Bladewatch.com

Sun

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

Very cool and I wonder if this might create new opportunities for the two particularly if they combined, MySQL, Oracle and Java in terms of solutions, using either as a revenue generator for the new organization. I’m off to read up more!

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Finextra

Canada’s National Bank Financial Group has agreed a seven year extension, worth C$450 million, to its IT infrastructure management deal with IBM.

The deal – an early renewal of a contract signed in 2001 – will see IBM manage the group’s information technology infrastructure including mainframe, server management and end-user services.

The vendor will oversee the implementation of new server technologies, standardised processes and an integrated set of enterprise tools in a bid to simplify the bank’s IT infrastructure.

Saad Toma, general manager, global technology services, IBM Canada, says the firm “will deliver cost-effective and flexible services in support of the Financial Group’s growth strategies”.

Outsourcing elements of the IT infrastructure remains a concept that works for many, that Canada’s National Bank Financial Group is benefiting from this deal is all that matters. I wonder what range of technologies are being used to achieve this, virtualization/grid?

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I remain a fan of Sun as a business, they’re products remain industrial strength (when I’ve asked managers and engineers about them), Solaris is getting good press, and they’re support and investment in open source has to be congratulated.

The Sun/IBM deal in which IBM buys out Sun’s business raises a few questions. Please note that this is in no way a negative commentary, simply some questions/statements.

• Is it a buy out or an integration? Which bits do we keep? The x86? SPARC? Sun’s blades?
• What happens to the SPARC processor? It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that we have an alternative platform, that customers may be heavily invested in in terms of application and infrastructure. An example of this could be the HP/Compaq decommission of the Alpha processor which is still a topic of debate with colleagues.
• How do we manage the sales and support of the two organizations, the way IBM sells might be very different to the way Sun sells and supports its servers.
• How do we manage the integration in terms of delivery, branding and support? Would I as a Sun customer find that I stopped buying x86 Sun servers and have to buy IBM? Would this make me think about HP/Dell or someone else like Fujitsu or Gary down the road who makes his own?

I can see core benefits for IBM:

• Greater exposure to the MySQL market – which could be huge if as I think we’ll see more enterprises switch to it as a platform, maybe not for everything but for some applications/roles?
• Greater exposure to Sun’s customers, it’s research and knowledge of it’s core sectors including it’s movements into open source, open solaris, linux etc.
• Exposure to Sun’s revenue, it’s innovative products and services such as a the xVM, technologies within Solaris, and their shipping container data center?

The deal will raise a number of issues which will get resolved as they always do if it goes ahead. As ever, I wish the management teams and employees of the organizations the very best for the future and look forward to seeing what benefits to the end user community and indeed to competition or innovation arise from it.

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http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/12/WhereSSDsDontMakeSenseInServerApplications.aspx

All new technologies go through an early phase when everyone initially is completely convinced the technology can’t work. Then for those that actually do solve interesting problems, they get adopted in some workloads and head into the next phase. In the next phase, people see the technology actually works well for some workloads and they generalize this outcome to a wider class of workloads. They get convinced the new technology is the solution for all problems. Solid State Disks (SSDs) are now clearly in this next phase.

Well intentioned people are arguing emphatically that SSDs are great because they are “fast”. For the most part, SSDs actually are faster than disks both in random reads, random writes and sequential I/O. I say “for the most part” since some SSDs have been incredibly bad at random writes. I’ve seen sequential write rates as low as ¼ that of magnetic HDDs but Gen2 SSD devices are now far better. Good devices are now delivering faster than HDD results across random read, write, and sequential I/O. It’s no longer the case that SSDs are “only good for read intensive workloads”.

So, the argument that SSDs are fast is now largely true but “fast” really is a misleading measure. Performance without cost has no value. What we need to look at is performance per unit cost. For example, SSD sequential access performance is slightly better than most HDDs but the cost MB/s is considerably higher. It’s cheaper to obtain sequential bandwidth from multiple disks than from a single SSD. We have to look at performance per unit cost rather than just performance. When you hear a reference to performance as a one dimensional metric, you’re not getting a useful engineering data point.

Solid State Drives remain an ideal solution for many specific uses, but as with any technology, you need to test it and see how it would fit within your infrastructure your business.

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Phone Plus Mag

Virtualization solution provider VMware Inc. (VMW) has unveiled the VMware Partner Network, VMware’s next-generation partner program. The VMware Partner Network will provide a common infrastructure, sales and services tools, margin opportunities and training for VMware’s entire partner ecosystem, from sales partners and solution providers to technology partners and OEMs.

Great news, I’m hoping this will continue to develop the solutions, products and services around the virtualization space. Interestingly could this open new opportunities in new market places?

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Eweek Europe

The new Microsoft licensing plan makes it easier and cheaper for enterprises to delve into desktop virtualisation

Microsoft is making it easier for enterprises to embrace desktop virtualisation, according to a report from Forrester Research.

In a report issued 9 April, Forrester analyst Natalie Lambert said new Windows licensing from Microsoft—which in the past had been a deterrent for businesses interested in desktop virtualisation—could help fuel a surge in the adoption of the technology.

