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Storage to the People! EMC Announces
Online ControlCenter Capabilities
By Charles King
EMC has announced new online capabilities for the
company’s ControlCenter family of open storage management solutions. The
online access and subscription-based software offerings provides customers
direct, Web-based access to EMC’s knowledgebases and intelligence engines,
including the entire EMC E-Lab database of heterogeneous storage, server, and
network interoperability metrics. According to EMC, the new capabilities offer
an affordable way for customers to shorten problem isolation times, create
and validate SAN designs, and benefit from current and historical data
trending analysis. The new Web-based ControlCenter software offerings include
EMC SAN Architect, a template-driven solution designed to guide storage
architects and administrators through the design, modeling, and validation of
fully functional SANs. Additionally, EMC AutoAdvice is an intelligence engine
that analyzes data about current and historical application and
infrastructure performance, helping customers to isolate current problems,
identify future trouble spots, and recommend best practice solutions. SAN
Architect and AutoAdvice can be used as stand-alone solutions or as
extensions of EMC’s ControlCenter application family. SAN Architect is
available immediately as a one-year subscription with an entry-level list
price of $2,400. AutoAdvice is available immediately as a one-year
subscription with pricing based per CPU beginning at $400 and declining with
larger installations.
At a time when IT vendors of every stripe are trying
to evolve service delivery products and strategies, it behooves us to ask
just what an IT service really is. Does it consist of a subtle blend of IT
expertise and enterprise acumen, stirred lightly with business integration
skills; or is it simply a means to sell more stuff to already
over-provisioned customers? Is it a way to raise the technological
sophistication and comfort zones of enterprises that have come to rely increasingly
on IT solutions to business problems, or is it a way to push the jargon level
up a notch or three so that customers remain essentially system-ignorant and
supplier-dependent? The answers to these question lie all over the map and
vary from vendor to vendor, but it seems to us that EMC’s new ControlCenter
offerings posit an approach customers are likely to find refreshing. By
providing SAN Architect to ease storage network design and deployment chores,
EMC is giving clients a way to become less dependent and more autonomous in
developing and controlling their storage networks. By delivering AutoAdvice
as a first line of defense for IT staff who monitor the flow of data through
company infrastructures, EMC is offering a means for enterprises to ensure the
availability business-critical information. However, the benefits do not flow
just one way. By becoming a trusted purveyor of storage intelligence, EMC
stands to gain by increasing the company’s stature among its clients and
through leveraging a store of information that took many years and dollars to
develop. If power and knowledge really are interchangeable, EMC’s new
ControlCenter offerings aim to place power directly into the hands of the
company’s enterprise clients, and constitute a strategy that should pay
dividends for both EMC and its customers.
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Think
By Jim Balderston
IBM announced this week that it has acquired Think
Dynamics, a Toronto-based vendor of software that automates the management of
datacenter resources. Think has four products: ThinkProvision, ThinkAssure,
ThinkRecovery, and ThinkUtility. Think Provision is the base of the system,
and automates company practices and rules as designed. ThinkAssure provides
management of resource capacity by responding to load spikes and making
resource allocation adjustments. ThinkRecovery responds to application
environment failures and provides a temporary application environment from a
remote location and ThinkUtility monitors varying levels of application
service and in conjunction with ThinkProvision executes provisioning based
upon priorities associated with availability and resource cost. The Think
Dynamics products are standards based, and designed to work in heterogeneous
environments. IBM stated that the Think Dynamics offering will sit in the
middle of the policy-based orchestration of its on demand computing
environment and that it will be integrated into its existing products. Think
Dynamics has been shipping products since February of 2002. Terms of the deal
were not announced.
While Think Dynamics may be a low-profile player in
the larger IT universe, it was becoming an increasingly well-known player in
the growing field of what IBM calls autonomic computing. No less an authority
than the now-defunct Red Herring Magazine called Think one of the hot
emerging companies in 2002. Think was partners with both IBM and HP. In the
middle of last year, some press reports noted that Think Dynamics, along with
Terraspring, which was acquired by Sun in November, were two hot acquisition
targets. Terraspring had been an HP partner, which used the company’s
technology in its Universal Data Center initiative.
By all accounts, this looks like a wise acquisition
for IBM. Not only does the company get a piece of its automated provisioning
and management package, it does so at the apparent expense of HP, which is
for the time being at least, playing catch-up in the autonomic or
self-managing software market. This also marks the second time in about half
a year that a key element of HP’s offerings has been bought by a competitor.
First Sun nails down Terraspring, now IBM bags Think Dynamics. While no
figures were announced in this deal, we suspect that the cost of acquiring
this company was miniscule, especially when one considers the price IBM paid
for Rational back in February. With only $8 million in funding and about a
year of actual product on shelves, we suspect that IBM did not have to lay
out a large amount of money for this relatively new company. In that light,
if Think Dynamic’s products actually deliver on the promises that IBM has
used to justify this deal, we believe it could be one of the most
cost-effective acquisitions of the past couple of years. In short, IBM
decided to think, did so, and thought of Think.
