collective unconscious of the smarter planet

Wow! Interesting analysis - and crazy implications.

IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.

If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that’s because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.

To say the IBM’s PC situation then and today’s server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.

Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will—-for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:

Specialization by workload. Think IBM’s PureSystems and Oracle’s Exadata efforts.

1. Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can’t ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn’t so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.
2. You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM’s Power systems won’t go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.
3. Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.

Now let’s talk timing here. The server market won’t unravel tomorrow. It won’t unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.

Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I’ll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let’s face it—-the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services’ customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.

On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There’s a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there’s instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.

Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.

Today, it’s big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won’t buy your own servers for that computing power.

Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. “Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There’s an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There’s no attachment to the wheat,” said Stowe.

In other words, Stowe’s excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren’t going to look so hot.

IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that’s why it’s ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.

An interesting article on Dell’s bespoke server unit which targets the world’s 20 largest hyperscale data center operators. Facebook was an early success story before they founded the Open Compute project and started designing their own servers, like Google before them. But now Dell is looking to commercialize some of the designs they originally developed for this space.

It has been five years since Forrest Norrod and his colleagues at Dell drew up the first custom server design on a napkin at a bar at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, getting the server maker into the tailoring business. Dell now custom fits servers for very precise workloads and can cater to the tight data center power and cooling requirements found at hyperscale web operators.

The tailoring unit, called Data Center Solutions (DCS), has now grown to over $1bn in sales, says Norrod. Norrod was vice president and general manager of the unit when Dell first started publicly talking about its operations back in October 2008. He is now general manager of server platforms at Dell, and tells El Reg that the DCS business is now a “greater than $1bn a year business,” adding: “We beat that a while ago.”

DCS was founded originally to chase the world’s top 20 hyperscale data center operators, and creates stripped-down, super-dense, and energy-efficient machines that can mean the different between a profit and a loss for those data center operators. These DCS machines were not aimed at general purpose server users, whose workloads generally run on one machine and who need RAID disk controllers, service processors, and other high availability features because all of their eggs are in one basket (if not literally, then there is one server per workload – so it amounts to the same if you are looking at it at the app level). The DCS custom designs were built for companies running parallel workloads that have redundancy, data replication, and failover built into the software stack – so a regular PowerEdge server would not just be overkill, it would be plain stupid.

Facebook was the poster child for the DCS business before the social media giant decided to launch the Open Compute project last April, open-sourcing its own server and data center designs and going straight to original design manufacturers (ODMs) to build its gear.

Dell struck oil with this custom server thing, but Google builds its own gear, and now so does Facebook. Even fellow Texan Rackspace Hosting is using whitebox servers to get more server for the dollar.

But a year before this all happened, Dell saw the writing on the bespoke server wall and did a smart thing: it partially commercialized some of the DCS designs and took them to market as the PowerEdge-C machines. But you can’t just log into the Dell site and buy a PowerEdge-C machine, you have to engage in a formal sales process so Dell can make sure you get the right iron.

“Our aim with the PowerEdge-Cs was for the next 1,000 customers who needed DCS-style machines, and we have blown way beyond that,” brags Steve Cumings, executive director of marketing for the DCS unit. And while Cumings won’t talk specific numbers, he adds “it is not 1,001, either”.

In the Dell lingo, the custom machines are known as the DCS “classic” boxes while the other cloudy boxes are called “PECs” after the abbreviation of their formal name. The PowerEdge-C machines not only traditional multi-node bare-bones servers in 1U and 2U chassis as well as a 3U chassis that can cram up to a dozen single-socket microservers into a 3U chassis. Dell has even built mini-servers based on VIA Technologies’ X86 processors for hosting customers looking for cheap, dedicated nodes. In all cases, these servers have shared power and fans and precious little else but CPUs, memory, and disks.

The DCS unit has another part of the business, which is the modular data centers built from the shipping container or from other modular components. Microsoft is a big Dell customer for modular data centers. Cumings says these containerized data centers are only available to the top-end hyperscale customers because there is so much demand that Dell can’t meet it. Of course, demand is a relative thing. Cumings estimates that worldwide, there are on the order of several hundred containers being used as data centers among the hyperscale crowd. “Our impression is that we are comfortably number one in that market,” says Cumings.

