Data centre managers and IT administrators at all levels need to keep power bills as low as possible. Many new-generation data centres are models of 21st century efficiency, but even effectively run systems can always use some advice on how to do things even better.
Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for the public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) sector clearly shows that IT service providers are moving into a space currently owned by pure-play cloud and data center service providers. This trend is sure to ramp up this coming year.
As each year passes, Intel’s frontline Xeon chips for x86 servers and personal computers add more cores and get more powerful. They also get smaller and use less electricity. They’re edging closer to high-performance capability all the time. But what will this mean for Intel’s Itanium line of processors?
VMware now offers a unified control panel for cloud software management and cloud infrastructure
Oracle took some big steps forward on its corporate journey into cloud systems and services on 30 September, the opening night of its annual OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco. Chief executive and co-founder Larry Ellison introduced two new products and two new cloud services before about 6,000 mostly quiet attendees at Moscone Centre on the first night of the five-day conference. About 50,000 people in all will be visiting the conference for at least one day this week.
Even though there wasn’t what anyone could describe as blockbuster news at VMworld 2012, there were a large number of smaller news items – mostly involving new products – introduced at the show. In addition, several key industry partnerships were announced that will result in other new products in the future.
One lasting impression for many people, however, is that VMworld clearly has confirmed itself as being among the top dozen or so most important IT conferences in the world, taking its place alongside such various events as the International Computer Electronics Show, SxSW, CTIA, CeBIT, Oracle OpenWorld, DreamForce, Web 2.0, Structure and a handful of others.
In the midst of wide open spaces of farm and grazing land, the central Oregon town of Prineville (population 9,253) has a new type of farm: farms producing Web services that interconnect people. Like horses, cows and sheep data centres need water, fresh air and plenty of space, and the Facebook green data centre is the most well-known.
Unlike a farm, a data centre is mechanical and use electricity – lots of electricity. With the Columbia River about 80 miles away, providing hydroelectric power, Prineville has this in plenty, and this is why the world’s largest social network decided about four years ago to build its first wholly owned data centre in Prineville.
On 16 August we joined a small group of journalists shown round the new facility by Facebook.
In the midst of wide open spaces of farm and grazing land, the central Oregon town of Prineville (population 9,253) has a new type of farm: farms producing Web services that interconnect people. Like horses, cows and sheep data centres need water, fresh air and plenty of space, and the Facebook green data centre is the most well-known.
Unlike a farm, a data centre is mechanical and use electricity – lots of electricity. With the Columbia River about 80 miles away, providing hydroelectric power, Prineville has this in plenty, and this is why the world’s largest social network decided about four years ago to build its first wholly owned data centre in Prineville.
EMC continues to broaden its software capabilities with the acquisition of a data centre information management specialist.
The storage giant on 31 May said it has acquired 12-year-old, Montreal-based Watch4net in an all-cash transaction, with terms of the deal not released.
Watch4net is a provider of carrier-class performance-management software that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into the performance of the network, data centres and cloud infrastructures.
The two companies are quite familiar with each other, having been partners for more than seven years. Watch4net’s frontline APG package is already tightly integrated with EMC’s IT Operations Intelligence Suite.
Emerson Network Power and its software division, Avocent, have launched for general availability a new data centre platform called Trellis, a hardware and software package that one simply plugs in, connects to all the necessary nodes, and puts to work.
Trellis, which runs on Oracle’s fast and power-efficient new servers and Java-based Fusion middleware, is an open architecture-based data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) package with real-time event-analysis capabilities across all physical and logical systems in the data centre. It can be accessed by either an on-site application or remotely by a web-based user interface.
Leadership is the main issue with both companies. Yahoo is searching for its seventh CEO since 2007 and already has told 2,000 of its 14,100 employees, or about 14 percent, they’ll need to move on. HP is on its third CEO in two years and is now looking at laying off between 25,000 and 30,000 of its 349,600 employees, a reduction of about 8 percent of its workforce.
If HP does this, it will be one of the top 10 largest rounds of layoffs in the history of the IT business, according to outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.
Both companies are defending themselves against previously unheard-of global competition on all flanks. HP is being challenged in all the markets in which it see its future: servers, enterprise software, storage, networking, cloud computing goods and services, personal devices–even printers and ink, two of the ...
On April 24, 2012 by Chris Preimesberger eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved. 0 Oracle on 23 April released several new products involving the data centre equipment and application sides of its business. In hardware, Orace updated to the third generation its Sun-developed ZFS Storage 7420 network attached storage (NAS) appliance. In software, the company upgraded its JD Edwards’ Enterprise One application for midrange enterprises with some industry-specific improvements. Support for more virtual machines The 7420 NAS system for data centres now has options that include a two-node, high-availability controller with up to 2TB of memory, up to 11TB of flash-based read/write cache, and 80 processing cores, allowing the system to handle more concurrent enterprise applications and support more virtual machines. Sun ZFS storage appliances also offer larger 3TB, capacity-optimized SAS-2 hard disk drives within its fully automated Hybrid Storage Pool environment. These new drives ...
On April 4, 2012 by Chris Preimesberger eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved. 0 Just 24 hours after Dell said it is acquiring virtual desktop client provider Wyse, the company also announced it is acquiring Clerity Solutions, a Chicago-based provider of application modernisation solutions. Terms of the transaction – the 15th company Dell has bought in the last two years – were not disclosed. Dell has always been all about helping its customers avoid forklift data centre changes in transitioning from legacy systems to new-gen IT, so Clerity adds clarity to that mission.
One could describe Dell as acquisition-crazy, and not be far off the mark. It has now captured two new companies in three weeks, and 13 in the last two years, if you’re keeping score.
That’s a lot of new-generation IT to uproot and move inside a company firewall. However, Dell has been doing this according to a system, and it is pretty picky about what it acquires. Michael Dell told eWEEK during a visit to Round Rock, Texas, last summer that his company, led by senior vice president of corporate strategy Dave Johnson, might look at up to 250 companies a year for possible acquisition and will settle on maybe seven or eight.
Hewlett-Packard, looking a bit more settled in its top-level administration with new chief executive Meg Whitman following a tumultuous 11 months under a previous administration, staged its first global partner conference on 13 February and unveiled a sweeping refresher of its ProLiant server franchise. The company made the announcement – among several others – on Day 1 of its first-ever global partner conference in Las Vegas at the Aria, Vdara and Cosmopolitan hotels. About 3,000 resellers, integrators, consultants, and other business associates from all over the world are attending the event.
