Bladewatch.com

I was doing some reading up about Dell’s PowerEdge M-Series blade solution as I have been doing some research in this space for a colleague, during this I saw and checked out this review which discusses the Dell offering, do check it out, it’s an interesting read. I remain a fan of the innovations that Dell have been making in the blade space particularly with their M series blades and I hear that this continues this year in the connectivity space which is great news, the more innovation of the platform, the more chances we have of finding the right range of solutions for our business.

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I have updated the HP firmware spreadsheet and pdfs which list server model with the current firmware date and a hyperlink to download the online firmware for the Windows operating system, be sure to check it (or indeed the HP support site) as there have been some important firmware updates in particular for the DL360 G7 and DL380 G7 servers, as well as some of their C-class blades. The download url is the same as the usual one on our other pages, you can get the pdf here and the excel document right here.

We’ll be completing the IBM and Dell firmware spreadsheets/pdf documents for the end of the week and I’ll make a post when they’ve been finished.

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http://www.napatech.com/uploads/c_news/127_file_4832.pdfNapatech today announced the introduction of the world’s first 40 Gbps Ethernet adapter for network monitoring and analysis. The NT40E2-1 intelligent network adapter provides a single QSFP-based 40 GbE port and can be used for both packet capture and transmission. The NT40E2-1 is one of the very first 40 GbE network adapters on the market, but in contrast to other vendors, Napatech focuses exclusively on the needs of network appliance vendors for full packet capture and transmission with zero packet loss.

This sounds very cool, I wonder what kind of opportunities this might bring not only in terms of network monitoring and analysis but for Ethernet as a platform going forward, the more bottlenecks we remove from the infrastructure and the application end to end, the more opportunities not only for linking new customers, new networks and new applications, but also in creating opportunities to new markets and to consolidating old ones. I’m off to read up more, the adapter is set to be announced at Interop Las Vegas later this year.

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http://hardcorecomputer.custhelp.com/ci/documents/detail/2/WP_landing_page/

Liquid Blade™ – A Revolution in Data Center Design Data center cooling requirements for high-heat density servers are driving power demand and taxing normal data center operational procedures. Hardcore Computer has an innovative and elegant solution.

It’s great to see Hardcore Computers continue the innovation and development of their next generation blade platforms, I do find the concept interesting and love the idea of being able to reduce our dependency on air conditioning and cooling through the use of liquid cooling. I’m off to download the white paper, do check it out.

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http://ibmremote.researchlabs.ibm.com/IBM_Mobile_Systems_Remote/Welcome.html

IBM Research (Austin) has developed an IPhone application that can connect to multiple IBM BladeCenter management modules and/or System x rack mounted systems containing RSA2 cards to allow for remote system monitoring and management.

It’s on the iTunes store and lets you remotely manage your IBM blade  and rack servers through your iPhone, I have to say that I love the concept, you can download it from here, and submit comments or suggestions here.

It’s great to see the vendors get involved with their end user communities reach out and provide additional tools to make life just that little bit easier.  I hope that IBM are set to release further applications or functionality to help connect the end user to their support and specification content, to display systems information on the go and allow you to check what firmware or drivers you should be running, or even if your server is 1GB Ethernet ready for example. We’ll have to see in the meantime well done to IBM Research and hope that their competitors are working on similar ways of adding value to the end user community.

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Microsoft are set to announce their security patches for March today (later today dependent where you are geographically), so do check out the Microsoft Technet site to see which systems and applications are in scope for patching, and remember that applying patches is the cost of doing business and often the first thing a provider or vendor will ask when logging a support call.

