IBM Cuts Blade Servers for SMBs
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IBM Friday sharpened it blade offerings to target small and midsize businesses with the announcement of new hardware and software bundles.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is revamping part of its sales organization to better target the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) market. IBM is realigning its Systems and Technology Group (STG), creating one sales group to sell to large enterprise customers and another to sell to SMBs, business customers with no more than 1,000 employees. It will also better integrate STG with IBM's Global Technology Service (GTS) group and with companies in its Global Business Partners Organization, and design products specifically for the needs of SMBs. The changes were outlined in a memo released Thursday by William Zeitler, IBM's senior vice president and group executive of STG. A new level of sales management will be created within each of 220 geographic sales territories IBM operates globally. The new SMB Systems Sales Manager in each territory will focus solely on SMB sales efforts. IBM named Ross Mauri to head a new Power Systems unit within STG selling high-end System p and System i products to enterprises, and named Marc Dupaquier to run the new Business Systems unit selling low-end System i and p products to SMBs. IBM is making the changes to boost its market share in the $32 billion market, based on 2006 sales, for IT systems for SMBs, said Alex Gogh vice president of channels marketing for STG. IBM's share of the SMB system market was just 15 percent, half of what it is for the overall systems market. "This is a reaction to the marketplace opportunity and a recognition of how large the SMB market opportunity is," said Gogh. The SMB Systems Sales Manager positions are being created to offer just one level of IBM sales management to work with partners to sell to SMBs, not one manager for each of many different product lines, said Bob Samson, vice president of worldwide systems sales for STG. The partners are usually system integrators or independent software vendors. "[Before], a partner had to go to five different IBM people in a territory. Now they just have one," Samson said. The sales reorganization coincides with the introduction of new products designed to appeal to SMBs, including blade servers, he said. IBM announced June 13Â the coming BladeCenter S systemÂ that is packaged to include server, storage, input-output connections to a network and software integrated into a single chassis. IBM said it plans to begin shipping the product in the fourth quarter. With new products and the sales reorganization, IBM hopes to build on the momentum created from Wednesday's announcement of the best quarterly financial performance the company has recorded in six years. For the second quarter of fiscal 2007, ending June 30, IBM reported net income rose 11.8 percent to $2.3 billion on a 9 percent revenue gain to $23.8 billion, compared to the same quarter of 2006. Earnings per share (EPS) grew 19 percent to $1.55, over the year ago quarter.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that Zumiez Inc. (NASDAQ: ZUMZ) -- a leading specialty action sports retailer -- reduced the amount of electricity it uses in the datacenter by 15 percent by implementing an IBM BladeCenter solution.
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The computer maker envisions the blades being used to replace large numbers of stand-alone servers, among other functions.
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IBM on Friday unveiled its lowest-priced-ever BladeCenter chassis and a series of ready-to-go solutions, dubbed &quot;business-in-a-box&quot; to push blades deeper into small- and mid-sized businesses (SMB).
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the development of a Blade Migration Center aimed at helping clients escape the complexity of multiple incompatible architectures by migrating to a smarter IT platform, IBM BladeCenter.
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IBM said it plans to build a blade server system for small to medium-sized businesses.
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Six years coming IBM has teased with scant details of its long-awaited updates to AIX and its Power6-based blade server line â but today the specs have dribbled out of Big Blue at last.â¦
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IBM announced on Friday a lower-cost blade server option--a pared-down chassis geared for small and medium-sized businesses. The new Express version of IBM&#39;s BladeCenter chassis still can accommodate as many
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Dell has announced a dense blade server designed for enterprises with space-tight, hard-to-cool data centres. The PowerEdge 1855 can pack as many as 10 blade servers in a 7U-sized
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IBM&#39;s decision to free up design specifications for its blade server system has stimulated interest in the tech community. The company said more than 100 companies have embraced the BladeCenter spec to build various hardware products.
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RLX Technologies will stop making blade servers to concentrate on management software, the company announced Thursday. Instead, it will sell its Control Tower software management software and will offer it for all major brands of blade servers.
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Sun Microsystems launched a new blade server system today that is capable, it says, of providing up to twice the memory and input/output capacity of rival systems. The powerful new server is part of Sun&#39;s attempt to increase its share of the fast-growing blade market, which has been dominated until now by IBM and HP.
