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Gartner: Server Market Still Growing, Despite Virtualization

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Just recently, Gartner published a report showing that the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %.

The analyst firm has now proclaimed server sales and shipments also showed strong growth in the first quarter of this year compared to last year despite continued growth of the use of server virtualization technology. Jeffrey Hewitt, VP Research at Gartner said that certain factors are “masking” the impact of server virtualization.

“A lot of the growth in physical server sales is coming from an explosion in the use of certain applications such as Web servers, which often do not lend themselves to being virtualized. Also, server virtualization is still much more accepted in mature markets such as the US, Europe, and Australia, and less adopted in fast-growing markets such as China. Additionally, customers are not running server virtualization on old hardware. Customers are buying larger servers to host virtualization. This market is so hungry for more and more horsepower. Virtualization makes it easier to host more and faster applications.”

Gartner on Thursday said that a total of 2.3 million servers were sold in the first quarter, up about 7.6 percent over the 2.1 million shipped during the same quarter last year. Revenue growth was not as strong, however. Vendors sold $13.6 billion worth of servers during the quarter, up only 4.3 percent compared to the $13.0 billion in server sales last year, Gartner said.

HP was the world’s top server vendor during the first quarter of 2008, accounting for 30.1 percent of the total worldwide shipments. Fast growth in server shipments by Dell, which boasts a 22.7 percent market share, puts that company within striking range of the top position. Dell’s shipments grew 15.8 percent over last year compared to HP’s growth of 7.8 percent.

Worldwide RISC-based and Itanium- based server shipments slipped 8.4 percent compared to last year, with all top five vendors seeing a drop in sales. However, revenue for this class of servers grew 3.7 percent over last year, with all top five vendors seeing revenue growth except for Sun, which saw revenue drop as its Solaris Unix-based focus continues to shift more towards x86-based servers, Hewitt said.

Shipments of servers with the Linux OS grew the fastest year-over-year, up 13.9 percent compared to the 6.8 percent growth of shipments of servers with Windows, Hewitt said. However, the overall base of Linux-based servers is still only half that of Windows-based servers, so in terms of absolute numbers, Windows- based server shipments grew faster.

[Source: ChannelWeb]

Silicom Provides Server Adapters For Mystery Storage Company In Its Virtualization Appliances

May 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Silicom today announced that its quad-port Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapters have been selected by an unnamed “leading storage company” as a standard component in its virtualization appliances. Silicom’s adapters will reportedly be used to enhance the throughput of the appliance as required in high-traffic and mission critical environments, and to prevent I/O bottlenecks at the appliance level.

Virtualization appliances are an innovative solution for the IT department’s need to be able to change the configuration of complex Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) without disrupting system availability. The virtualization appliance separates the logical and physical representation of storage resources, independently managing the relationships in order to free the main system from the task.

“Virtualization is on the rise as a significant market trend, and the emergence of Virtualization Appliances is good news for Silicom,” said Shaike Orbach, Silicom’s President and CEO. “Our role is to provide the technology needed to assure a high level of throughput, preventing I/O bottlenecks and other roadblocks that can limit an appliance’s performance. In installation after installation, our innovative cards have proven their ability to ‘unclog’ the pipes, resulting in an appliance that continues to work at top speed in all environments.

“This order validates the need for our server adapters in Virtualization appliances and gives us an important entry point into the Virtualization arena. This has the potential to become a significant market for Silicom as we believe that more and more virtualization appliances will be launched by additional companies over time.”

VirtualLogix Conforms to Open Mobile Terminal Platform Security

May 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix announced its continued commitment to the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) by submitting a Product Profile Statement in conformance with the organization’s new mobile hardware security recommendations designed to help protect against threats such as malware and fraud attacks. The OMTP is an operator-sponsored forum that gathers and drives mobile terminal requirements.

According to the press release, VirtualLogix VLX for Mobile Handsets is among the first products to conform to the “Advanced Trusted Environment” security recommendations through the OMTP Product Profile Statement.

In its “Advanced Trusted Environment” paper, OMTP focuses on the full set of hardware security requirements that will enable new mobile services to be run in a protected and secure environment. In addition to its Recommendations Papers, OMTP offers its Product Profile process, an online tool that enables network operators, device manufacturers and platform and technology providers to quickly compare and contrast technology offerings that can deliver compliance against the OMTP Recommendations. By conforming to the new “Advanced Trusted Environment” requirements VirtualLogix is helping set the baseline for hardware security in mobile devices for the next five to ten years.

