Bladewatch.com

Daily Finance

Oracle (ORCL) is in the server business now. So is IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). But these four companies are fairly evenly matched. HP has annual revenue of over $100 billion. So does IBM. Oracle’s is less at $22 billion, but it has one of the highest operating margins in the software industry. Cisco’s operating margins are nearly as good. And, all four have market caps in the $85 billion to $135 billion range. They all also have highly diversified businesses.

The one other large company in the server business, Dell (DELL), has almost none of the advantages of the rest. Its market cap is only $20 billion, a sign that the market does not like its prospects.

Dell had revenue of $61 billion last year, but tiny margins. Its operating income for the period was only $3.2 billion. Dell does have scale in the PC business. It is the No. 2 PC manufacturer in the world. Dell falls behind HP and IBM in global server market share, and just ahead of Sun (JAVA). With Oracle’s financial and marketing services, Sun has a good chance to step that share up after it becomes part of the larger enterprise software company. 

I was talking with a colleague about this, you see I think Dell buying Sun would have been a great deal. You see Dell is already doing well in the SME and increasingly moving into the enterprise, with this in mind, would having not had Sun given them greater experience in the industrial strength type server market, given them more exposure in those start-ups/internet companies, you use Sun servers? Great, why not try our Dell laptop/desktops? That said it will be interesting to see how the Oracle/Sun deal goes ahead and what enterprise and range of products/services will be available going forward, also what goes on with MySQL?

Share and Enjoy

Vmware

PALO ALTO, CA, April 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice. 

As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 4 will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment.  Any application – an existing enterprise application or a next-generation application – runs more efficiently and with guaranteed service levels on VMware vSphere 4.  For enterprises, VMware vSphere 4 will bring the power of cloud computing to the datacenter, slashing IT costs while dramatically increasing IT responsiveness.  For hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures.  Over time, VMware will support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling “private” cloud environments that span multiple datacenters and/or cloud providers.

This is great news, being able to create your own internal cloud computing solution using VMware, I’ll need to read up more about it. I see there are significant performance and scalability improvements with the new vSphere 4, which is always great to see, anything we can do to extend the possibilities with the virtual infrastructure, to onboard more applications and workloads has to be a good thing. Building your own internal cloud could be a very effective way of delivering the infrastructure, that I provide a shared virtual infrastructure and dynamically allocate the resources that are needed as appropriate in line with the business need. I’m off to read up more, I wonder if there are further enhancements in terms of system management and reporting?

Share and Enjoy

HP.com

HP today unveiled new solutions within its Adaptive Infrastructure (AI) portfolio that fundamentally change the way technology is used to deliver business services, while also reducing overall infrastructure costs and data center complexity.⁽¹⁾

HP BladeSystem Matrix (Matrix) is the industry’s first converged software, server, storage and networking platform that automates service delivery for the data center. HP Matrix Orchestration Environment provides a unified management interface to rapidly design, deploy and optimize the application infrastructure.

Together, these offerings create an integrated pool of resources that operate in both physical and virtual environments, creating the first truly business-ready infrastructure.

This powerful combination dramatically simplifies complex infrastructure tasks such as disaster recovery, capacity planning, consolidation and provisioning. As a result, companies can save nearly 80 percent in operational costs and realize payback in as little as eight months, with a potential return on investment in three years of over 300 percent.⁽²⁾

Through a self-service portal, Matrix provides chief information officers with a push button approach to accelerating the provisioning of the infrastructure for applications. It also dynamically assigns resources to meet the needs of the business in minutes versus weeks or months. Resources are assigned to requests as needed, and then returned to the pool once the service requirements are completed, optimizing utilization of the infrastructure.