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http://www.idc.com

• x86 servers reached $2.7 billion in revenue and grew 15.4% year on year. Growth in non-x86 was flat at 0.1% year on year, with revenue reaching $ 1.6 billion.
• Mainframes (servers running on CISC processors) made a strong comeback, with demand surpassing the $600 million mark in EMEA, an increase of 62.6% year on year. RISC revenue was down year on year by 19.3%, and EPIC was down 15.8%.
• Volume servers (servers priced below $25K) posted annual revenue growth of 9.1 %. The vast majority (98.6%) of volume servers shipped in EMEA were x86 systems, whereas midrange servers, which declined 20.2% year on year, were evenly spread between the x86 and non-x86 segments (48.9% and 51.1% of units, respectively). High-end systems, up 28.9% annually, were predominantly non-x86 (95.4% of all shipments).
• By operating system, Windows continued to hold the largest market share, with 44.7% of total revenue in EMEA. Unix was the second largest, but was behind by a big margin of 23.3 percentage points, grabbing 21.4% of the EMEA server revenue share. Linux edged closer to Unix, with a revenue share of 17.3%. Demand for this operating system originated largely on the x86 volume space, holding 81.3% of the Linux revenue in 4Q10.
• All form factors grew, indicating that market demand is diversifying as organizations look into different environments based on hybrid architectures. As usual, blade revenue growth was above the market average, at 11.4% year on year, but it was nearly matched by rack-optimized systems (up 8.7% annually) and non-rack servers (up 8.6% on the back of mainframe demand).

I got this sent through to me and found it very interesting to read more about the EMEA server sales and shipment statistics. These figures can be one of those things that create debate, to me it illustrates a competitive market which is still quite diverse with Dell appearing to do quite well as do Oracle in the SPARC space, I’ll need to examine them in more detail, but do check them out, it’s interesting to see regions the demand in emerging markets increasing, I wonder if this is a combination of renewal and new infrastructure for new services and applications?

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110301xb.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 1, 2011 – HP today announced the integration of 3PAR Utility Storage across the HP Converged Infrastructure portfolio to simplify scalable cloud computing, and introduced new storage solutions for virtualization and data deduplication.

This integration enables clients to optimize cloud delivery with features like automated storage tiering to improve performance, and thin storage offerings to eliminate over-provisioning.

The combination also helps clients seeking to consolidate storage hardware and respond to explosive data growth to address both of these challenges with converged block-and-file storage on a single storage array. HP also has simplified data management with solutions built on converged storage, server and networking platforms to provide clients with unified management and a lower total cost of ownership.

“Our clients tell us their journey to the cloud will be one of the most critical transitions for them this decade,” said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks, HP. “HP 3PAR Utility Storage meets their demand for a new storage architecture specifically designed for IT as a Service. The integration of 3PAR with Converged Infrastructure is ahead of schedule and HP is poised to take clients to levels of agility and efficiency they’ve never experienced before.”

Interesting news from HP with regards to further integration of the 3PAR platform into HP’s Converged Infrastructure portfolio of services, we’ll have to see what this brings in terms of product innovation and opportunity. I’ll need to read up more.

Data Deduplication continues to be an area of interest for many organizations, being able to reduce storage utilization or achieve more efficient use of their storage, particularly as demand for storage continues to grow, combined with the challenge of the client. The client pc these days comes with up to 1TB of space or more, so end users can so easily think nothing of requesting hundreds of gigabytes of storage for their new application, their new platform without anticipating the associated costs of providing that volume of storage on a platform and in a method that provides it in a fashion that includes their backup and resilience requirements factored in. It’s a matter of user education, looking at applying tiers to storage, considering the as we complete the installation of one storage rig, we commit to buying the next one, but again it requires funding, user education and buy in, and smart management, the cheaper storage that you might buy as an organization might be cheaper, but not that much cheaper per gigabyte or terrabyte than the high availability one, in which case do we tier as a result of principles, or using the same storage platforms but in smarter ways?

In terms of data duplication, I’d also like to see more work in the enterprise around the application space in terms of interactivity, data sharing and deduplication of data at source, I process a sale, that sale is then sent to processing, and then through to the packing and despatch space, each could be its own application, its own database, its own set of disks and storage requirements. Could we not work out a way of having in band transaction data which we load process and then archive rather than have three sets of duplicate transaction data? Maybe I’m dreaming and not understanding application architecture, but the concepts remain the same, we need to be identifying what bits of data are core, which parts need to be online, which parts we can archive to tape, to offline and online storage, and how we can be more efficient operationally and financially.

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http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110228c.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP has assumed a tie for the No. 1 position in worldwide server revenue and maintains the leadership position outright for server shipments in calendar year 2010, according to a new report from IDC released today.⁽¹⁾

HP captured 39.1 percent of the total x86 market revenue for all of 2010, growing 33.9 percent compared to 2009, according to IDC. HP ProLiant servers have held the No. 1 position in the x86 server market for 59 consecutive quarters, or as long as IDC has been measuring x86 server market share.

