Hewlett-Packard on Monday said it has created a business unit that will deal in purpose-built systems based on specific applications and usage models, and also announced the reorganization of its server unit.

The HP Converged Systems business unit brings together dedicated resources to “deliver purpose-built technology for social, cloud, mobile and big data solution,” HP said in a statement.

The unit includes purpose-built servers and appliances running Hadoop, HP’s Vertica or SAP’s HANA. Also part of the new unit is the company’s CloudSystem integrated offerings, which include software and servers specifically built for public, private and hybrid cloud.

The move comes as companies like Oracle, IBM and others closely tie their software to specific hardware. Tom Joyce has been chosen to lead Converged Systems as its senior vice president and general manager. He previously was vice president of marketing, strategy and operations of storage at HP.

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IBM's reported interest in selling parts of its x86 server business to Lenovo may bring major changes to the global market.

IBM is the third-largest seller of x86 servers by factory revenue, with 15.7 percent of the global market in 2012, according to IDC. That represents $5.6 billion for a company that earned $104.5 billion in revenue last year.

IBM's share of the x86 server segment has declined over the last several years. In 2010, it had 17.4 percent of the market and $5.5 billion in revenue.

By divesting at least part of its x86 server line, IBM gains additional investment dollars that it can spend on its higher margin efforts, especially its analytics and business intelligence, putting more pressure on rivals in these areas.

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Any deal by IBM to sell parts of its server business to Lenovo is likely to focus on low-end commodity x86 hardware, not higher-end x86 systems such as IBM’s PureSystems and iDataPlex servers, an industry analyst said Thursday.

IBM reportedly is in talks with Lenovo to sell all or part of its x86 server business. It’s unclear how far along the talks are or whether a deal will materialize, but unnamed sources told both CRN and The Wall Street Journal that discussions are under way.

Asked about the talks on IBM’s quarterly financial call Thursday, IBM’s CFO declined to comment on what he called “rumors.” An IBM spokesman also declined to comment.

It could make sense for IBM to off-load its commodity x86 business, where profit margins are relatively low, said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting. But he doesn’t see IBM selling off all its x86 businesses.

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IBM is in “advanced discussions” with Lenovo over a possible deal for it to purchase IBM’s x86 server business, according to two news reports Thursday.

Any such deal would reshape the massive x86 server market, which was worth $35.8 billion last year and accounted for two-thirds of all server spending, according to figures from IDC.

The sale price isn’t known, but the deal could be worth billions of dollars if it goes ahead, said The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.

CRN reported the news earlier in the day, also citing unnamed sources. It said IBM wants $5 billion or $6 billion for the business.

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The low-power capabilities of ARM-based processors have created high expectations for their use in servers, but one of Dell’s top engineers said they are unlikely to take off until 64-bit versions hit the market.

“I don’t think you’ll see any serious momentum in ARM until 64-bit comes out,” said Jimmy Pike, vice president, senior fellow and chief architect of Dell’s Data Center Solutions division. ARM has said it expects 64-bit server chips based on its processor design to start shipping next year, with servers shipping in volume starting in late 2014 or early 2015. Pike is highly regarded in low-power server design and the Dell division he’s in was among the first of the top-tier server providers to experiment with very low-power servers for hyperscale data centers.

ARM processors are being used in most smartphones and tablets, but are being investigated for use in servers as a way to cut electric bills while efficiently processing large volumes of Internet transactions. To counter ARM, Intel is offering Atom server processors as low-power alternatives to its power-hungry Xeon server chips, which dominate the data center landscape today.

But Intel has an early advantage over ARM. Hewlett-Packard last week announced its Project Moonshot dense server with Intel’s Atom processor and Dell is already offering dense servers with low-power x86 chips. The companies are relegating ARM servers to the labs, where they are offered to customers for testing.

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Oracle and Hewlett-Packard’s ongoing legal battle over software for Itanium has run into another delay, and this time there’s no telling how long it will last.

HP sued Oracle in 2011 after the database company announced it would stop porting software to Itanium, the chip architecture at the heart of HP’s high-end “business critical” servers. HP won in the first phase of the case last year, when Judge James Kleinberg of the Santa Clara Superior Court ruled that Oracle had to resume porting.

The second phase of the trial, where HP is expected to seek about $4 billion in damages from Oracle, has been delayed several times and now has no trial date at all.

Oracle had sought to shut down the damages phase of the trial by filing a so-called anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion that said HP was infringing on its free speech. On Monday, Kleinberg dismissed that motion on the grounds it was filed too late. Oracle promptly appealed Kleinberg’s decision to a higher court.