Whether containerized data centers can go quasi-volume, as the PowerEdge-C servers did with several of the DCS custom server designs, remains to be seen. A lot depends on how radically customers are prepared to change their data center operations, how outdated their glass houses are, and how quickly they need to upgrade.

Dell has not broken out shipments and revenues for the DCS unit in the past, but it has hinted that this stealthy part of its business would have been among the top five server shippers in 2008 – and that in some quarters would have ranked as high as number three. This ranking would also depend on the shipments for Dell’s other stealth server business, its OEM Solutions Group, which OEMs Dell’s traditional PowerEdge servers for appliances, kiosks, and other interested parties. Three years ago, the OEM Server Group was twice as large, in terms of revenues, as the DCS unit. The gap has probably closed significantly since then.

Back in October 2008, the DCS unit had 200 employees, mostly engineers and sales people who helped craft machines and the houses they run in for hyperscale customers. Three-and-a-half years later, DCS now has 400 employees. Both then and now, DCS relied on other parts of Dell for back office functions, parts acquisitions, and manufacturing. Norrod says that while DCS uses the same manufacturing facilities as the general-purpose PowerEdge machines, they tend to have dedicated lines because the DCS run is usually 10,000 or more of the same thing, rather than a handful of similar machines built on demand for one set of customer orders that day, followed by a complete new set of machines with different configurations once they are built. You have to tool and run a DCS line differently from a PowerEdge line, he says – and in some ways, it is easier.

If the employee count is any guide, then it looks like the DCS biz has at least doubled in that time and is probably about the same size as the Dell OEM Solutions Group. Dell had about $8.2bn in servers and networking revenues in the trailing four quarters, and it is not unreasonable that these two stealthy server units could account for around a third of Dell’s server revenues.

In the latest server number out of IDC, which covered the fourth quarter of 2011, density-optimized servers like those sold by the DCS unit accounted for 132,876 units (up 51.5 per cent) and generated $458m (up 33.8 per cent). Dell had 39 per cent share of shipments of these boxes (that’s 51,821 machines) and 45.2 per cent share of sales (or $195m). IDC says that this was double the revenue and shipments of the nearest competitor in this category. Clearly, IDC’s definition of a density optimized machine and DCS’ sales SKUs don’t overlap completely for DCS to be pushing more than $1bn in sales per year. But Dell wanted to brag about the IDC numbers just the same.

ARMed … and possibly Tilera’d and FPGA’d

Dell Enterprise Products Group, which makes the PowerEdge line, has been monkeying around with ARM-based servers for years now, and Cumings says that the DCS engineers took another stab at it with the latest rev of ARM chips from unnamed suppliers in the past year – just to keep up to speed on what is possible with these ARM chips in terms of performance and thermals.

“If we see a market develop, we are ready to go,” says Cumings. “We have done a good job in seeing potential markets coming. But we are not shipping a product now and I can’t tell you when we might.”

The DCS engineers have done some research on many-core processors from Tilera, but Cumings concedes that Dell has “spent less time looking at this”.

That said, when it comes to the DCS classic designs, Cumings says that Dell will “look at any technology that will solve a customer’s problem”.

That could mean field programmable gate arrays, GPU coprocessors, and all kinds of weird stuff someday. (That’s El Reg speculating, not Dell DCS talking.)

For now, the DCS unit is focused on five key markets: hyperscale web, big data, cloud, hosting, and high performance computing. The latest projections from IDC show CPU shipments in the cloud segment to be growing at a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent between 2012 and 2015, with HPC growing 7.3 per cent compared to shrinkage of 1.2 per cent in the traditional, general purpose server space. Cumings says that Dell’s DCS business in the five key growth areas is larger than the sub-markets at large, and won’t be specific about how much larger because this is a competitive advantage for Dell.

“The growth is significant enough that DCS was created with its own resources to chase the opportunity,” says Cumings. “Dell believes in this business and it continues to grow.”

This means we won’t hear about any defections from Facebook or any other name-brand hyperscale customers who don’t talk about where they get their servers.

Great article on how the CTO of Capgemini is looking at recent developments in enterprise adoption of the cloud. Good stuff.

