DORA Article 30: what UK financial services firms need in their ICT third-party contracts
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) came into force across the EU in January 2025. UK-headquartered firms with EU subsidiaries, EU-licensed entities or EU client-facing services are in scope — and the UK regula…
BIOS/UEFI power & performance profiles: tuning servers for throughput or efficiency (UK 2026)
Most servers ship on a balanced firmware profile that is nobody's optimum - it leaves latency on the table for performance workloads and burns watts you do not need on idle ones. With UK electricity among the most expens…
Intel Xeon 6 for UK server buyers: P-cores, E-cores and refresh timing
Intel Xeon 6 is the first server generation in years where the headline question is not how many cores you can buy, but which kind of core you want. The line splits into Performance-cores for latency and per-core through…
Specifying a server for ERP workloads - SAP, Dynamics and Sage (UK 2026)
An ERP system is the server that runs the business, and it has a distinctive profile: it is memory-bound, intolerant of downtime, and almost never a single tier. SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Sage all share these trait…
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN migration: the playbook for UK enterprises moving from Viptela
Cisco renamed Viptela SD-WAN to Catalyst SD-WAN in 2023 — but the platform underneath continues to evolve in two divergent directions: the long-term IOS-XE Catalyst SD-WAN platform that Cisco is investing in, and the ori…
SXM vs PCIe GPUs and EDSFF storage explained: AI hardware form factors
Two acronyms decide how an AI or storage server is physically built, and both confuse buyers who are otherwise comfortable reading a spec sheet. SXM versus PCIe is the question of how a GPU plugs into the system and how …
Proxmox VE and Hyper-V host hardware: what to buy when you leave VMware (UK)
Plenty has been written about whether to leave VMware after Broadcom's pricing changes. Far less has been written about the hardware question that follows the decision: the server you specified for vSphere is not automat…
Specifying a Veeam backup repository: hardware for a hardened, fast-restore target (UK 2026)
Plenty of guides tell you which backup software to buy. Far fewer tell you how to build the box the backups land on — and a badly-specified repository is where slow restores and broken immutability come from. This is how…
What is a DPU (SmartNIC)? Offload, isolation and vSphere DPU explained
A DPU, or data processing unit, is the third programmable processor that has quietly appeared inside modern servers, alongside the CPU and the GPU. In its more familiar guise it is a SmartNIC: a network card with its own…
Specifying an Active Directory domain controller without over-building it (UK 2026)
The domain controller is the server people reflexively over-build. It sits at the centre of everything, so the instinct is to throw a big two-socket box at it - which is almost always the wrong call. Active Directory is …
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