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Intel announced new server chips on Tuesday, including the latest Xeon E3, which is the first server processor based on the company’s latest Haswell microarchitecture.

Intel’s Xeon E3 chips are targeted at low-end servers and microservers, which are an emerging category of dense servers largely aimed at Web hosting and cloud implementations. Microservers usually have lower-power processors and are designed to handle large volumes of lightweight web or cloud transactions, like search queries and social networking page renderings.

The E3 chips will have up to four cores and receive a performance and power-efficiency boost with Haswell. Most of Intel’s chips are currently based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, and Haswell will be the basis for the upcoming fourth-generation Core processors, which will be in laptop and desktops this quarter.

Intel also announced the faster Xeon E5 and E7 chips, which are based on Ivy Bridge. The E5 chip is for mid-range servers and will come with up to eight cores, while the E7 chip is targeted at high-end servers and will have up to 10 CPU cores.

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To make server upgrades easier, Intel introduced a rack reference architecture that speeds up data throughput while reducing energy and maintenance costs in data centers.

The architecture, announced on Tuesday, calls for decoupling processors, memory and storage, and putting them in separate boxes. That is a change from the industry-standard server design, in which the processor and memory reside in a single chassis.

The reference design could potentially change system topology and reorganize traffic patterns between CPUs, memory and storage in data centers. Intel said data would move faster and in a more energy-efficient manner with the design, which could help process data and serve up results faster.

The rack-level reference architecture will be officially released next year. The architecture was introduced ahead of the Intel Developer Forum show in Beijing, which will be held on April 10 and 11.

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Hewlett-Packard in the future will offer customized Moonshot servers at different prices and also offer configurations with ARM and Intel Xeon processors.

HP on Monday started shipping the first offering in its new class of hyperscale servers called Moonshot, which runs on processors built for smartphones and tablets. The initial Moonshot system has a fixed configuration with 45 Proliant servers—also called cartridges—based on Intel’s Atom S1200 x86 low-power processors, and will be priced at $61,875.

Over time, customers will be able to work with HP to configure Moonshot depending on how the server will be used and that also will determine the price, said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of the Industry-Standard Servers and Software group, in an interview.

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Hewlett-Packard’s new densely packed low-power Moonshot server has finally come out of the company’s labs and is available to customers in the U.S. and Canada starting at $61,875.

This will be the first time commercial users will get a full view of HP’s Moonshot hyperscale class of servers, which are for data centers that handle large volumes of fast-moving social networking, mobile and Internet activity. After more than a year of experimentation and multiple delays, the first Moonshot server was released Monday.

The new Moonshot system includes a chassis that will accommodate up to 45 Proliant servers—also called cartridges—based on Intel’s Atom S1200 x86 low-power processors. The company did not immediately announce a Moonshot system based on ARM processors, but has left the door open for such a server in the future.

The server system, which includes the chassis with a switch and fabric, is shipping now in the U.S. and Canada and will ship in other parts of the world at a later date.

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After years of incremental improvements, Atom chips are poised for a big jump in performance and power efficiency with a new generation of low-processors that have shipped to server makers for testing.

Atom chips are primarily designed for smartphones and tablets, but have also been repurposed for low-power servers. The server variant will be the first Atom chip made using Intel’s 22-nanometer manufacturing process, which is considered the most advanced in the industry.

The Atom chip, code-named Avoton, will become commercially available in servers starting in the second half. Avoton chips will be based on the new Silvermont microarchitecture, which is the first major Atom architecture redesign since the chip was first released in 2008.

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A flaw in the widely used BIND DNS (Domain Name System) software can be exploited by remote attackers to crash DNS servers and affect the operation of other programs running on the same machines.

The flaw stems from the way regular expressions are processed by the libdns library that's part of the BIND software distribution. BIND versions 9.7.x, 9.8.0 up to 9.8.5b1 and 9.9.0 up to 9.9.3b1 for UNIX-like systems are vulnerable, according to a security advisory published Tuesday by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), a nonprofit corporation that develops and maintains the software. The Windows versions of BIND are not affected.

BIND is by far the most widely used DNS server software on the Internet. It is the de facto standard DNS software for many UNIX-like systems, including Linux, Solaris, various BSD variants and Mac OS X.

Attack can crash servers

The vulnerability can be exploited by sending specifically crafted requests to vulnerable installations of BIND that would cause the DNS server process—the name daemon, known as "named"—to consume excessive memory resources. This can result in the DNS server process crashing and the operation of other programs being severely affected.