As Capgemini’s CTO for North America, Joe Coyle hears an awful lot about cloud computing. He hears it from customers that want to evaluate cloud solutions and from vendors that want to win that business. Capgemini, a $12 billion global systems integrator, has relationships with all the major vendors and many enterprise customers, so it’s interesting to hear what Coyle has to say about the current state of the market.

Here are my main takeaways from a recent conversation with him.

1: IBM is cloudier than you think.

Big Blue has a pretty potent set of cloud options but it’s going about its business very cleverly. Given it’s big-iron heritage, IBM rarely talks about the hardware component of its cloud portfolio, Coyle said.

“They’re attacking this from a software perspective. They’ve taken Tivoli and are building this software umbrella so that you can take whatever you’re running in your data center now and put all or part of it in a public or private cloud,” he noted. IBM’s 2010 acquisition of Cast Iron also give it a slick appliance that lets customers integrate in-house apps with SaaS applications running outside.

He doesn’t see IBM cloud penetrating a ton of new smaller businesses, but for many existing IBM shops — and there are a ton of them — IBM cloud is a no brainer.

2: Microsoft Azure has a tough row to hoe

Coyle is of two minds on Windows Azure, the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) underlying Microsoft’s cloud strategy.

“Azure’s been a bit of a disappointment,” he said. “When Microsoft briefed us on it years ago, all the national [systems integrators] were chomping at the bit. But then it stumbled.”

“Then the message was the software would only run on Azure. That’ s fine, but by that point, the world had moved on, companies were already using Amazon,” he said. The usual argument that Azure is a PaaS while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) simply doesn’t matter to most customers. The big AWS draw is they know they can deploy their applications on AWS now and move them to another hosted or in-house data center, later.

On the plus side, the Azure technology is solid and, unlike previous Microsoft development technologies, forces developers to follow the rules — they can’t design software services that misbehave. ”Azure is extremely powerful and if [Microsoft] can get its act together people will try it,” Coyle said.

But overshadowing all that technical mastery is the perception of Azure as a closed platform — despite its multi-language support.  Microsoft’s single biggest problem is customer suspicion that it will use Azure to lock them into the next wave of Microsoft technologies, essentially replacing the Windows/Office upgrade cycle.

“I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s what people think,” Coyle said.

3: Amazon is Amazon

Amazon Web Services are what they are: extremely flexible and leading the league in public cloud. AWS suffered a couple black eyes in 2011 with an embarrassing four-day outage in April and then a widespread reboot glitch later in the year.

Coyle is pretty forgiving of these miscues. The April outage, he said, was largely due to people  implementing their work incorrectly, something that AWS tried to fix manually. There are things you can do now in AWS to prevent this stuff, to build in more reliability and redundancy, although users will have to pay for it, he said.

The bottom line? Glitches and all, Amazon is the incumbent public cloud power and will stay that way, he said.

4: OpenStack as big-time cloud disruptor

Coyle is also bullish on the OpenStack movement, which is building a standard cloud foundation out of open-source tools. Initiated by Rackspace and NASA, it’s achieved critical mass with nearly every IT provider — from Dell, to HP, to Cisco, to Citrix — aboard and Rackspace offloading management to a more neutral OpenStack Foundation. 

“OpenStack will change the world of cloud computing. As a lot of smaller companies look to build their own clouds, this will be a natural choice,” Coyle said.

Who stands to lose if that’s the case? Ironically, the Dells and HPs of the world — all of which are building their own clouds. “Why do you think they joined?”  His feeling is these hardware companies — many of which were building their own more vendor-specific clouds — are hedging their bets.

Will OpenStack affect Amazon? “No. Amazon is Amazon,” he said.

5: CIOs are getting over cloud phobia

It’s taken time, but the economics of cloud computing are too good for CIOs to ignore, Coyle said. Any doubts they had about moving at least some corporate data to an outside cloud storage provider, for instance, have evaporated in recent months.

And they’re getting emboldened to do more than storage. The advent of Hadoop and NoSQL technologies means that companies could actually get some use out of all that old stuff sitting on tape or in platters, he said.  Uploading that information, and massaging it with the latest analytics means that historical data can be used to test assumptions and new models, for example, seeing what a price change means to sales over time.

Wringing real value out of old data is a pretty good proposition for most CIOs.

A really good piece on how server arrays work - and the battle that’s taking place to reshape how they work in fundamental ways.

