Archive for April, 2008
April 21, 2008 at 10:26 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3740111
HP certainly dominates the worldwide blade server market. Out of last year’s almost $4 billion in overall blade server sales, HP accounted for about $2 billion.
“HP maintained the number 1 spot in the server blade market in 4Q07 with 47.7 percent revenue share,” said IDC analyst Jed Scaramella. “As the complexity and operational expenses of IT infrastructure continues to increase, a greater number of customers are turning to blade servers as a solution.”
Despite this position of strength, the HP blade development train rolls on with new products being a regular occurrence. The latest is the ProLiant BL260c, and the company is touting this box as the industry’s most power-efficient and affordable server blade.
“The ProLiant BL260c is priced 20 percent lower and is 64 percent more power-efficient than any other server blade,” said Steve Gillaspy, group marketing manager, HP BladeSystem (Palo Alto, Calif.).
HP claims this 1U model uses no more power than a coffee pot due to built-in Thermal Logic technologies designed to increase processing power while keeping watt consumption low. The quad-core Intel chip helps, too, of course. Up to two Xeon dual-core or quad-core (5400 and 5200 sequence) processors are available for a total of up to eight cores. These are supported by 12 MB of L2 cache and up to 24GB of ECC 667MHz DDR2 memory.
Very cool, an interesting article talking about the new HP BL260C server, it does look cool and is a great read, do check it out.
April 21, 2008 at 10:23 pm · Filed under Grid, blades
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1404133
Apr 21, 2008 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) — ESIGF | news | PowerRating | PR Charts — ESI Group, a supplier of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes, has announced that Audi has implemented its supercomputer to advance safety standards.
According to ESI, the new system is based on the company’s PAM-CRASH 2G simulation software and an HP Cluster Platform 3000BL system, providing 15.36 teraflop/s of computing performance for crash simulation models of Audi.
Very cool, check out this article talking about Audi using HP’s blade technology to provide it with a digital simulation solution, it does sound cool and it’s always good to see how the technology is being used. In this case it’s based on HP BL460c blades using infiband.
April 21, 2008 at 10:20 pm · Filed under Other things, virtualization, vmware
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/04/18/the-lies-of-it.aspx
Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.
A great read, it’s a topic that is regularly discussed whether you’re dealing with big or small customers. It’s a mixed thing, Consultants need to keep the customer needs and issues in mind, at the same time customers need to ask the right questions and do the research on the technology or solution that they want deployed. Related to this when speaking with a vendor or consultant:
- Establish the in-scope - what’s included in the price and what’s extra
- What are the responsibilites
One small business had called me up saying that they’d got half way through a virtualization project and been told “we’ve virtualized your infrastructure” by the consultant but when they asked where the data was, were told - “that’s extra”. It’s a dual relationship, the customer should have stipulated that the data would be migrated, but then the vendor should understand that there are some things you expect as part of a solution - the data when you virtualize the server is one of these things.
April 21, 2008 at 10:13 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=12447
HP recently announced that in the past 18 months, more than 50 Asia Pacific and Japan customers from have successfully migrated from legacy mainframe systems to HP Integrity systems to support mission critical IT environments. Companies moving to next-generation data centers from diverse industry sectors have replaced legacy systems, including IBM mainframes, with HP Integrity to minimize high hardware maintenance and software licensing costs.
Fueled by increased demand for HP Integrity and Integrity NonStop servers in Q4 2007, HP’s Intel Itanium (EPIC) processor-based server revenues grew 53.0 percent in Asia Pacific (excl. Japan) region(1). According to IDC, HP tied for the top position in the Asia/Pacific (inc. Japan) Unix server market in revenue terms, securing 33.0 percent market share measured in CYQ4, 2007. HP’s RISC & EPIC Unix server revenues grew 29.3 percent on a quarter-on-quarter basis in Q4 2007, underpinned by 23.8 percent growth in EPIC Unix. RISC Unix server revenues grew by 46.4 percent on a quarter-on-quarter basis, outperforming the market growth of 8 percent during the same period. HP Integrity servers represented the majority of HP’s Business Critical Systems revenue in Asia Pacific (Inc. Japan), with 77.0 percent share in Q4 2007 (2).
Very cool, this article illustrates the sales of Itanium based servers and also highlights the different solutions which have been deployed using Itanium based servers, an interesting read, check it out. Itanium might not be for everyone, but deployed in the right way (as with anything else) with the right layered applications/middle ware, they can be an effective solution.
April 21, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Other things
http://computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=7893&pubid=3&tab=Home&issueid=126
SINGAPORE, 17 April 2008—The financial services industry continued to lead all vertical markets in server revenue, as it accounted for 25.3 per cent of worldwide server revenue in 2007, according to Gartner. Total world server revenue in 2007 was US$54 billion.
The finance sector includes three major subsegments: investment services, banking and insurance. Global server revenue for the sector was US$13 billion.
The communications market was a distant second at 14.4 per cent, or US$7 billion. The government market was the third vertical, with 11.5 per cent of total server revenue. This amounted to US$6 billion.
In Hong Kong, financial services accounted for 43.8 per cent of Hong Kong server revenue in 2007. This is followed by the services sector which accounted for 15.2 per cent for the same period.
I wonder how much of this is from hardware refreshing projects, virtualization and consolidation projects as well as bringing online new services for existing and new markets? Related to this with the reported downturn in the finance sector, will this change? What about those banks that haven’t had the exposure that have been reported in the press? Might they continue their spending on IT, their investment?
April 21, 2008 at 10:03 pm · Filed under rackmounts
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400342&subSection=News
Fujitsu on Thursday introduced a line of high-performance servers powered by Intel (NSDQ: INTC)’s latest Itanium dual-core processor.
