Bladewatch.com

Dell

Building on years of customer collaboration as the infrastructure partner for some of the world’s largest cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operators, Dell today announced new solutions, systems and services designed to help more customers build efficient and affordable cloud computing and hyperscale data center installations.

The News:

• New integrated cloud infrastructure solutions comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services enabling public and private cloud builders to easily and quickly deploy and manage cloud infrastructures with confidence
• New Dell Cloud Partner Program works with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer customers easy-to-buy and deploy cloud solutions and blueprints optimized for Dell platforms
• New Dell PowerEdge C-series servers with hyperscale-inspired design for high-density compute performance with efficient energy consumption and low operational costs
• New Dell Cloud Services including consulting, deployment and support help customers plan, manage and reduce complexity when adopting cloud computing models

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Dell PowerEdge C Servers: Dell is extending its PowerEdge server family with the new C-Series. Designed with inspiration from Dell’s DCS business, these new servers are feature- and power- optimized for customers in HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, social networking, energy, SaaS providers and public and private cloud builders. The new PowerEdge C servers include:

• PowerEdge C1100: high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server
• PowerEdge C2100: high performance data analytics, cloud compute platform and cloud storage server
• PowerEdge C6100: 4-node cloud and cluster optimized shared infrastructure server

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These new servers optimized for the HPC/Web and cloud solutions are very cool, anything Dell can do to meet the unique requirements of these business should create new opportunities for Dell and the end user community alike,  the innovations in systems management, deployment and energy efficiency are welcome developments.

HP

Businesses around the globe are using software from HP to increase customer satisfaction and drive greater efficiencies for competitive advantage.

Major airlines, hospitals, telecoms and energy companies are adopting the HP software portfolio to transform their technology processes in order to deliver business services faster and with higher quality.

“As the business environment becomes increasingly competitive, clients are looking to technology solutions to drive differentiation and support both top- and bottom-line growth,” said Anton Knolmar, vice president, Marketing, Software & Solutions, HP. “Our goal is to help clients use technology to power business innovation and deliver amazing outcomes to their customers and markets.”

Anything HP and the other vendors can do or bring to the challenges in managing the server and the other elements of the infrastructure both in terms of reporting, task automation and delivery has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more.

Dell

• Dell defies industry trends by announcing open platforms that give customers an alternative to closed, proprietary stacks
• New strategy and solutions enables customers to devote more of their IT budgets to innovation and cut the costs of “keeping the lights on”
• New integrated, interoperable and modular platforms empower customers to build highly virtualized datacenters and cloud computing platforms

At a time when competitors are producing increasingly proprietary products, Dell today announced open, standards-based solutions that let customers of all sizes integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or their existing IT investments. Dell’s new solutions and flexible services free customers to capitalize on the ‘Virtual Era’ of the technology industry and realize new levels of efficiency, with a goal of reducing data management costs by up to 50 percent and making room in budgets for the strategic investments they need to make now.

“Enterprise innovation and efficiency depends on solutions that are open, capable and affordable,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, President, and Dell Large Enterprise. “Dell is uniquely open and un-tethered to legacy assets and proprietary approaches to deliver against these needs. The CIO agenda isn’t about managing OPEX at the expense of CAPEX, or, innovation at the expense of open. It is about driving efficiency without compromise and reinvesting the savings towards innovation and returning shareholder value.”

It’s an exciting announcement today, anything Dell can do to help end users achieve their goals whether it’s reduced cost, complexity or improved agility. That as an industry we continue innovation of the platform both in terms of accessbility, we continue to aid in transformation and delivery is key, I’m off to check out more.

Fujitsu

Munich, March 16, 2010

Fujitsu announces the global availability of the next generation of its PRIMERGY dual-socket x86 server family, combi-ning efficient hardware, service offerings, and solutions for comprehensive virtualization scenarios. The range – comprising the PRIMERGY tower server TX300 S6, PRIMERGY rack servers RX200 S6 and RX300 S6, and PRIMERGY blade servers BX920 S2 as well as the new BX922 S2 – has been re-launched, and now includes the new Intel Xeon 5600 processor series, the first 32nm processors (codenamed Westmere).[1]

I’m off to read up more about these next generation servers built on the Intel Xeon 5600 processors, I wonder what innovations and improvements we will see.

