IDEAS Insights

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:

IDEAS Joins SPEC

This week, Ideas International joined the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Actually, since IDEAS has been involved with comparing servers since before SPEC was founded in 1988, this move is somewhat overdue.

With Solaris 11, Oracle Makes Sun’s OS Its Own

In early November, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Solaris 11, a major update to its UNIX operating system (OS). Solaris 11 introduces many new features, and following Oracle's announcement of SPARC T4 systems in September, the update serves as more proof that the company is making significant investments in the Sun server platform that it acquired in 2010. Further, the release of Solaris 11 will put considerable muscle behind Oracle's strategy to deliver a vertically integrated systems architecture that is optimized for the use of its own technology at every level. This announcement is not just of interest to Solaris users. It could strengthen Oracle's value proposition for any users who rely on Oracle software for enterprise computing.