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Egenera Blog

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery

The traditional mindset around disaster recovery has been that it is too expensive for anyone other than the large enterprise.  DR meant a second data center with 2x the number of servers and infrastructure and 2x the management complexity (every change had to be replicated at two locations). We’ve all talked about this here before. [...] Read More

Sun: Back in blades?

The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System has been out for a couple weeks and what little dust there was has settled. Actually, I haven’t seen too much out there in the form of analysis beyond the usual news pieces (have you?). Perhaps that’s a signal that – again – the industry is taking a “wait [...] Read More

Blades and Virtualization: Observations from Server Blade Summit

I was sitting in a hotel ballroom – outside, the warm California sun was luring me away from the cold air conditioning breeze I felt before the breakout panel began at the Server Blade Summit. The panel session was called “Blades and Virtualization,” which alone is a very broad topic – but this panel focused [...] Read More

Grid: Feeling the pressure

The “Google model” remains a constant touchpoint for most folks in the technology industry. How they do it, why it works, etc. My take has always been, “the Google model of assembling large numbers of commodity servers in a huge grid only works for certain types of applications.” Historically, grids have been really good in [...] Read More

What’s the “N” in N+1 High Availability?

Many virtualization solutions running on distributed systems claim the ability to automatically move an application between processing resources in the case of a hardware or application failure. This eliminates the 1:1 mapping for high availability (for every active server there is a corresponding active/passive server) and therefore creates N+1 high availability. That’s great but what [...] Read More

What VMware’s Public Offering Might Mean…

Why is EMC offering shares of its VMware subsidiary to the public market? Some theories: Maximize on VMware’s current market value. EMC is trying to benefit from VMware’s maximum value, before the market becomes more competitive with future offerings from Xen (via XenSource) and Microsoft. The commoditization of hypervisors may lower VMware’s future valuation over [...] Read More