IBM claims virtualization victory over EMC
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IBM is claiming a storage management victory over EMC, saying it can now control its leading competitor's entire line of storage arrays with the latest version its SAN Volume Controller appliance.
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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. &quot;It helps postpone the inevitable,&quot; he adds.
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Storage maker EMC&#39;s profit increased dramatically compared to last year&#39;s third quarter, lifted again by continued growth of its VMware subsidiary and EMC&#39;s recent sale of a slice of the company.Net income for the third quarter ending Sept. 30 was $492.9 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, which was 77 percent more over the same period a year ago, EMC said Thursday. Those figures included the&#160;sale of 6 million shares of VMware to Cisco Systems.Excluding the VMware gain, EMC&#39;s net income was $377.8 million, or $0.18 per diluted share. Analysts predicted $0.17.EMC, which&#160;acquired VMware&#160;in 2004 for $635 million, said in February it would&#160;sell off 10 percent of VMware in an IPO&#160;(initial public offering), which was completed in August. EMC said the money would go toward stock compensation for its employees as well as boost the stock price. Intel now also owns a stake in VMware.VMware maintains a huge, 85 percent market share for virtualization software, which allows multiple operating systems to run on one piece of hardware.The technology remains a hot area, since&#160;virtualization enables servers to perform at a higher level, reducing the need for more servers. EMC, which has retained a majority stake in VMware, said third quarter revenue came in at $354 million, 90 percent higher than for the same quarter a year ago.EMC said its Information Storage business reported 8 percent higher revenue, backed by sales of its Clariion and Celerra networked storage systems plus other backup and recovery products.RSA, EMC&#39;s security business, saw revenue grow 22 percent over a year prior. Those gains were attributed to RSA&#39;s authentication business, consumer applications, and event management business.&#160;
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IBM introduced a virtual tape storage management system for mainframe environments.
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With the proclamation that it intends to overtake EMC as the top enterprise storage supplier, IBM announced today the DS6000, a disk storage system slightly bigger than a VCR, and the TotalStorage
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new release of its premier virtualization management software that adds powerful new capabilities for simplifying the management of virtual and physical systems across multiple platforms.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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Despite the buzz over the public offering of its VMware software business, EMC Corp. of Hopkinton isn't forgetting its roots as a maker of data storage systems. The company will today unveil major upgrades to its key storage products.
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EMC announced plans Wednesday to offer 10% of its virtualization software subsidiary in an initial public offering.
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IBM has added a new capability to its virtualization platform that will allow Linux applications to run on IBM&#39;s Unix servers, the company announced Tuesday.The &quot;Lx86&quot; capability, to be included in IBM&#39;s PowerVM virtualization software, allows x86-based Linux applications to run on IBM&#39;s System p and Power-based Unix systems without modification, according to IBM. The systems will automatically detect and run Linux-based binaries designed for x86 environments.&quot;Lx86 is a way to say, &#39;Whatever you have, it can run,&quot; said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems.The capability will simplify the consolidation of Unix and Linux server sprawls, Handy said. Running Linux applications in the Unix environment can reduce the cost of server consolidation and energy consumption and increase asset utilization, he argued.Lx86 will be a useful tool for people looking to migrate from Linux systems to other IBM systems, IBM said. The company offers both Unix and Linux operating systems on its servers.The capability will be included in all editions of IBM&#39;s PowerVM platform, which it also renamed Tuesday from the Advanced Power Virtualization platform.The software now includes an Express edition targeted at SMBs. It allows customers to create up to three partitions on a server and control the use of processor cycles to get optimal performance. The Express edition will be shipped to customers soon, priced at $40 per core. PowerVM is also available in Standard and Enterprise editions.IBM also announced that it will update its i5/OS operating system with support for Power6 processors. The update, called V6R1, includes improved performance, storage and security features, according to IBM.The update supports IBM&#39;s Power6 EnergyScale technology for controlling energy use. The company also updated its Rational software tool set for the i5/OS, Handy said.The i5/OS V6R1, for IBM&#39;s System i servers, will ship in March. It will also work with the company&#39;s new BladeCenter H server chassis, Handy said.
