1.6TB Solid State Disks - BitMicro

BitMicro announced a new solid state disk, an "E-Disk Altima"

• Capacity 16GB - 1.6TB
• 4Gb FC
• Sampling Q1-2008
• Shipping volume Q2-2008
• 230MB/s, 55,000 I/O (I think this is comparable to other solid state disks)

Company news release, November 12th, 2007
Company news release, November 13th 2007 (Supercomputing, Reno, Nevada)

Hitachi jumps on the "Hypervisor in our firmware" bandwagon

It seems like the trend continues. Here's an article about Hitachi's offering of their firmware based hypervisor on the Xeon platform.

“ASIC coupled with embedded firmware”.

“Other attempts to embed virtualization within a server don't do so in hardware. In September, XenSource Inc. announced an embedded virtualization platform called XenExpress that integrates into servers via flash or on the hard disk. Similarly, VMware's ESX Server 3i fits on 32 MB of flash memory.”

“Virtage can partition physical server resources by building multiple isolated logical partitions (up to 16 partitions per server module) capable of running independently and supporting independent operating environments on each logical partition. It also provides a secure environment for each virtual machine and fault isolation through hardware boundaries.”

“BladeSymphony's SMP interconnect backplane supports two-socket Itanium processor blades that can be scaled up and/or out for up to two eight-socket (or 16-way) servers in a single chassis or eight two-socket (or four-way) servers.”

Hitachi blades virtualize without VMware

Reason for EFI boot?

Is this one of the killer apps for the EFI boot?

Today (with the Legacy BIOS) - you can only create an up to a 2TB partition. While this sounds like a fairly large partition size, think of the size of the storage devices on our desktops. Drives of 1/2 TB are commonplace. The storage demand in the datacenter is far greater. Seems that there is support in Linux for the GUID Partition Tables (GPT).

Blog - Linux Creating a Partition Size Larger than 2TB
FYI - GUID partition table
Microsoft Article - How Basic Disks and Volumes Work

Phoenix BOIS Hypervisor

Several sources discuss a Hypervisor offering from Phoenix Technologies:

1. Phoenix - Investor Presentation
2. EEtimes Article - Phoenix Rolls Environment for PC Apps
3. Computerworld - Is the move encroaching on Microsoft?
3. Blog - The Battle for the Hypervisor Heats Up
4. Blog - BIOS Maker Reinvents Itself as Virtualization Platform Vendor
5. WSJ Article - Making Laptops Work Better

A related, and possibly competing (?) project is called "Blue Pill". This is based on the research done by Joanna Rutkowska of the Invisible Things.

I'm not sure if Phoenix has looked into the copyright or trademark issues with respect to name HyperCore. A company called Plurality is developing a CPU architecture called "Hypercore Processor".