IDEAS Insights

Measuring the Cloud Market through Jobs Data

 The market for public cloud computing is young, with few companies that are publically listed and reporting financial data. The cloud divisions of larger public corporations do not break out their cloud revenue stream from other sources – for example, revenue from Amazon’s AWS is included with the company’s non-cloud revenue in the "other" category. As a result, it can be difficult to determine the winners and losers in this highly competitive space. When developing a cloud migration strategy, end-users do not want to be stuck with a vendor who will not be around in a few years, or who can no longer afford to invest in features and capacity. This uncertainty is one of risks of cloud computing deployment plans, and yet it is rarely or never mentioned (think back to the controversy when del.icio.us said it was shutting down and users could not export their bookmarks). Although there is little reliable information on market share and revenue for public cloud computing services, there may be other methods to determine the health of a cloud provider’s business.

 

Is Dell Entering an Integration Phase?

IDEAS recently attended a Dell briefing conducted by Joe Kremer, Dell’s Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand. The briefing occurred hot off the heels of the latest worldwide Dell quarterly earnings announcement and so took in discussion around this, as well as a wider set of topics including how the company is positioning itself for an even greater drive into the Enterprise.

Is Your Blade Chassis Obsolete? (Part 2)

Blade midplanes – the circuit boards inside blade enclosures that connect servers to I/O devices – vary considerably between blade system vendors. Earlier, I examined the midplane architecture of the most popular blade chassis.  Here, I'll compare their readiness for future technologies like 40Gb Ethernet.

 

The Link Between SPC-2 Storage Benchmark Performance and Capacity

More than 80% of the variance in SPC-2 storage benchmark results appears to derive from the capacity of the storage system alone (controlling for given, non SSD, drive RPM speed). This statistic makes sense when considering the variables at hand. A fire hose can expel more water per second than a straw, because of the greater thickness of the pipe. Not surprisingly, the same is true with storage. The more disks available to a system, the more IOPS and MBPS it can achieve. When scanning headlines of SPC-2 results though, that message is not entirely clear.

 

Is Your Blade Chassis Obsolete?

A key benefit of the blade form factor is the ability to reuse the chassis, power supplies, and other slower-to-evolve infrastructure pieces across multiple generations of servers. In fact, a blade chassis that you know can handle future generations of servers is more valuable to you than one that can't. So how likely is it that the chassis you're about to deploy is a good investment?

 

Responding to Customer Outcry VMware Adjusts vSphere 5.0 Licensing Model

Just a few weeks after introducing its new licensing scheme for vSphere 5.0, VMware has made some adjustments based on customer feedback. These changes have been made to address some of the concerns customers expressed about the new model, which shifted licensing constraints from processor sockets to vRAM (provisioned memory). The feedback that VMware heard boiled down to three key themes:

• The vRAM entitlements may be too low in some circumstances.
• The flexibility of the model may introduce a degree of planning uncertainty in some cases.
• The change was seen by some as an "indirect" price rise.

To its credit, VMware has acted quickly to address the feedback, and it has made changes in three areas. Let’s take a closer look at these changes, why they were made, and what they mean to you.