[Source: EDA Geek]

Alternative Technology Adds McAfee Security Solutions and Services

May 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Alternative Technology, an Arrow Electronics company and specialty distributor of thin-client/server-based computing, edge infrastructure, virtualization, and security solutions, has announced it will distribute the full line of McAfee security software, appliances and managed security services for small to medium businesses and enterprises. Those offerings include: system/endpoint security, network security, data protection, and risk and compliance management.

Alternative Technology will offer McAfee’s complete line of security solutions which can protect consumers, small business, and all types of enterprises. McAfee Total Protection Suites offer security solutions for servers, networks, desktops and mobile devices.

McAfee solutions offered by Alternative Technology include the recently announced 10Gbs Network Security Platform and high-performance McAfee Content Security Blade Server. McAfee offers scalability for security and compliance management for networks, data and endpoints across large-scale physical and virtual environments as well as small-scale and mid-size networks.

“McAfee security solutions are a significant addition to our line card and will be well received by our North American channel partners,” said Tom Zorn, senior vice president, Alternative Technology. “They complement our other products and service offerings. In particular, McAfee’s recently announced Email and Web Security Virtual Appliance, in beta, built from the ground up for the VMware platform, McAfee’s new virtual infrastructure security assessment service, and their plans to embed VMware’s VMsafe security technology into future McAfee security solution offerings, tie in very well with our rapidly growing VMware business.”

Complementing Alternative Technology’s professional methodology for security assessment, remediation and management, is the McAfee Foundstone Professional Services offering. The Foundstone Virtual Infrastructure Security Assessment is the first security service dedicated to virtualization. McAfee security solutions will also be added to Alternative Technology’s PCI Compliance Solutions Program.

PlateSpin Reaffirms Commitment For Extended Citrix XenServer Support

May 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

PlateSpin, since recently a Novell company, today reaffirmed its commitment to support Citrix XenServer across the PlateSpin product line. PlateSpin considers XenServer support to be a key element of its multiplatform strategy, which aims to offer enterprises a unified suite of solutions for managing heterogeneous data center environments and making physical and virtual infrastructures work as one.

“As a Citrix Technology Partner, PlateSpin is committed to working with Citrix to offer customers simple, efficient and interoperable solutions to virtualize servers and better manage their XenServer environments,” said Stephen Pollack, CEO of PlateSpin ULC. “PlateSpin Workload Portability and profiling technology helps Citrix customers make the most of their XenServer investments by accelerating and simplifying the integration of XenServer into their mixed data center environments where multiple hypervisor technologies coexist.”

With broad support for today’s distributed, multi-platform environments, PlateSpin PowerRecon provides an enterprise-scale workload profiling, planning and optimization solution that improves the speed and quality of virtualization initiatives and eases the burden of managing virtual environments.

[Source: VMblog]

Novell And Red Hat Upgrade Linux Enterprise Distros, Improve Virtualization Support

May 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Novell and Red Hat announced upgrades of their Linux-based enterprise distros, featuring improved virtualization and hardware support. In addition, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 adds a new subscription management tool, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 adds new security, clustering, desktop, and networking features.

Virtualization is the big story here. Red Hat has upgraded RHEL’s core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to version 3.1.2, and has improved its support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures.

RHEL now supports virtualization of very large systems, says Red Hat, including systems with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory. New CPU frequency scaling support is said to reduce power consumption for virtualized processes. RHEL also gains new clustering capabilities, including improved application failover support, which when combined with the virtualization enhancements, should lead to greater server farm stability.

Virtualization also seems to lead the way with Novell SLES 10 Service Pack 2 enhancements, which support Xen 3.2 (compared to RHEL 5.2’s Xen 3.1.2 support). Novell claims that with Xen 3.2, the new SLES is “the only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests, and live migration of those guests across physical machines.” Novell and Microsoft went in on an interoperability lab last fall.

Meanwhile, the company has been dropping hints about SLES 11, which is due in the first half of 2009. Novell hopes to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that will be supported by a new toolset designed to quickly build specialized images. Novell is planning versions optimized for specific ISV stacks, as well as a new embedded version to allow independent hardware vendors to embed virtualization and operating systems directly into the hardware. Other touted SLES 11 enhancements relate to “mission-critical data center technologies, Unix migration, virtualization, interoperability, green computing, and desktop Linux,” says Novell.

Both distros are available from today, according to both companies.

[Source: Linux Watch]