Yes, Western Digital has now entered the traditional enterprise drive market with its first SAS hard disk drive, the S25.

It spins at 10,000 RPM, has a 2.5" form factor, and has SAS interfaces of 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s. Sequential transfer rate is clocked at 128MB/sec. And the drives have a 1.6 million MTBF estimate to go with them. With read and write seek times of just 3.6ms and 4.2ms respectively, these timings are even faster than the VelociRaptor.

More details from the full press release follows.

Cnet has an article on Microsoft’s new data center in Chicago. For those who are curious to know what goes on in a data center and how it looks like inside can check out the article here.

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China's National University of Defense Technology has announced the “Milky Way One” supercomputer, the world’s 2nd petaflop supercomputer. Weighing a whopping 155 tons, Milky Way One consists of 103 refrigerator-like cabinets lined up over 1,000 square meters.

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Following official unveiling of Nvidia's next-gen Fermi architecture, Nvidia have notched up a big win in the HPC industry already.

Oak Ridge Natural Laboratory (ORNL) will build a supercomputer using Nvidia's Fermi products, intended to be 10 times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputer. This is a massive magnitude to overtake what is today world's most powerful supercomputer.

More details next page.

The U.S. meteorological department has recently upgraded their National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) system, used for weather forecasting, with the purchase of 2 supercomputers from IBM. The 2 supercomputers are capable of 70 TFLOPS (trillion calculations per second), making it the 50th most powerful computer in the world. With 5000 IBM Power6 processors in between themselves, the system is reportedly 4 times faster than it’s predecessor.

Recently, Apple announced their Mac Pro with the yet-to-be announced Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors. Basically, Mac Pro is powered by two Nehalem Xeon processors clocked at 2.93GHz where each processor has 4 cores and 8 threads capable with HT. Not to be outdone, Supermicro too has a SuperServer 1026JTT-IBX 1U server that supports four Nehalem Xeon processors onboard. Certainly, we would love to have that as a VR-Zone server :)

AMD provided a live demonstration of their 6-core Opteron processor code-named "Istanbul." It is basically a 6-core version of 45nm "Shanghai" Opteron and is pin compatible with the current Socket F boards. AMD seems to be right on track for launch in H2 2009. As Tech Report has reported, AMD has provided a few demonstrations on Istanbul silicon in action.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to use NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs to boost the computational horsepower of its TSUBAME supercomputer. Through the addition of 170 Tesla S1070 1U systems, the TSUBAME supercomputer now delivers nearly 170 TFLOPS of theoretical peak performance, as well as 77.48 TFLOPS of measured Linpack performance, placing it, again, amongst the top ranks in the world’s Top 500 Supercomputers.

TYAN today announced at SC’08 that its current line of 23 AMD Opteron™ processor-based platforms and 1 new AMD Opteron™- processor based product will support the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (codenamed “Shanghai”).  TYAN launched the TYAN S4992 motherboard that will target high-end HPC and workstation users supporting HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology or 5.2 GT/s HyperTransport™ technology links between the four CPUs. The S4992 will have a total memory capacity of 256GB DDR2 800/667/533/400 ECC memory, (5) PCI Express Gen. 2 slots, (1) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz slot, (2) GbE ports, and onboard iKVM features. Expected to be in mass production in Q1 of 2009.

We've seen PC Manufacturers roll out mini-desktop systems that's well less than 6 liters in volume since the dawn of the Intel Core 2 Duo. Asus made their entry into the market a few months back with the Nova PC, and now, we'e got their latest Essentio PC, touted as the smallest desktop computer with discrete graphics built in. We'll also see one of the most expensive Blu-Ray burner in the Essentio too....