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Sharpening the Ever-Thinner Blade: IBM
Announces eServer BladeCenter
By Clay Ryder
IBM has announced its thinnest server to date, the
IBM eServer BladeCenter based on Intel’s Xeon processor. Its intent is to
help large businesses reduce their TCO by allowing deployment of individual
blades as capacity demands warrant. The blade server is a server on a
removable card that plugs into a chassis, which is installed in a rack
(BladeCenter). IBM indicates that its eServer BladeCenter offers superior
performance at twice the density of most of today’s 1U Intel Xeon processor-based
servers and can hold up to eighty-four blades per rack, providing the ability
to purchase redundant hot-swap cooling, power, and management modules as well
as other automatic failover components, so there is no single point of
failure. The BladeCenter supports integrated features including optional
fibre switches to support IBM TotalStorage SAN infrastructures as well as
Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to support IBM TotalStorage NAS. In the future
IBM plans to support InfiniBand and other networking upgrades. In conjunction
with this announcement, IBM is also delivering IBM Director 4.1 systems
management software that provides autonomic blade management including a
single point of deployment and management for blade server architectures,
automated set-up and configuration wizards, and support for mass
configuration of chassis and blades. The IBM BladeServer will support Linux,
Microsoft Windows, and Novell Netware and will be available in volume
worldwide in November at the base price of $1,879.
One of the hot — or cool depending on your point of
view — technologies of the past year has been the continued development of
blade servers. IT managers that have found themselves amid a sea of cabling,
heat dissipation, power consumption, and footprint issues may find solace in
the relative sanity of the blade infrastructure and its implications. The
current economic climate has stretched IT as its managers
deal with the high costs of administration and management while
simultaneously facing static or shrinking budgets and ever-rising user needs.
A solution to this quandary is simplifying and improving the computing
environment without significantly increasing costs. If the number of servers
can be consolidated from hundreds down to tens, then significant savings
could be realized in administration, management, and the physical
environment. Thus server consolidation is a phrase that resonates with many
IT managers today.
While server consolidation is possible with
traditional solutions where faster higher capacity systems replace multiple
older systems, achieving consolidation through blade servers addresses many
of the management and physical infrastructure issues that traditional systems
introduce. Since blades are designed for dense environments, share subsystems
such as storage and networking, and seek to minimize cabling issues they are
well suited to meet this IT challenge. We believe that IBM, by focusing on
increased performance, density, environmental controls, and system
manageability while providing next generation Xeon based solutions, has raised
the bar for blade servers so that the historic tradeoff of blade efficiencies
versus processor performance has been effectively muted. The combination of
the integrated Systems Management Processor for integrated systems
management, the IBM Director product for rapid deployment, Xeon processors,
and server density of 7U (14 blades per BladeCenter) positions IBM well to
address the market demand for server consolidation, blade infrastructures,
and high performance Intel-based solutions. A warning to system vendors like
Sun and HP: the cuts from this blade might hurt.
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EMC Acquires Prisa Networks
By Clay Ryder
EMC has announced the acquisition of Prisa Networks,
a SAN management software vendor that is focused on SMB SAN environments. The
acquisition, which is EMC’s eighth software acquisition in three years, was
completed through a cash transaction valued at approximately $20 million.
Prisa’s suite of products include: VisualSAN Network Manager, which
discovers, manages, and monitors multi-vendor SAN devices including storage
systems, switches, hubs, routers, and HBAs; VisualSAN Configuration Manager,
which enables rapid visual identification and isolation of issues within a
SAN; VisualSAN Performance Manager, which provides real-time performance
monitoring and tracking; and VisualSAN Remote Support Suite, which provides
remote support tools for SAN installations. Prisa software will initially be
sold through existing OEM agreements with plans for the software to be
offered through additional channel partners and EMC’s sales organization.
Prisa’s management team and more than sixty employees will continue to operate
in San Diego as part of EMC’s Open Software organization.
Storage is more than blinking lights, rotating
spindles, and rolls of rust-coated plastic. While for some storage may be
seen as the last frontier of geekdom (and boredom) in the IT environment, the
reality is that storage is shaping up to be one of the most important and
interesting aspects of IT. As the demand for information continues to grow
and the distributed nature of computing, grids, and other initiatives
continue to make their influence felt, the notion of a single datastore
supporting a single application on a single server is as archaic as the
horse-drawn cart. While larger enterprises have been to take advantage of
SANs, NAS, and other storage solutions, the limited availability of moderate-
to low-cost solutions for smaller organizations have effectively kept much of
this powerful technology out of reach of many businesses today. At the same
time, commodity hardware, including disk drives, continues its downward
trajectory on price, or alternatively its price/performance ratio continues
to rise. Thus, the value proposition for vendors is increasingly highly
differentiated hardware implementations, services, and the all-important
product called software.
