Compared to 12 months ago, the term “converged infrastructure” is now practically a commonplace term.
All major vendors — Cisco, HP, IBM — are offering their corporate version, their interpretation, their pre-configured systems. And the press & analysts are eating-up the marketing for all of these proprietary solutions.
Meanwhile, in the adjacent cloud computing space, another different [...]
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Egenera announced a new version of Dell PAN System and PAN Manager Software today that greatly expands the scalability of PAN Manager on a number of fronts. PAN Manager can now manage more blades on a single converged fabric , more VMs, and more servers. It also increases the IO throughput, utilizing 10Gbps Ethernet uplinks, [...]
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Posted in Blade Servers, Data Center Consolidation, Data Center Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Dynamic Data Center, High Availability, IO Virtualization, Industry, OEM Partners, Virtualization on Dec 3rd, 2009
Egenera – as well as much of the IT industry – is standing at an exciting point in its evolution.
When Egenera was founded in 2000, nearly nobody had heard of virtual I/O or converged networking. In fact, blade servers were hardly part of the vernacular. But the company had a vision of simplified data center [...]
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Well, the June 12th Channel Register report on Cisco UCS prices certainly changes the conclusions of the original Cisco price comparison done in April.
For Blades, assuming the “Legacy” Blade Price used by Cisco in the original comparison is the actual List Price of a “Legacy” Nehalem Blade (Cisco agreed that HP was [...]
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With the entry of new products to the market such as Cisco’s UCS and HP’s Matrix Operating Environment - a new name for HP’s collection of tools - I thought it would be worthwhile to re-visit the architectures for Real Time Infrastructure and discuss the different approaches and what the strengths/weaknesses are of each. Specifically, [...]
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Gartner’s recent article Oracle RAC Moved to Mainstream Use made me think about how important Oracle’s work has been around RAC — but also how its progress could have been even faster if not for stubborn complexity of the underlying physical infrastructure.
Let me explain with an example. Oracle Grid, aka Oracle RAC, allows database [...]
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Last year, Egenera announced support for Dell rack mount servers, extending the Processing Area Network architecture to off-the-shelf, industry standard servers. This combination joins the best-in-class Unified Fabric architecture (PAN) with the best-in-class industry standard hardware from Dell. The solution earned early praise from customers and has proven to be a terrific offering for the [...]
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I read with great interest the J.D. Morris blog on the death of independent enterprise hardware and software companies. It’s an interesting and thought provoking read. However, it’s also one that I’ve read many times in my career. Every time we hit a snag, someone predicts the death of innovative new companies and it usually [...]
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Posted in Blade Servers on Jun 26th, 2007
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 [...]
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Posted in Blade Servers, Virtualization on May 3rd, 2007
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 [...]
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