IDEAS Insights

With Price Cuts, Mellanox is Driving 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet to the Masses

With the rise of virtualization, network convergence, iSCSI, and cloud computing, I/O is rapidly becoming a serious bottleneck for many datacenters. Datacenter managers are desperate for higher bandwidth, but solutions that would relieve the bottlenecks remain cost-prohibitive. Today, most datacenter networking infrastructure remains at Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) bandwidth speeds. Server vendors offer 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) mezzanine and network interface cards (NICs) for their blades and servers. However, these cards are expensive, and they do little good for servers connected to a slow network. 10GbE is making limited inroads into the datacenter, but it is mostly used as a trunk between switches, where bandwidth is absolutely critical and cost is not an issue. In January, Mellanox Technologies decided to change this situation by slashing the prices of its 10GbE and 40GbE switches and NICs to get the new technology moving rapidly and gain market share at the same time.

Image: scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What Server Power Calculators Can (and Can’t) Do For You - Part 1 of 2

I recall ten years ago standing at the back of a rented 42U cabinet in large data center, staring as the entire stack of servers suddenly lost power.  I had just plugged two new servers into the cabinet’s power feed.  I was following a then-common method of power planning: adding servers until the circuit breaker tripped. 

The only other method available to me was to guess: I could look at the wattage printed on each power supply faceplate, and estimate that my server would consume perhaps half of that.  Much to the chagrin of the colocation facility operators, I preferred the plug-until-it-blows technique.

Cloud Jobs Have Increased Substantially

Although the economy is still reeling from the Great Recession in the United States and Europe, cloud hiring, at least for the majority of the public cloud market, is up. IDEAS recently analyzed cloud-hiring statistics from the job search website Indeed.com and compared them with similar statistics compiled in August 2011. Overall, the data spells promise for the cloud market, which has exhibited a substantial uptick in hiring over the past five months.

Drive to Public Clouds Powered by Both Consumers and IT Managers

The farthest-reaching changes in the IT industry often occur when a single new development simultaneously responds to the needs of both consumers and business users. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of wave was the original PC: office workers used PCs during the day for their business tasks and then used the machine when they got home to play games (and often vice versa). The Web was also adopted in equal measure by consumers and business users when it first broke into the mainstream, which was a key factor in its incredibly rapid rise. The same will happen with cloud computing, once the public cloud providers close the loop between business and consumer services.

Image: nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

IDEAS Adds Free Membership to Its Line-up of Offerings

We recently introduced IDEAS Membership, a free-with-registration offering designed to provide new levels of access to insight, trends, and opinion. IDEAS Membership provides industry professionals with an easy way to keep up with IT infrastructure development highlights, including our new Benchmark Checker app, which lets you quickly verify vendors’ world record benchmark performance claims.

Storage Hypervisor Market: Ready to Take Off?

While server hypervisors have become a well-defined and established server virtualization solution, the term “storage hypervisor” may raise more questions than it answers. Whether a particular solution can be classified as a storage hypervisor is a subject of much debate, but to truly earn the “hypervisor” moniker, a storage hypervisor must virtualize storage hardware – that is, it must consolidate the resources from multiple storage devices into a common pool. However, it is not clear what capabilities are needed to supplement the virtualization function. IBM and DataCore believe that a strong management platform is key. Virsto, with its recent announcement of support for VMware, highlights the need for significant I/O optimization. These attributes are both needed to create a complete solution, and the ideal storage hypervisor would merge them into a single product.

Fundamental Changes Ahead for IT in 2012

IDEAS has identified several major topics that are likely to dominate the attention of IT managers throughout 2012, including the continued rise of cloud computing, the diversification of client devices, and the next stage in the evolution of server designs and storage systems. Some developments will be incremental and fairly predictable; other developments will fundamentally change the course of the industry, as organizations adopt public cloud services for a growing number of workloads, and as users shift from traditional PCs to tablets and other mobile devices for more and more client applications. IDEAS analysts expect the following ten developments to unfold in 2012.

IDEAS Top 10 Predictions for IT Industry in 2012

• User concern will grow about lock-in with public cloud service vendors.
• IT workers will start confronting an acute need to retrain for cloud-computing skills.
• The public cloud business will undergo a shakeout. 
• Some systems vendors will reconsider their client strategies in order to strengthen server positions.
• Rejuvenated PCs will underscore their importance for critical computing tasks.
• Growing use of solid-state drives (SSDs) will start blurring boundaries between server memory caches and storage.
• Simplified and automated storage management will break out in emerging world markets.
• Unified storage will become a requirement for entry-level and midrange customers.
• Systems vendors will step up efforts to differentiate themselves with integrated software stacks.
• Software-defined networking (SDN) will start to get attention.

GoGrid’s Pricing: Cheaper, but at a Cost

Cloud Comparison Series: GoGrid

Most end users would choose the cheaper option between two identical goods. However, this point is moot if those end users can't readily calculate and compare the costs of their options. In some cases, the complexity of a particular pricing model can negate its economic benefits.

Figure 1. Cost Analysis of GoGrid's Professional Cloud vs. Amazon Large Instance (Nonreserved) over a Five-Year Period

IBM Is Jumping into Network Virtualization with VMready Switches

As virtualized servers become more prevalent in the datacenter, networking components such as switches must adapt to become more aware of virtualization. Most switches were originally designed for physical networks, in which LAN configurations were more or less static. When a new node was added or an existing node was moved to a new subnet, it often required a network administrator to make manual changes to the network configuration to ensure that requirements such as SLAs and security were maintained. As a result, changes to the network topology needed to be carefully planned in advance. With the rise of virtual infrastructure, in which virtual machines (VMs) migrate frequently from one host to another, it becomes nearly impossible for network administrators to keep up by making manual changes. IBM is now directly addressing this problem with the VMready technology that it acquired with Blade Network Technologies.

Academics Aren’t Paying Enough Attention to Potential Cloud Benefits

 Although there has been an exponential increase in the number of academic articles that mention Amazon AWS or Amazon EC2, the service still has little penetration outside the computer sciences. Research teams at universities, with limited budgets and transient computer needs, have the most to gain from the public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) pricing model. Amazon AWS needs to do more to market itself in colleges by letting professors know how the service works and how it compares with outright server purchases – IDEAS CloudSizer can help with that task.

Below are the mentions of "Amazon EC2" and "Amazon AWS" in a Google Scholar search, organized by year of publication: