IDEAS Insights

IDEAS Adds Free Membership to Its Line-up of Offerings

We recently introduced IDEAS Membership, a free-with-registration offering designed to provide new levels of access to insight, trends, and opinion. IDEAS Membership provides industry professionals with an easy way to keep up with IT infrastructure development highlights, including our new Benchmark Checker app, which lets you quickly verify vendors’ world record benchmark performance claims.

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.

Latest Improvements to Competitive Profiles Q211

Our Competitive Profiles subscription service aimed at IT Sellers, such as computer vendors, resellers, and consultants, recently received some enhancements. These include the ability to filter benchmark results in the Benchmark Wizard and improvements to the Competitive Landscape price/performance analysis tools. Coverage of the Fujitsu ETERNUS product line has also been added to the CPStorage module. In addition, minor changes include improvements to product lifecycle information, project management in CPService Cost of Ownership, and more. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

 
The new Benchmark Wizard product filter

Latest Improvements to IDEAS Advantage Q211

Our IDEAS Advantage subscription service, aimed at IT Buyers to support their planning and decision making, recently received a number of enhancements delivered through the IDEAS quarterly enhancement program. Fifteen enhancements in total were implemented and included improvements to product and configuration comparisons, the addition of Fujitsu ETERNUS storage products, an update to the product lifecycle coverage, improved handling for calculation options in the IT Efficiency module, and more. Let’s look at these in more detail.

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.

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.

 

How to Use CloudSizer – Part 1

CloudSizer (www.cloudsizer.com) can be used in a number of ways to solve problems related to public cloud computing. It can be used as a calculator that compares the costs of cloud service providers, or as a tool to estimate the number of cloud instances to replace a server. Today, we illustrate CloudSizer’s primary function: How to map physical server workloads to the cloud, and compare the costs of different providers. Although CloudSizer includes a “Help” section that guides the end user through each step, below we provide annotated screenshots that gives a more thorough introduction:

 

 

CloudSizer image text: CloudSizer uses IDEAS propriety performance metric RPE2 and other variables to translate physical server workloads to the cloud in four easy steps.

 

IDEAS Reports Full Year 2010 Profit and Declares Dividend

Many of our readers may not be aware that IDEAS is a public company, making it one of just a few public industry analyst organizations. IDEAS recently announced its 2010 financial results highlighting a reported a profit and a dividend payout to shareholders. The following gives an overview of the results, including an audio interview with Stephen Bowhill and a short video overview of Ideas International the company.

New Wizard Makes Finding Competing Products Easier

The competitive landscape for servers and storage continues to become more complex. Storage subsystems in particular have an array of technical features. First there is the product type, such as direct attached storage (DAS), storage area network (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), and unified storage. Then there are a variety of host connectivity choices, drive types, and more. The server realm is not much better, with choices of form factor, processor architecture, server type, operating system, etc.

So, how does one quickly and easily find competing products in the market that meet your particular set of criteria?

IDEAS Reaches the Finals of the Australian Technology Showcase Awards

Recently, IDEAS was a finalist in the 2010 Australian Technology Showcase (ATS) Patrons’ Award for Outstanding Export Achievement. The award, which is in its 11th year, acknowledges and celebrates outstanding export achievements by NSW technology companies that are members of the ATS program. Applicants for this prestigious award are independently judged by a panel of representatives from the ATS Patrons.

[Gary Burgess (third from right) accepting the IDEAS Finalist Award]