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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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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Back on 16 April, Cisco began its marketing push on its Unified Computing System (UCS) hyping the fundamental cost savings it provides – as much as 31% over traditional approaches for a large scale-out implementation.
But after close scrutiny, Cisco either needs to check their math or adjust their pricing. Their claims about TCO, bandwidth etc. [...]
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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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Yogi Berra said it, Cisco just reconfirmed it.
Reviewing Cisco’s much-leaked, and much hyped announcement of Project California was like a trip down memory lane.
Blade Form Factor - Check!
Unified Fabric for IP and Storage traffic - Check!
Management Console - Check!
Integration with Virtual Machine Management - Check!
Sounds oh so PAN like to me. If imitation is indeed [...]
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We all knew it had to happen at some point. You had the old guard running servers on physical platforms, sprawling through the data center, using more and more power generating more heat. Then came virtualization via the hypervisor, condensing the many physical servers into a few. This, of course, could not take care of [...]
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What is a utopian data center? It has always been desired for obvious reasons, but has never really been attainable. Data centers have become overly complex over the last decade due to so many different levels of management to keep up with the growing demand of servers and trying to keep it from getting out [...]
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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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In my last couple of posts, I discussed the journey that we are on and how applications will be purchased and deployed going forward. In this post, I’ll discuss how I see systems being provisioned to support these applications.
In order to support an environment where applications are purchased as a service, with performance and availability [...]
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As Ethernet speeds reached Fibre Channel’s 1Gb/s and IP became a defacto global protocol for small and large enterprises alike, it became clear that wrapping SCSI commands in TCP/IP packets may be the next standard for block transfer over networks. Even more exciting was that iSCSI would run on everyone’s favorite data center network, Ethernet. [...]
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