In early June, HP announced an expansion of its strategy for HP Converged Infrastructure by rolling out a number of new products and services for implementing virtual, cloud and dedicated application environments using a common architecture and staged process. According to HP, “Converged Infrastructure is the HP strategy to help clients accelerate IT value, and do so at their own pace and preference. This is achieved through a systematic approach that enables clients to overcome the complexity, inflexibility, and high costs created by IT sprawl and turn technology assets into interoperable, shared pools of resources with a common management platform.”
With its extended strategy, HP now pursues a continuum of opportunities for its blade server platform, extending from pure vertical integration to more open integration, all supported by a common hardware architecture, management software, and security software.
"It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure… The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management."
Last month’s blog called for service providers to reveal more specifications for their cloud offerings. However, users also have to do their part to demand transparency from service providers, and until now, they have not yet shown much interest in understanding how service providers truly compare in terms of operational characteristics. Consumers vote with their dollars, and it seems they are not demanding data from many cloud vendors about supporting basic compliance regimes, for example. This does not bode well for the availability of uptime statistics in the future.
For the worldwide (Pentium III) campaign, Intel has chosen a performance art outfit called the Blue Man Group (BMG). Famous throughout small areas of the US, they are totally unknown anywhere else on the planet. Perhaps they were cheap?
The once beleaguered Apple has become the second largest company in the world, yet many of the enterprise tech giants that were once superstars in the 1990s are struggling to grow in an evolving market. Recently, Cisco has offeredmultiple apologies for its anemic performance and Microsoft has spent billions in order to (re)enter the search arena with Bing (the second link shows the truly dismal statistics). However, Intel still holds a virtual monopoly in servers (90+%) and notebooks (80+%), and it has a strong market share in desktops (70+%). While other tech names have staggered by making misplaced bets, the problem that Intel may have in the future is that it is doing the job it set out to do too well.
A key challenge for IBM is to articulate the benefits of solutions that combine different platforms in its server portfolio, in a way that exploits the unique benefits of each platform. A good example of a product that helps to blur the lines between IBM’s server platforms in this manner is its zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX), a specialized version of BladeCenter that can be used to offload compute-intensive processing from IBM’s zEnterprise mainframe.
IDEAS recently attended the Tata Consulting Services (TCS) Analyst Summit. Analysts from various Asian countries met with senior TCS executives in Sydney for the day. A key theme of the event was the company’s journey from its traditional outsourcing roots to one which provides more business transformational services. This story provides a little more insight into this evolution of the company’s business model and looks at some of the cloud computing initiatives TCS is embarking on to solve unique business problems in India. These TCS initiatives demonstrate the real impact cloud is having in other parts of the world.
NetApp's recent announcement headlines a push into the cloud market by providing storage infrastructure and software supporting the transition to cloud. Pushing strong integration with its partners and a comprehensive software package, NetApp's cloud aspirations are focused on flexibility and efficiency for the end user.
Large datacenters have recently come under fire for focusing on increased efficiency without considering the carbon dioxide emissions from the source of their electricity. Some datacenter managers were caught off guard when they became the targets of advocates for lowering greenhouse gasses. The attention on datacenters’ use of cheaper, but possibly dirtier, electricity is admirable. However, even as the campaign for clean power admonishes end users to reduce carbon footprints, it does not offer much information on where to find more environmentally friendly options. In order to achieve the best results, organizations should concentrate on reducing CO2 output across the enterprise as a whole, and not focus exclusively on a particular area within the business.
IBM has a more diverse portfolio of server platforms than many other systems vendors. Each of its three server platforms (System z mainframes; Power Systems for UNIX, Linux, and IBM i; and System x servers based on x86 processors) is strategic to IBM's market position, and each offers unique added value that can benefit particular workloads. One of IBM's challenges is to articulate the advantages of its complete server portfolio working together, while still promoting differentiation between the different server platforms that allows each to stand on its own in the marketplace. A natural way to bridge the divergences between IBM's server platforms is through software, which may allow the different platforms to appear more homogeneous when they work together, while simultaneously strengthening their individual capabilities where appropriate. In late 2009, IBM created a new business unit called Systems Software, which has the dual mission of integrating and differentiating IBM's server platforms by applying consistent naming, packaging and licensing of software that is optimized specifically for each platform. A few weeks ago, IBM gave analysts an overview of how the Systems Software group plans to boost the adoption of IBM servers as the use of virtualization and cloud computing takes hold across the industry.
The Storage Performance Council's (SPC) benchmarks have never achieved the same industry-wide acceptance as their server counterparts, and even as the popularity of SPC's headline SPC-1 benchmark has grown, the future of its other metrics is uncertain. Although participation in the SPC-1 benchmark has doubled since its inception in 2002, it stands alone as the only SPC metric that has grown since introduction. The more recently introduced SPC benchmarks, including SPC-1C and SPC-2C, seem to have one foot in the grave and may be dragging SPC-2 with them. However, after careful consideration of the data, predictions about SPC's decline may be premature.
