IBM taunts Sun, HP and VMware with $40 PowerVM hypervisor
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Slaps software on new Unix boxen IBM thinks it can slice the hell out of a server. In fact, it looks to use virtualization as a major weapon against Unix rivals Sun Microsystems and HP and against x86 vendors. Don't believe us? Then witness the PowerVM branding exercise.â¦
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Hyper over hypervisors IBM this week marched its virtualization agenda forward on two fronts, announcing new code for beastly mainframes and some labs-crafted software for thin x86 systems.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ unveiled a Web site and IT security software application Thursday as part of its effort to compete with Hewlett-PackardÂ and SunÂ for customers in the fast-growing SMB sector. New customers can share tips on how to migrate from servers to mainframes on the Web site, which acts as an online community for users, system integrators, software vendors, and academic institutions. Existing customers can use the enhanced z/VM virtualization software to support more virtualized memory or use the new Tivoli zSecure V1.8.1 suite to monitor threats and enforce compliance. IBM created the new version of zSecure with technology from itsÂ first-quarter acquisition of Consul Risk Management. That purchase is part of IBM's strategy to spend $100 million toÂ simplify its mainframe platformÂ by 2011, hoping to persuade businesses to buy its System z9 mainframe computers instead of high-end servers. IBM sells an enterprise-class version of its z9 for large corporations and a business-class version for SMBs. Compared to servers running on chips from Sun or Intel, customers can save money by using power-efficient mainframes, said Jim Stallings, general manager of System z for IBM's systems and technology group. "The biggest reason customers are drawn to the mainframe -- a trend we've seen for more than 10 years now -- is power," Stallings said. "Servers running on the faster chips and greater numbers of chips draw an enormous amount of power, and our smaller customers can't get that power. I'm talking about basic electricity." The streamlined architecture of the mainframe makes it attractive to customers who need to process large amounts of information, such as financial services firms and hedge funds, he said. That group is quickly growing to include midrange banks, including the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus and Nexar, an Internet banking company in Belgium. "SMB customers are realizing that they cannot afford to change their infrastructure every two years because it's too expensive. The cost comes not so much in the hardware as in training people to administer it," Stallings said. "Our customers came to us and said, 'We want to migrate more work to the mainframe because of the economics. We're way over the religious debates about which processor is faster -- we don't care -- we need better economics.'" IBM is making a big bet on its mainframe business with the $100 million investment, but the gambit may pay off. In theÂ first quarter of 2007, the company credited strong growth in its software and system z sectors for an 8 percent increase in net income to $1.8 billion and a 6.6 percent increase in revenue to $22 billion, compared to the same period in 2006.
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In an attempt to grab business from Hewlett-Packard&#39;s and Sun Microsystems&#39; entry-level Unix market, IBM this week plans to introduce a Power5 processor-based server tuned for Linux.
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IBM IBM.N said on Thursday its  workhorse commercial computers have smashed the industry's most  demanding tests, which analysts said creates a performance gap  that could put further pressure on Hewlett-Packard HPQ.N or  Sun Microsystems SUNW.O to recalibrate their strategies.
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
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InfoWorld - Targeting Unix archrivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, IBM on Friday topped off the high end of its Power 5-based line of iSeries and pSeries servers, rolling out three systems all capable of hosting as many as 250 virtual servers on a single machine.
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With starting hardware prices of $3,993 and $7,050 respectively, the IBM eServer(TM) p5-520 and p5-550 Express models are among the most cost-effective in the industry.
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IBM has rolled out new Power5 server models i595 and p595. The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single server is a particularly attractive to customers handling an array of software platforms, says IBM&#39;s Guy Paradise.
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IBM (Quote, Chart) upped the ante against rivals HP (Quote, Chart) and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) in the server market by adding three new machines based on its Power5 processor, two of which can run 254 virtual servers on a single machine.
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InfoWorld - IBM has added a new capability to its virtualization platform that will allow Linux applications to run on IBM's Unix servers, the company announced Tuesday.
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While low-end Dellintel trumps IBM's 4.7GHz heater Pop quiz. You're in desperate need of making Java fly and have the coin to prove it. Do you shell out on IBM's new 4.7GHz Power6 eye candy or keep on replacing Unix kit with x86 systems?â¦
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InfoWorld - Hewlett-Packard hammered home its commitment to the Itanium 2 chips this week, announcing new mid- and high-end members of its Integrity family of servers with the Madison chip, along with new support for OpenVMS 8.2, Novell's version of Linux, bundled virtualization software and, for the first time, a pay-per-use policy for server-based Windows.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume. These considerations are more important than ever. The power consumed by a rack of servers has risen from around 5 kilowatts (kW) of power per server rack five years ago to as much as 30 kW today, thanks to the introduction of more powerful processors and denser blade servers. And the power-consumption levels will continue rising in the years ahead. "People want more compute power and we can give it to them because we can package this into a smaller footprint, basically," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer at IBM's Server and Workstation Division. The challenge that Schmidt and his colleagues face is how to dissipate the increasing levels of heat these systems generate. "We're working on this all the way from the chip to the datacenter," he said. At the datacenter level, Schmidt sees an expanded role for water cooling as a means to bring heat levels down. Water cooling, which uses small pipes filled with distilled or deionized water to dissipate heat, was first used by IBM to cool mainframe computers during the 1960s. The technology, which was used in more than 90 percent of mainframes by the mid-1980s, was given a second lease on life in 2005, when IBM introduced its line of Cool Blue water-cooling products. One such product is IBM's $4,299 Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which attaches to the rear of a server rack. Four inches thick and weighing about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) when filled with water, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger, can absorb more than half of the heat coming from a server rack, according to IBM. IBM's water-cooling systems, as well asÂ competing products from companies like Hewlett-Packard, offer several benefits for datacenters. Most importantly, water can absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate water in a cooling system consume less power than air-conditioning systems. And IBM plans to expand its line of water-cooling products in the months ahead. "We've got other enhancements coming out shortly," Schmidt said, declining to elaborate on specific details. One potential enhancement is to extend water cooling from the rear of the server rack to specific components, such as processors -- as was done with some IBM mainframes. "Once you bring water to the rack, you've got a lot of options," Schmidt said. Convincing datacenter operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy. The easiest to convince are those IT managers with experience from the days when water-cooled mainframes were the backbone of large corporations, Schmidt said. But many remain nervous at the thought of water-filled pipes coursing through rooms filled with expensive servers and invaluable data -- even though water is already a key component of all datacenters. "Water cooling in datacenters is already there," Schmidt said. "The chilled water that's brought to the air conditioning units? That's water and it's in the pipes right above the server racks. We're just plugging into that to apply that at the rack level."
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Hewlett-Packard has announced four entry-level servers for SMBs, along with updates to its remote management software.The servers are part of HP&#39;s ProLiant 100 series, aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees. They are all two-processor rack-mount servers, with two 1U machines and two 2U machines. (The 1U refers to the height of the machine and is equal to 1.75 inches.)Rack-mount servers have lost the limelight lately to trendy blade servers, sales of which are growing at a faster clip, and even HP&#39;s vice president of marketing, Paul Gottsegen, who was charged with promoting the new rack-mount servers, advised customers to look closely at blades.&quot;When they see the blades, customers tell us there&#39;s an advantage in cooling, in cabling, in reduced power consumption and overall density, so the rack customers typically transition to blades, it&#39;s just a matter of customers in this market becoming aware of them,&quot; he said.Still, rack-mount servers account for a high proportion of sales despite their slower growth, and smaller companies tend to be more comfortable sticking with what they are used to, said Gordon Haff, principal IT adviser at Illuminata.Two of the HP servers are available now. One is the DL185 G5, a 2U system designed for high-capacity jobs like mail serving and video capture. It comes with up to 14 large-form factor drives and 10.5TB of storage, and it runs on one or two Opteron 2200 processors from AMD. Pricing starts at $1,749.The other machine on sale now is the DL160 G5, a 1U server that can act as a node in a high-performance computing cluster as well as a standard business server. It has two PCI-Express x16 2.0 slots and support for a faster front-side bus, and it runs one or two of Intel&#39;s quad-core 5400 &quot;Harpertown&quot; chips. Pricing starts at $1,399.The other two machines won&#39;t ship for another three months, HP said. They are the DL180, a general-purpose 2U server with three PCI-E slots and up to 12 large form factor drives, and the DL 165, which will be the first rack-mount server that can hold four 3.5-inch disk drives, according to HP. Pricing for those servers was not announced.HP has been doing well in the server market lately. In the third quarter last year, it sold more machines than second-place Dell or third-place IBM, although IBM earned the most revenue, research company Gartner said.Low-end servers are fairly commoditized, and there isn&#39;t a great deal that distinguishes one vendor&#39;s hardware from another, Haff said. &quot;Certainly, there are some differences in areas like management software, but for the most part, it&#39;s about the channels and the partners and what&#39;s offered around the server,&quot; he said.HP announced two Lights-Out management packages for the servers. They allow users to install software remotely and monitor the health of fans, power supplies and other components. A Lights-Out 100i Advanced Pack is $199 per license and a Select Pack is $99. Customers must also buy a Remote Management Card for $219.HP also announced two updated software packages for the machines. They are Citrix Access Essentials, for remote access to applications, and Exchange Server 2007, the latest version of Microsoft&#39;s e-mail server software.
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IBM (Quote, Chart) moved to undercut its rivals Friday by offering an entry-level storage server for about a third less than the street cost of EMC&#39;s (Quote, Chart) and HP&#39;s comparable products.
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IBM on Friday introduced high-end servers in its pSeries and iSeries lines that include virtualization features and raw power that some experts say put the products on par with offerings from rival Hewlett-Packard Co.