For further technical information, please see:

TX300 S6: http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/rack/primergy_rx300s6.html

RX200 S6: http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/rack/primergy_rx200s6.html

RX300 S6: http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/tower/primergy_tx300s6.html

BX922 S2: http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/blade/bx900/primergy_bx922s2.html

SGI

FREMONT, Calif. — March 16, 2010 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced availability of Origin® 400, an integrated workgroup blade system that features compute and storage area network (SAN) storage functionality, making it ideal for remote offices and small- and medium-sized enterprises. Origin 400 delivers highly differentiated enterprise features, such as virtualization capabilities that provide maximum flexibility and eliminate the need to overinvest in hardware. Extensive software certifications, including VMware®, Linux®, SAP®, Microsoft® Windows®, Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft® SQL Server®, ensure suitability for a large number of applications.

Origin 400 is a single platform that functions seamlessly as a web server, applications server, email server and backend database server. It addresses a variety of enterprise verticals, including regional healthcare, education, local government, retail, software development, call centers, and community banking, accounting and legal.

An interesting concept, and I could see how it might be ideal for remote site deployments, in those scenarios where I might need to deploy infrastructure in a box for supermarkets, small retail outlets etc, I’ll need to read up more about it, but it’s always great to see innovation and opportunities for the end user community.

Bull

Bull consolidates its position as a major outsourcing player in Europe, with massive investment and new certifications

Bull Group invests heavily in new Data Centers and at the same time achieves two key certifications, reflecting the high quality of its expertise

• A new virtual space extending to almost 3,000 m2, which puts intelligent energy management at the heart of Bull’s outsourcing facilities
• With this investment, Bull is further strengthening one of the Group’s strategic businesses

It will be interesting to see what products and services result from Bull in this area, it’s always great to see more competition and innovation in the industry, I’m off to read up more.

Bull is now one of the very few European outsourcing suppliers who is both a ‘SAP Certified Provider of Hosting Services’ and ISO 27001 certified: reflecting the maturity of its outsourcing expertise

Citrix.com

SANTA CLARA, CA » 3/18/2010 » Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTXS) today announced a new release of Citrix XenDesktop™ 4 that enhances end user experience, improves scalability, simplifies management. With the new Feature Pack 1 release, XenDesktop 4 offers significant new improvements in user experience, enhancing the company’s high-definition HDX™ technology and allowing users to access their virtual desktops up to 5x faster. The new release also builds on recently announced XenDesktop scalability enhancements, enabling customers to host an unprecedented 100,000(1) shared virtual desktops concurrently from a single location, dramatically improving the ROI of desktop virtualization in large scale enterprise deployments. Finally, the new release simplifies application management by incorporating all the capabilities of the recently announced Citrix XenApp™ 6 as an integrated feature, including seamless new integration with Microsoft App-V and support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Anything we can do to reduce the cost and the complexity of the virtual desktop has to be a good thing, the more accessible we make the technology and the concept, the more opportunities and innovation for the industry and the end user community.

Do check out this great post which is talking more about the refresh of the HP Proliant G6 servers, it mentions a 27x performance increase in performance over the G4 servers and also a consolidation ratio of 20:1.

Finextra

Google has posted job ads for traders and analysts at its Mountain View headquarters, raising speculation on the wilder fringes of the Web that the search engine giant may be looking to start its own hedge fund.

Very interesting, I wonder what this might bring going forward. More Google based applications for financial services?

I was on the IBM site today checking out their updates/announcements around the new Intel Xeon 5600 processor, the url is here. It’s great to see the innovation around the new processor and to see what innovations of the platform are made at the same time. Any improvements that can be made in the efficiency or systems management space has to be a good thing. Do check it out.