What is a hot spare in RAID? (2026 guide)
A hot spare is a standby drive that automatically takes over when a member fails, so the rebuild starts immediately instead of waiting for a human. Size arrays with spares in the RAID calculator.…
Veeam vs Rubrik vs Commvault in 2025 — which backup platform should UK IT teams pick?
Veeam, Rubrik and Commvault are the three platforms UK IT leaders most often shortlist when modernising backup. They overlap heavily on paper. In practice they make sharply different trade-offs — and …
How to pick a UK colocation data centre: the procurement framework
UK colocation is a mature market — Equinix, Digital Realty, Telehouse, Pulsant, ARK, IONOS, Custodian and 20+ regional operators. The right choice depends on connectivity needs, power density, geograp…
AMD EPYC Turin (9005 series) for UK buyers: wait or refresh from Genoa?
AMD's EPYC 9005 series, codenamed Turin, lands on the same SP5 socket as the Genoa 9004 parts before it - and that one fact reframes the whole buying decision. When a new generation drops into your ex…
Multi-node twin servers explained: shared-infrastructure density done right (UK 2026)
When you need many servers in as few rack units as possible, discrete boxes start to waste space, power and money on duplicated infrastructure. Multi-node twin servers answer that by packing several i…
How RAID parity works (RAID 5 & 6 explained)
Parity is the clever maths that lets RAID 5 and RAID 6 rebuild a failed drive without keeping a whole second copy. Here's how it works — then see the capacity and rebuild trade-offs in the RAID calcul…
Lenovo ThinkSystem SD and SE series: dense multi-node and edge servers (UK 2026)
Mainstream buyer guides focus on the 1U and 2U rack servers most organisations buy, but Lenovo's ThinkSystem range has two specialist families that solve very different problems: the SD series, which …
Dell PowerEdge R670 buyer's guide: a single-socket 1U for edge and core roles (UK 2026)
The default server purchase is a dual-socket box, and for a great many workloads that default now costs more than it should. The Dell PowerEdge R670 is a single-socket 1U built on Xeon 6, and modern s…
How many CPU cores does your server actually need? (UK 2026)
More cores is the default instinct when speccing a server, and it is frequently wrong. Core count is one variable - and on its own it tells you very little about whether a server will be fast for your…
What is RAID? A plain-English guide (2026)
RAID combines several disks into one array so they go faster, survive a drive failure, or both. Here is what it means in plain English — then size any level in the RAID calculator.…
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