Dell

Which Deals Will HP Be Announcing Soon?

March 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Reuters is reporting Hewlett-Packard is set to announce a series of deals this month expanding the server virtualization software it sells with its servers, quoting HP Vice President Mark Linesch.

HP is already working with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft on customizing their software and Hewlett-Packard’s computer servers so they work together better out of the box, Linesch said, but declined to specify which companies the deal announcements would apply to.

We’re following Reuters’ perspective on this and think the most likely is Citrix Systems, which reportedly claimed earlier that close partnerships with HP and Dell would be announced in the course of 2008. Citrix has said it would get a payment for each HP server shipped with a basic package and a larger license fee for each upgrade sold.

What do you think the announcements will be?

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

March 5, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Jay Lyman from The 451 Group (also check out the interview we did with John Abbott, Chief Analyst & Research Director at The 451 Group) wonders about the future of Linux distributions in the virtualization arena.

Now that VMWare announced that it will embed its ESX 3i hypervisor in different server platforms from HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM, the question pops up how Operating System Vendors will deal with this change of platform.

VMWare certainly isn’t the only one with those plans, since Ian Pratt from XenSource mentionned exactly the same during his Fosdem talk.

How do the OS vendors react to this new feature ? According to Lyman’s blog post, Red Hat claims

it is hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel that will create that standard virtualization layer and capability.

and

Novell indicates VMware may be taking somewhat of a risk, though, since OEMs like HP will look to upsell to their own software to create and manage VMs, which ESX 3i can’t do.

A hypervisor still needs management tools, so that the guest OS’s can be initiated, stopped and migrated. Applications aren’t running on hypervisors (yet); they need an operating system for IO, Memory Management and Network stacks at least for the foreseeable future.

On a longer term, we’ll have applications running natively on the hypervisor for sure. But today Operating System vendors are hoping for a uniform and better way to support different available and upcoming hypervisors and off course those lightweight systems will also benefit from these improvements.

If I were in the Operating System market I wouldn’t worry yet at this pointis , just as with all other features that hardware vendors are selling it is still ‘only’ a feature. When ordering a Dell you can choose between different CPU’s, different hard disks, different Operating Systems and most likely in the near future, different hypervisors as well.

NextIO Raises $ 18.8 Million In Series C Funding For Virtualizing Server Communication

March 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Austin-based connectivity virtualization developer NextIO announced Friday that it had raised $ 18.8 million in a third round series as the five-year-old company prepares to launch its first products to enable distributed computing systems to connect and communicate using any of a variety of technology standards.

The deal was led by Crescendo Ventures and Adams Capital Management, and included previous investors JK&B Capital, the VentureTech Alliance arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., and Dell, as well as two new strategic investors. The new funding brings total equity investment in NextIO to about $ 40 million and will allow the company to launch its first commercial products with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) partners in the second quarter of this year.

NextIO co-founder and CEO K.C. Murphy said the company made its first switch products available to customers in late 2007 but will launch its primary appliance product in April, in conjunction with new products introduced by OEM partners. The products are aimed at bringing the same advantages of virtualization to connectivity technology that developers including VMWare, Microsoft and the open source Xensource platform have brought to the server market.

NextIO’s product virtualizes I/O functions to bring high-performance computing capabilities to clustered systems of commodity servers. The products enable individual server connectivity using any of the several available connectivity standards with systems level technology that controls connectivity within a virtual “cloud.”

[Source: TechConfidential]

VMWare To Embed VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor Across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM Servers

February 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Today at VMWorld Europe 2008 (watch our video reports), VMware announced agreements to embed the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor in servers from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and IBM. System providers are expected to begin shipping servers embedded with the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor within the next 60 days.

From the release:

“We are very excited to be partnering with Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM to proliferate virtualization and fast-track customers on the path to running a self-managing virtual datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “Customers can now get VMware pre-integrated and pre-configured for the hardware platform of their choice for immediate standalone server consolidation. As customers want to expand their adoption and get more value from virtualization, they can upgrade from the ESX 3i hypervisor to VMware’s complete datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).”

“VI3 provides automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines with no service interruption. In addition, customers who are already using VI3 can plug-and-play virtualization-enabled servers into their datacenters to dynamically and automatically expand the pool of resources (CPU, memory, and networking) available to meet their changing business requirements.”