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Blue Away Blown Away? Sun Announces
1,000th Mainframe Rehosting Win
By Charles King
Sun Microsystems has announced that it has acquired
its 1,000th mainframe rehosting customer installation at Europ Assistance
Group, which provides assistance services such as roadside service and home
repair for the automobile, medical, and home care industries. According to
Sun, Europ Assistance Group’s Italian subsidiary is rehosting mainframe
applications with Sun MTP and Sun MBM software on Sun UNIX servers, allowing
the company to decommission its mainframe system. No specific details about
which Sun hardware is being used in the project were included.
Public relations events have lifecycles like any
other organism, and tend to perish quickly once the life-giving glare of the
spotlight dwindles. Judging by the rhetoric of this press release, Sun timed
the announcement to snatch or dim some of the light surrounding IBM’s launch
of its “T-Rex” eServer zSeries z990, the company’s new flagship mainframe.
Given that, we believe it is worth taking a closer look at the current state
of mainframe rehosting in particular and the mainframe market in general.
Sun’s efforts in this space follow a meandering trail, beginning with the
company’s acquisition of Critical Path’s mainframe rehosting business in
September 2001, in time to be featured in the launch of Sun’s flagship Sun
Fire 15K server. Eight months later rehosting became key to Sun’s “Blue Away”
initiative, which aimed to snatch IBM customers by moving their mainframe
applications to Sun’s “Midframe” Sun Fire 3800-6800 servers. In February
2003, Sun announced that mainframe rehosting and Wintel server consolidation
were targets for its Sun Fire V1280 rack mounted servers. Sun’s PR spin on
the downward migration of mainframe rehosting through the Sun Fire food chain
was that even its lower-end servers were robust and reliable enough to offer
mainframe performance at a fraction of the price; however, we expect that a
simpler explanation is closer to the truth. Traditional mainframe customers,
who are among the most conservative of IT users, are as unlikely to replace a
$1 million mainframe with a $1 million UNIX server as they are to entrust
business-critical data to an uncertain solution. As a result, Sun’s rehosting
solutions are most likely to be considered by enterprises with modest
mainframe needs or those who already have sizeable investments in and
experience with the Sun platform.
So how does that reflect on Sun’s Europ Assistance
Group announcement? While the Italian subsidiary of a company that operates
in 208 countries would seem to qualify as a classic example of a customer
whose mainframe needs could be met with Sun’s rehosted solutions, we find the
absence of any mention of IBM or the Blue Away initiative, outside of a bit
of dinosaur mayhem implied in the headline, somewhat puzzling. We wonder if
it suggests that either the replaced mainframe was another vendor’s or that
Sun is stepping quietly away from Blue Away. In the greater scheme of things,
does Sun’s 1,000th customer win mean that mainframe rehosting is alive, well,
and coming soon to a datacenter near you? Maybe, but more likely maybe not.
The fact is that the mainframe market has changed considerably since Sun’s
leap into rehosting, largely due to IBM’s willingness to actively rethink,
retool, and revitalize its mainframe business. Last year’s introduction of
the eServer z800 “mini” mainframe and the company’s later revision of the
z800’s minimum MIPS configuration should appeal to many of the smaller
mainframe customers Sun is courting. Additionally, the On/Off Capacity on
Demand elements of this week’s z990 launch, along with IBM’s plans to provide
mainframe access through its On Demand datacenters, offer further
alternatives to customers whose mainframe needs are modest or intermittent.
Overall, the danger we see to Sun in all this is that by continuing to insist
that mainframe solutions remain mired in prehistory, the company’s
opportunities in this space are likely to face eventual fossilization.
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Check Point Adds another Layer
By Jim Balderston
Check Point Software has announced a new security
software suite based on its firewall that will include intrusion detection capabilities
to offer what the company said would be application-level security to its
existing network level security capabilities. The Check Point Next Generation
with Application Intelligence is designed to thwart the increasingly common
attacks such as Code Red and Nimda worms, which can make their way through
standard firewalls. The company said that the new product will be available
in June and will carry an annual cost of $1,000 per firewall and will be
included in the company’s Firewall-1 product going forward.
The Check Point announcement comes at a time when IT
security vendors across the market are either acquiring or promising more
fine-grained security screening products for the enterprise customers. Check
Point’s offering continues that trend, the company also has a valid claim
with its offer to provide great integration with its existing – and market
dominant firewall product. Other security vendors offering similar products
will have to have an answer to the question of how well they will interoperate
with the Firewall-1 product.
That being said, we believe that IT security is
still in its infancy. To date, most enterprise IT security consists of what
could be viewed as a big wall surrounding the enterprise IT assets. The wall
has some gates for access; these gates are guarded with increasingly
sophisticated locking mechanisms to which specific and increasingly
difficult-to-copy keys are required. But despite the improvements in the gate
management technology, the simple fact remains that the prime value of a
firewall is that it is a wall. We believe that in the coming years more
intelligent, proactive, self-minding, and responsive security products are
going to make their way into the marketplace. Just as we are seeing the idea
of more intelligent computing models being offered in the realm of resource
management, diagnostics, and self-healing, we believe that increased
intelligence in security deployments is inevitable moving forward. To be
sure, human intervention will still be required for many security issues;
after all, in most cases it is human intelligence behind the attacks. But
just as the self-healing, self-provisioning, and self-management initiative
continues to promise reduced workload for IT staff, so would increased
intelligence in security products aid and abet the IT security officer who is
bombarded with a constant stream of new attacks designed to defeat his or her
most recently deployed security product.
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