IDEAS Insights

Daniel Bowers Joins the IDEAS Server Performance Team

IDEAS recently welcomed on board a new team member, Daniel Bowers. Daniel possesses 19 years of IT industry experience in roles spanning server hardware and software engineering, product marketing, and server administration. His primary areas of expertise include blade servers, virtualization, and datacenter technologies.

Maximizing Memory Capacity in Two-Socket Blades

I recently attended the Cisco Live! event in Melbourne, as a guest of Cisco, where executives spoke about the unique Extended Memory Technology used in some of Cisco’s Unified Computing System rack and blade servers. In the age of virtualization, memory capacity is an important enabler for maximizing compute resources. Currently, Intel’s Xeon architecture is the pre-eminent platform for many computing applications and vendors are looking for ways to differentiate their products from those of competitors using the same basic technology. So we thought it would be worthwhile to compare the memory capacities of some of the leading two-socket blade servers in the market today.

Dell’s Plans to Ride Wave of Cloud Adoption

Earlier this month, IDEAS attended Dell‘s annual Analyst Conference in Austin, TX. Unlike the past few years, where Dell outlined its rapid transformation from hardware vendor to full service solutions provider, this year’s event reinforced the theme of “stay the course and execute.” Because the conference was located so close to Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, we ended up hearing from many more Dell people than in past years, including Michael Dell, who gave the keynote on the second day. The focus of the conference was “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era,” and the presentations detailed Dell’s cloud strategy and vertical solutions focus.

IBM Increases Storwize V7000 Scalability with Clustering

 
IBM has revealed a major improvement to its Storwize V7000 storage system, announcing support for clustering and 10 Gigabit iSCSI connectivity. The system will now support a second controller enclosure, improving system performance and maximum capacity while extending its external virtualization capabilities.

 

Will On-Demand Support Options Raise Prices for All?

Cloud vendors such as AT&T Synaptic are starting to offer on-demand support options for their public cloud services. While these options appear to have a higher price tag than subscription-based support services, they may be  more cost effective for some users. However, their widespread adoption could result in higher support prices for others.

 

Priority Support

This optional support enhancement allows you to call the cloud support team 24x7x365 for assistance with urgent issues. The service can be enabled or disabled at anytime through your CaaS SMB user interface. The price for Priority Support is the greater of $500 or 20 percent of your usage fees in a given month. Charges are not prorated and will be applied in any month the service is active.

 

IDEAS AGM – 2010 in Review and the Outlook for 2011

Ideas International recently held its 2011 annual general meeting during which IDEAS CEO Stephen Bowhill presented to the audience. Mr. Bowhill’s address included commentary on market issues and trends, an overview of the 2010 Competitive Profiles enhancements, the IDEAS Advantage launch, the release of CloudSizer (www.cloudsizer.com), and the company’s Free Research now available on the IDEAS public website. The presentation also included a company financial summary and looked at IDEAS objectives, challenges, and outlook for 2011.

 

Sniffing Out the Geographic Location of Cloud Service Data Centers



 

 

A central element of the vision for cloud computing is that it will ultimately give end users the ability to consume computing resources on a utility basis, similar to the way they consume electricity or gas in the real world. However, few cloud service providers actually want their services to be treated as commodities. Rather than competing purely on the basis of cost, service providers would prefer to differentiate in ways that allow them to charge a premium. Indeed, it has become difficult to ignore the cacophony of pleas from vendors enticing end users to migrate to their clouds for reasons that do not involve prices. Ironically, though, pinning those qualitative differentiators down can be tedious for end users, largely due to a lack of transparency by the service providers. Few are willing to divulge details about their cloud services without getting prospects on the phone with a sales representative. End users deserve better; they deserve standardized specifications.