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Dell on Monday&#160;added a new series of blade products to its PowerEdge server line, expanding its presence in a market dominated by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.The PowerEdge M-Series of blades includes the fastest-performing and most power-efficient blade servers the company has, said Mike Roberts, senior product planning manager for Dell.The PowerEdge M1000E, a 10U enclosure, will support the new Intel-based PowerEdge M600 and Advanced Micro Devices-based PowerEdge M605 blade servers, also announced Monday.The M1000E enclosure supports a range of network connectivity options, including modules for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand connectivity. The enclosure allows customers to upgrade or stack up on network hardware to boost networking speed.The PowerEdge M600 blade server is a dual-socket server that supports up to two quad-core Intel Xeon processors, including processors in the Xeon 5400 series running at up to 3.16GHz. The dual-socket PowerEdge M605 servers support dual-core Opteron 2000 series processors running at up to 3GHz. Both blades support Windows Server 2003 and Linux OSes.Targeted at data centers, the PowerEdge M1000E enclosure is priced at $5,999, and the blades start at $1,849. The products will be available worldwide starting Monday.Dell&#39;s OpenManage systems management technology, which will be bundled with the blades, includes energy management tools. Capabilities include real-time power reporting and the ability to set power usage by blade.Power efficiency in blade servers is an important consideration for those looking to upgrade data centers, said Richard Doherty, cofounder and director of Envisioneering Group. Energy costs have become a big factor in considering hardware for data centers, and companies are taking a closer look at reducing their carbon footprints, Doherty said.&quot;Going greener can be a reason for an upgrade,&quot; Doherty said.The new blade server gives Dell an opportunity to catch up with HP and IBM blade products, especially in small data centers, Doherty said. Dell&#39;s PowerEdge M-Series will compete with IBM&#39;s BladeCenter H and HP&#39;s BladeSystem c-Class blades.In addition, the new blade servers will need strong management tools in order to succeed, Doherty said. Dell in the past has announced service and support initiatives that haven&#39;t panned out, and the company&#39;s OpenManage system management tools are not as strong as autonomic computing offerings from HP and IBM, Doherty said.System management is a big concern for data centers, and customers are looking for the ability to manage systems without the need for additional IT engineers, Doherty said.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will license its technology for cooling servers with water instead of air to a Chicago-area company. Panduit, a global networking and electrical manufacturer, will license IBM's Rear Door Heat eXchanger product, a five-inch deep cooling door to be mounted on the back of a conventional server rack in a data center. Water courses through the door, cooling the processors in the server hardware. IBM's water-cooled system reduces server heat output in data centers by up to 55 percent, compared to air-cooled technology, said Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer for IBM's BladeCenter and System x server product lines. The heat exchanger isÂ part of IBM's CoolBlue portfolioÂ of products to manage data centers more cost-effectively, reducing the heat generated by the increased processing power of servers and the increased number of servers crowded into datacenters. Datacenter operators who use fans for cooling have been slow to embrace water cooling because "it's difficult to do water cooling inexpensively," Bradicich said Wednesday in an interview. But over the last 18 months, the growth of datacenters running more and more industry-standard x-86 type servers "has been getting extremely out of hand," he said. The growth drives up demand for electricity to run more powerful computers and to keep the equipment cool. High energy costs have made water-cooled solutions more viable. Water cooling is getting a closer look from some IT administrators, but they still have some reservations about it, said Michael Bell, a GartnerÂ analyst, in a Wednesday interview. Water cooling can be initially more expensive to introduce into a datacenter than air cooling, and IT managers worry about water systems leaking and causing damage, Bell said. Some are sticking their toe in the water-cooling pool cautiously, clustering their highest powered servers into one part of their data centers and introducing water-cooled technology only in that area. But as datacenter electricity bills grow, "I think we'll see water usage coming more into play," he said, adding that it now costs data centers as much to cool a server as to power it. IBM rival Hewlett-PackardÂ introduced a water-based cooling systemÂ for its high-density servers in January. Also in January, blade server maker Egenera introduced a product called CoolFrame that integrates Liebert's X-Treme Density cooling technology into a blade architecture. Liebert is a division of Ohio-based Emerson Electric.
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IBM Corp. said Wednesday it cut 1,753 jobs, mostly in its U.S. technology-services unit, as part of a continuing operations overhaul.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade PCs designed to compete with offerings from IBM Corp. HP announced its BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 products on Monday, promising to reduce IT management costs and improve data security for corporate buyers by replacing traditional desktop and notebook PCs. Specialist blade manufacturers like ClearCube Technology Inc. and Wyse Technology Inc. also compete in this segment, as vendors see growing demand from businesses that struggle to balance security and compliance regulations with an increasingly dispersed and outsourced workforce. The new BladeSystems are the desktop version of HP's range of remote computing products. They fit between a blade server arrangement for workers with light computing needs and a blade workstation system for engineers and stock traders. In all three models, the user connects to a remote processor and data storage by accessing the office network with a desk-based access device such as a thin client. Since the main computing resources are located in a single, controlled data center, the corporate IT department can cut management costs by making hardware repairs and applying software patches remotely instead of visiting numerous workers at their desks. HP is selling the bc2000 for US$1,000 per unit when a company buys 10 of the machines. Although that is up to twice the price of a traditional desktop, the IT department can pay off the difference in 12 months of operation, said Tate Davis, CCI product manager for HP's consolidated client infrastructure group. IBM is chasing that same market with its HC10 blade and a TC10 thin client from its partner Devon IT Inc., both launched in May. IBM also targets midrange business users, but uses an Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo processor, 8G bytes of memory and 60G bytes of storage. In contrast, HP upgraded its previous blade PC -- the BladeSystem bc1500 -- by increasing the storage from 40G bytes to 80G bytes, the memory from 512M bytes to 1G byte, and the processor from an AMD Athlon 64 1500-series chip to Athlon 64 2100-series (for the bc2000) or dual-core Athlon 64 X2 (for the bc2500). The extra power meets user demands for a blade PC capable of running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista Business edition and its fast graphics handling, Davis said. "Customers say 'If we're going to do thousands of units for a wholesale desktop replacement, we need this thing to support Vista, we need a graphics look and feel equivalent to a desktop PC, and we need a little more processing power than the bc1500, our previous generation,'" Davis said. The bc1500 ran Windows XP Professional. HP says that power allows the bc2000 to outperform other blade computing designs, since it accesses those new processors over a dedicated link instead of through a "time-share" network where multiple users tap into a single blade computer. "The IT department is being asked to do more than keep the trains running on time," Davis said. "They also have to help the end user comply with disaster continuity and recovery, handle outsourcing and offshore jobs, and maintain high security and compliance with the data." The bc2000 is shipping now, with the bc2500 to follow by late July. Pricing for the bc2500 has not yet been announced. Â