Welcome to the Network World’s Masters of Servers microsite. Masters of Storage will hopefully be a site you visit daily for updated server news from vendors such as HP, IBM, Dell and Sun and from processor vendors such as Intel and AMD.
What qualifies me to write about servers for Network World, you might ask. I handled server, storage and data center coverage for Network World for nine years and in the past year have founded my own analyst firm, Storage Strategies NOW, which focuses on storage and virtualization technologies. I write a storage newsletter for Network World that you can subscribe to at this link http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/index.html
In addition, I’ve covered operating systems since NetWare first saw life in 1983 – I installed NetWare 3.51 on a Tricord 386/33 server (remember them) in 1993, was editor of Networking Solutions magazine and have been covering ProLiant, IBM and other servers since way before HP acquired Compaq in 2001. I remember the early days of blade servers when RLX introduced the first of them in 2001 and was subsequently acquired by HP in 2005.
In other times, I remember when Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corp. in 1998, when Digital users most of whom used HP-UX and VMS urged Compaq to adopt what many considered to be aging operating systems, and when Intel and HP introduced the Itanium processors.
Today, the world of servers continues to be exciting. Even in this economic downturn, we’ve seen organizations adopting server technologies to save money and maximize space in already overcrowded data centers. Organizations are deploying blade servers as replacements for denser 1U and 2U servers and installing multi-core, multi-processor servers to save on energy costs. They’ve installed back-of-rack heat exchangers and water-cooled systems to cut their power consumption and remove the high levels of heat generated by today’s servers and storage systems.
We’ve seen companies virtualizing and consolidating their servers to save money or space. As the year goes on, we’ll see more of server virtualization – customers are now starting to adopt Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform and investigating other platforms such as Citrix’s XenServer. Customers are continuing to deploy simpler blade architectures – many of them tied to storage-area networks where they can boot from the shared storage or recover server images in the event of disaster.
Masters of Servers hopes to follow all these trends and to keep you up-to-date. We want to give you information so you can make more informed purchasing decisions whether they are about the newest clustered server system or protecting your servers in failover scenarios. We’ll chat with your peers in IT about their experiences in deploying servers and related technologies. Giving you better information on managing your server environments is also a goal of Masters of Servers.
If you have any feedback, questions or suggestions for the microsite, feel free to e-mail me anytime. My address is dconnor@ssg-now.com.
