HP

Will Increasing Memory Costs Slow Down Virtualization Growth?

March 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Memory vendor Kingston Technology (check out the short interview we did at their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth) says memory in industry standard servers is causing virtualization projects to become unnecessarily expensive and that fears over warranties are holding back users from upgrading.

“Not having enough memory restricts the number of virtual machines, and also restricts the overall performance. Not having enough memory is either down to improper planning, or in most cases, the inability to purchase enough memory due to the higher cost of OEM memory,” the company said.

Hewlett-Packard does not seem to share their vision:

Rhys Austin, who runs the virtualization practice for industry standard servers at HP agreed that too little memory will affect virtualiszation performance but strongly rejected Kingston’s assertion that users were worried about price or warranties.

[Source: PC Advisor]

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.

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]

HP upgrades virtualization features of Integrity servers

March 20, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

HP has enhanced its HP Integrity server line and HP-UX 11i operating environment with significant capacity, virtualization and management upgrades.

The enhancements offer customers greater server capacity as well as faster deployment of enterprise software within an HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) running on the HP-UX 11i operating system – some virtualization projects can be brought online in less than half the time.
…
The next-generation chipset for Integrity servers delivers significant enhancements to performance and availability. The chipset enables customers to get 30 percent more work done across multiple workloads, while using the same number of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Featured and available today in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640 and Superdome servers, the chipset delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity and fault tolerance…

Enhanced security and availability

HP is extending its business continuity and availability solutions by providing more disaster-tolerance offerings for HP-UX 11i customers. The capabilities include intercontinental failover of Oracle® 10g environments and support of SONET, a low-cost networking option for disaster recovery. New HP Serviceguard Extensions for SAP improve the speed and simplicity of high-availability solutions for HP-UX 11i and Linux on HP Integrity servers. …More information about HP Integrity systems is available at www.hp.com/go/integritymarch06.