Hasta La Gadget!

The internet is a mighty big place that’s only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under-estimation because it doesn’t address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we’re guzzling down data as if we were. Check out the report below for fuller details on the study and its methodology.

Our annual data consumption estimated at 9.57 zettabytes or 11,298,261,800,000,000,000,000 bytes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Someone deep down in Intel’s development dungeons must be laughing a haughty laugh of disdain at us mere mortals getting excited about dual-cores in smartphones. The old Chipzilla has just turned out its 10-core Xeon E7 processor family, which can work on 20 simultaneous computational threads courtesy of the company’s Hyper-Threading knowhow. Needless to say, there aren’t that many casual workloads that will ever properly harness such extremely parallelized prowess, but then Intel isn’t really gunning for the Facebook crowd here anyhow. The new E7s are for those dealing with truly data-intensive tasks, meaning that Facebook itself would be a good candidate to buy up a few, provided it’s tempted by such things as 40 percent performance improvements over the Xeon 7500 tied to dynamic power adjustment for increased energy efficiency. Pricing for the Xeon E7s starts at $774 and climbs up to $4,616 per 32nm chip, with the usual proviso that Intel won’t sell them in batches of less than 1,000. More details follow in the press release and video after the break.

[Thanks, Khan]

Continue reading Intel rolls out 10-core, 20-threaded Xeon E7s, shows everyone who’s boss

Intel rolls out 10-core, 20-threaded Xeon E7s, shows everyone who’s boss originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seagate has just taken the wraps off a slew of fresh enterprise storage drives, highlighted by a pair of new Pulsar SSDs. The MLC NAND-equipped Pulsar.2 is capable of 6Gbps speeds over SATA, while the 2.5-inch XT.2 uses SLC memory and a 6Gbps SAS connection, and both are unsurprisingly touted as being the fastest and finest guardians you can buy for your company’s data. Seagate sees the use of MLC flash on the Pulsar.2 as a major advantage in lowering costs, while its data-protecting and error-correcting firmware is expected to maintain the high levels of data integrity required in this space. No price is actually given to validate Seagate’s claims of a breakthrough price / performance combination, but both of its new SSDs should be available in the second quarter of this year. The XT.2 is already shipping out to OEMs, along with its 360MBps read and 300MBps write speeds. There are also new Savvio and Constellation HDDs from the company, but you’ll have to read the 1,400-word essay press release after the break to learn more about them.

Continue reading Seagate Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 SSDs target enterprise, reliability-obsessed consumers

Seagate Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 SSDs target enterprise, reliability-obsessed consumers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 06:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fusion-io‘s been in the flash memory game for some time, but until now it has been known primarily for screamingly fast PCI Express-mounted flash storage solutions with wallet-crushing prices. Those drives are primarily aimed at the enterprise market, so it seems logical for the company to now enter into an OEM agreement with Supermicro to make NAND Flash servers. The aptly, if not modestly, named SuperServers can perform over 2.2 million sequential I/O operations per second (IOPS) and over 1.4 million random IOPS — for comparison, the OCZ SSDs we saw at CES are an order of magnitude slower in IOPS, and they aren’t exactly sluggish. Supermicro also claims that the new servers speed up enterprise applications by ten times while using only one-tenth of the power. Impressive numbers to be sure, but we shudder to think of how much the SuperServers will cost. A second mortgage for a server’s a sound financial decision, right? PR’s after the break.

Continue reading Supermicro and Fusion-io team up to deliver new SuperServers

Supermicro and Fusion-io team up to deliver new SuperServers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew good and well that Fujitsu’s Stylistic Q550 was en route, but now we’re learning a few more dirty details as its official launch day draws ever nearer. Reportedly, the business-oriented slate will be fully revealed at CeBIT next month, with Fujitsu being one of the only outfits out there eager and willing to take a chance on both Oak Trail and Windows 7 Professional. Our experiences with existing Win7 tablets haven’t been stellar, but it’s possible that the added power in Oak Trail will cut down on the lag and make things a bit smoother to operate. We’re told to expect a 10-inch LED touchscreen, smartcard slot, fingerprint reader, trusted-platform module (TPM), front and rear cameras, a 32GB / 64GB solid state drive, USB socket and an optional 3G module. Most impressive, however, is the claimed eight hours of battery life, which we’ll quite honestly have to see to believe. If all goes well, it’ll start shipping this April to European nations, but there’s no word yet on how badly it’ll hurt your wallet (or when it’ll grab a passport and head to other continents). As you’d expect, we’ll be live from Germany digging for more just as soon as the show floor opens. A brief introductory vid is just past the break.

Continue reading Fujitsu’s 10-inch Stylistic Q550 tablet to sport Oak Trail, Windows 7

Fujitsu’s 10-inch Stylistic Q550 tablet to sport Oak Trail, Windows 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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