Microsoft to expand data centres

Microsoft intends to ramp up the number of servers running in its data centres worldwide by 15 times over the next five years, according to The New York Times.

The growth, outlined in a presentation at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference held in Los Angeles this week, is designed to handle increased hosted computing demand from enterprise software running on the Windows Azure platform as well as third-party services Microsoft hopes to attract.

The company expects to boost the number of data centres it operates by three times, its power usage by 15 times, and the Internet traffic going out of its data centres nine-fold, says Benjamin Ravani, GM of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services.

Lenovo has unveiled its latest ThinkServer line of Intel-based tower and rack-mounted servers, says PC World.

All servers can be pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, or Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

Matthew Steele, director of channel development, workstation and server for Lenovo Asia Pacific and Japan, says the company wants to give customers a choice of operating system and adds that its management software is also cross-platform.

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu added a new Sparc-based server to their line-up of jointly developed high-end systems that support database and other transaction-heavy workloads, reports eWeek.

The Sun and Fujitsu Sparc Enterprise M3000 server is a 2U (3.5-inch) rack-mount system that uses the quad-core Sparc64 VII processor.

The Enterprise M3000 will start shipping to customers early next month for a starting price of $15 000.