VDI Market Heats Up – and So Do Vendor Rivalries

April 12, 2010 by 1 Comment

I’m pleased to welcome Laura DiDio of ITIC as a contributor. ITIC is a rich source of data and insightful commentary. This piece originally appeared in the PUND-IT newsletter.

There’s no hotter market in high tech this year than Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and you don’t need sales and unit shipment statistics to prove it.  No, the best measurement of VDI’s hotness is the sudden flurry of vendor announcements accompanied by a concomitant rise in vitriol. The main players in the VDI market are actually two sets of pairs. It’s Citrix and Microsoft lining up against VMware and EMC for Round 2 in the ongoing virtualization wars. On March 18, Citrix and Microsoft came out swinging, landing the first potent, preemptive punches right where they hope will hurt VMware the most: in its pocketbook. Read more of this post

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New TPC-H Record – Virtualized by ParAccel, VMware

April 12, 2010 by 6 Comments

You can set performance records in a virtualized environment – that’s the message of the new 1 Tb TPC-H benchmark record (scroll down to see the 1Tb results) just released by ParAccel and VMware. Running on VMware’s vSphere 4, the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB) delivered a one-two punch: not only the top performance number for a 1 terabyte (TB) benchmark, but the top price-performance number as well. The results in a nutshell: 1,316,882 Composite Queries per Hour (QphH), a price/performance of 70 cents/QphH, and a data load rate of over 3.5 TBs per hour. ParAccel moved quickly to promote the result; oddly, VMware seems to have been asleep at the switch, with no promotion on its site as the release hit the wires, and a bland quote from a partner exec in the release itself.

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Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues

April 10, 2010 by Leave a comment

By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. – I’m delighted to welcome Charles as a contributor. This piece was published in the PUND-IT newsletter.

In a blog, Dan Reger, senior technical product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server group, announced that Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 will be the last Microsoft products to support Intel’s Itanium microprocessor architecture. Mainstream support for Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems (and R2) will end, in accordance with Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle Policy, on July 9, 2013, while extended support will continue until July 10, 2018. Read more of this post

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Dell Marketing Gets It Right

April 6, 2010 by 2 Comments

I ignore virtually all the marketing emails I get, even from folks whose offerings I tend to like – Apple, musicians I follow, baseball teams…. But today, I got a great note from Dell that started with a guaranteed stopper: Happy Birthday, Merv! Yup, even a jaded old analyst like me will stop for a moment. Read more of this post

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And Then There Were Three: POWER, x86 and z

April 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

by Joe Clabby, President, Clabby Analytics. Updated from a November 2009 publication

There is a major shakeout underway in the midrange/high-end server marketplace as sales of Sun SPARC/CMT (cellular multi-threading) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Itanium-based servers decline significantly — and as new, more powerful versions of Intel’s Xeon and IBM’s POWER micro-architectures come to market. Read more of this post

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How the Cloud Will Lead Us to Industrial Computing

April 5, 2010 by Leave a comment

From  Judith Hurwitz, president, Hurwitz & Associates (http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com)

I spent the other week at a new conference called Cloud Connect. Being able to spend four days emerged in an industry discussion about cloud computing really allows you to step back and think about where we are with this emerging industry. While it would be possible to write endlessly about all the meeting and conversations I had, you probably wouldn’t have enough time to read all that. So, I’ll spare you and give you the top four things I learned at Cloud Connect. I recommend that you also take a look at Brenda Michelson’s blogs from the event for a lot more detail. I would also refer you to Joe McKendrick’s blog from the event. Read more of this post

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Cloud Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning – BTM Arrives

March 18, 2010 by 9 Comments

I’m delighted to feature this piece from Joe Clabby of Clabby Analytics, an independent technology research firm that focuses on systems, storage, networks, infrastructure, management and cloud computing. In this 8-page report, Joe looks at  business transaction management (BTM) — a segment of the application performance management (APM) market he believes anyone looking at cloud computing needs to know about.  It’s well worth investing the time to read this important piece of work.

What happens when a transaction is sent into a cloud for processing?  Which physical and virtual resources does it use (how do you do capacity planning in a cloud if you don’t know which resources a given transaction is using)?  What dependencies does the transaction have?  If the transaction is performing poorly, how can the fault be isolated?  If the transaction misbehaves intermittently, how can that fault be isolated?  And, how do you tune transactions in the cloud to improve performance?

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RainStor Adds Funding, Investors, Readies Nearline Archive Rampup

March 10, 2010 by 1 Comment

RainStor, a firm I discussed as Clearpace in a June 2009 post, had some very good news this week.  $7.5 million in Series B funding came in from Informatica, Storm Ventures and its previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company. RainStor plans to “use the funding to expand into new markets, grow its partner base, and invest in product development and R&D” says the press release. Read more of this post

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Judith Hurwitz Comments on Cloud Impact on HW Biz

February 18, 2010 by 4 Comments

My longtime friend and colleague Judith Hurwitz and I have decided to cross-post on one another’s blogs (hers is at jshurwitz.wordpress.com). I’m delighted to have her here. For me, this is another step in the continuing evolution of the loosely coupled independent analyst collaborations I find myself participating in more and more, and a very exciting development. Welcome, Judith!

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I am thrilled to be contributing my “cloudy” observations to your blog. I have been an analyst and consultant focusing on distributed software. I look at everything from service oriented architectures, service management, and even information management. My philosophy is that cloud computing, in all its iterations, is the future of a significant portion of enterprise software.  Judith Hurwitz, President, Hurwitz & Associates

I thought I would provide my thoughts on the future of hardware in the context of where software is headed.

It is easy to assume that with the excitement around cloud computing would put a damper on the hardware market. But I have news for you. I am predicting that over the next few years hardware will be front and center.  Why would I make such a wild prediction? Here are my three reasons: Read more of this post

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Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]

January 13, 2010 by 4 Comments

(Co-authored with Charles King of PUND-IT, Inc.)

Microsoft and HP announced a new investment of $250M into their Frontline Partnership, designed to deliver integrated stacks supporting applications from Microsoft’s Exchange and SQL Server and beyond into the cloud. As part of this effort, the companies plan to deliver solutions built on what they defined as a “next generation infrastructure-to-application model” which will help speed implementation, eliminate IT management complexities and lower overall costs by automating manual processes. With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will also collaborate on an engineering road map for joint products including data management machines using the new SQL Server MPP database option when it is announced, pre-packaged application solution bundles, comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools. Read more of this post

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