Over the course of the last few days, IT Villains have attacked our website to prevent us from making more IT Heroes!!!

Do not fear, for help is here! 

I just noticed that newcomer 3Leaf Systems posted some very impressive SPECjbb benchmarks for their upcoming Dynamic Data Center servers, which has nabbed them the #1 spot in the overall SPECjbb list - beating the closest rival by a factor of 2 and setting a new world record.

I'm not normally one to get too excited about benchmarks, but what is interesting is the sheer game-changing performance characteristics of the platform, especially when you factor in the cost considering that the platform is based on industry standard hardware and software.

So, how far do we want to go with this virtualisation business? We have server, storage and now I/O virtualistion!

While virtualised I/O is not new (The hypervisors in VMware, XenServer and  IBMPowerVM all present virtual path mappings to physical resources), an appliance virtualising both network and storage I/O is.

Xsigo is not a well-known name in the virtualisation world, especially on this side of the Atlantic, but for a relative newcomer to the market they are turning quite a few heads with their I/O virtualisation technology.

In a move to re-assure existing IBM p570 and p590 customers, IBM earlier this week announced a statement of direction for those customers looking to upgrade to the new POWER7 based systems.

The new POWER7 processors from IBM are due to be released some time next year.

IBM is keen to stress the relatively simple upgrade path for those customers with exisitng POWER6/POWER6+ systems. No fork-lift upgrades will be required allowing for the preservation of existing serial numbers. The upgrade process will involve replacing the "Processor Books" and "System Controllers" of existing systems.