There is a battle going on behind the scenes over the location of storage’s soul: the controller hardware and software. Oracle, Dell, EMC and VMware want it to be in the server, while NetApp and HDS want it to be in the array, an array operating with servers but distinct from them.

The picture is not as clear-cut as this on the surface – NetApp is working with Oracle for example – but this is my take on what is happening down in the development depths, among the strategists and engineers with multi-year product horizons.

The modern storage industry, the one shipping networked external storage arrays, has been built on two foundations. One is EMC’s establishment of a market for third-party external, block-addressed storage arrays distinct from the server suppliers of the time: HP, IBM, Digital Equipment, etc.

The other was the invention and establishment of file-addressed network-attached storage (NAS or filers). NetApp is the single most effective proponent of that, although EMC grew to ship more filers than NetApp. EMC and NetApp represent the twin peaks of the external storage array.

A storage array comes in two flavours. It is either monolithic, with multiple controllers or engines and some fancy interconnect hardware to link these to the storage shelves – think Symmetrix, latterly VMAX – or modular. Modular arrays have two controllers linked – by simpler Fibre Channel or latterly SAS – to the storage shelves. NetApp’s FAS arrays and EMC’s CLARiiON are classic embodiments of this idea.

Applications in servers sent SCSI block requests or file access requests to these arrays, which presented themselves, logically, as a single pool of storage, separated into dedicated logical disks (LUNs) for the server apps, or sharable filestores.

This long-lived storage concept is now being discarded, and the first nail in its coffin came from Sun and the inventive Mr Andy Bechtolsheim.

Honeycomb upsets the storage hive

Bechtolsheim’s idea was that co-locating servers and storage in the same overall enclosure would speed server apps dependent on lots of stored data. Thumper, a server-rich NAS device delivered as the X4500, was one result of this and Honeycomb another.

Neither set the world on fire but they did show the way to getting more data into servers faster. Then Oracle bought Sun in 2009 and suddenly Bechtolsheim’s idea got a rocket boost from the Exadata product, a set of server resources running Oracle software with their own storage resources. This is setting the Oracle World on fire, with much encouragement from Oracle marketing because its own bunch of modular arrays was pretty second-rate.

What Sun invented and Oracle extended is the NoSAN server. EMC has seen this idea and responded by devising an opposite of this, the No-Server SAN, a kind of reverse engineering in its way.

EMC brings the servers to the array

EMC is trying to have it both ways. VMAX, VNX and Isilon arrays are going to be able to run application software in server engines in the array controller complex. There is a natural fit with VMware’s ESX running the whole shebang and VMs being loaded to run storage controller software and applications that benefit from low-latency access to buckets of data. These array-located app servers use the array’s own internal network or fabric, VMAX’s Virtual Matrix for example, instead of the normal Ethernet or Fibre Channel fabric. This isn’t SAN access as we know it.

EMC also has its Project Lightning to have its arrays manage the loading and running of flash caches in servers, PCIe-connected flash. That’s a step on the road along which Dell appears to be further along. The Round Rock company is also going to build servers with flash, but this is a storage tier and not cache. This tier zero storage is logically part of the entire array controller-managed storage pool with automatic data movement.

Now EMC may well have this in mind as well, with FAST VP shipping data to and from the server flash which is then not really a cache but tier zero too. However Dell’s vision, as I understand it, is to move the storage into the servers and hook it up to the same PCIe gen 3 bus that the flash and server’s DRAM hook into. Once again this means that the servers will not use traditional external storage links to access data. This again is not a SAN. What do these NoSAN ideas mean for external array vendors?

Storage array vendor conundrum

The mainstream external storage array vendors are facing two, not one, strategic challenges to their long-term hegemony. The nearer term one is the introduction of networked flash-only arrays from companies like Huawei, Nimbus, Pure Storage and others, which threaten to cream off their profitable fast array business based on 15,000rpm Fibre Channel disk drives. All primary data storage could migrate to flash-only arrays, leaving the EMC, Dell, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp-style vendors to store the bulk data crumbs, the low-access rate, lower profit, online data repositories.

The second threat though is the more important one because, after all, a networked external flash storage array is still a networked external storage array. Co-locating servers and storage with no traditional storage networking protocol connecting them is different. If servers absorb external storage, as is the Oracle Exadata plan, or external storage absorbs servers, as is the import of Dell and EMC’s plans, then networked external storage is no longer needed: we have the NoSAN server.