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AMD took the wraps off a new high-end reference-design video card at the end of the company’s GDC press briefing Tuesday night: the dual-GPU Radeon 7990.

Details are exceedingly sparse: Matt Skynner, general manager of AMD’s graphics business unit, simply held up the card for the audience to see. “This is the first public showing,” Skynner said. “We’re not saying much about it other than it’s two series-7900 GPUs on a single card, and it’s whisper quiet.”

AMD

As you can see from this slide taken from AMD’s presentation, it’s a full-size, dual-slot card. A heat sink runs the length of the board, and there are three cooling fans. AMD had previously mentioned that the Radeon 7990, code-named Malta, at the CeBit trade show in Germany, but this is the first time the card has been shown.

The Radeon HD 7990 will compete with Nvidia’s Titan for fastest video card on the planet when the card ships (unless Nvidia manages to come out with a dual-Titan card). Expect to see cards like this at retail before the end of the first half of the year, because AMD is expected to ship its Radeon HD 8000 series GPUs in the second half.

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With its new Grid VGX software, Nvidia is aiming to tear down the performance barrier that keeps graphics-intensive applications from running on virtual desktops.

The company detailed how it plans make its mark on running graphics remotely in the data center at the GPU Technology Conference, which takes place this week in San Jose. It's working with partners such as Hewlett-Packard and VMware on the effort.

At the heart of this push is the company's Grid VGX software, which is a suite of technologies that enables improved graphics performance in virtualized systems. The software, for example, enables virtual desktop solutions to capture and encode remote streams directly on its Kepler-based Grid K1 and K2 graphics boards, which were first announced last year.

On Tuesday, the company said the cards will be used in servers customized for hosting virtual desktops such as the Dell PowerEdge R720; the iDataPlex dx360 M4 from IBM; and the eighth generation of Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant WS460c. On the software side, Nvidia is working with Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware.

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Hewlett-Packard may seek damages of US$4 billion to $4.2 billion from Oracle in its lawsuit over support for Itanium server architecture.

An economist that HP plans to call in the case made the estimate at an evidentiary hearing on Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose, California. The economist, Jonathan Orszag of the consulting firm Compass Lexecon, estimated the difference between HP’s Itanium-related revenue with and without Oracle’s March 2011 announcement that it would stop porting software to Itanium.

“The Oracle conduct at question in this case had a very significant and negative effect on the HP Itanium business,” Orszag said during questioning by HP’s legal team.

HP sued Oracle in June 2011, saying the company had breached a contract when it stopped porting software to the Itanium platform, which powers HP’s so-called mission-critical servers for large enterprises. Last August, Oracle was ordered to resume Itanium support, a decision the company is appealing. The case is now being prepared for a jury trial to determine what damages, if any, HP is entitled to. On Monday, the two sides began presenting the testimony of their planned expert witnesses for approval by the judge in the case, James Kleinberg.

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The majority of email and Web gateways, firewalls, remote access servers, UTM (united threat management) systems and other security appliances have serious vulnerabilities, according to a security researcher who analyzed products from multiple vendors.

Most security appliances are poorly maintained Linux systems with insecure Web applications installed on them, according to Ben Williams, a penetration tester at NCC Group, who presented his findings Thursday at the Black Hat Europe 2013 security conference in Amsterdam. His talk was entitled, “Ironic Exploitation of Security Products.”

Williams investigated products from some of the leading security vendors, including Symantec, Sophos, Trend Micro, Cisco, Barracuda, McAfee and Citrix. Some were analyzed as part of penetration tests, some as part of product evaluations for customers, and others in his spare time.

More than 80 percent of the tested products had serious vulnerabilities that were relatively easy to find, at least for an experienced researcher, Williams said. Many of these vulnerabilities were in the Web-based user interfaces of the products, he said.

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Hewlett-Packard’s effort to build ARM servers will get a boost from Texas Instruments, which will provide chips based on the latest ARM processor design.

The TI chips will be offered as part of Project Moonshot, which is HP’s effort to build and deliver low-power servers with either Intel or ARM processors. The first servers are projected to ship commercially in the second quarter, and are currently available only to select customers for testing in HP’s labs.

HP will use a package of TI chips—also called a system-on-chip (SOC)—that includes ARM’s quad-core Cortex-A15 processor, the server maker said in a blog entry. The Cortex-A15 processor design is ARM’s latest, and was shown in a prototype tablet and smartphone at last week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

TI’s Keystone II chip package will also include cores for network processing and I/O, much like a unified server chip package offered by Calxeda, which uses an ARM processor. HP also is offering the Calxeda chip called EnergyCore as part of Project Moonshot.