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(InfoWorld) - Three years after being bought by EMC, VMware is going public.Â EMC announced plans Wednesday to offer 10 percent of its virtualization software subsidiary in an initial public offering (IPO). The offering will "unlock more of VMware's value for EMC shareholders," and help the company "retain and attract the software industry's top talent," EMC Chairman, President, and CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. "We think now is the point where the planets are aligned and this makes sense," Tucci said on a conference call with financial analysts. WhenÂ EMC acquired VMwareÂ in 2004, it had 300 employees; today it has 3,000, he said. "The growth rate of this company has been phenomenal." EMC plans to file a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late March or early April for the planned IPO, and the shares could be available for sale some time in the second quarter, said David Goulden, executive vice president and chief financial officer of EMC. The shares to be put on the market will be new shares, not ones already owned by EMC, Goulden said. The proceeds will "provide VMware with the financial resources it needs to achieve its full growth potential and provide EMC with the potential to return a portion of the original investment in VMware to EMC shareholders, while enabling them to continue to enjoy the vast majority ownership in this strategic and fast-growing business," Goulden said. Virtualization, which allows a server to better run multiple applications simultaneously, has helped businesses reduce the number of servers they need, reduce their energy consumption and assist in data center disaster recovery efforts, said Diane Greene, who founded VMware in 1998. She is president of VMware and executive vice president of EMC. "The IPO is a powerful way for us to accelerate our vision of a pervasive, industry standard virtual infrastructure. We see an incredible opportunity ahead of us," Greene said. More than 10 percent of new x86 server workloads are running on VMware virtualization software, and VMware is used by more than 20,000 customers, Greene said. Analysts have recently speculated on whether EMC would spin off VMware, said Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor with research firm Illuminata Inc. "EMC wants to get some of the money while VMware is clearly a hot property," he said. "On the other hand, they clearly want to retain a very large chunk of VMware." EMC's stock (EMC) has been stuck in the $10 to $15 range for the last three years. The IPO was announced after the New York Stock Exchange closed for the day. In after-hours trading, EMC shares rose $0.91 to $14.55. Tucci's comments about unlocking VMware's value "might be less politely phrased as 'hopefully getting the shareholders off my butt,'" Haff said. VMware is an early leader in one of the IT industry's hottest market segments. The company's revenue was up 83 percent in 2006, totalling $709 million, EMC said. The IPO should generate capital for VMware to invest in innovation, said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research. Although VMware is the industry leader in server virtualization software, MicrosoftÂ is expected to introduce an update of its Microsoft Virtual Server in the fourth quarter of 2007, which could increase competitive pressure on VMware.
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Airespace, a Silicon Valley telecom services start-up, won a partnership with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) that will help Airespace
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IBM announced Monday a set of offerings from its Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware, including &quot;how-to&quot; guides and a solution sizing toolkit, all aimed at helping the company&#39;s business partners build and deploy applications on IBM technology.
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Ziff Davis - The company says the new version of its SAN virtualization manager can handle all of rival EMC's arrays.
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(InfoWorld) - The president of virtualization software leader VMware Wednesday questioned the strategy of rivals that are integrating virtualization functionality into their operating systems. Diane Greene made the comments at the third and final day of the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. VMware, a subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, doubled revenue in EMC's latest quarterly report, compared to the year ago quarter, as enterprises embrace VMware's virtualization software to make more efficient use of the servers in their data centers. RivalsÂ like Red Hat and Microsoft have responded to VMware's dominance by integrating virtualization into coming new operating systems. Red Hat is introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 next week, and Microsoft's new Windows server OS is due later this year. But Greene, in discussing virtualization with analysts for the investment firm, said she wonders how effective the competition's virtualization features can be. "Traditionally, the operating system manages the hardware and manages the application. Once you virtualize with a hypervisor, that is now what is managing the hardware, not the OS," Greene said, in a presentation that was distributed via webcast. "Now the operating system is just managing the application. So certainly Windows and Red Hat are moving to integrate virtualization into their OS, but part of the value proposition seems to be lost when you do that." Spokespeople for Microsoft and Red Hat did not respond to requests for comment. VMware is a strong contributor to the earnings of parent company EMC, which also sells storage hardware and security software. Greene also is executive vice president of EMC. Revenue for VMware increased to $232 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, 101 percent more than a year prior. The growth comes from increased demand for VMware Infrastructure 3, a virtualization software suite for servers and storage networks. VMware's growth prompted EMC to recently announce plans toÂ spin off 10 percent of VMware in an IPO. EMC executives said they anticipate releasing the prospectus later this month for the IPO, expected about midyear. Greene noted the stock sale will benefit VMware employees as well as potential shareholders. "Our stock-based compensation will track our performance, and that is the ideal model," she said. Also at the Morgan Stanley conference, Greene acknowledged that virtualizing servers, which helps them use more of their designed capacity, may suppress server sales growth. But she said many customers are upgrading servers as they introduce virtualization into their operations. Those new servers are more high-end products, with greater processing power, and should yield higher margins for server vendors. EMC reported fourth quarter 2006 financial results Jan. 23, posting net income of $389 million, or $0.17 a share, on revenue of $3.21 billion. It edged out analysts' estimates of $0.16 a share. Â
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Here&#39;s the skinny: The EMC Storage Router made its debut at Storage Network World here this week, but only in ballroom demonstrations (see EMC on Virtualization: Wait for Us).
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Beware IBM, HP, Dell and Sun EMC's grand stretch across the data center continued this week with the purchase of Voyence - a maker of network configuration software.â¦