The Enterprise Engineering Center Blog

Free eBook: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2

EEC — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:31:00 GMT

A great new book on the new features and refinements in Windows Server 2008 R2 is available in the Microsoft download center. It’s called Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 and is targeted primarily at Windows server administrators who are responsible...(read more)

Benchmarking Exchange 2010 on Fusion IO solid state drives

EEC — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:50:00 GMT

During a recent engagement with Siemens SWAT team we were able to benchmark Fusion IO cards in their exchange environment and used JetStress 2010. The server used was an HP 385 G5 running Windows 2008 R2. Below are the storage performance results from...(read more)

Samba's Great DRS Success

EEC — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:49:00 GMT

Last week 5 Samba developers once again came to the EEC for to do some interop work. This time around they were going to be working with the Directory Replication Service (DRS) with the aim of moving from 'Samba4 to Samba4' replication to 'Samba4 and...(read more)

Scale testing the world's largest PKI, all on WS08/R2 and Hyper-V

EEC — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:31:00 GMT

This week, we’ve been in the EEC doing our scale testing on the world’s largest PKI, issuing 100s of millions of certificates from 100s of CAs to devices around the world. The entire design is built on WS08R2 Hyper-V and WS08/WS08R2 CAs. To simulate one...(read more)

Hyper-V Support, Performance and Load Tools

EEC — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:05:00 GMT

During one of our engagements with Tuev Nord , (one of the world’s largest technical service providers of the Mobility, Industrial Services, International, Natural Resources and Training and Human Resources fields), the Windows Server Hyper-V feature...(read more)

Microsoft’s “Redmond Ridge 1” Now Open

EEC — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:08:00 GMT

For those folks that like facility news, yesterday Microsoft’s Managed Lab Services team gave a small group of reporters and bloggers the first external tour of the their new data center in Redmond, aka Redmond Ridge 1. Artist’s rendering of Redmond Ridge...(read more)

Dell Increases Footprint at the EEC

EEC — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:17:00 GMT

Last week 20 new Dell™ PowerEdge™ R710 servers arrived and are quickly being brought online for a customer engagement occurring in the next couple weeks. These servers contain Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® X5550 CPU’s, 24GB memory, eight 300GB SAS HDDs, and...(read more)

Customers testing on 256 Processor Superdome

EEC — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:19:00 GMT

Recently I was able to work with BWIN, the world’s largest online sports-betting and gaming provider, at the EEC while they tested the scaling of their workload on the world’s largest Windows Server, a HP Superdome with 128 cores and 256 threads, and...(read more)

More HP ProLiant DL380 G6’s Arriving

EEC — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:31:00 GMT

While I was on vacation a couple weeks ago we received 10 new HP ProLiant® DL380 G6's equipped with dual Intel® Xeon® X5570 CPU’s, , 24GB memory, dual port 8Gbps fiber channel adapter, 2 146GB 15K SAS drives and dual power supplies. These were the 1 st...(read more)

New IBM Storage Comes to the EEC

EEC — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:44:00 GMT

This week we just completed installing a new IBM XIV® Storage System: Model 2810 in san-alley. Ours is configured with 180 1TB SATA drives, and 15 modules; a data module consists of one Intel® Xeon® Quad-core 64-bit CPU, 8 GB fully buffered DIMM RAM....(read more)

UC Releases OCS R2 Site Resiliency White paper

EEC — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:51:00 GMT

Earlier this year the Office Communications Group (OCG) approached the EEC and our Partners ( HP , F5 and Shunra ) to help them build an environment where they could perform the necessary testing to create this much needed white paper. This was a challenging...(read more)

Latest Lizard results on Rhiannon – 90%+ on 512 cores and 5.15 TFlops!

EEC — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:15:00 GMT

The latest Lizard results on Rhiannon came in over the weekend. On 64 nodes of 2.66 GHz Dual socket Nehalems (Turbo mode on), we achieved 5.15TFlops out of peak performance 5.72 TFlops (2.8*4*8*64), still north of 90%. Needless to say, we feel pretty...(read more)

Sun releases Virtualizing Windows on Sun Ray Thin Client White Paper

EEC — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:24:00 GMT

As part of the expansion of the EEC, our team looked at a way to improve the customers’ experience of accessing their virtualized environments to perform their testing while at the EEC or from a remote location. We have accomplished this with our VDI...(read more)

Rhiannon has landed!! – The new IBM iDataPlex based Windows HPC benchmarking cluster is operational

EEC — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:27:00 GMT

We are excited to unveil the name for our new Windows HPC benchmarking cluster – Rhiannon: “ Rhiannon. This stunning name has never cracked the U.S. top 500, despite the Fleetwood Mac song of this name that hit the charts in the 1970s. In Welsh mythology,...(read more)

Nehalem HPC Cluster Installation Close to Finished

EEC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:05:00 GMT

The servers are in the racks and the final configuration of them is being completed and will be ready for use once the EEC comes back online July 20 th . The IBM folks have been great to work with and we appreciate their support. If your company is interested...(read more)