EMC has clearly understood that hardware alone will
not allow it to thrive in, let alone drive this market. The company’s
investment in intelligent storage software is a clear reflection of this
reality and the acquisition of Prisa bolsters the company’s position into the
lower end of the SAN marketplace. At the same time, the audience for Prisa
software is one ripe for continued building of channel partnerships, which
not so coincidentally is the way for enterprise vendors to gain traction in
the SMB marketplace. Add to this the established OEM distribution agreement
with Dell and one can see that this acquisition provides EMC’s ability to
deliver automated networked storage capabilities to the broader market. The
decision to build or buy is an ongoing one, and with Prisa it seems EMC is
betting that these additions to its family of Intelligent Supervision
products will provide a significant time-to-market advantage in the entry-level
SAN management market. As such, we expect to witness renewed vigor in EMC’s
SMB initiatives as the company continues to broaden the opportunity for its
products to play in all sectors and sizes of the marketplace.
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Chaos on the Privacy Front?
By Jim Balderston
Stakeholders in the information privacy debate
gathered this week in Cleveland at the Privacy 2002 Conference in the latest
installment of activities designed to bring forth compromises concerning
information privacy. A key issue of discussion at the conference is the 2004
expiration date of a provision in the Fair Credit Reporting Act that
prohibits states from enacting tighter privacy guideless than federal
statues. In early 2004, states will have the power to write privacy
regulations that are stricter than existing nationwide laws. The U.S.
Congress is considering new privacy standards as well, and may attempt to
limit how much leeway the states will have in going past federal guidelines.
If Congress does not pass legislation limiting
individual states’ abilities to pass more stringent privacy regulations, we
see an increasingly chaotic landscape unfolding. Different states will pass
different levels of privacy legislation: what may be legal in Texas could
then become very, very illegal in California, for example. Furthermore, we
would expect to see not only states taking action to appease increasingly
alarmed consumers (and voters) but counties, cities, and towns getting into
the act.
In this mish-mash of competing and often
contradictory regulation, managing what can and cannot be collected or disseminated
would become a near-impossible task, as banks and financial companies rarely
operate in a town, county, city, or state. At the same time, it is very clear
that both the gathering and dispersing of personal financial data have become
much more sophisticated operations in the past decade. Consumers have
reasonable concerns about who has access to records that offer a detailed
diary of a practically every action a person takes. While Congress is
unlikely to act this year on the issue, it appears that it will move next
year to head off the problems created by giving the states the ability to set
privacy standards above and beyond federal controls. If they don’t, they will
certainly have to a few years down the line, when privacy regulations are
being written and amended on a nearly quarterly basis. A growing consumer
concern and awareness will drive vote-hungry politicos to actually try and
accomplish something before their next election cycle.
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Is BT Getting the Internet?
By Jim Balderston
BT has announced that it is launching a Web Services
offering that it hopes will provide a computing environment allowing any
computer running any application to communicate with any other computer,
regardless of software, operating system, or platform. The company said it
has revealed a five-step methodology for approaching Web Services to assist
customers in meeting present and future computing needs. The company also
announced that it has named Microsoft as its first alliance partner to
provide these services. Finally, the company announced that it will offer
business-class environments using Web services that address security, performance,
and control.
BT has been mucking around with the Internet for
some years now. It was one of the earliest of the big national telco carriers
to show interest in finding ways to leverage its position to be a dominant
force in Internet services as well. Yet BT has always struggled a bit to get
the bloody thing right. Consumer bandwidth rollouts have gone less than
smashingly; market penetration lags as a result. Does anyone remember
Concert?
Under pressure to find new revenue streams, BT has a
window of opportunity to get to the rather unfamiliar position of being ahead
of the curve with Web Services, as the market for such offerings is only
beginning to mature. Bringing aboard Microsoft — with its laser focus on Web
Services — can’t hurt a bit and may well provide the spark BT needs to
establish a solid position in this emerging marketplace. BT needs to make
this gambit work, and make it work in the next few years, as its once
dominant position for all things involving communication in the UK is being
aggressively eroded by more savvy and nimble competitors. Despite new
challenges, BT does offer the ability to propagate Web services more widely
than anyone else in the UK, a significant value proposition for both BT and
the adoption of Web Services themselves. Yet we still have to take a wait-and-see
approach here. BT offered little or no information about its Web Services offering
beyond what is described above, and its Web site offers zero documents when
searched against the phrase ‘Web services’. All of which leads us to wonder
if there is any more substance to this announcement than the press release
itself, which would be a shame as BT’s window of opportunity in Web services
will close in the relatively near future, possibly never to opened again.
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