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Microsoft has joined the Open Data Center Alliance, a user-led organization that aims to simplify the purchasing of data center and cloud services by promoting interoperability and common standards.

The alliance has gathered over 300 members in its two-and-a-half years of existence. Most of them are users of data center and cloud services: Banks and telcos dominate, but others include a U.S. university, a French car manufacturer and the Dutch national police agency.

Vendors are welcome to join too, either as solution provider members or, like Microsoft, as contributor members, a status that allows them to see early drafts of the organization's publications and to contribute to the technical workgroups that write them.

Those publications include "usage models" defining standard terminology to aid in the writing of requests for proposals. The usage models cover areas including service orchestration, secure federation, long-distance workload migration and interoperability across clouds. There is also a tool to help write RFPs. The Proposal Engine Assistant Tool (PEAT) can generate ODCA-recommended verbiage calling for open, standards-based solutions to a variety of requirements.

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Hewlett-Packard's first low-power server for hyperscale computing environments, developed under a project it calls Moonshot, will go on sale next quarter, CEO Meg Whitman said last week.

Project Moonshot is an effort to build low-power servers based on alternatives to Intel's Xeon processors for use in mega data centers like those operated by Facebook and Google.

HP announced the project in 2011, and the first server platform it talked about, known as Redstone, was to be based on an ARM-type processor from Calxeda.

HP switched gears last year, however, and showed another Project Moonshot server design dubbed Gemini, the first version of which was to be based on an Intel Atom processor.

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Oracle is moving 130 manufacturing jobs from Mexico to Oregon in the U.S., a company spokeswoman said.

The move by Oracle reflects a growing trend by both tech and other companies to move a part of their manufacturing back to the U.S. Apple, for example, has said it will make some Macs in the U.S., while Intel is expanding its manufacturing in the country.

Oracle has committed to adding 130 jobs and retaining 300 jobs at a facility in Hillsboro, Ore., according to a statement this week by Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber. The company’s decision to expand in the U.S. rather than overseas is just the latest example of “an industry leader choosing to ‘onshore’ in our state,” Kitzhaber said.

By moving production of its systems and servers from Mexico to its Hillsboro facility, Oracle said it will be able to meet customer demand while bringing new technology jobs to the state of Oregon.

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Dell has reported another quarter of declining revenue and profits as the company's CEO continues his battle to take the PC maker private.

It was the fifth consecutive quarter in which Dell's profits shrank, and the fourth in which it reported declining revenue. The company has been hit by a downturn in the PC market.

Revenue for its fourth fiscal quarter, ended Feb. 1, declined 11 percent to US$14.3 billion, Dell said. Net income was $530 million, or $0.30 per share, down from $764 million, or $0.43 per share, a year earlier.

Revenue from desktop and laptop PCs, which account for about half Dell's business, declined 20 percent in the quarter. Sales from storage and services also fell from the year earlier. The only business unit to see growth was Dell's server and networking business, where sales were up 18 percent, Dell said.

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Hewlett-Packard is set to deliver a new blade that will quadruple the virtual desktops that can be deployed from one server compared to the company's previous offerings.

The HP ProLiant WS460c Gen8 blade server uses graphics processors to deliver virtual desktops, but adds a layer of virtualization on top of the GPUs to expand the number of virtual clients deployed from servers to client devices, said John Gromala, director of product marketing for Industry Standard Servers and Software at HP.

Virtual desktops are typically delivered to remote devices so that they can access centralized data and applications residing on the servers. An increasing number of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are being used for work, and there is more desire for workers to access enterprise data and applications beyond calendars, Gromala said.

Deploying more virtual desktops helps reduce the cost per virtual client by 60 percent while boosting work efficiency, Gromala said. The company is working with Nvidia in order to deliver more virtual clients, but did not talk about the technology being deployed.

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Intel has scaled back plans for the next version of Itanium in a move that raises questions about the future of the 64-bit server chip, used primarily in Hewlett-Packard's high-end Integrity servers.

In a short notice posted quietly to its website on January 31, Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be produced on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process, like the current version of Itanium, instead of on a more advanced process, as it had previously planned.

Intel has also shelved a plan announced only a few months ago to make Kittson socket-compatible with its Xeon server chips, which would have reduced costs for both Intel and HP, the main seller of Itanium systems. Kittson will now plug into the same socket as the existing Itanium 9300 and 9500 chips, Intel said.

"The modular development model, which converges on a common Intel Xeon/Intel Itanium socket and motherboard, will be evaluated for future implementation opportunities," Intel said.