“With the latest licensing rules, Microsoft has now made possible popular [desktop virtualisation] scenarios that IT ops pros have been clamoring for,” Lambert wrote in the report, which was developed along with Forrester analyst Simon Yates, Christopher Voce and Margaret Ryan.

Licensing has been one of the key topics when talking to colleagues about desktop virtualization, anything Microsoft and the virtualization platform vendors can do to reduce the cost and accessibility of desktop virtualization has to be a good thing for the indusrty.  The challenge we’ll have is the cost per virtual machine in terms of the operating system and virtualized licenses, keep in mind that in the enterprise I might face a fixed cost to provide the desktop say £600 per unit pet year including a pc, Windows and Office, what would the cost be if we used thin clients, virtualization, operating system and Office application?

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Byte and Switch

Networking vendor Brocade Communications Systems on Tuesday introduced a switch and converged network adapters that support Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) at Storage Networking World in Orlando. It is the latest in a series of moves by a variety of networking, storage, and data center vendors to provide a migration path to a 10-Gigabit Ethernet unified network infrastructure that many believe will become the foundation for next-generation data centers.

But that won’t happen soon, Brocade acknowledges. “We believe we are extremely early and that adoption of this technology might not be as quick as we had hoped,” says Marty Lans, senior director of product marketing at Brocade. “There are many forces working against it right now.”

Being able to provide network and storage down the same pipe can bring benefits in automation, the ability to deliver and in terms of energy efficiency. Anything we can do to reduce the cost of the adoption, bring more choice to the end users in terms of choice and innovation has to be a good thing.

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Computerworld

April 8, 2009 (Network World) HP Wednesday announced updates to its business service automation suite designed to help customers cut the cost of managing virtualization and improve service quality.

The company updated two software applications and introduced one new offering in its BSA suite, which is built on technology HP acquired with Opsware.

“We see a huge opportunity to cut back on labor bloat. When you have very expensive resources, the storage administrator is one of the most expensive people in the data center. Logging into storage arrays and checking for capacity is a huge waste of their time,” says Michel Feaster, senior director of products for Business Service Automation Software at HP. “We want to take all these low-level tasks and apply automation to take advantage of the huge opportunity for productivity improvements.”

Anything that we can do to reduce the time to live, the time it takes between when the business request infrastructure or resources and the time at which it’s brought online has to be a good thing. I’ll need to read up more.

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The IT Jungle

This is getting ridiculous. Well, maybe it was ridiculous from the beginning. Anyway, the latest reports are that server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems was, as of the end of last week, still interested in renewing acquisition talks with IBM. However, Big Blue has, according to sources, lost interest. Again.

Bloomberg reported on late Wednesday (April 15) that people familiar with the situation said that Sun was still interested in selling itself to Big Blue, but it was sticking to its line that IBM had to assure Sun’s board of directors that it would commit to the deal and see it through various antitrust regulators. The ghost of antitrust lawsuits with the U.S. Department of Justice, and consent decrees that IBM signed in 1956 and amended in 1969 to govern its behavior, seem to be haunting Big Blue.

And rightly so. The very governments that will be looking at the deal are big users of IBM mainframes and Unix iron from Sun, and if there is only one guy controlling those two platforms, competition will cease. Right now, only the high-end Unix server market puts any competitive pressure–albeit somewhat indirectly–on the mainframe market. And it would not be surprising to see very big mainframe and Unix shops get involved if IBM tries to do the deal. Perhaps with a lawsuit arguing over the establishment of the relevant market for determining with IBM would have a monopoly in high-end servers and therefore be subject to regulation again.

An interesting article talking about the ongoing excitement around the Sun and IBM transaction, we’ll have to wait and see.  These kind of deals can be great for revenue, for refreshing a business, creating opportunities and developments. I’m off to read up more.

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News Factor

In a sign of the economic times, VMware is running a promotion that guarantees at least a 50 percent savings on server hardware .

Customers that participate in the program will work with the VMware Professional Services organization to deploy VMware’s virtualization platform on existing servers using best practices. Customers won’t have to pay for design and implementation services until they realize at least a 50 percent savings on server hardware.

VMware is also offering customers assistance with a server buyback referral program. This helps customers get an appraised value for the server hardware the company no longer needs, thanks to server consolidation.

“In today’s difficult economic climate, this new promotion shows our commitment to customers and our confidence that we can help them reduce cost with no risk,” said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president of product marketing for VMware’s server business unit. “Based on our experience in thousands of customer engagements and data collected over more than three years with our Capacity Planner tool, we are confident that many customers will be able to achieve more than 50 percent savings on server hardware costs.”

From an energy efficiency standpoint and one of operating costs, this could be a powerful message. The maximum benefit will be in virtualizing the right systems, choosing to get rid of legacy systems where possible, virtualizing on to newer more energy efficient servers (or blades) using a combination of energy efficient power supplies. An example might be blade servers running ESX, booting from SAN, so you have no local disks for data, get the combination of the integrated switches and combined power supplies for maximum effect. It will depend on your business and your goals, interesting offer from VMware though, I’ll need to check it out.

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