Archive for October, 2007
October 31, 2007 at 10:17 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns102907-story01.html
Egenera has been a pioneer in the areas of blade server design and server virtualization and systems management since it was founded seven years ago. Up until now, if you wanted to use Egenera’s PAN Manager virtualization management tools, you had to buy Egenera’s BladeFrame platform. But soon, that will change. Egenera announced today that it will be making its future PAN Manager Release 6 software available to OEMs so they can license it and sell it for their own server, storage, and peripherals.
I know what many of you are thinking. Another blade server pioneer, RLX Technologies, delivered the first commercial blade servers to the market in 2001, way ahead of the whole power and cooling issue than many server vendors since it chose the low-power Transmeta X86 processors for its blades. But even after expanding to more powerful X86 processors, by the end of 2004, RLX hired a new chief executive officer with deep experience in the software business, and then soon announced it was killing its hardware business. And it was only a few months later that RLX’s Control Tower software disappeared in an asset acquisition inside of Hewlett-Packard to be heard of again only as a set of management tools that HP deployed on its BladeSystem machines running Linux.
This is not how the Egenera story is going to go, says Mike Thompson, the president and chief executive officer at the company. Egenera has no plans of abandoning its BladeFrame hardware business–not in the slightest. And for good reason. According to Thompson, in 2006, Egenera’s sales rose by in excess of 30 percent to above $100 million. (Egenera is a privately held company with backing from venture capitalists, and has not yet gone public so the company does not provide any more specific details on its sales.) As for 2007, Egenera is adding between 20 and 30 new accounts each quarter, and it could do substantially better than that in the fourth quarter, helped in part though an OEM agreement that has Fujitsu-Siemens peddling BladeFrames in the EMEA market. So breaking PAN Manager loose from BladeFrame sales is not about not having a healthy, profitable, and growing server business.
Very cool, it will be interesting to see how Egenera does in the near future, by licensing its software available to OEMs, the company can get exposure in terms of blade and system management, giving it two or more potential revenue streams, very cool. Let’s not forget as you start scaling up your infrastructure, reaching the hundreds or thousands of servers, the issue is not so much component failures, it’s system management, deployments, asset/inventory management, patch revisions and everything else.
October 31, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Grid, data caching
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1863711.html
BEAVERTON, Ore., Oct. 30 — GemStone Systems, the leading provider of distributed data management and virtualization solutions, today announced GemFire Enterprise 5.1, a core component of its high-performance, enterprise data fabric (EDF). The new GemFire Enterprise 5.1 release serves as a distributed operational data management infrastructure that sits between clustered application processes and back-end data sources to provide very low-latency, predictable, high-throughput data sharing and event distribution. By managing data in-memory, GemFire Enterprise 5.1 enables extremely high-speed data sharing that turns a network of machines into a single, logical data management unit or a data fabric.
GemFire Enterprise 5.1 introduces an advanced set of technical features to deliver powerful, end-to-end scalability and performance improvements. By augmenting native C++/C# caching capabilities, GemFire Enterprise 5.1 provides highly available asynchronous cache update notifications to ensure clients are protected against server failures.
Very cool, GemStone’s solution around a data management platform is an interesting solution, coupling that with a caching solution enhances the GemStone value proposition further. I’m off to take a look..
October 31, 2007 at 7:52 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,209722.shtml
TORONTO, and MARLBOROUGH, Mass., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ — Platform Computing announced today it has acquired the Scali Manage business from Massachusetts-based Scali Inc. Scali Manage(TM) is an integrated and flexible High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster management and monitoring system. This strategic acquisition supports Platform’s vision to be the partner of choice for HPC infrastructure software worldwide. The Scali Manage product complements Platform’s existing HPC offerings and extends Platform’s products’ cluster and grid management capabilities.
While the use of clusters and grid infrastructure is on the rise, the integration and management of these systems remains complex. Products such as Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS)* and Scali Manage have been developed specifically to improve performance, simplicity, and lower the support cost necessary to operate a HPC infrastructure. With the acquisition of Scali Manage, Platform will build upon the success of Platform OCS by integrating components of both technologies into a best-of-breed product offering.
Very cool, it will be interesting to see what new products or solutions come from this new acquisition. Grid solutions can be a very effective and efficient way of achieving your processing/performance computing requirements particularly in the risk/credit type applications like Calypso etc.
October 31, 2007 at 7:49 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell1_v2.html
The Cell concept was originally thought up by Sony Computer Entertainment inc. of Japan, for the PlayStation 3. The genesis of the idea was in 1999 when Sony’s Ken Kutaragi [Kutaragi] “Father of the PlayStation†was thinking about a computer which acted like Cells in a biological system. A patent was applied for listing Masakazu Suzuoki and Takeshi Yamazaki as the inventors in 2002 (the first version of this article covered this patent [Patent] ).
The architecture as it exists today was the work of three companies: Sony, Toshiba and IBM. Sony and Toshiba previously co-operated on the PlayStation 2 but this time the plan was more ambitious and went beyond chips for video games consoles. The aim was to build a new general purpose processor for a computer. With that in mind IBM was brought in as their expertise is in computer design.
Do check out this site, it’s got a lot of information on the Cell processor, useful if you’ve been thinking about or wanting to know more information about this processor which is available in the IBM QS20 blade server. The processor continues to get good commentary, the challenge being coding your application to be optimized for the platform, (as with any other processor).