According to IDC, HP was the only major server vendor to gain revenue share in the EPIC/RISC Blade server market, gaining 20.8 percentage points year over year in the fourth quarter of 2010 (to a total of 62.3 percent market share in 4CQ10).

Well done to HP server sales continue across vendors to be doing well, I wonder whether this is due to refresh and upgrade projects, more movements to virtualization or even cloud as a platform both internally in a private cloud scenario or for external cloud providers. I’m off to check out more about it.

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From one of the CIOs that I regularly speak with:

“About five years ago it was multi-core or performance that they spoke about when trying to sell you a server, then we moved to the green message, the performance per watt message, and now it’s cloud, multi nic, multi core and large memory support…”

A rather skeptical viewpoint, but one that remains valid and which raises some issues around not only how we approach the cloud and virtualization message but how we continue the dialogue with our end user community both in the business and technology communities. The focus should remain on end user empowerment, providing the right tools and technologies in order to deliver business benefits, providing insight and examples, concepts that could be used in order to deliver or form parts of a solution.

At the same time we need to see cloud as the opportunity that it is, absolve ourselves of comments around ‘it’s outsourcing online’ or ‘buying in service’ to thinking of it as a vehicle to not only provide infrastructure or services, but as a platform that can create opportunities for revenue generation, opening new markets and users to be the platform that joins the dots, just as the internet has proved to be through email, through community, rich media like youtube, would I have discovered Giles Peterson on Radio 1 if I hadn’t listened to him on the iPlayer if it meant staying up to 3am when his show is on?

Cloud is the next generation, the next concept and re-invention of IT services, products and solutions as IT re-invents itself every decade or less what represents the most significance to me though is the accessibility and the opportunities that we see presenting themselves. Virtualization brought us the possibility of having more servers but using less hardware, grid brought us real opportunities to achieve high performance and low latency compute farms using shared infrastructure and absolutely delivered more with less, the job that might take overnight on one pc might take minutes or hours on the grid. Cloud though is more exciting because it opens opportunities for the Small business, for the one man band, the manufacturer and the enterprise at different levels, and presents for the vendors ways of supplying products or services in a format and at a price that might not have previously been possible – online backup, email as a service, salesforce.com or googlemail, virtual infrastructure from Amazon for example. It’s these things that excite me, that the garage with twelve employees that might have previously had to pay thousands of pounds for the setup and on going maintenance of their IT might instead buy it as a service and level the playing fields between organizations, the social media, the email, the web services, backup and tools that the national dealer might be available to the stand alone dealer, creating both opportunities for the small businesses in agility and business to business services, whilst giving the enterprise the chance to realign their business and IT needs, focusing their time on making their inhouse systems work and buying in the services they need without the associated barriers to entry that exist in the traditional outsourced model.

The startup can now subscribe to an email service from google or using Exchange, have their own web servers virtually from Amazon, have their compute or dev farms and online storage and backup all provided down a wire reducing the start up costs, the barriers to entry real and perceived. We therefore need to be discussing cloud not only as a concept of how you as a vendor are supplying devices cloud ready, or how I as a customer need to get cloud ready, but how cloud works, how it can create opportunities for all, how it works for your business and how to leverage it and take it from an abstract concept, one which means many things to many people, to a concept that works for you and your business.

Last of all it’s important for vendors and service providers (as well as customers) to continue dipping their toes in both worlds, the virtual down-the-wire cloud space, and the legacy world. There are many companies both service providers, enterprises and consumers adopting cloud loving the agility and on demand presence that it gives them, but equally there remain enough of us legacy people with simple and complex problems which need addressed. We need to be adjusting the message, the support and the empowerment we provide to the target market, for that small business talking about their first server (which might just be an up scaled desktop) talking cloud is great, but they aren’t there yet, they might be given the right conditions, given the right set of need for services and solutions, but in the meantime is it a 1u a 2u or a Microserver you need, and do you need a guy to plug it in and set it up. Let us not forget it’s the small start up operating out the garage that could be your next cloud provider, your next Facebook or google, help them with their problems and their opportunities and the rest will follow, removing the barriers to entry, making it just that little bit easier can be the difference between a one of server sale and a partnership leading to years of commitment both in products, services and the cloud solutions you are working on for now and the future…

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