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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Robin Wauters

IDC: Worldwide Server Market Stabilizes in Third Quarter, Improvement Ahead

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According to IDC‘s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 17.3% year over year to $10.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09).

Although this is the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline, the market grew sequentially for the first time since 4Q08. Server unit shipments declined 17.9% year over year in 3Q09, a significant improvement over the 30.1% year-over-year decline experienced in 2Q09, but grew a healthy 12.4% quarter over quarter – the largest sequential unit growth since 2005.

All three server segments – volume, midrange enterprise, and high-end enterprise – experienced year-over-year revenue decline in 3Q09, marking the fourth consecutive quarter in which this has happened. However, the market for volume servers improved sequentially in the quarter as demand is returning to the low end of the market. Volume systems revenue declined 14.7% year over year in the third quarter, the smallest decline for this important market segment since 3Q08. Revenue for midrange enterprise servers declined 23.4% year over year while revenue for high-end enterprise servers declined 19.3% year over year.

IBM and HP ended the third quarter in a statistical tie with 31.8% and 30.9% of overall factory revenue market share respectively. IBM’s overall factory revenues declined 12.9% year over year helped in part by healthy System x and System p sales. HP experienced a 16.8% year-over-year factory revenue decline in 3Q09. Dell experienced a 6.8% revenue decline and maintained third place with 13.5% overall market share in 3Q09, helped in part by strong server sales growth from its Datacenter Solutions business unit.

Sun maintained its fourth place position by posting a 35.0% year-over-year revenue decline and holding 7.5% market share for the quarter as many customers wait for additional product roadmap detail following Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun. Fujitsu maintained its fifth-place standing in terms of factory revenue, with 5.7% market share in the quarter, an improvement over its 3Q08 market position.

Top-Level Server Market Findings

  • Microsoft Windows server revenue was $4.5 billion in 3Q09 showing a 12.8% year-over-year decline and comprising 43.0% of all server revenue in the quarter. Windows servers account for the single largest segment, by operating system, in the worldwide server market.
  • Linux server revenue declined 12.6% year over year to $1.5 billion in the quarter. Linux servers now represent 14.8% of all server revenue, up slightly from 14.0% a year ago.
  • Unix servers experienced a 23.4% revenue decline when compared with 3Q08. Worldwide Unix revenues were $2.8 billion for the quarter, representing 26.9% of quarterly server spending. IBM gained 5.1 points of share year over year and holds the 3Q09 leadership position, posting 39.5% share in this segment, followed by Hewlett Packard (29.2%) and Sun Microsystems (23.4%) respectively, based on factory revenue.

x86 server factory revenue declined 12.3% year over year in 3Q09 to $6.1 billion. However, x86 factory revenues increased a healthy 18.7% when compared with 2Q09. This is the largest sequential improvement in x86 server revenue in nearly 5 years (since 4Q05). On a year-over-year comparative basis, shipments also continued to slip when compared to 2008 market highs, dropping 17.0% to 1.6 million units. HP led the market with 37.7% factory revenue share as Dell held second place with 23.2% factory revenue share and IBM maintained the third position with 18.5% factory revenue share. Overall, IBM exhibited the strongest x86 performance of the top 3 OEMs, gaining 2.5 points of market share on a 1.2% improvement in year-over-year factory revenue.

After two consecutive quarters of declining year-over-year revenues, the blade server market segment returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenue increasing 1.2% year over year on a 14.0% year-over-year shipment decline. Overall, bladed servers, including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades, accounted for $1.4 billion in the third quarter, representing 13.6% of quarterly server revenue. IBM exhibited the strongest blade server performance of the top 5 OEMs, gaining 6.0 points of market share on 27.2% year-over-year factory revenue growth. HP led the market with 50.7% revenue share as IBM held second place with 29.4% revenue share and Dell maintained the third position with 8.9% revenue share.

Xen Optimization Group Joins Neptuny’s Business Partner Program

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Neptuny, provider of Performance Optimization and IT Resource Management solutions for large data centers and networks, today announced that Xen Optimization Group, a consulting firm offering professional services mainly in performance management and the capacity planning area, has joined the Neptuny Business Partner Program.

The Neptuny Business Partner Program is designed to support partners in reselling its solutions and providing their consulting and support services on Caplan. This is the company’s Capacity Planning solution that allows customers to safely optimize, rationalize and consolidate their data-centers. Caplan has been adopted by major companies in several industries (such as Telco, Finance, Energy, Retail, Travel, etc) around the world.

Xen Optimization Group markets capacity planning and performance management services that enable customers to move from physical Windows servers to virtualized environments.  The firm delivers competitively-differentiated virtualization and IT assessments that help customers accelerate adoption of virtualization through the application of prudent capacity management.

Radware Builds Application Delivery Solution vAdapter On VMware Platform

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Radware, a provider of integrated application delivery solutions for business-smart networking, today announced it has built its vAdapter on the VMware platform.

vAdapter is a free of charge, easy to deploy tool that ensures real-time, automatic synchronization of the application delivery controller (ADC) configuration with any relevant changes in the virtual environment. The solution is Radware’s newest addition to its application delivery suite, integrating with the company’s award-winning AppDirector and VirtualDirector products as well as with the Alteon Application Switch.

