NetApp pumps its midrange
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SAN/NAS hybrid is a rose, not a monster Network Appliance has renewed another chunk of its midrange, sliding the 3040 series in on top of the 3020 and 3050. The new box adds technology such as 64-bit processors, 4Gig Fibre Channel and Gig Ethernet, and is in effect a half-size version of the 3070 released last year.â¦
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EMC puts the boot in Network Appliance is buying the privately-owned storage service management vendor Onaro for an undisclosed sum. Israeli tech pub The Marker reports NetApp is putting $120m on the table, but chief marketing officer Jay Kidd declined to confirm the figure.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. "It helps postpone the inevitable," he adds. But the first servers chosen had very low utilization -- around 5 percent -- so the 40:1 rate is not sustainable. Over time, Rubesch expects the ratio to be 6:1, taking into account such servers as e-mail, database, and telephony that cannot be virtualized. That utilization rate will still reduce overall power usage to 16 percent of what it had been and physical space needs to a tenth, as the use of blade servers plus virtualization greatly reduces the physical footprint. Facilities costs should fall by $75,000 per year and hardware costs by $250,000 per year, he says. But organizations considering the use of virtualization need to be careful calculating costs, Rubesch cautions. If you have fewer than 10 virtual server instances running on a physical VMware server, virtualization becomes "extraordinarily expensive," he says. IT managers must also be careful not to factor in too much savings for the operating systems and applications running in virtual machines, Rubesch says. Many IT managers count on being able to run multiple instances of an OS or an app on one CPU, paying for just one license, because most enterprise apps are licensed on a per-CPU basis. But vendors are starting to charge per instance, not per CPU. For example, BEA now charges per instance rather than per CPU for its WebLogic server, and Microsoft Windows Server Enterprise Edition's license allows use on one physical server and as many as four VMs on that server. As virtualization grows more popular, you can expect the licensing savings to evaporate, so the investment should be based on savings elsewhere, such as in hardware and facilities efficiencies, Rubesch says. The use of VMs also increases your risk, because "you can put a lot of eggs in one basket," Rubesch says. But because you've reduced the number of points of failure, IT staff has more capability to focus on those critical areas, he notes. Rubesch is building sufficient capacity so that no single server is fully utilized, providing space for EMC's VMotion software to move VMs if a physical server fails. He's also keeping a spare physical server ready to go if needed. Using virtualization also incurs a high up-front cost. "The benefits aren't immediate," Rubesch says. A big reason is that to use the EMC VMotion utility to move server instances to other physical servers for better load-balancing or failover requires that all the hardware use the same CPU family, requiring a big hardware cost at each refresh cycle. "You need to sell that concept a little bit," he says dryly. Beyond the hardware costs, the use of virtualization makes the server environment more complicated, as "servers" can reside anywhere and change where they reside over time. As a result, "you need more skills," Rubesch says. For example, although a good Windows administrator will easily adapt to running virtualized Windows servers, you still need a dedicated person to handle such items as dynamic allocation and failover, he says. Of course, you can also use virtualization to simplify your environment, Rubesch notes, such as having standard server images that ensure consistency -- ending the nightmare of navigating the peculiarities specific to each hand-deployed physical server. "It's a lot simpler with VMs to have them nearly identical." Despite the caveats on understanding actual savings and the increased up-front costs, Rubesch is a big fan of server virtualization: "You get real benefit from it -- as long as you plan ahead." Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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While Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM are the recognized leaders of the X86 server market, one player has surprisingly begun to gain ground.
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte level.
