There are some slight variations on the latest results for third-quarter server shipments and revenues from Gartner and IDC, but the two research companies agree that IBM seems to have profited at the expense of HP and Oracle. According to Gartner, Q3 server shipments grew 7.2% year-on-year, with revenue up 5.2%, with Big Blue narrowly beating out HP for top revenues. IDC put factory revenue up 4.2% YoY, shipments up 4%, but also had IBM supplanting HP from its long-held domination of the market.
Network Computing
Trouble In Server Paradise
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Categories: General.
The Cloud, Day 16: Stuck in Upload Hell
30 Days With the Cloud: Day 16
As I spend this 30 Days With the Cloud it has not been that difficult to find acceptable cloud-based alternatives for most tasks and functions I normally perform using local software. So far, the biggest roadblock to a complete migration to the cloud is getting my data from Point A to Point B.
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Categories: General.
DOD’s Data Center Budget Challenge
The Department of Defense surpassed its data center consolidation targets in fiscal 2011 and continues a push for more data center closures. Budget concerns, however, are a “major risk factor” for the initiative’s future success, the military says in a new report outlining its plans.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Ruckus Shakes Up Auto RF Management With New Paradigm
For those who worry about things like which channel large groups of wireless access points are on, there hasn’t been a lot to get excited about on the topic over the last couple of years. For most “smart WLAN systems”, you put your faith in a murky channel selection algorithm, respect that the 2.4 GHz band only has three non-overlapping channels, and hope that the vendor built the right intelligence into the product set. That changes with ChannelFly, the new channel selection method from Ruckus that challenges tradition and promises big payoff for those willing to try the new magic.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Video Calling Is Finally Catching On
Do you use Skype for video calls? How about FaceTime? It is still a novelty right now, but a new report from NPD In-Stat suggests that video calling will explode over the next four years to become more mainstream–a trend that will benefit businesses by saving money and increasing productivity.
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Categories: General.
NexGen: The Next “David” to Battle Midrange SAN “Goliaths”
Small vendors, especially startups, often tend to follow baseball great Willie Keeler’s advice of, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t” by targeting a market niche which has potential, but where larger vendors either don’t play or have a very small footprint. NexGen, with its NexGen n5 Storage System, does just that but with a more direct twist. And that makes it very interesting.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
HP Dedupe Comes Of Age
According to HP, more than 50% of information within an organization is unconnected, undiscovered and unused, but it says it can help harness the power of 100% of this data to drive insight, foresight and action. HP is making a number of storage-related – Information Optimization – announcements, including the debut of what it calls ‘deduplication 2.0′, a market where it has had minimal participation but now expects to pose a significant challenge to the dominant vendor, EMC.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Rapid Backup And Retrieval With Riverbed’s Whitewater
Cloud storage brings cost effective off-site backup and retrieval capabilities to small and medium sized business, but using cloud storage as an external disk is not as effective as it seems, particularly as the data set grows. It takes time to send and retrieve files to a cloud storage provider and often means using another set of tools to do so. Riverbed’s Whitewater appliance makes the cloud storage appear as a backup target and balances the competing needs of speedy read/writes against the need for long term bulk storage. Using a combination of local file caching and deduplication with cloud storage replication, IT gets the best of both worlds.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Clouds Cannot Be Contained In A Box
A big part of the value proposition of cloud is to ensure that you have continuous access to your data, and that you’ve moved beyond the physical limitations of a single box or a single data center or a single geography. While the move to the cloud can allow greater leverage of compute servers and storage, it also provides the ability to move away from aging, monolithic storage and servers, and gives cloud customers access to their data irrespective of any technical issues that may be going on and irrespective of their physical location. Cloud is supposed to be always on, with resources available on-demand, 24×7. However, how do you deliver all of this with a cloud that’s been imprisoned in a box? Clouds cannot be contained in a box.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Xsigo Boosts ViaWest Cloud Portfolio, Performance
Denver-based ViaWest, one of the largest privately held data center and managed services providers in North America, is utilizing Xsigo Systems, Inc.’s virtual I/O solution to increase its cloud service performance by 2 to 4 times, as well as to facilitate the creation of a new class of cloud offerings. The company, which owns and operates 22 enterprise-class data center facilities in Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Utah, and Nevada, has deployed the Xsigo offering in their KINECTed Cloud services data centers, enabling customers to combine ViaWest’s services, including co-location, hosting, managed and cloud services, within a single, consolidated offering.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.