Archive for February, 2007
February 28, 2007 at 11:57 pm · Filed under vmware
http://continuitycentral.com/news03090.htm
SunGard Availability Services has unveiled its virtualization-based infrastructure and services initiative, which will extend its portfolio of information availability services to include additional virtualization- and automation-based IT recovery, end-user recovery, high availability and managed services. These services will provide organizations with a cost effective way to achieve recovery timeframes of less than four hours, as well as providing ‘capacity-on-demand’ for times when business situations require companies to scale up their usual operations for short-term requirements.
I’ve posted about how you could use virtualization in bcp, an example being vmware to virtualize particularly the stand alone, or legacy proliant platforms in order to save energy and space requirements for your bcp datacenter suite. It’s great to see that Sungard are offering something like this.
February 28, 2007 at 11:55 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Sun+Burns+Brightest+in+Latest+IDC+Server+Study/201913_1.aspx
In a year of comebacks for once-struggling Sun Microsystems, the company’s server revenue grew 15 percent in 2006, which jolted the company into a tie for third place among the top five vendors, according to the latest IDC study.
The survey, which IDC released on Feb. 26, showed Sun increasing its server revenue 24.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2006 compared with the same time the previous year. That quarter helped Sun collect $5.6 billion in server revenue for the whole year, which represented 10.8 percent of the marketplace.
In addition, the IDC report showed that Hewlett-Packard overtook IBM for the No. 1 spot in the blade market during the fourth quarter of 2006. However, for the year, IBM remained in the top spot with 40 percent of the blade market’s revenue compared with 37.4 percent for HP.
Very cool, competition does bring new possibilities to the customer, whether it’s Sun, IBM, or HP, the promotion of the blades as an infrastructure platform whether for consolidation or virtualization or as grid engines for a blade calculation farm.
February 28, 2007 at 11:51 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
http://www.dqchannels.com/content/reselleralert/107022705.asp
NEW DELHI
FEBRUARY 27, 2007
According to Gartner, the Indian server market has witnessed an excellent quarter as it annually grew by 23 percent in terms of the server revenue on the back of an overall shipment growth of six percent. With a shipment of 27,818 units, the Indian server market was pegged at $132.6 million during the last quarter of the year 2006 (Oct-Dec). As compared to last year, this quarter emerged as an excellent quarter with an annual revenue increase of 23 percent. As per the latest Gartner estimates, Indian server market has been sized at $532.2 million for calendar year 2006 with a shipment of 1,13,986 units thus registering annual revenue growth of 11.8 percent in 2006.
The market for servers appears to be growing at significant levels during last year, very cool. Check out this article it’s very interesting, it mentions that consolidation and virtualization account for some of this expenditure, and that blades are becoming more popular.
February 28, 2007 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, blades
http://www.dailytech.com/IBMs+NextGeneration+Supercomputer/article5389c.htm
IBM is developing a next-generation supercomputer that will become the world’s most powerful computer
IBM plans on building Roadrunner, a next-generation supercomputer that will be located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The computer will have a performance level of 1 petaflop, which is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Roadrunner will use a conventional cluster of 16,000 AMD Opteron processor cores alongside 16,000 Cell B.E. chips, with both chips working together to handle a share of the calculating work.
The Department of Energy contacted IBM in September about the need of a next-generation supercomputer that is able to sustain a speed of at least one petaflop. The computer will cost the Department of Energy $110 million over three years of development. The Opteron and Cell chip combination should make attempts to lower the overall cost of building the supercomputer interesting. According to IBM, the Cell B.E. processors will act as the workhorse, completing the major floating point calculations. The AMD Opterons will act as the system interface processors and as the transactional backbones between the nodes.
Very cool, interesting that they’re using the cell and amd blades, I suppose you put the cell ones at the back end and them amd in between for communication with the applications. Interesting to see what performance they get, and I wonder what technologies, operating systems they are using.
February 28, 2007 at 5:15 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/2/prweb507601.htm
London, England (PRWEB) February 28, 2007 — Building on the success of 2006, DatacenterDynamics returns to New York for a fifth year, on 20 March at the Hilton Hotel, Avenue of the Americas. The Conference is anticipated to be the largest ever gathering of US data center professionals (last year in New York over 480 senior data center professionals attended, this year more than 600 are expected).
As a focal point for end-users, consultants and solution providers, the DatacenterDynamics Conference & Expo has quickly established itself as New York’s premier gathering of professionals involved in the design, build and operational management of 24/7 mission critical IT facilities, from the datacenter to the LAN closet. It is an unrivalled education & networking opportunity for the industry, where the regular audience is characterized by senior representatives of the financial sector, trading firms, service enterprises and other Fortune 500 companies operating in the New York Metropolitan area.