There’s a distinction to be made between converged systems with co-located servers and storage using storage networking protocols and converged systems that do not, the NoSAN servers.

A VCE Vblock, an HP VS3 and a NetApp Flexpod set-up all use networked external storage. An app-running VMAX has no storage networking protocol needed to link servers (app-executing VMAX engines) and storage (storage controller app-executing VMAX engines) as they all hook into the VMAX internal fabric. This is fundamentally an entirely different beast. For a start the server-storage link is proprietary and not open. You wouldn’t be able to substitute a NetApp, HP or IBM array for the VMAX storage part of VMAX app-executing system. It would be like trying to put a BMW engine in a Mercedes car. Good luck to you and don’t expect any sympathy for the grief heading your way.

Criticise Fibre Channel, FCoE and iSCSI all you like but they are open systems allowing you to switch suppliers of servers and storage either side of the storage networking link.

FCoE becomes irrelevant

Discussions about whether to move to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) from Fibre Channel will be rendered irrelevant by co-located servers and storage communicating across some kind of I/O backplane or mesh network, or servers and storage talking across PCIe. FCoE is a transition from one instantiation of a legacy storage-server connection protocol to another.

The future may be not to have a storage networking protocol at all. Data will ship between server memory and flash to co-located array storage across PCIe buss links or an array’s internal fabric.

What this means for stand-alone storage array products is that a razor thin end of a wedge is appearing in the door through which they sell their arrays. This wedge can be expected to fatten. If it does, then the external array business will be impacted. It may be that data growth will be such that array sales increase while NoSAN server storage sales grow as well. But there is a long-term threat here, looking at a five-year or 10-year timescale, in which the external array business declines.

Its only hope of rescue will be through the provision of external array links that match the latency and bandwidth of third-gen PCIe, or internal array fabrics such as is found inside VMAX.

A strategic battle has been joined and the existence of the external storage array business is being questioned. Yes, it’s a razor thin wedge that has been slipped into the external array door, but wedges do what wedges do: they become thicker. If Dell and EMC pull their NoSAN server ideas off, then a world of hurt awaits external array vendors that have no effective response.

HP and Cisco are beginning to work more closely together again - following the fall-out around Cisco’s introduction of UCS and HP’s purchase of 3Com. Apparently customers continue to want more choice when it comes to networking options. Who knew? This Forrester post also has some interesting arguments concerning customer uptake of converged solutions from IBM and Dell, as well.

The thawing of the cold war between HP and Cisco breaks down the walls that limited choice and, hopefully, ignites more innovation between the companies. HP customers can now connect and configure their HP BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure with Cisco’s Unified Fabric.  Quietly, HP has been offering Cisco’s legacy switching technology in its c-Class BladeSystem enclosure but halted integration with Cisco’s next generation data center products after HP acquired 3Com and Cisco released UCS.  Similar to Juniper’s QFabric architecture that extends virtual line cards to server edge, the relationship between a fabric extender and a Nexus 5000 is similar to the relationship between a traditional 6500 line card and its supervisor engine, only now the fabric extender can be connected to its master switch — Cisco Nexus 5000 — with remote fiber connections. This allows I&O to effectively decouple the line cards of the modular switch and spread them throughout the data center, all without losing the management model of a single “End of Row” switch. The master switch and all its remotely connected fabric extenders are managed as one Cisco Nexus switch.

As Rich Fichera points out in his blog, customers are the winner in this coopetition.  Even though the walls are coming down, this doesn’t signal the end of HP networking, but customers should be wary of HP’s networking commitment (see Prediction: HP Cuts Loose Their Networking Hardware And Transforms Into A True Networking Alternative).Customers have been telling me they’re putting pressure on HP’s Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) of ESSN (Networking) to open the door to choice. Infrastructure and operation teams are telling Forrester that they want the option to leverage newest data center alternatives to HP’s networking infrastructure so that they can:

• Simplify operations.The top priority within I&O over the past three years has been to increase efficiency. Most networking vendors have responded by offering their own way of eliminating the link down state in spanning tree. A few others have taken increased utilization a step further and offer the capability to manage a large pool of switches under one logical grouping like Juniper’s QFabric. With Cisco’s FEX technology, customers can manage up to 24 modules under one logical grouping, which wasn’t possible under HP’s Virtual Connect technology and their IRF technology in their switch line.
• Standardize processes.HP’s Virtual Connect (VC)technology was designed by server teams to simplifying server operations; for example, virtual connect technology allows organizations to move or replace the server without reconfiguring MAC/WWNs, but VC has fallen short in the network controls. As with SANs, there’s no need for VM or server administrators to manage network policies in the hypervisor while network administrators do it on physical switches. Consequently, I&O personnel want solutions providers to move that network demarcation line from the physical port to the virtual one on the hypervisor; network administrators’ roles are evolving so they take ownership of monitoring and controlling traffic in the virtual world. Cisco’s technology provides consistent control from the physical to virtual world under one management domain.
• Scale capabilities.Forrester Research surveys indicate that few enterprise infrastructures have matured their infrastructure to the point where they have created an abstracted set of resources (storage, software, compute, etc.), assessed in a standard way and billed by use. This means a majority of data centers are in the process of evolving with virtualized hardware and legacy systems. Customers can tie them together with Cisco’s 1000v, 2000 series, and HP’s new Fabric Extender.
• Implement it now. At this point, I&O managers are telling us that IBM, Dell, and HP’s converged solution sound good on paper but are too restrictive at this point since they are in the infancy stage. In addition customers are saying they aren’t bothered by the proprietary nature of the data center network, because they can’t wait for VEPA, TRILL, or OpenFlow functionality—mostly waved around by the convergence vendors—and feel all data center networking solutions have various levels of proprietary functionality: QFabric, VCS, IRF, and FabricPath.  Consequently, customers are choosing to stay the course and purchasing networking solutions from traditional networking vendors: Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Juniper, etc… . at least for right now.

What does this mean? More choice. More flexibility. The old days of mainframe computing are over, and there is no sign of customers going back to that model no matter how much marketing spin is put behind converged infrastructures. Besides HP, we’ll see IBM and Dell embrace Cisco’s FEX.

And you might ask, “What about their networking acquisitions?” The real value behind them will be the development of networking expertise to create better orchestration solutions.

Dell is still in the server business… though we hear less and less from them these days.

Dell, the man, said that Dell, the company, would launch its 12th generation of PowerEdge servers during the first quarter, as soon as Intel gets its “Sandy Bridge-EP” Xeon E5 processors out the door. Dell wasn’t giving away a lot when he said that future Intel chips would have lots of bandwidth. As readers of El Reg know from way back in May, when we divulged the feeds and speeds of the Xeon E5 processors and their related “Patsburg” C600 chipset, that bandwidth is due to the integrated PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral controllers, LAN-on-motherboard adapters running at 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds, and up to 24 memory slots in a two-socket configuration supporting up to 384GB using 16GB DDR3 memory sticks running at up to 1.6GHz.

But according to Dell, that’s not the end of it. He said that Dell would be integrating “tier 0 storage right into the server,” which is server speak for front-ending external storage arrays with flash storage that is located in the server and making them work together seamlessly. “You can’t get any closer to the CPU,” Dell said.

Former storage partner and rival EMC would no doubt agree, since it was showing off the beta of its own “Project Lightning” server flash cache yesterday at OpenWorld. The idea, which has no doubt occurred to Dell, too, is to put flash cache inside of servers but put it under control of external disk arrays. This way, the disk arrays, which are smart about data access, can push frequently used data into the server flash cache and not require the operating system or databases to be tweaked to support the cache. It makes cache look like disk, but it is on the other side of the wire and inside the server.

Dell said that the new PowerEdge 12G systems, presumably with EqualLogic external storage, would be able to process Oracle database queries 60 times faster than earlier PowerEdge 11G models.

The other secret sauce that Dell is going to bring to bear to boost Oracle database processing, hinted Dell, was the system clustering technologies it got by buying RNA Networks back in June.

RNA Networks was founded in 2006 by Ranjit Pandit, who led the database clustering project at SilverStorm Technologies (which was eaten by QLogic) and who also worked on the InfiniBand interconnect and the Pentium 4 chip while at Intel. The company gathered up $14m in venture funding and came out of stealth in February 2009 with a shared global memory networking product called RNAMessenger that links multiple server nodes together deeper down in the iron than Oracle RAC clusters do, but not as deep as the NUMA and SMP clustering done by server chipsets.

