When I last spoke to Rainstor, a new round of funding had just come in and prospects seemed bright. It could hardly have happened at a better time. A recent Information Week study of 437 business technology professionals showed that more than half are managing over 10 TB of data, 7% managing 201-500 TB, andContinue reading “RainStor Ramp Rolls On”
Category Archives: Hardware platforms
VDI Market Heats Up – and So Do Vendor Rivalries
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.Continue reading “VDI Market Heats Up – and So Do Vendor Rivalries”
New TPC-H Record – Virtualized by ParAccel, VMware
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 forContinue reading “New TPC-H Record – Virtualized by ParAccel, VMware”
Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues
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 MicrosoftContinue reading “Microsoft Ends Itanium Support — Parsing the Clues”
Dell Marketing Gets It Right
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 aContinue reading “Dell Marketing Gets It Right”
And Then There Were Three: POWER, x86 and z
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.
Cloud Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning – BTM Arrives
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 cloudContinue reading “Cloud Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning – BTM Arrives”
RainStor Adds Funding, Investors, Readies Nearline Archive Rampup
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,Continue reading “RainStor Adds Funding, Investors, Readies Nearline Archive Rampup”
Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]
(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 asContinue reading “Microsoft and HP Announce New Application-to-Infrastructure Model/Partnership [Yawn]”
Additional Caveats Obscure Oracle’s TPC Benchmark
Since my piece on Oracle’s recent TPC-C was posted, interesting emails have pointed me to additional price/performance data, and I thought I’d offer a bit of that to my readers. One of the more interesting came from the admittedly biased Conor O’Mahony, a DB2 product manager for IBM. In his blog, Conor points out some interestingContinue reading “Additional Caveats Obscure Oracle’s TPC Benchmark”