Greene and other VMware executives highlighted the new VMware ESX 3i agreements with representatives from Dell, HP and IBM during today’s VMworld Europe general session keynote presentations. The presentations will be available via a recorded web cast (http://www.vmware.com/go/europe-webcast ) by 3:00 p.m. Central European Time and 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today.

Gartner: Server Market Doing Fine Until Further Notice

February 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A new report from Gartner shows 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 world’s server vendors combined to ship 2.4 million boxes during the fourth quarter and brought in $ 15.5 billion for their efforts. In all of 2007, shipments rose 7 %, while revenue jumped 4 %. For the entire year, vendors moved more than 8.8 million units and generated $ 54.8 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.

The rise of virtualization and the general economic slowdown, combined with trimmed budgets at the financial services companies, has left a lot of analysists proclaiming a big slowdown and even downfall in hardware sales. But so far, the sky seems blue.

Out of the top vendors, Hewlett-Packard enjoyed the strongest fourth quarter in terms of shipments. It grew 12 % year-over-year, while Dell grew at 9 %, IBM grew at 7 % and Sun declined by 6 %. Fujitsu-Siemens also enjoyed a super quarter with 18 % growth.

Vendor	Q4 Shipments	Gain/Loss
1) HP	702,100	12%
2) Dell	499,687	8.8%
3)IBM	372,701	7.4%
4)Sun	84,778	-6.3%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens	75,882	17.9%

Almost all of the vendors saw their revenue rise during the fourth quarter. IBM stood out as the lone laggard, despite it talking an awful lot lately about how strong its server business is.

Vendor	Revenue	Gain/Loss
1) IBM	$5.3bn	-0.8%
2)HP	$4.4bn	7.6%
3)Dell	$1.6bn	4.1%
4)Sun	$1.49bn	1.0%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens	$616k	2.1%

For the full year, HP stood out with 17 % growth in shipments, leading the herd. Sun was the biggest loser, dropping 8.3 %. In revenue, Dell was the main gainer, showing sales growth of 13.2 %. HP notched 9 % growth as well, while the rest of the vendors were in the low single digits.

Everyone moved a ton of x86 boxes and benefited from double-digit growth in terms of shipments. HP, Fujistu-Siemens and Sun had double-digit revenue growth as well, while Dell came in at 4 % and IBM hit 7 % growth.”Blade servers continue to be a high-growth segment with a revenue increase of 44.5 % and a shipment increase of 19.9 % for the year,” Gartner said. “HP was the 2007 leader with blades at a 41.7 % shipment share, with IBM being in second place at 30.9 %. These two vendors continued to dominate this form factor and totaled almost 78 % of the worldwide blade revenue share for 2007.”

[Source and tables: The Register]

Funding For CiRBA and Virtual Iron, Dell Completes Acquisition of EqualLogic

January 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

More interesting news today:

CiRBA Raises $12 Million With Sigma Partners

CiRBA Inc., today announced that it has raised $12 million in its second round of institutional funding led by Sigma Partners . Existing investors including Edgestone Capital Partners and others also participated in the round. The funding will enable CiRBA to further accelerate growth on a global scale, with investments in sales, marketing and product development.

Virtual Iron Capitalizes on Strong Market Momentum, Raises $20 Million in New Equity Financing

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise server virtualization software, today announced that it has secured $20 million in new venture equity financing. The funding, provided at an increased valuation, will be used to accelerate product development and expand global sales, marketing and distribution efforts. The investment brings Virtual Iron’s total venture funding to $65 million in invested equity capital and includes Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.

Dell Completes EqualLogic Acquisition

Today Dell completed the EqualLogic acquisition, a leading provider of high-performance storage area network (SAN) solutions designed for virtualization and ease-of-use. The purchase extends Dell’s leadership in simplifying IT for customers.

“Customers face extreme challenges with data growth. Storage solutions that use existing infrastructure, install in minutes not days, manage themselves, can grow easily as needs increase and plug into the virtualized IT ecosystem will help businesses with their storage needs. EqualLogic provides these storage solutions and that’s the incredible value that Dell will now be able to deliver to our customers. With Dell’s PartnerDirect channel, we will unleash the power of iSCSI and virtualization to redefine the economics of storing and processing data.”