Blades

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=hardware&articleId=9107198&taxonomyId=149&intsrc=kc_feat

July 7, 2008 (Computerworld) While most major disk-drive manufacturers have developed or are already selling solid-state disk drives or hybrid drives, which use a combination of flash memory and spinning disk, Fujitsu Ltd. has chosen not to develop a product for market. Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu’s vice president of business development, said his company does not plan to launch any solid-state disk-drive products over the next two years because the value proposition of the technology is not compelling enough and won’t be until technology breakthroughs change solid-state disk’s performance and reliability. Computerworld spoke with Hagberg about the future of solid state disk. The following are excerpts from that interview.

An interesting read, I’ve been wondering when we will see more vendors offer solid state drives in their servers as standard, at the same time, with solid state disks, do I still need to have RAID in terms of reliability? We’ll have to see, do check out the article.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Blade-Network-Technologies-874654.html

SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwire - July 1, 2008) - BLADE Network Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in network virtualization and high-performance solutions for servers and storage, announced the first 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet network virtualization switch for IBM BladeCenter.

BLADE’s new switch provides the ability to use six 1-Gigabit copper and three 10-Gigabit SFP+ fiber uplinks concurrently — for 50 percent more bandwidth than alternative blade switch offerings. BLADE’s new switch applies the principles of “Rackonomics” to “scale out” and virtualize data center networks, driving down the total cost of ownership associated with high-performance clusters and virtualized data centers that require an affordable migration path to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The BLADE 1/10Gb switch features:
– Power consumption that is 33 to 50 percent lower than alternative blade
switches
– Layer 2/3 support for advanced features such as Open Shortest Path First
(OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) built-in at no additional
cost, and
– Extensive network virtualization capabilities such as VMReady™.
The BLADE switch is priced up to 50 percent less than alternative blade switches.

Very cool, it will be interesting to see what new solutions and possibilities these switches bring to the blade platform, any innovation, of improvement in functionality has to be a good thing for the industry and the end user community. I’ll need to check it out.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Egenera-874385.html

MARLBORO, MA–(Marketwire - June 30, 2008) - Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced three new members to the Egenera® Assured Solution Alliances program: Axeda, Micron Technology and Transitive. The Egenera Assured Solution Alliances program leverages a technical assurance process designed to optimize the interoperability of third-party software solutions with Egenera virtualization solutions. The relationships forged between Egenera’s support organization and each member’s support team create highly integrated, seamless service standards for joint-customer engagements.

Axeda

Axeda Corporation delivers secure remote service and support capabilities to some of the world’s leading manufacturing companies and large enterprises. The award-winning Axeda® ServiceLink™ solution helps companies proactively service and support products to drive optimal uptime at the lowest possible cost.

Very cool, any evolution and innovation of the Egenera blade solution has to be a good thing, and it’s always interesting to see what the different vendors can offer, do check it out.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/windows_servers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208802678

Gartner on Thursday cut by almost half its worldwide server revenue number for the first quarter and returned IBM (NYSE: IBM) to the position of market leader.

In May, Gartner reported that first-quarter server revenue grew by 4.3%, and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) had toppled IBM from the No. 1 spot. But updated guidance and additional analysis of the data prompted Gartner to lower the increase to 2.5% over the same period a year ago and drop HP to second place.

The debate about market share, about who has the best server is one that is set to continue. That the innovation of the platform, blade or rackmount continues, that the choice of configuration and range of solutions continues is key. More choice, more innovation has to be a good thing for the end user and the industry.  I wonder with the green agenda, with virtualization and consolidation projects, what developments we’ll see both in terms of server innovation, of server management tools, as well as services and solutions of the growth in professional services?

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2008/2008_07_01_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp

Round Rock, Texas, July 1, 2008

• Low-Cost Solution for Blade IO Virtualization, Deployment and Reducing Downtime
• Utilizes Existing Networking Investments; No Need to ‘Switch Your Switch’
• Achieves up to 100 Percent More Networking and Storage Connectivity at Half the Cost of HP Virtual Connect

Dell has followed on the successful introduction of its PowerEdge M-Series blade server solution with Dell FlexAddress, a patent pending tool for blade chassis virtualization and persistent identity. Dell FlexAddress is a simple, low-cost way for customers to deploy and manage blade infrastructures while reducing data center downtime. Dell FlexAddress is enabled by a special SD card for the PowerEdge M1000e Chassis Management Controller (CMC) and the latest firmware. The FlexAddress SD card is now available worldwide with a starting price of $499. For more information, visit www.dell.com/blades.

“We delivered one of the greenest, most energy-efficient blade solutions on the planet with the PowerEdge M-Series and now we’re making it one of the most flexible,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions, Dell Product Group. “FlexAddress frees customers from existing high-cost, proprietary tools, and enables them to utilize existing networking infrastructure and knowledge to handle predictable or even unplanned changes in their data center without affecting the network.”

Dell and Partners Declare: No Longer a Need to “Switch Your Switch” for Blades

Dell FlexAddress allows any M-Series blade enclosure to abstract the Fibre Channel World Wide Name(WWN) and Ethernet/iSCSI Media Access Control (MAC) from the blade hardware and, instead, tie it persistently to a slot in the M1000e chassis. This feature provides customers with an efficient, flexible and consistent infrastructure. Dell FlexAddress is managed by the Chassis Management Controller (CMC) in the PowerEdge M1000e, keeping it agnostic to the IO module and avoiding the need to “switch your switch.” Customers can achieve 100 percent more network and storage (LAN and SAN) connectivity at half the cost of HP Virtual Connect by enabling automated deployment configuration in advance and network stacking. This speeds network configuration and management by virtualizing the switches across up to 8 chassis (up to 128 servers), making them appear as a single virtual switch. FlexAddress also works with all Dell pass-through modules.

This is very cool, being able to allocate the MAC, the World Wide Name to slot, will improve the support process, and should reduce the delays of provisioning a new blade. By allocating the slot, the details when I swap the blade we can avoid the need for several teams to be involved, for storage to re-zone the World Wide Name, for Networks to reconfigure the Network, I just have the hardware guy/server team swap the blade and go. I also love the concept of the solid state card containing your configuration, that I can make one configuration and duplicate it/back it up, that if I need to replace parts of the enclosure, I can plug in the card to restore everything to my previous configuration.

That innovation continues across the blade platform has to be a good thing for the end user in terms of choice and functionality, but also in the industry, in illustrating the benefits of the blade platform for a range of uses.