Bladewatch.com

I wrote about the Dell Lifecycle controller in an earlier post, this url (from the Dell Enterprise Technology Center) has an interactive demo which you can watch if you are after more information about it and how it works including the numerous features of the Lifecycle Controller, it’s very informative, do check it out. It’s always great to know what’s going on from each of the big vendors if only so that you are in the position to ask for similar functionality or features from the vendor you buy your servers from.

At this point I’ll also mention that I love the concept and the content in Dell’s Enterprise Technology Center, their chat’s videos and blogs are all very cool, I wonder if there is any scope for a podcast or meet up going forward where I can meet fellow customers or innovators? We’ll have to see, in the meantime the concept of reaching out to customers, adding content and making it more accessible are all praiseworthy and illustrate their commitment to openness and customer empowerment – key to success on both sides, the vendor and the customer or end user community alike.

It has been building for a while. An overview in brief (apologies for missing anything)

• Oracle made an announcement that they were discontinuing their ongoing support for the Itanium processor referencing Microsoft and Red Hat already doing so and HP at the same time.

• HP respond that they are committed to the Itanium processor as are Intel, and there is an extended Roadmap detailing its support through the generations with long term commitment through 2014 at their HP Discover event in Madrid. HP also mentioned that the announcement was unhelpful to the marketplace and would result in customers being forced to migrate from their Itanium systems towards Oracle platforms.

• HP has subsequently released an announcement of their intention to sue Oracle for a number of complaints.

• Oracle responded immediately explaining their viewpoint and commitment to defending themselves in court.

So what’s the Bladewatch view?

For anyone invested heavily in Oracle running on Itanium, the Oracle announcement is at best unhelpful going forward. To HP it matters for a number of reasons – its customer base for their current investment and future commitment to Itanium platforms – for this read HP.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the court case and the ongoing dispute develops both from a business and technology viewpoint, these cases have a habit of becoming long term, ‘part of the five year plan’. We’ll have to see.

The market space is narrowing and I see vendors attempting to lock others out of their space becoming a norm.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/416567

Today HP filed a lawsuit claiming that Oracle had breached an agreement to support the Itanium microprocessor.  It just takes a few minutes to read the early drafts of the agreement to prove that HP’s claim is not true.  What is true is that HP explicitly asked Oracle to guarantee continued support for Itanium; but Oracle refused, and HP’s Itanium support guarantee wording was deleted from the final signed agreement.

An interesting response from Oracle detailing their viewpoint and response to the allegations or analysis of their on going support of the Itanium processor.

The debate, the court case could be set to be moving towards the ‘emotional’ space, I’m going to be speaking with a few CIO and Director level colleagues both in the business and IT space to see what they think, it will be interesting to see what the response is to either HP or Oracle’s comments and actions.

HP have announced their continued efforts to request Oracle continue with their support and commitment to the Itanium platform, with the press release below:

HP today issued the following statement:

HP believes that Oracle’s March 22 statement to discontinue all future software development on the Itanium platform violates legally binding commitments Oracle has made to HP and the more than 140,000 shared HP-Oracle customers. Further, we believe that this is an unlawful attempt to force customers from HP Itanium platforms to Oracle’s own platforms.

As a result, on June 15, HP filed a civil lawsuit in the Superior Court of the State of California, for the County of Santa Clara, seeking Oracle to reverse its decision. HP believes that Oracle is legally obligated to continue to offer its software product suite on the Itanium platform and we will take whatever legal actions are available to us necessary to protect our customers’ best interests and the significant investments they have made.

HP remains committed to a long-term mission-critical server roadmap, including Intel’s Itanium processor. Similarly, Intel has repeatedly reinforced its ongoing commitment to the Itanium roadmap.

It will be interesting to see what response we receive from Oracle and if this can stem the tide with regards to their existing statements about their commitment and ongoing development of their products for Itanium as a platform. We’ll have to see.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110609xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today announced that the Wi-Fi version of HP TouchPad will be available in the United States on July 1.

HP’s first webOS tablet will be available in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany a few days later and in Canada in mid-July, with availability scheduled to follow later this year in Italy and Spain, as well as in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore.

HP TouchPad will be available from U.S. retailers, commercial resellers and direct from HP with the option of either 16 GB or 32 GB of internal storage⁽¹⁾ for $499.99 and $599.99, respectively.⁽²⁾ Preorders in North America and Europe will begin June 19.

“What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS,” said Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president and general manager, Palm Global Business Unit, HP. “The platform’s unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP’s scale can do with webOS.”

With webOS, HP TouchPad users have a next-level multitasking experience, access to the web, premium audio playback with stereo speakers and Beats Audio™ technology, the ability to find information on the device or in the cloud using the Just Type feature, integrated access to their information with HP Synergy, and HP’s exclusive Touch to Share capability for sharing web addresses between HP TouchPad and compatible webOS phones.⁽³⁾

I’m genuinely excited about the HP TouchPad and I wonder what range of applications and services we will see launched with it? I can’t wait to sit and play with one.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110606xa.html

HP today announced several industry-first Converged Infrastructure solutions that improve enterprise agility by simplifying deployment and speeding IT delivery.

HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are a key element in a client’s Instant-On Enterprise journey. These offerings break through IT sprawl and turn technology assets into interoperable, shared pools of resources with a common management platform. These new offerings include:

• Converged Systems, a new portfolio of turnkey, optimized and converged hardware, software, tailored consulting and HP Solution Support services that enable clients to be up and running with new applications in hours vs. months.⁽¹⁾ The solutions address top application areas including real-time data analytics, database consolidation and data warehouse.
• Converged Storage architecture and portfolio, which integrates HP Store360 scale-out software with HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant hardware to reduce storage administration, speed time to service delivery, increase energy efficiency and improve access for any data type or application workload. The offerings are complemented by new Storage Consulting services.
• Converged Data Center, a new class of HP Performance Optimized Data Centers (PODs) that can be deployed faster than any competitive offering – just 12 weeks – and at a quarter of the cost when compared to a traditional brick-and-mortar data center.⁽²⁾ Extending HP’s leadership in modular data centers, the HP POD 240a, also referred to as the “HP EcoPOD,” uses 95 percent less facilities energy.⁽³⁾
• HP Server Automation 9.1 software seamlessly provisions physical and virtual application instances across the entire life cycle.

The ability to have a Converged Infrastructure, one in which the IT is scalable and adaptable in line with the business need can be transformational to the business, not only can it meet and exceed user perceptions, but with the right technologies in place, with the traditional barriers removed it can free the business to examine solutions, opportunities for revenue or agility that might not have been possible in the traditional physical and cross charging world. It’s all about gaining the right mix of bought in and internally provisioned services, technologies like the HP POD can be not only temporary data centers but also virtualization on demand devices, or as my friend said to me the other day, data center as a service. Exciting times are ahead, the more we think around and outside the box, the more we can identify possibilities for revenue and end user empowerment from a business and technology standpoint.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-hitachi-060911.html

Hitachi to Deliver Cloud Solutions Based on VMware vSphere and the VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform to Financial Institutions in Asia

TOKYO and PALO ALTO, Calif. — June 9, 2011 — Hitachi Ltd. and VMware today announced a strategic partnership enabling Hitachi to deliver new cloud services to financial institutions in Asia. The new solution, Private Cloud for Finance Institutes, is based on VMware vSphere® and the VMware vFabric™ cloud application platform and will help Hitachi deliver IT as a Service to customers.

Japanese financial institutions are moving away from tightly coupled IT architectures in favor of virtualized infrastructures containing loosely coupled applications that can access a flexible pool of IT resources. This new model of delivering IT is designed to help customers simplify infrastructure management and improve business agility in a secure and flexible manner.

It’s interesting to see Hitachi delivering cloud services to financial institutions based on VMware’s virtualization and cloud technology, this creates further opportunities for their customers to be able to consume their requirements for capacity be it on all the time or on demand infrastructure using industry standard platforms that can be easily managed and integrated with their existing infrastructure with more flexibility in mind. Anything we can do to help end user requirements for services, for capacity or business empowerment on demand has to be a good thing for the end user communities and vendors alike.

https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/ibmx86/entry/did_you_miss_this_on_june_7_ibm_system_x_announced_the_juniper_ex4500_ethernet_switch?lang=en_us

This is a strong offering for both data centre and campus aggregation deployments.

The Juniper Networks EX4500 10 GbE Switch features 40 wire-speed 10Gb/1Gb Ethernet ports in a 2U rack platform, and delivers Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity to networked devices such as System x servers and other networking switches.  The EX4500 supports Juniper Networks’ unique Virtual Chassis technology, which enables multiple interconnected switches to operate as a single, logical device with a single IP address.

I always like to check out the IBM blogs and saw this post talking about the Juniper Networks EX500 10GbE switch, do check it out, it sounds very cool and could be ideal for virtualization deployments, I’ll need to read up more about it.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34642.wss

ARMONK, N.Y. - 02 Jun 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new cloud services to deliver advanced software, computer lab resources and services to students and researchers at schools, colleges and universities, without the need for advanced IT expertise at those locations.

The IBM SmartCloud for Education is a set of cloud services and offerings designed to help education systems leverage predictive analytics to get real-time insights on student and institutional performance, enhance researcher effectiveness, and alleviate constrained lab resources for learning.

By using the IBM SmartCloud for Education services, K-12 schools and higher education institutions can address significant challenges they face:  student retention, graduation rates, grant funding, and demands for IT resources for learning and research.  Schools can analyze their own data using new SPSS models and tools running in a cloud to identify at-risk students at an early stage.  Additional cloud-based social networking tools help discover and recommend funding opportunities and collaborators to researchers.  Students and educators can also benefit from self-service reservation of and seamless access to virtual computer resources both on campus and on the IBM public cloud.

This sounds interesting from both a technical and educational standpoint, could it mean a move to further the opportunities for learning and interaction between students and course or content providers, could we see more rich experiences and more real time content, covering more elements or concepts. For the maths students could this mean access to hpc platforms that might not previously have been available to the mainstream? We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up more about it.

Fujitsu: Time is right to move business critical applications into the Cloud

London, 8 June 2011 – Fujitsu has announced in the UK a new top end version of its highly successful enterprise-class Cloud service. The company is now offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Cloud services using “twinned UK data centres”, providing even higher levels of reliability, security and performance to both existing and new customers. This major upgrade provides customers with the service levels they need to feel confident in putting their business critical applications into the Cloud.

This latest Cloud service upgrade means that customers can now use Fujitsu’s IaaS to host applications for critical business processes without past concerns about the safety of moving such applications into the Cloud. These include frontline services which are essential to the day-to-day operations of an organisation, such as the ability to process customer sales and place orders with suppliers.

Launched in November 2009, Fujitsu was the first IT services company in the UK to provide a dedicated IaaS offering for enterprise organisations. The updates announced today ensure that Fujitsu’s IaaS service continues to lead the market by extending the use of Cloud for key business systems.

Offering cloud services with added investment in reliability can only help strengthen focus and confidence in cloud as a platform for business. It might also create further opportunities where hesitation or perceived barriers to entry existed, we’ll have to see how this plays out, but exciting times for both cloud and Fujitsu’s Cloud services are ahead, do check it out.