News for December 9

TheRegister: Sun puts Shanghai Opterons in Galaxy boxes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While it isn't always the case, Sun Microsystems usually likes to wait until it can actually ship products before it sends out a press release. So while Advanced Micro Devices announced the "Shanghai" quad-core Opterons for servers nearly a month ago, Sun is only making its "Galaxy" x64 launch today because it has enough of the chips to start pumping out boxes.

The existing second-generation of Galaxy rack and blade servers, which were created to use the "Santa Rosa" dual-core Rev F Opterons in August 2006 and which also can support the earlier quad-core "Barcelona" processors that were delivered last summer with a bug but only really went volume this spring, support the new Shanghai Opterons by default.

Arvie Martin, group marketing manager for Sun's x64 products, says that Sun has kept its Galaxy server prices the same and any price differential between Barcelona and Shanghai boxes is due to the differences in processor prices from AMD and, in some cases, from a richer base memory configuration on the Shanghai version of the box. The Shanghai chips can plunk down into the X2200 M2, X4600 M2, X4140, X4240, and X4440 rack servers and the Sun Blade X6240 and X6440 blade servers.

The extra memory and pricing adds up. An X2200 M2, for instance, with a 2.3 GHz Barcelona chip and 4 GB of main memory costs $1,995, while a top-end Shanghai machine with a 2.7 GHz processor and 8 GB of memory costs $3,995. A big portion of that extra two grand, if Sun can get customers to go for it, could end up dropping to the bottom line. Sun's blades are also pricey (as are blades made by others) and could have plenty of profits (it is hard to say unless you know Sun's parts and manufacturing costs). A two-socket Sun Blade X6240 using two of the 2.7 GHz Shanghai chips with 16 GB of memory costs $5,160, while a four-socket blade using 2.7 GHz Shanghais with 32 GB of memory, a 16 GB Compact Flash, and a passthrough fabric expansion module costs $17,525.

Martin says that Sun's internal benchmarks show the top-speed Shanghai chips providing about a 30 to 35 per cent performance boost over the fastest Barcelona parts inside the same servers.

Publish.com: Google, Salesforce Integrate Cloud IT Services

by Nathan Eddy

On-demand CRM vendor Salesforce.com announced a partnership with Google to allow its Force.com platform as a service (PaaS) to the Google App Engine application, Google's own cloud-based application development platform. The partnership gives Salesforce developers native access to Google's distributed storage system, Bigtable and allows Google App Engine developers access to the Salesforce platform.

The partnership allows Salesforce.com developers to talk to applications built using the programming language Python. Google and Salesforce teamed up in June of this year, when the companies announced the release of the Force.com Tool for Google APIs, which allowed developers using the Force.com platform to access the data in Google Apps.

"We think that in economic times like these, the advantages of the cloud computing option make more sense," says Salesforce senior director of platform product marketing, Ariel Kelman. "You get fast results, no capital expenditure, and low risk. Kelman says these advantages particularly benefit small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

"When we talk to our customers in the SMB space, these companies are really looking to leverage the technology investment in these scalable platforms," he says. "The ability for them to take their ideas and run them on a world-wide, secure infrastructure is a huge win," Kelman says.

CNet: Getting started with Amazon CloudFront CDN

by Dave Rosenberg

I've been experimenting with Amazon's new CloudFront CDN service since the launch and thus far it's proven to be a good option provided you don't need to update content in anywhere near real-time (you are pretty much looking at 24 hours before content updates hit the full network.)

And while the functionality doesn't match something like Akamai, my best math effort suggests that the service will cost you 10% (or less) than Akamai does for static image serving, which makes the service very compelling.

Paul Stamatiou wrote up a great how-to guide for CloudFront and it shows how setting up the new service is still not for the faint of heart. You still need to be a developer/admin type in order to get everything up and running.

The net result:

I'm pretty happy with Amazon's first CDN offering, CloudFront. It's extremely easy to setup and affordable to boot. I was able to get it running from scratch in under 5 minutes, including CNAME DNS propagation. While it might not be mature enough yet with advanced usage reporting for companies to use in place of Akamai, Limelight or CacheFly, it certainly has potential.

Where CloudFront will start to get really interesting is when it can do real-time video at this low cost. Until then it's a nice option to speed delivery but still not a full-blown commercial CDN.