Oracle Exadata: Early Signs Promising

June 15, 2010 by 1 Comment

Exadata is looking good. In the past few months, I’ve had the chance to talk to several early adopters of Oracle Exadata V2, some in connection with a sponsored white paper Oracle has just published. It’s still early, but I see this product as a milestone, regardless of its commercial success. That is still to be determined, although I wouldn’t bet against it. How it will be affected by Oracle’s execution of the Sun acquisition is another open question, and the recent surprise layoffs, which showed that either the announced expectations were laughably off base or Ellison’s early announcements about  hiring plans were less than candid, don’t bode too well for the near term. Rob Enderle made some strong and provocative points in his guest post here. Read more of this post

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HP To Add 6000 Jobs in Sales and Service

June 1, 2010 by 1 Comment

“…with funding to come from 9000 positions that will be eliminated as a result of HP’s successful data center and automation efforts.” My headline from today’s news. Funny how emphasis and choice of lead matters. HP attempted to drive the message on this story by headlining its press release “HP to Invest $1 Billion to Launch New Era of Enterprise Services.” That didn’t work; those are costs associated with the separation of employees, and the pundits pounced on burying them at the bottom. But the predictable anti-business, determinedly contrarian response has missed the mark as well.

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RainStor Ramp Rolls On

May 29, 2010 by Leave a comment

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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, and 8% more than 500 TB. The study says that “for the first time  enterprise storage architects are more worried about meeting capacity demands than they are about data security.” On the heels of the Economist’s recent assertion that more data is being generated than storage being built to contain it, the issue is more critical than ever. Read more of this post

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EMC World 2010 and IT Vendor Evolution

May 24, 2010 by 4 Comments

From Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.

IT vendor conferences offer a variety of amusements and educational opportunities, and EMC World 2010 was no exception. But the most interesting aspect of this year’s event focused on how things have changed for EMC during the past year. Consider this: EMC World 2009 kicked off with a keynote co-hosted by company President and CEO Joe Tucci and VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz, emphasizing the companies’ common vision of virtualization as the foundation for cloud computing. Last week in Boston, Tucci used his solo keynote to highlight EMC’s notion of private cloud computing as the rightful future of enterprise datacenters and discussed the partnerships EMC is pursuing to make that vision a reality. Read more of this post

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SapphireNow Day Two – Pump It Up

May 18, 2010 by 1 Comment

Bill McDermott began the day for Orlando attendees of SapphireNow by demonstrating that there is no charisma deficit at SAP these days, and his co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe was right there behind him to make the case that commitment and strategy are not lacking either. They welcomed Sybase, hailed the new ByDesign release about to ship, and waved the sustainability flag high, leveraging their strong position there. Read more of this post

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SapphireNow Day One – Getting Virtual Events Right, And More

May 17, 2010 by 1 Comment

I got some great messages today from people who enjoyed my tweets “from” SapphireNow in Orlando – although I wasn’t there. That’s a tribute – not to me; we’re only talking tweets, for goodness’ sake – to SAP for pulling off a two-continent, video-streaming, full-on collaborative event I was able to participate in meaningfully from my desk in California. There was substance, partner announcements, customer dialogue, and star keynoters. A good day, with the best ahead, if my pre-briefs are any indication; there’s more ahead. Read more of this post

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IBM Gets Feisty — Mobilizes Analytics for Oracle Battle

April 14, 2010 by 5 Comments

In July 2009, IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 7600, a workload-optimized, pre-integrated bundle of hardware and software targeted at the business analytics market. Included in that package are an IBM POWER 550 running AIX, storage, plus InfoSphere Warehouse Enterprise Edition (which consists of DB2, Warehouse design and management tools + Cubing, Data Mining and Text Analytics services), and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, configured and tuned, and “health check” features. Accommodations are made if the customer already has licensed some of the software and wants to use it on the platform; in this sense, the software is described as “optional.” This month, IBM broadened the story and upped the ante, making Smart Analytics System a key weapon in its widening battle with Oracle.

This post is a slightly updated version of a piece that appeared in the PUND-IT newsletter. Read more of this post

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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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