The Primequest 520A, 540A, and 580A servers are available with up to eight, 16, and 32 9100 series processors, respectively. The product line is expected to ship in May.
The servers are available with either open source Linux or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows Server. The systems are built for running databases, enterprise resource planning applications, and scientific computing.
The new products are updates of the midrange Primequest 520 model and the high-end 540 and 580 models. The three systems were introduced in July 2006.
Very cool, the more cross platform solutions we have for the end user, the more choice we have in terms of the processor and platform combinations which has to be a good thing for competition in the market and for the end user in finding the solution for them. That Fujitsu have updated their Itanium servers is very cool, I wonder if there will be a Fujitsu Itanium blade version as well some time soon?
April 21, 2008 at 10:02 pm · Filed under environment
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080417006342&newsLang=en
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), TechTurn and the National Recycling Coalition will host an Earth Day computer recycling event for consumers in the Washington metropolitan area.
The free event, to be held at Freedom Plaza downtown, is part of Dell’s ongoing commitment to educating consumers about responsible computer recycling options and keeping IT equipment out of landfills.
- Consumers can drive to the event and volunteers will unload equipment for recycling. Cars should enter from 13th Street, turning on to E Street.
- Washington, D.C. area residents can recycle any brand computer, monitor, printer and other computer equipment as well as cell phones and PDAs by dropping the items off at the event from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Consumers are advised to remove all data from computer hard drives and any removable media such as disks, PC cards, flash drives, CD-ROMs. Televisions, stereo equipment and other electronic appliances cannot be accepted.
- Dell completed a rollout of its global recycling program in December 2006 and offers consumers free and convenient recycling of Dell products, worldwide irrespective of product purchase. The company recovered more than 78 million pounds of equipment from customers for recycling in 2006.
This really is very cool, I’m a strong believer in recycling, the easier, the less ’stressful’ (real or perceived) that we can make it, the more it becomes ’standard’, anything we can therefore do to make it so has to be a good thing. That Dell had a recycling event is great news and furthers the recycling message which has to be a good thing.
Is the way forward in recycling computers/printers etc not to make it free at the point of use? That as a consumer I can call and have my computers/printers/scanners and devices collected and recycled? Individual vendors providing the service is great, but an industry wide standard provided by government/non-governmental or corporates, the option to ‘post’ or drop in technology for recycling might further the effort, make it more mainstream and reduce environmental impact through incorrect disposal?
April 21, 2008 at 9:54 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23180
The future is one standard of connectivity for servers and storage in the data center combined with high speed networks, courtesy of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol and10Gb/s Enhanced Ethernet.
Now, in the testing stage in selected enterprise sites before they will appear in OEM products in a year from now, the vendor’s new LightPulse LP21000 family of converged network adapters combines network and storage traffic under one cabling and switching infrastructure or fabric.
“It is the same drivers and management tools; so it is a seamless extension of Fibre Channel over Ethernet if you will,” stated Joe Gervais, senior marketing director at Emulex.
The result will be reduced data center complexity, management costs and power consumption, he stated.
Very cool, check out this article talking about Emulex’s LightPulse LP21000 Fibre Channel over Ethernet cards, they do sound cool. It will be interesting to see what the response is to Fibre Channel over Ethernet, I can certainly see the benefit of convergence of network and storage. We’ll have to see, do check it out.
April 21, 2008 at 9:50 pm · Filed under Societe Generale
http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/17/news/international/SocGen_ceo_stepsdown.fortune/?postversion=2008041716
PARIS (Fortune) — Daniel Bouton will step down as chief executive of Société Générale in May, although he’ll stay on as chairman, the French bank announced Thursday. Bouton, 58, is taking the fall for the bank’s failings in the rogue trading affair involving Jérôme Kerviel, a junior stock arbitrager who ultimately cost the bank $7.5 billion in net losses.
The bank’s announcement came just days after FORTUNE revealed that Bouton had decided not to mention anything about Kerviel or the gargantuan $75 billion open position he had taken in stock index derivatives at a board meeting on Jan. 20, the day he found out about the size of the position. It was only three days later, after the bank had liquidated that position and put in place an $8.5 billion capital increase, that Bouton called an emergency board meeting and disclosed what had happened.
Bouton’s silence was apparently motivated by concern about word leaking. But it’s surprising not just because the bank itself was severely threatened by the crisis - Kerviel’s position was almost double the bank’s equity - but also because the CEO himself is an authority in France on corporate governance. In 2002, he wrote an official report following the Enron scandal that urged French boards to be more transparent and play a larger role in decision-making, especially in tough times.
An interesting article talking about developments at Societe Generale, do check it out.
April 21, 2008 at 9:30 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/17/230329/data-centre-energy-consumption-not-an-it-priority.htm
A survey of firms by the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum shows that despite showing concern for making data centre operations more environmentally sound, few firms have any specific plans in place.
The survey shows that most IT managers give their operations failing grades in reducing energy consumption.
An interesting article and it highlights some interesting concepts. I wonder if this is a mixture of things, environmentally sound could suggest a number of things to different user communities, and specific plans for an environmentally sound data center could also mean different things to different people. At one end of the scale it could be the data center that’s wind and solar powered, with no kvm’s, operating using lights out functionality running virtualization technologies to provide the infrastructure. Is it not that data center energy consumption is a priority because it’s a limited resource? Am I adopting environmental processes/technologies to be more environmentally friendly or to stretch the life span of the data center, to keep deploying servers/instances or service for as long as possible before I have to move data centers or upgrade my existing one? We’ll have to see, do check it out.
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