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Dell’s decision to go private has led to mixed reaction from the company’s customers, who are watching developments closely as they consider the next steps in their product procurement plans.

Some of Dell’s customers think privatization is a good idea, while others are waiting for more details surrounding the company’s direction under new ownership. Some customers also have questions about the fate of PC operations as the company chases high-margin enterprise products, and about the impact of the deal on service and support.

Dell this week announced it was being purchased by Michael Dell and equity investor Silver Lake for $24.4 billion. The transaction includes a $2 billion loan from Microsoft and debt financing commitments from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets.

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IBM's Watson supercomputer outperformed humans in the televised game show "Jeopardy." Now the company is moving some of its underlying technologies from the supercomputer into new entry-level servers.

The company's new Power Express servers announced on Tuesday will integrate some hardware and software elements derived from Watson. The servers start at US$5,947, and IBM is targeting the new products at businesses with over 100 employees.

The new Power Express 710, 720, 730 and 740 servers include IBM's Power7+ chips, which were introduced in October. By lowering the price of the servers, IBM hopes to take on rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which sell large volumes of commodity servers based on x86 chips.

With Watson technologies, companies can use the new servers to analyze warehouses of data, and to answer complex queries with high levels of confidence. The technologies will provide insights into structured and unstructured data at a cheaper cost, said Steve Sibley, director of Power Systems offering management at IBM.

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A rugged server from NCS Technologies introduced on Friday can withstand drops, will work in extreme temperatures and can be deployed via parachute into crisis areas or war zones if needed.

The Bunker XRV-5241 is a 1U rack server designed for organizations such as the military and first responders that need servers in rugged environments. The server has been tested to meet U.S. Department of Defense specifications for environmental, temperature and shock requirements.

"This equipment, in a transit case, will likely be parachuted into service in tactical deployments," said John Callahan, director of marketing at NCST. The Bunker XRV-5241 can withstand a free-fall drop of around 1 meter, but for parachute deployment it needs to be packaged into the case for additional protection.

Servers are not known for their ruggedness, but many laptops such as Panasonic's Toughbook are tested to the U.S. military's ruggedness specifications and can withstand drops and resist the elements while keeping components and data intact. The server was designed to be ready for extreme cases such as remote military deployments and could also be used on a truck or a ship in a combat situation.

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Sophie Curtis from PCWorld sibling publication Techworld.com, contributed to this article .

Security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro have uncovered a piece of backdoor-type malware that infects Java-based HTTP servers and allows attackers to execute malicious commands on the underlying systems.

The threat, known as BKDR_JAVAWAR.JG, comes in the form of a JavaServer Page (JSP), a type of Web page that can only be deployed and served from a specialized Web server with a Java servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat. (See also "Security in 2013: The rise of mobile malware and fall of hacktivism.")

Once this page is deployed, the attacker can access it remotely and can use its functions to browse, upload, edit, delete, download or copy files from the infected system using a Web console interface. This is similar to the functionality provided by PHP-based backdoors, commonly known as PHP Web shells.

"Aside from gaining access to sensitive information, an attacker gains control of the infected system thru the backdoor and can carry out more malicious commands onto the vulnerable server," Trend Micro researchers said last week in a blog post.

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NEC's new high-end server contains swappable battery packs, intended to provide backup power without the need for an external uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in data centers.

The new rack-mounted server is part of NEC's main "Express5800" line. The company said the internal batteries will cut power use, outlast traditional UPS systems and allow for more compact data centers.

The rack-mountable server can hold up to two battery packs, although it ships with only one. When both are used, they can deliver 100 watts for 15 minutes and 30 seconds, or six minutes and 40 seconds with a single battery. The dual setup can provide power for 3 minutes and 40 seconds when the server is maxed out at 311 watts.

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With a future in ARM servers looming, Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced its fastest 16-core Opteron 6300 server chips as the company continues to enhance its x86 line-up.

The five new Opteron chips, code-named Abu Dhabi, are up to 40 percent faster on enterprise application workloads than the 1-year-old Opteron 6200 chips code-named Interlagos, which also had 16 cores, said John Williams, vice president for server marketing and business development at AMD. Depending on the workload, the performance boost could be as low as 7 percent.

The Opteron 6300 chips have clock speeds ranging from 1.8GHz to 3.5GHz, and the processors will be quicker at deploying virtual machines, Williams said. AMD is "heavily engaged" with virtualization partners like Red Hat and Microsoft to improve virtualization performance, Williams said.

The chips are designed for servers running public and private clouds, and for enterprise applications such as database and analytics programs.

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