Given that data center managers continue to struggle to reduce costs while maintaining high levels of performance, combined with the dynamics of the virtual data center compared to the physical data center, the challenge of keeping the application delivery controller (ADC) aligned with application resources is becoming much more complex. With Radware’s vAdapter, companies are able to prevent configuration errors and reduce expensive operating costs that are commonplace when changes occur in the data center. IT administrators can use the solution to easily map between a cluster of virtual machines (VMs) that define a service in the virtual environment and its corresponding configuration from the ADC viewpoint. Once a new VM is added or removed from the virtual service cluster, vAdapter automatically configures the ADC accordingly, in real-time.

By installing vAdapter into VMware environments, Radware’s ADC customers considerably reduce operating expenses thanks to reducing constant coordination between the network and server team, which eliminates the need for frequent manual configuration updates. In addition, vAdapter lowers the risk involved with rapid application deployment due to its automation capabilities, which prevents the human errors that are typical in manual configuration and script writing processes. All configuration changes — whether automatic or manually confirmed — are also logged, providing a complete audit trail for compliance and change control purposes.

vAdapter is available as a free of charge downloadable software and is easily deployed as an Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) Virtual Appliance designed for VMware environments. Offering integration with VMware APIs, vAdapter is provided as a plug-in to VMware vCenter(TM) Server or as a standalone Web-based management tool, and does not require additional installation. The solution also integrates with Radware’s AppDirector and Alteon Application Switch products, third-party management systems, and supports multiple ADC devices.

In 2008, Radware joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. With more than 1,200 members worldwide, the program works with best-of-breed technology partners to provide a comprehensive set of technical and marketing services, support, tools and expertise to deliver enhanced value to joint customers.

Cloud Testing Provider SOASTA Raises $10 Million Series C Round

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SOASTA today announced the successful close of $10 million in Series C funding as it prepares its global expansion.

The round was led by UV Partners, and included participation from all existing investors: Canaan Partners, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs’ Fund. The company’s growth plan includes the opening of offices in Europe, broadening of the reseller channel and increasing its technology roadmap with product enhancements to address the growing demand for SOASTA’s cloud-based testing service.

Today’s announcement follows other significant company milestones. SOASTA recently announced a new partnership with Computer Sciences Corporation , a managed services provider, who has integrated CloudTest into its Trusted Cloud Services offering and its testing and development methodology. The company completed large web-scale tests with Best Buy, Hallmark, Leapfrog, M-Dot Networks, MySpace, Schlumberger, SAP and Zappos.com, and also announced open source support by offering JMeter users the ability to run their scripts in the SOASTA Global Test Cloud.

With the closing of the Series C funding, SOASTA adds Blake Modersitzki, managing director, UV Partners, to its board of directors.

SOASTA CloudTest On-Demand is a full-service offering. Customers simply describe the web user business process, such as logging into an account, executing a transaction, or browsing content. SOASTA’s team of experienced performance engineers build the tests, provision the complete cloud environment, execute the tests, and work with customers to analyze, fix and tune a site’s performance. SOASTA CloudTest’s unique, real-time metrics and analytics of massive test results data gives customers the performance intelligence they need to pinpoint and fix issues as tests are being run — ensuring greater confidence in website reliability and performance.

NetApp Introduces New Management Tools and Support for VMware View

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NetApp today introduced new tools to help customers deploy and manage virtual desktops through VMware View 4.

VMware View and NetApp storage together enable customers to rapidly provision virtual desktops and storage to keep up with their business needs and help drive down costs.

With the release of NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility version 3.0, which provides support for VMware View 4 and VMware vSphere, customers can simplify the way they provision VMware virtual machines and streamline their business. Rapid Cloning Utility is a VMware vCenter Server plug-in that allows customers to replicate a single image hundreds of times in minutes while using almost no additional storage capacity.

Rapid Cloning Utility complements VMware View Composer linked clones by providing advanced cloning capabilities for individual desktops and manual desktop pools. Now VMware View customers can automate and reduce administrative requirements for virtual desktops and complete projects faster, all while keeping storage costs at a minimum.

NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility version 3.0 will be available in January 2010. Pricing for Rapid Cloning Utility is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners.

White Paper: Embotics Digs Deep Into the Causes of Virtual Sprawl

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Embotics today announced the release of a whitepaper that identifies the costs and causes of virtual sprawl, as well as recommendations to mitigate it. The study helps companies move beyond estimating possible costs associated with virtual machines (VMs) to enacting a plan to resolve the issue of sprawl.

Embotics’ research indicates that because of a lack of insight and automation in virtualization management systems today, organizations must devote excess time to administration, manual management and troubleshooting. With little to no time to proactively ensure the virtual environment is optimized, virtual sprawl results and quickly negates the benefits of virtualization.

Customer audits consistently show that up to 30 percent of VMs in any given environment are redundant, absorbing administration time and resources. The study helps companies address the bigger issue that virtual sprawl represents, not by simply attacking sprawl itself, but by attacking the fundamental weaknesses in virtualization management infrastructures that cause it.