I’m genuinely excited about the concept. Anything we can do to empower the end user community to orchestrate, to give the end user great control and see IT as an enabler to their business has to be a good thing. That as an end user I can provision servers in line with my business requirements helps illustrate IT as an enabler to business, allows IT to focus on strategy, to service improvement, managing and identifying longer term issues, application memory leaks, issues with the infrastructure which might need optimization. This need not be a threat to roles in the IT world, it’s simply a switch of your server guy from installing Windows to creating Windows builds, to server engineering and greater time to add value to the business teams, a move from the nuts and bolts to the bigger picture.

There will be comments, we can achieve similar end results using a mixture of different products, that the best results are achieved when using the range of products and technologies that are bundled in with the HP product suite. However, let us not detract from two things, firstly that HP have brought together a range of technologies to enable their customers to do this ‘out of the box’ using one interface, secondly, can we as an industry not agree that going forward this kind of solution, this kind of way of working is where we should be moving towards?  Should we not be working with the end user community to provide them with the tools they need? By offering the option to provision or rebuild a server, do we not reduce the delays to excellence? Do we not illustrate what could be achieved if we had the right investment, the right business buy in? In effect does this kind of concept whether it’s Altiris with IBM blades and networks guy configuring the blade switches or BladeSystem Matrix, not show how IT can deliver when the application and the infrastructure are in step, what we can achieve with the first step towards the next generation infrastructure? What could we achieve with grid? With Virtualization and cloud?

Share and Enjoy

ARS Technica

In spite of the fact that virtualization has officially been hot for well over two years, it’s still fairly new to many businesses. Indeed, if the number and regularity of threads in the Ars forums discussing first-time virtualization deployments is any indication, there are plenty of businesses in categories ranging from SMB all the way up to the enterprise that are still just getting started with virtualization. And again, if the Ars forums are any indication, many first-time virtualization deployers are learning many of the same lessons. So wouldn’t it be great, we thought, if we could distill the collective wisdom of regulars in The Server Room, our forum dedicated to servers and datacenters, into an article that could help others avoid common pitfalls and blunders in virtualization deployments?

I’ve written about best practice or issues to consider in the virtualization space, it’s always good to see what people have to say on the subject, do check it out.

Share and Enjoy

CIO

 April 23, 2009  — Computerworld Australia — IT spending in infrastructure and operations projects across Australia are expected to remain healthy in 2009 according to new research by Gartner.

According to the research firm, IT projects remain a priority amongst most Australian companies, including virtualisation and green IT projects. But despite this, a quarter of companies surveyed reported that they had cancelled IT projects due to the global financial crisis.

“IT infrastructure remains the biggest area for IT spending within Australian organisations and it also represents the biggest opportunity to drive operational efficiencies and minimise costs,” Gartner managing vice president Matthew Boon said.

The survey showed that IT hardware investments, such as client computing, printing devices, storage and servers, is expected to stay the same.

An interesting article and we’ll have to see, this tends to be a sector thing, as one sector does badly, another tends to do not so badly. At the same time, those longer term infrastructure projects that we’ve been buying into, virtualization, data center consolidation should all create opportunities. We’ll have to see how things go for the rest of the year, I keep hearing that things in May/June are going to pick up in the UK – here’s hoping so for all concerned.

Share and Enjoy

Green Tech Media

Forget about cutting-edge research into more efficient information technology, and start with using the IT that you have more efficiently.

That’s the simple strategy that the United Kingdom is taking to cutting its government IT energy footprint, John Suffolk, the nation’s chief information officer, said Thursday in San Jose.

That includes steps as simple as using fewer printers per employee, making sure those printers print on both sides of the paper, he said.

But Suffolk also gave a plug to using thin clients in lieu of PCs to cut energy use – welcome words, no doubt, to the executives at thin client maker Wyse Technology, which hosted the talk by Suffolk and California CIO Teri Takai.

“For the love of me, I can’t understand why we persist on having a big lump of lead on the desk” for every government employee, Suffolk said, using a less-than-generous description of the modern PC.

