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 [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Dynamic Data Center on Jun 16th, 2009
Lots of buzz in the air about Cisco entering the server market with the Unified Computing System – using the words “Revolutionary”, “Breakthrough”, etc. Now, to have Cisco enter the server market is certainly revolutionary… but neither their technology nor their business value is particulary new. But their marketing sure turned-up the volume on it [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
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, [...]
Read Full Post »
Seems like virtual switches are now the new “it” thing. Cisco announced one that plugs in to VMWare environments. Now comes news from Citrix Syngergy that they are also developing a virtual switch for Xen and KVM. Why all the buzz over virtual switching?
There are 2 good reasons for virtual switches - one is to [...]
Read Full Post »
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. [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
Check out the post fellow blogger and colleague Ken Oestreich wrote recently. It’s a great description of the Processing Area Network. Sometimes a picture/video is better than text and Ken does a great job illustrating the architecture and value of PAN.
Given all the buzz around Cisco UCS, Ken’s blog is timely and informative. Way to [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »
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 [...]
Read Full Post »