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Deni's DAILY Server News

Parallels launches cloud-based small business package

- Posted Thu 11/05/09

Parallels on Tuesday announced the availability of Parallels Small Business Panel 10, which allows cloud services providers to offer IT-in-a-box solutions to small businesses. The package system provides an intuitive user interface designed to connect employees to the right applications, which can be installed with a single click with no need for special training or technical knowledge. Role-based access enables user organizations to restrict functionality as appropriate for their employees.

Emerson rear-door heat exchanger now available

- Posted Thu 11/05/09

Emerson Electric Power on Thursday announced the general availability of the Liebert XDR, a rear-door heat exchanger that removes heat from IT racks before it ever enters the data center. A version of the product has shipped from Sun Microsystems as the SCD5600 for about a year. The heat exchangers are mounted in a moveable door, which is fixed to a frame attached to the rear of the rack. It relies on server fans for hot air movement across a cooling coil, utilizing a pumped refrigerant that is 700% more efficient at removing heat than water. The pumped refrigerant also eliminates danger of equipment damage from water leakage, and air exits the rack at the same temperature it enters, simplifying data center cooling.

ScaleMP extends virtualization foundation for enterprise cloud

- Posted Wed 11/04/09

ScaleMP on Wednesday announced the vSMP Foundation for Cloud, which enables on-the-fly aggregation of x86 servers into larger symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) virtual systems. Features include on-demand provisioning and re-provisioning of SMP systems for cloud infrastructure, seamless integration with systems management and provisioning tools, support for any programming model (serial, throughput, multi-threaded or large-memory) without machine boundary and aggregation of up to 16 x86 servers to create virtual SMP with up to 128 cores and 4TB of main memory utilizing Intel’s latest generation of Intel Xeon 5500 processors.

HP announces new data warehouse platform, converged infrastructure architecture

- Posted Wed 11/04/09

HP on Wednesday introduced new offerings designed to provide flexibility to customers in unpredictable times. The new release of HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform supports real-time decision making regarding organizational data, with improvements in performance, capacity, footprint and manageability. HP Neoview Advantage helps reduce the cost of ownership with industry-standard components and prebuilt, pretested configurations optimized for warehousing. HP also announced the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which provides a flexible network fabric for deploying applications through shared services. The architecture provides optimized use of virtual resource pools and improved energy integration and effectiveness across the data center through data center smart grid technology.

Eye on Enterprise Servers Weekly Blog

Virtualization adoption impact on server sales to increase

- Posted October 28, 2009, 10:40 am by Deni Connor

By James Bagley [Editor’s note: I asked James Bagley, senior analyst for Storage Strategies NOW to respond to Gartner’s research on server virtualization.] Gartner recently reported that only 16% of applications are running under a hypervisor, but predicted that this will rise to 50% of workloads on x86 servers by 2012. This is great news for VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, but probably does not bode well for server unit sales. As we discussed in an earlier blog, server unit sales have been struck by a perfect storm involving virtualization, massively powerful multi-core processors and the economic downturn that has driven unit volume to levels lower than any time in the dozen years since metrics were collected on server unit sales. Of the three factors, the economic downturn is the only one that is variable. If Gartner’s predictions are valid, virtualization will impact unit sales at in increasing rate, more than offsetting gains from an economic recovery. Processors are getting more powerful and cheaper, especially when the surrounding chipset costs, that are becoming integral to the processor chips, are brought into the equation. Server manufacturers, fighting for a share of pie that is increasingly looking like a zero-sum game, will be forced to reduce gross margins to stay competitive. This is all good news for consumers of enterprise-class and computing products, at least in the near-term. There has never been a more exciting time in terms of rapid advancement at the processor speed and price performance levels. New storage capabilities, including SSDs in hybrid storage arrays with high-speed and low cost connectivity fabric will help these servers chew through data at unsurpassed rates, while reducing the footprint of datacenters and power consumption. However, the long term prospects for the continued development of server technologies is dependent on viable product margins in order to justify heavy development investments in research and manufacturing and support. We are all dependent on a healthy server market to continue these advancements.

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Deni's Hand-picked Server News

Apache Software Foundation: 10 years and still open to innovation

By John Fontana, Network World, 11/04/2009

Acadia gets cloud-computing venture rolling in Asia

By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service, 11/04/2009

Novell prepares enterprise social networking suite

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, 11/04/2009

Cisco, EMC unveil data center joint venture

By Jim Duffy, Network World, 11/03/2009

Microsoft sets SQL Server 2008 R2 preview

By John Fontana, Network World, 11/03/2009

Microsoft pushes switchover deal for CRM Online

By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, 11/03/2009

Cisco's data center guru talks direction, strategy

By John Dix, Network World, 11/02/2009

Unisys introducing software for private clouds

By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service, 11/02/2009

SAP users fear impact of planned upgrades

By Mike Simons, Computerworld UK, 11/02/2009

EMC teams with Intel for power-efficient cloud storage

By James Niccolai, IDG News Service, 10/30/2009

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About

Deni Connor

Deni Connor is the principal of Storage Strategies NOW (SSG-NOW) which was founded in 2007. Deni is a well-known Servers expert, who was previously a reporter for IDG’s Network World. In addition, Connor worked in marketing and editorial positions for Novell, IBM, Control Data, Radix International, Thomas-Conrad and Networking Solutions magazine. SSG-NOW is located in Austin, Texas.

Deni is a regular contributor in both print and online for Network World and authors NWW’s twice-weekly Storage News Alert Newsletter with a circulation of over 26,000 subscribers.

In a previous and long ago life, Connor is known as a Novell NetWare expert and co-author of IDG's NetWare for Dummies and several other books on networking the NetWare way.

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