An interesting article talking about the Green IT concept, how the government is addressing the amount of power it uses to provide services using IT. I see it mentions the thin client concept, it’s a great way of reducing the end users’ carbon footprint, in most cases a thin client would provide everything the end user needs at a lower cost. The only barriers to entry I see at the moment having spoken with people are licensing costs coupled with the fixed cost scenario of the desktop function. As inflexible as the desktop can be, it works, it’s a fixed cost, we know every year the cost of the desktop function, it’s handled by someone else, all I have to do as CIO is sign the contract. Moving towards a centralized virtual desktop solution requires investment financially and operationally, not to mention some benchmarking so that we provide the right user experience and functionality for the different user groups.

Share and Enjoy

Business Wire

PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that it has formed a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The “Open Cloud Standards Incubator” will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management.

As virtualization technology continues to be more rapidly adopted, it is emerging as a common enabling foundation for delivering software solutions into IT environments along with the potential to lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies. While deploying virtualization technologies it is also critical to have comprehensive management capabilities associated with the implementation. Along with the adoption of virtualization, more and more enterprise IT customers are looking at the cloud computing paradigm to better deliver services to their customers.

No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability. 

Anything we can do as an industry to enable cloud computing, to empower end users to adopt the technology and get the most from it has to be a good thing for cloud as a concept. I’m off to read up more.

Share and Enjoy

BD Africa

April 16, 2009: The battle to control corporate computer rooms with latest technologies and services went a notch higher with Hewlett Packard (HP) unveiling a series of servers into the local market.

This comes at a time when technology giants HP, IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystem have intensified the turf war.

In recent months the companies have been trying to outdo each other to get more control of the market pie, estimated to be worth $ 53.3 billion, by either releasing new servers that use the latest technologies or looking for buyouts to leverage on product offerings.

The need  to capture the East Africa market is driven by the anticipated undersea fibre optic cables and the shrinking  America , Europe and Asia markets according to HP who says the cables will drive more IT and internet use in the region and create need for the vendors’ equipment

Check out this article taking about the server market in Africa, it’s always interesting to read how the different regions are different in their requirements, in the way the do business.

Share and Enjoy

Sun

Cruise Line Reclaims Datacenter Real Estate, Reduces Costs, Simplifies Management with Virtualized Sun Server Solution

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) is an innovator in the cruise industry. Distinguishing NCL is its concept of innovative Freestyle Cruising, which offers guests the freedom and flexibility to do whatever they choose during their cruise vacation. NCL sails 11 ships to more than 140 ports of call on four continents and has approximately 14,000 employees shoreside and shipboard.

It’s always great to read what range of solutions have been put together to deliver business benefit, and at the same time what we’ve done in terms of business and technology to reduce costs, whether it’s data center consolidation or virtualization using VMware for example.

Share and Enjoy

Unisys

BLUE BELL, Pa., April 21, 2009 – Building on a strong foundation of expertise and best practices in virtualization, Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) today announced enhancements to its line of enterprise servers along with a framework designed to help clients select the virtualization architecture appropriate for their enterprises and reduce the costs of implementing and managing a virtualized environment.

Unisys is making the new VMware vSphere™ 4 – the latest version of the widely used VMware virtualization software, also announced today – available across the entire line of Unisys Enterprise Servers. These Unisys servers range from the rack/tower-based ES3000 servers to the ES5000 blade servers to the large-scale ES7000 series. Also today, Unisys is launching new models of the ES3000 and ES5000 families that use the new dual-core and quad-core Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series.

 Powered by VMware vSphere 4 software and Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, the new Unisys ES3000 and ES5000 server solutions – combined with Unisys advisory and implementation services – allow clients to improve their total cost of ownership (TCO) with a choice of scale-out and scale-up virtualization approaches. Unisys virtualization solutions can help clients benefit from a reduction from 5:1 to 3:1 in the TCO ratio between scale-out and scale-up virtualization using Unisys 

Great news that Unisys will support the exciting new platform announced by VMware, and that they have released new models of their servers with the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor. Anything we can do to aid the scale up and out of the virtual platform has to be a good thing for the end user community. I’m off to check it out.

Share and Enjoy