Dell said that a rack of these new PowerEdge systems – the picture above shows a PowerEdge R720, which would be a two-socket rack server using the eight-core Xeon E5 processors – would have 1,024 cores (that would be 64 servers in a 42U rack). 40TB of main memory (that’s 640GB per server), over 40TB of flash, and would do queries 60 times faster than a rack of PowerEdge 11G servers available today. Presumably these machines also have EqualLogic external storage taking control of the integrated tier 0 flash in the PowerEdge 12G servers.

The economy may be hovering close to recession, but server sale continue to go up, up, up, according to IDC…

Server sales in the second quarter of 2011 grew 17.9 per cent in revenue terms to $13.2bn, reckons IDC.

This is the sixth quarter of growth and unit sales also grew 8.5 per cent to 2.1 million boxes.

The IDC abacus-botherers classify servers as either volume, midrange enterprise or high-end enterprise. Volume and midrange grew by 16.6 and 16.7 per cent respectively, while high-end boxes saw sales grow 22.6 per cent.

Blade sales grew 26.9 per cent year on year in cash terms. Linux-based systems grew 47.5 per cent, thanks to Fujitsu’s K-computer HPC system. Windows-based machines also grew: 12.4 per cent year on year.

IBM and HP are almost tied for top spot with 30.5 per cent and 29.8 per cent market shares respectively. But IBM grew revenues 24.5 per cent on last year compared to 9.3 per cent for HP.

Dell was in third place, then Oracle and then Fujitsu.

Another runner in the Hadoop appliance race - though both Dell and Cloudera are quick to distance their solution from the appliance word.

Cloudera and Dell today announced an agreement to sell a complete Apache Hadoop solution. The package will include Dell hardware (including Dell PowerEdge C2100 servers and PowerConnect switches), Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Enterprise and of course support. It should be available for purchase within the next 30 days. Details can be found on dell.cloudera.com.

It would be easy to see this as a reaction to EMC’s Hadoop appliance, which uses MapR’s version of Hadoop. But the Cloudera and Dell teams are quick to distance themselves from the comparison.

“Customers don’t love the word appliance, this gives customers more flexibility,” Ed Albanese, head of business development at Cloudera, said. He says that although “turnkey” can mean a lot of things, he wants to emphasize that this is not a restrictive or prescriptive approach. Customers will have a lot of flexibiilty to customize the base package.

IDEAS International gives HP’s new converged infrastructure offerings the thumbs up.

In early June, HP announced an expansion of its strategy for HP Converged Infrastructure by rolling out a number of new products and services for implementing virtual, cloud and dedicated application environments using a common architecture and staged process. According to HP, “Converged Infrastructure is the HP strategy to help clients accelerate IT value, and do so at their own pace and preference. This is achieved through a systematic approach that enables clients to overcome the complexity, inflexibility, and high costs created by IT sprawl and turn technology assets into interoperable, shared pools of resources with a common management platform.”

With its extended strategy, HP now pursues a continuum of opportunities for its blade server platform, extending from pure vertical integration to more open integration, all supported by a common hardware architecture, management software, and security software.

The week of June 6, HP announced two new types of converged systems, and enhancements to a third, all of which are built on a single hardware foundation based on HP’s servers, storage and networking:

• HP VirtualSystem (New): This system integrates servers, storage, networking, virtualization software, and services into a system that is optimized for virtual server and virtual desktop environments from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware.  It supports Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, and VMware. An optional common security model, based on HP TippingPoint, delivers end-to-end security, and everything is managed through a single ‘pane of glass.’ In addition to TippingPoint, extensions to VirtualSystems include Site Scope, Data Protector, and Storage Essentials. Three preconfigured modular systems are available for virtual server, supporting 750, 2500, and 6000 VMs. A single system supporting 3000 virtual clients is also available.
• HP CloudSystem (Enhanced): This system, using the same infrastructure components as HP VirtualSystem, includes tools to build both private and hybrid clouds. CloudSystem, which was originally announced in January 2011 as the evolutionary follow-on to BladeSystem Matrix, adds intelligent automation and orchestration, along with ongoing management and security to support cloud multi-tenancy. On June 7, HP enhanced its CloudSystem offering by announcing a new service provider program, and a new array of cloud services. HP also announced “dual bursting.”  Bursting to local resources is available today and out of the box bursting to service providers will come later in 2011.  
• HP AppSystems (New): With this system, HP leverages Converged Infrastructure to create a number of application-specific configurations, based on solutions from Microsoft and Vertica. These configurations are fully configured, turnkey systems that can be brought online rapidly with minimal issues. Because HP AppSystems are all based on HP Converged Infrastructure, they can help customers transparently move these applications to virtual or cloud environments as appropriate. So far, HP has announced the following AppSystems (not all are yet shipping, though): HP Enterprise Data Warehouse for Microsoft, HP Business Decision Appliance for Microsoft, HP Messaging System for Microsoft, HP Vertica Analytics System, HP Database Consolidation Solution for Microsoft, HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance for Microsoft

Other vendors have their own versions of converged infrastructure, and HP is competing in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. Through the VCE (formerly Acadia) joint venture, Cisco, EMC and VMware had one of the earliest entries with the vBlock, which was announced in late 2009. IBM’s CloudBurst on System x and Power Systems is another tightly integrated, preconfigured solution that is similar in concept to HP CloudSystem. Dell’s recently announced vStart, a pre-packaged, tested, balanced, and fully validated virtual enterprise infrastructure solution. Finally, Hitachi’s Converged Data Center Solutions hit the market very recently. We expect to see even more competition going forward.

With this announcement, HP has not only shown that it has a solid vision and strategy, but an increasingly complete inventory of products, services and financing to back up their approach. HP has been demonstrating for years that it is very serious about converged infrastructure. Many potential customers had been holding back on implementing converged infrastructure because of the significant steps they must take to get there and the associated risks. By creating a staged approach that leverages common hardware, management, and security stacks, HP allows customers to move at their own pace from dedicated applications to virtualized applications, to cloud infrastructure, and finally to common modular datacenter components, thus minimizing risk. This announcement is an incremental, yet critical, step for HP as it strengthens its portfolio with vertically integrated systems that make it easy for users to take advantage of virtualization and the elasticity of cloud computing. We expect many more announcements like this as HP executes on its Converged Infrastructure strategy.

The server market continues to grow at a healthy pace, with all of the major players seeing some benefit from the overarching trend. Not so much in storage. EMC and NetApp are rocking but the traditional players - IBM, HP, and Dell - are faltering.

Big changes are afoot in the storage world, with IDC’s storage tracker showing NetApp outgrowing everybody, Dell fading and HDS coming on strong. EMC is still top dog but HP and IBM are faltering.

These conclusions come from IDC’s quarterly storage tracker for the first 2011 quarter. IDC tracks the worldwide disk storage market on a revenue basis and ranks the various suppliers.

In the total external disk storage systems market EMC was the leader with a 27.3 per cent revenue share ($1.523bn) and NetApp second, leaping past IBM and HP, with a 13.5 per cent share ($757m). The market as a whole grew 13.2 per cent from 2010’s first quarter (Q1) to Q1 2011. EMC grew at 24.7 over the same period while NetApp grew at 37.8 per cent. That growth rate is impressive but slowing. In the preceding quarter NetApp revenues grew 43.7 per cent and 54.9 per cent in the quarter before that. This slowing growth rate looks like a steady trend.

IDC lists five top vendors and lumps everybody else into the “Others” category. IBM is number three (12.2 per cent), HP number four (10.5 per cent), and Hitachi fifth (9 per cent). Someone’s missing, and it’s Dell. In the previous quarter Dell tied with Hitachi for the fifth position. Now it has slipped back into the “Others” category.

Another upset has occurred in the total disk storage systems market where HP and EMC were joint pack leaders in Q4 2010 with a 19.2 per cent share. Now EMC has now overtaken HP and has a 20.3 per cent share compared to HP’s 18.4 per cent. EMC grew at 24.7 per cent while HP grew at 14.2 percent. Both were ahead of the market growth of 12.1 per cent. IBM is in third place, as in the previous quarter, with a 14.6 per cent share; Dell is in fourth place at 11.4 per cent and NetApp fifth at 10.1 per cent.