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FPGAs, zonemaps, and a strong roadmap Comment I have recently returned from Netezza's second annual conference. This was well attended, with nearly all of the company's customers (around 75) being represented, as well as a significant number of both prospects and partners.â¦
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SuperPuppy writes &quot;Hardcoreware.net has rounded up three 2500+ Socket A processors from AMD. An AthlonXP, based on the Barton core (this particular one predates the locked multipliers we&#39;ve been seeing lately
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Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte level.Systems capable of that scale will be available beginning in the middle of this year, according to the company. The increased performance will be made possible in part through the company&#39;s recently announced Compress Engine, for advanced compression, according to Netezza. The new systems will also support multiterabyte per hour data-loading, the company said.Netezza, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, has regularly announced performance improvements since launching its appliance in 2002. That initial version could handle up to 6TB of data, according to the company. That leapfrogged to 27TB in 2004 and 100TB in 2005, Netezza said.&quot;We have a number of customers who are now at or approaching that upper range,&quot; said Phil Francisco, the company&#39;s director of product marketing.Francisco said the new systems will preserve the company&#39;s existing pricing model. Low-end systems start below $200,000 and scale up from there, with support coming at additional cost, he said.Richard Winter, a consultant with Winter Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts, said the BI market is ripe for more powerful data-crunching products. &quot;Every time you turn around you see another industry that&#39;s facing a tidal wave of data and they need to understand what this data is saying,&quot; he said. &quot;Many of them have data volumes in this range that they haven&#39;t been able to afford to analyze, as much as they&#39;d like to. ... [Netezza] can deliver that analytic capability, and at a very attractive price.&quot;James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research, said Netezza is now aiming for the highest end of the data warehousing market, going after the likes of Teradata.&quot;Being able to scale up to a petabyte in context of an NPS deployment will go a long way toward getting Netezza in that inner circle of vendors,&quot; he said.The company may face certain problems of perception when attempting to poach such vendors&#39; customers, however. &quot;Their chief challenge is the fact that they&#39;re a startup,&quot; Kobielus said. &quot;They&#39;re definitely not as old and mature as the IBMs and Teradatas.&quot;Netezza also may have limited appeal to customers that would prefer a one-stop shopping approach for their BI-data warehousing needs. Instead, Netezza has partnered with BI vendors such as Business Objects.In addition, heightened competition may be around the corner for the firm, according to the analysts.&quot;Over the course of the year you&#39;ll also see some appliance-type offerings from the major players like Teradata and Oracle,&quot; Winter said. &quot;They&#39;ll compete down the road.&quot;Kobielus said he sees Microsoft making a particularly strong push in coming months.&quot;I am confident Microsoft will have some really important announcements this year,&quot; he said. &quot;Definitely look out for those guys.&quot;
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ParAccel, a new company based in San Diego, this week released a database for midsize companies that combines a number of BI-oriented features at a low price point.The company is targeting the middle of the midmarket, not smaller businesses, according to vice president of marketing Kim Stanick. &quot;You have to have a certain amount of data before our product becomes compelling for you,&quot; she said.The software does not provide radical new technology, but ParAccel is touting its database&#39;s columnar orientation and MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities. The company argues that columnar databases are more effective for&#160;BI applications because users can query just the desired columns of a given row, saving bandwidth.&quot;That itself is a nice product set, especially with the price point,&quot; Stanick said.ParAccel is offering the database as a software package or incorporated into a hardware appliance. It can also be deployed as a &quot;drop in&quot; accelerator for existing SQL Server and Oracle databases. The company said the database is compatible with all major brands of hardware.A number of licensing options are available. All-in-memory systems cost $1,000 per gigabyte, beginning at 100GB. Disk-based systems cost $40,000 per node plus $10,000 per terabyte, starting at five nodes. Subscriptions cost $5,000 a month and up.ParAccel counts some notable names among its management team. One of Oracle&#39;s co-founders, Bruce Scott, is vice president of engineering.The startup originally positioned its product as an accelerator for SQL Server, but in response to market interest widened its focus to include data warehousing and Oracle&#39;s platform. This week&#39;s announcement doubled as the official company launch for ParAccel, which joins an increasingly crowded market for data warehousing.ParAccel also announced benchmarking figures for its database running on Sun Fire X4100 and Blade 6000 servers. According to the company, the combination set TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support) records for performance in the 1TB category. Sun and ParAccel are also partnering on a data warehousing product.
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(Source: Network Appliance)  This technical report discusses the virtual storage solutions that reduce cost, increase storage utilization, increase fault tolerance, and address the challenges of backing up and restoring VMware ESX Server environments by using NetApp technologies.
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LIVE WEBCAST(Source: NetApp)  Join a live panel of speakers from Sprint Nextel, Enterprise Strategy Group and NetApp to learn how you can leverage NetApp virtualization, data center efficiency, and backup and recovery solutions to achieve: - 50% savings in power, space, and cooling- 38% total cost savings in VMware environments- 95% faster backups- Up to 20:1 space savings with deduplicationThis webcast will air on Tuesday, February 26th at 11:00 a.m. PST.
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Network appliance will announce this week additional capabilities and partnerships for its NetApp NetCache line of Internet security appliances. Meanwhile, EMC will unveil a major upgrade to its ILM (information life cycle management) product line with a focus on adding application-aware components.
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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TechWeb - Now with easy customization and process integration, will utility apps dominate?
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Fresh gear beats rivals The fresh Xeon-based servers from Sun mark the companyâs most muscular play to date in the x86 realm. The four-socket 2U X4450, in particular, has Sun pushing the equivalent of a midrange SMP down into the heart of the so-called âcommodityâ market. This move plays well with Sunâs historic strengths in the SMP (symmetric multi-processing) arena and supports Sunâs âR&amp;D will winâ mantra.â¦
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Forget about 'upgrading.' Blowing away everything on each machine and beginning from the ground up results in a faster, more stable install.