Great to see a datacenter forum in London, these can be very effective mediums in terms of knowledge transfer, seeing what other people are doing in the datacenter space, to respond to the rising cost of power, the carbon factor, datacenter space issues etc. I’d love to attend, it would be great to see what the vendors are doing to help with this, as well as see what companies are doing in terms of process, or procedures to continue supplying IT and services to the business within the current datacenter constraints.
Will anyone talk about the carbon footprint? In the UK some companies are asking their hosting companies what the carbon footprint of their datacenter is for their corporate and social responsibility statements.
February 28, 2007 at 5:08 pm · Filed under Grid, blades, rackmounts
http://www.verivox.de/News/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=45191&pm=1
(pressebox) Stuttgart, 28.02.2007 - IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today new initiatives designed to make it easier for clients to use “clusters†of servers for high-performance computing tasks. The company is investing in development, marketing and sales-channel programs that leverage IBM’s technology prowess in high-end supercomputing and deep experience delivering industry-focused solutions.
Excellent, anything offering solutions to make high performance computing easier from an implementation, support or billing strategy, will encourage more business opportunities for the vendors in this market. Businesses have been seeing the benefits from grid and high performance computing, whether it’s an oracle cluster running reports in half the normal time, or risk reports being delivered in a faster, more accurate or effective way to minimize my risk exposure.
February 28, 2007 at 4:17 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1274239.html
Allinea Software Announces Support for IBM Cell Platform
Warwick, United Kingdom, February 19, 2007 –- Allinea Software today announced plans to offer both its Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) and its Optimization and Profiling Tool (OPT) on the IBM QS20 BladeCenter Cell Broadband Engine platform. In addition to the powerful features that DDT and OPT offer on other multi-core and multi-processor platforms, new features that are specifically designed for the IBM QS20 BladeCenter Cell Broadband Engine will be integrated into its products to further enhance the development environment.
The new Cell blades do look very cool, I’d love to see what we could do with them, if the application were written/coded in the right way, there could be real benefits over the x86 range of servers. Anything to aid with the development of code for the platform has to be a good thing.
February 28, 2007 at 3:56 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2184164/green-beats-red-tape
Despite plentiful meetings and conferences, there is still little near-term prospect of state-backed incentives to reduce datacentre power consumption. Thankfully, however, enlightened self-interest on behalf of IT vendors and buyers is likely to bypass the need for red tape.
Business needs coupled with energy costs, corporate social responsibility are causing businesses to wake up to the carbon footprint, to the datacenter challenges and change the way they use their IT, looking at virtualization and consolidation are examples of this. The greengrid should help with this process as well.
February 28, 2007 at 12:58 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
http://www.whatpc.co.uk/vnunet/news/2184244/server-sales-break-dotcom-boom
Server sales reached $52.3bn in 2006, the highest level of overall sales since the market peaked in 2000, according to new data from analyst firm IDC.
The new sales record is different from the buying spree on which companies embarked at the turn of the millennium, when they loaded up on low-cost industry standard servers.
The IDC report indicated that revenue growth in mid-range and high-end servers outpaced growth of volume systems for the first time in 10 years.
Very cool, server sales seem to be doing well, the newer energy efficient servers from Dell/Sun and the other vendors has helped as have the demand for blade servers. I suspect that some virtualization and consolidation projects are also contributing to demand for servers as companies try to purchase and supply their IT more efficiently and effectively.
February 28, 2007 at 12:54 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/26/HNgreengrid_1.html
The IT industry’s thirst for energy is growing exponentially, far outpacing the supply of reliable, clean power. Now a group of leading IT firms has banded together to try to head off an impending energy crisis in the datacenter.
Eleven enterprise heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel, AMD, Rackable Systems, and VMWare announced Monday that they have formed a non-profit group called The Green Grid to drive new metrics, technology standards, and best practices for curbing power consumption.
Robust growth in the IT sector and in companies’ use of technology is leading to an acute power shortage, according to analyst firm Gartner. Half the world’s datacenters will run out of power by the end of 2008, Gartner estimates. That means companies face swelling utility bills as they struggle to keep their servers cool and humming.
Very cool, I hope that it can start aiding CIO’s and datacenter hosting organizations in working out better datacenter design for the future, and what small changes can be made to either the infrastructure or the datacenter to be more energy efficient. Being energy efficient is good for business, and remember it’s part of your corporate and social responsibility and is related to your carbon footprint.
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