IDEAS Insights

HDS Device Manager Unifies Block and File Management

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) recently introduced the Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) 100 platform to replace its Adaptable Module Storage (AMS) 2000 family of midrange products. HUS employs the gateway-based architecture of HDS's NAS solutions, featuring an enhanced version of the AMS 2000 FC/iSCSI SAN arrays attached to the Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) 3080/3090 gateways. The key enabler of this unified storage solution is the Hitachi Device Manager software, which integrates more deeply with HNAS in order to provide converged management for file and block storage. While HUS already offers a converged software-licensing scheme for block- and file-based features, the updated Device Manager software will now technically enable the same level of unified manageability for all HNAS-based solutions, benefitting many existing customer installations.

Architecture of the HUS 150 (source: HDS)

Oracle Systems Strategy Remains Steady, Focus Turns to Execution

Several IDEAS analysts attended Oracle Industry Analyst World 2012 at its campus in Redwood City, CA a few weeks ago. At this annual event, Oracle provided an update on its strategy to maximize the value that can be gained from integrating its hardware and software assets into complete solutions. The event focused primarily on Oracle’s customer momentum, as well as a review of some hardware and software announcements made since last year’s analyst conference. Oracle took this opportunity to remind analysts that its strategy feels solid and that it does not need to be tweaked on a yearly basis.

 

The USA 76 America's Cup Class Racing Yacht Used by Oracle Racing 

Buying Datacenter as a Service? Measure Capacity, Not Units

It is seductive to say that "more is better," but when it comes to datacenter infrastructure, the number of servers is a misleading metric to judge value. Public cloud computing is sold in nebulous units called "instances" that often come without capacity or throughput specifications. This makes it hard for users to do apples-to-apples comparisons. In order to compare the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component of datacenter as a service (DCaaS), one needs to measure compute capacity in terms of performance metrics and not "number of instances" or "number of servers." Amazon's standard metric for compute instances, elastic compute units, shows the different compute capacity one gets for a given budget. But an industry-wide standard performance metric is needed for a complete understanding of cost and capacity.

 

Figure 1. Buying $100 of Amazon EC2 Cloud: Number of Instances vs. Aggregate Compute Power

Intel’s Romley-EP Ratchets Up Performance and Energy Efficiency

On March 6, Intel launched its latest platform for two-socket servers. The Romley-EP platform consists of the E5-2600 Sandy Bridge-EP processors and the C600 Patsburg chipset. Following Intel’s Tick-Tock development model, the E5-2600 is fabricated using the same 32-nm process as the previous chip generation, but it incorporates substantial enhancements to help deliver better energy efficiency, higher performance, more security, and more intelligent management.

Dell’s 12G Servers Are Engineered to Take the Heat

Dell rolled out a new line of 12G servers this week that it claims are more powerful and much easier to manage than previous generations. Like similar announcements from competitors, this announcement focused on Dell’s high-level strategy and capabilities instead of detailing the components inside the boxes. For hardware, Dell is updating virtually all of its two-socket blades, towers, and rack servers with the new architecture. But it is not necessarily the core server hardware that catches our interest; it is all of the extras Dell has wrapped around the hardware. During development of the 12G servers, Dell says it received design input from 7,700 customers in 17 countries and four continents, and 500 evaluation units have been out since October, ensuring that Dell got this one right.

The Complexity of Measuring Cloud’s Impact on Costs

Despite the name, total cost of ownership (TCO) is not the measure of "total cost," as used by economists, but the measure of "accounting cost." TCO calculations measure some costs and are useful for business decisions, yet these calculations always leave out other costs that inevitably only the user can define. Analysts and end users alike will benefit from recognizing that TCO calculates only the accounting cost and does not include the opportunity cost, which includes the cost of the "road not taken," in a cost scenario. Opportunity cost needs to be included in a true analysis of total cost.

Figure 1 - Production Possibility Frontier Graphs Tradeoffs
(Above, a manufacturer with a limited amount of resources, which describes all real-world scenarios, can only produce guns or butter. The manufacturer can produce a mix of guns and butter, but there are tradeoffs in the amount they can produce of each.)

Amazon’s Cloud Already a Billion Dollar Business?

By now, most technology industry analysts have released their predictions for 2012. Many, including IDEAS, forecast that Amazon AWS would become the first cloud venture to have over $1 billion in revenue. We were all probably wrong.

That's because Amazon AWS likely already reached that mark in 2011. The financial results for its cloud business are reported by Amazon in a category called "other," which Amazon defines as "AWS, miscellaneous marketing and promotional agreements, other seller sites, and co-branded credit card agreements." Revenue from "other" for the past decade is shown in the chart below, which is sourced from Amazon's own quarterly report. However, by separating the sales specific to Amazon's cloud business from "other," we can get a pretty good idea of Amazon's revenue from cloud.

 Figure 1. Amazon Sales for "Other" Category. Source: Amazon Quarterly Reports

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

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