Archive for March, 2008

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143753-c,companynews/article.html

Dell will make significant investments in China to beef up the company’s regional presence, CEO Michael Dell said Friday.

Calling China one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Dell said his company would purchase US$70 billion of hardware components from Chinese companies between last year and next year. In 2006, Dell purchased about $18 billion in technology components and related products from suppliers in China.

Dell officials have stressed the importance of emerging markets like China and India for sustained growth. Dell last year signed up Chinese consumer electronics retailer Gome to sell its PCs. For the fourth quarter of 2008, the company reported a 36 percent rise in combined sales in the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, compared to a 17 percent increase in sales in the U.S.

Check out this article talking about Dell making significant investments in China. I wonder if this covers the range of Dell products, from the desktop for the home user, to industrial strength server/blade solutions - will there be a focus on open source products? Virtualization/Grid? We’ll have to see, sounds exciting particularly as I keep reading about the new possibilities there whether we’re talking about the number of mobile phones - all of which need content, billing as well as the infrastructure to make and receive calls.

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080318005443&newsLang=en and http://www.verari.com/bladeRack2_XM.asp
SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Verari Systems®, a premier developer of energy efficient data center and desktop consolidation platforms utilizing independent blade-based computing and storage solutions, today announced the introduction of the BladeRack® 2 XM computing platform. The newest addition to Verari’s BR2 X-Series is the company’s densest platform yet with support for 96 blades which represents 33% additional capacity and an industry leading 768 processing cores per platform.

The unveiling of the BR2-XM platform continues Verari’s tradition of setting the standard in enterprise computing by redefining data center power efficiency and server density. The BR2-XM platform is engineered to provide a stable compute environment while eliminating CPU thermal throttling behavior. This innovative thermal management solution enables a wide range of blade options running the fastest, hottest processors at maximum performance.

“The BR2-XM platform addresses the dense computing applications in the financial market, which require more compute capacity and energy efficiency. Each trading day is a perfect storm as the volume of data increases, the sophistication of algorithms and business processes grow. With the introduction of BR2-XM, Verari Systems will continue to be the industry leader in overall performance, performance per watt and price/performance,” said David B. Wright, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Verari Systems. “The continued innovation of our blade server platforms demonstrates our ability to deliver compelling blade-based compute and storage solutions that will provide our clients investment protection for years to come.”

Very cool any innovation in the blade platform is welcome, the more informed we are about what the different vendors offer, the more I can ask my vendor, “when will you do that (or something similar), what’s you’re equivalent”, it’s only by knowing what options there are, that we can make informed decisions about the infrastructure and drive innovation and competition in the market.

Interestingly, Verari seem to have improved the thermal management of their blade servers, which is very cool, I remember the main concern deploying high performance blade servers was the associated cooling/power requirements; the viewpoint being that you might typically deploy up to 5 enclosures in a rack to avoid such issues, anything that can be developed to aid this has to be a good thing.

http://www.itnewsonline.com/showstory.php?storyid=12098&scatid=8&contid=2

Fujitsu Ltd. announced that it has become a Contributor Member of The Green Grid, the first Japanese company to take a leadership role in the global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

The membership will help to promote Fujitsu’s initiatives to improve the energy efficiency of its data centers and its server and storage products, and support its overall environmental goal of preventing global warming through the reduction of IT-generated carbon dioxide emissions.

Very cool, Fujitsu joining The Green Grid should further innovation in the green message both in terms of the energy efficiency as well as the business benefits. Implementing energy efficient solutions can be a real enabler to your business, for example virtualization of the server estate not only allows a more dynamic infrastructure, abstracting the application from the hardware, it is also typically more energy efficient, considering that one midrange rack server or blade server might easily replace four or more virtual machines dependent on their configurations and application requirments.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=10248&cid=5

Manila, Philippines — IBM announces that it has won the “Most innovative use of VMware Virtual Infrastructure” award at VMworld 2008 Europe for its implementation of VMware desktop virtualization solutions by IBM Global Services Virtual Infrastructure Access (VIA) Services. Using virtual desktops, which are hosted in the datacenter and accessed from anywhere, organizations can provide security enhanced application and information access, improving availability to end users, while reducing cost and complexity.

The “Most innovative use of VMware Virtual Infrastructure” award is given to VMware partners that are first-to-market with industry-leading service solutions and who provide innovative technology and a comprehensive service wrap-around. IBM VIA Services provides clients with an integrated solution to assess, design, implement and manage virtual desktops, enabling employees, partners, and customers to access their desktop from thin clients.

Very cool and well done for IBM, virtualization of the desktop is becoming one of those topics of interest in terms of developing platforms to reduce the cost of supplying and supporting the desktop. A virtual desktop can be a great way of doing this, and allows more central approach, reducing support costs and hopefully bringing the benefits of virtualization, a more fluidic desktop infrastructure. Anything the virtualization vendors, partners and IBM can do to aid this, has to be a good thing for the virtual desktop platform and the industry.

http://gigaom.com/2008/03/21/coming-soon-the-cisco-blade-server/

The movement toward blade servers in the enterprise data center has been growing steadily for some time, backed by manufacturers like IBM and HP. But expect to soon see networking giant Cisco Systems enter this market as well, setting themselves up for a tense battle with blade server manufacturers for control of the enterprise data center.

Check out this great post talking about the chance of Cisco developing it’s own blade platform. It’s an interesting idea and I can certainly see where it would fit within Cisco’s data center 3.0 innovation. It would depend on a number of things, where it perceives revenue generation or market share, how a Cisco blade might fit within the Cisco family of products.

It could be something of interest for those proprietary network solutions, the one where I buy a carrier grade server, why not have a Cisco blade solution with the relevant networking equipment functionality built in for VOIP etc? We’ll have to see do check out the article, its an interesting read.