October 31, 2007 at 2:00 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202201558&subSection=Systems+Management
The blade server wars are heating up, and this time the battlefield is the small and mid-sized businesses, whose specific needs and volume potential have led market leaders Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) to tailor specific new platforms to meet their requirements.
IBM since June has been touting its BladeCenter S platform, which has a Dec. 18 roll-out scheduled and is targeted specifically at SMBs. Hewlett-Packard last month introduced a new blade server chassis dubbed “Shorty” that the company claims will provide mid-size companies with an “easy-to-configure data center in box.”
The efforts to provide mid-size businesses with tailored blade platforms represent something of a “catch-up” effort for IBM and HP, which both were caught by surprised at the high level of server blades into data centers of medium-sized businesses, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, in an interview.
It will be interesting to see how sales of blades particularly the small business blade solutions sell in the small/medium business market. Do check out this article, it’s an interesting read.
October 31, 2007 at 1:40 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1937864,00.asp
Intel has taken the wraps off of a new, low-power, dual-core Xeon chip for blade servers, the first of three new server chips it will roll out in coming weeks.
The chip maker on March 12 said it had begun shipping its Xeon LV chip. The Xeon LV is Intel’s first blade server-oriented processor to offer dual-cores. But it also promises to be stingy on power, meeting the needs of the most energy-conscious customers.
The company derived it from its Core processor family, sometimes referred to by the code-name Yonah, which includes single-core Core Solo and dual-core Core Duo notebook processors.
Very cool, the low power Xeon will help with the energy footprint of the blade, it will be interesting to see how they perform, considering that with lower voltage processors, we can deploy more blades for similar overall performance.
October 31, 2007 at 1:28 pm · Filed under Other things, environment
http://www.domain-b.com/companies/companies_s/sun/20071029_consortium.html
New Delhi: Sun Microsystems, in collaboration with APC-MGE, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hitachi Data Systems and Wipro Infotech today announced a new eco consortium to address the growing issues of limited power, space, and energy, in a climate of increasing demand for performance and utilization. The consortium is part of Sun Microsystems’ new Eco Innovation Initiative designed to enable customers to tackle the data centre eco issues of cost savings and energy efficiency.
The alliance will edify customers on technology infrastructure, practices and methodologies that can help them cut costs, use less space, improve performance and efficiency and “green” their business on their own.
APC-MGE, a leading provider of global, end-to-end solutions for real-time infrastructure has been a longstanding proponent of an energy efficient environment. It will provide know-how of data centre infrastructure architecture as a potential solution to address power and cooling issues, wherein AMD will offer its advanced energy efficient computing technologies which will help customers reduce business energy costs substantially.
Very cool, I wonder what innovations this will bring in terms of the technology, best practice and methodology. It’s always good to see what recommendations people have for using the technology to see if they could help me with my projects, we’ll see.
October 30, 2007 at 11:48 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.bladewatch.com/2006/10/27/
So the blog is officially one year old (and a bit) that’s 2262 posts (so feedburner tells me).
So what’s next for bladewatch?
Well the coverage continues as does my commitment to the blog, it’s been a learning experience for me both in terms of writing and learning about new technology as well as somewhere to think out loud and keep myself up to date.
I’ve been speaking with our web guys to work out if we should improve the site design.
I’m building a directory of companies that you can speak to in areas that we cover in the blog, we’re putting this together as we speak I want to continue the coverage, the best practice notes/comments, and hopefully get that meet up organized.
In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or technologies we should cover, do feel free to get in touch with me at any time, martinmacleod@mac.com.
October 30, 2007 at 11:04 pm · Filed under Other things, datacenter
http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/0,39024649,39168991,00.htm and http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0321243.htm
Data centre chiefs are struggling with staff shortages, more work to do and minimal increases in budgets.
According to research from Symantec, the biggest challenges for data centre managers are tough internal service-level agreements, continuing data centre expansion and staffing issues.
Two-thirds of respondents said formal internal service-level agreements exist in their organisation - although 51 per cent admitted having more difficulty meeting those demands in the last two years.
More than two-thirds (69 per cent) of them said their data centres are growing at least five per cent per year, while 11 per cent reported 20 per cent growth or more. But the average budget increase in the last two years is a modest seven per cent, which adjusted for inflation means data centre budget growth has “been minimal during the past five years”, said Symantec.
Is it not that more and more data center managers are finding that the we’re reaching capacity in terms of space, power and cooling; as well as the demand for reporting on the data center, on managing the data center information is becoming more important. The concept that a business person could call up and ask “what space and power does the derivatives application use”, without understanding that we might have a list of servers, of assets in the data center, but it might be a manual process linking those systems back to the logical business units or applications. Not to mention the need for data center teams to understand the power, the cooling as well as the electrical aspects of the data center. An interesting read, do check it out.
October 30, 2007 at 10:56 pm · Filed under datacenter
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9044578
October 29, 2007 (IDG News Service) — BOSTON - Wachovia is working on a project of staggering scope: A 3-D map of the firm’s data-center operations.
The effort has been underway for about eight months, said Jacob Hall, a Wachovia vice president and head of the company’s platform design and data center, technology products group.
To generate the 3-D models, the financial services company is using geospatial data and also partnering with a pair of vendors, Tideway Systems and Intepoint, as well as the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, which has a visualization center.
Very cool, data center management remains an important transversal service, something that can be viewed by the CIO, the management teams as well as the IT. Managing the access, who has access to which parts of the data or the whole data center, who manages the data and how we link it to the business line, the application will remain the challenge.
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