Pluto Switch looks like nothing they have ever seen or even heard of. A number of networking ports at the back of the long, thin hardware are of unfamiliar design, and the writing on the back is in Finnish, of all languages.

"That must have come from outer space (as the name also implies)," one forum user says. 

The two men manage access the switch console, but all it provides is gibberish, at first. Further tinkering with the console provides identification for the hardware board inside the device. 

"Google Planet8541 Pluto Edge Switch," it says.  Read more...

Oil! What is it good for? According to Texas-based Green Revolution Cooling, more than simply making fries and other greasy foods-- oil can also act as means for more efficient server cooling. 

The idea is not that new. Gamers and enthusiasts have long experimented with housing hardware inside what amounts to tanks filled with vegetable oil. But when the likes of Intel decides to test out oil-based cooling, an entire industry stands up to notice... 

Intel recently finished a year-long test using the CarnotJet cooling system from Green Revolution Read more...