Cloud
Around this time, I usually pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. I am interested in the Data Center (around power, cooling, reliability and economics), IT Security (particularly Database and Mobile), Big Data and Storage (Particularly Solid State). So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers are likely to [...]
Globally the annual mid-market (companies with fewer than 1000 staff) spend for IT hardware, software and services exceeds $250B acording to Andy Monshaw, IBM’s General Manager for Mid-Market. Andy lives and breathes mid-market, he personally leads as many as 15 end user and IBM partner round tables a month, spending his time listening to customer problems and getting intimately [...]
The problem with computing is everyone wants to make it uniform – fit it into a neat box, categorise it as ‘all the same’, make it autonomic, self-managing and move on. In fact, IT is anything but uniform, so these simplistic approaches fall at the first hurdle. Smart CIOs understand applications need to be treated [...]
I wanted to share with you my latest news. A little over a year ago Steve Duplessie and I created ESG EMEA to help reach out and serve new European clients as well as provide local support for many of our ESG US based relationships. We have been immensely successful in building this business, working [...]
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
Recently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different [...]
Today Microsoft and HP announced an expanded partnership in order to deliver fully integrated application to hardware stacks. It’s a brilliant move, absolutely stunningly smart and spot on for HP. I wrote about Oracle VM and the fully integrated stack that Larry Ellison has been promoting to his customers. Superficially it might seem like a [...]
There is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]
Everyone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]
Today I had a really interesting conversation with my friend and colleague Richard Davis, CEO of Elastichosts a small (but perfectly formed) Cloud Computing company. Richard and I first met when he was a Business Technology consultant at McKinsey & Co and I was his client at BT. We worked together on a major project [...]
Application Developer: My new application needs to store some objects. Can I have a bit of storage please? Storage Administrator: So do you want NAS or Block storage? Application Developer: Is there a Java object library for that stuff, what did you call it nasty blocks? Storage Administrator: (mumbles) stupid code monkey… Who knows – [...]
Iceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies Brian Peterson, VP International [...]
Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by [...]
The Hot Aisle ran a poll recently asking you all about Cloud Storage and we got some very interesting results from over 5600 respondents: We asked the question – Does Cloud Storage have to be delivered as an Object Store? Here are my observations:- A surprising number of folks don’t know what Cloud Storage is! [...]
Google Docs now has a batch export facility for their documents created by the Data Liberation Front, a Google team setup to help customers leave. “Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light. I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was [...]
Anyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the latest photograph from the Verari manufacturing plant. A FOREST Data Center Scale container full of UCS and Nexus. This really demonstrates [...]
In a recent Hot Aisle poll of 2326 respondents, 80% say that they run some production workload on their virtualised environment, however only a tiny minority (2%) do this without restrictions on the application’s criticallity. 29% of respondents say that they run “all but the most critical applications” on their virtual platforms. 51% of respondents [...]
I posed the question about why readers of the hot aisle were running more than one hypervisor. An earlier poll had shown that 44% of respondants behave in a non-intuitive way and run two or more hypervisors. Early results are in – with a poll size of 1021 1141 readers and discounting those who only [...]
A recent Hot Aisle poll about the use of hypervisor technology in enterprises offers some interesting insights. 96% of respondents use at least one hypervisor 44% of respondents use two or more hypervisors 16% of respondents use three or more hypervisors 98% of Hot Aisle readers know what a Hypervisor is (we are a smart [...]
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series. IBM [...]
