servers

Lenovo’s Latest Servers Well Suited For Virtualization

July 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Lenovo today announced its latest line of servers, the ThinkServer TD200 and TD200x tower servers as well as the RD210 and RD220 rack servers. The new servers offer small to mid-sized businesses the latest in performance with several choices of Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors and vastly expanded memory and storage. These ThinkServers are also equipped for virtualization and several power saving features to help customers cut their energy usage without sacrificing performance.Equipped with the latest Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors, the new ThinkServers are up to three times faster than their predecessors. With high-speed DDR3 memory up to 128GB, the latest models offer more memory than previous Lenovo servers. These highly scalable, dual processor servers also offer increased storage capacity with up to 12 hard drive bays in the rack models and up to 16 in the tower models.

Lenovo’s new ThinkServers are virtualization-ready and are equipped with several time and cost saving features that help customers seamlessly transition to a virtual environment. The latest ThinkServers come with an onboard connector for an embedded hypervisor. With the expanded memory and storage capacity on the new models, customers can consolidate several legacy servers onto a single new ThinkServer to save on hardware costs and energy usage while boosting their return on investment. Lenovo supports a variety of virtualization solutions from Microsoft, Novell, VMWare and Red Hat.

The ThinkServer TD200, TD200x, RD210 and RD220 are the most energy efficient servers from Lenovo yet, featuring low wattage processor and memory options, and small form factor hard drives. Select models are compliant with Energy Star for Servers 1.0, finalized in May 2009, which provides a 30 percent reduction in power usage compared with other x86 servers that do not meet the standard. In addition, the ThinkServers’ power supplies are more than 92 percent efficient, meaning more energy is translated into usable power.

The new ThinkServers come with the Integrated Management Module (IMM), which provides complete, “always-on,” out-of-band server management capabilities via an easy-to-use Web interface. With IMM, users can remotely access and manage their ThinkServer from anywhere, anytime, even if the server has crashed or is turned off.

Select models come with IMM Premium, giving users full control of their ThinkServer (including the mouse, keyboard and video) from remote locations, as well as the ability to connect local drives remotely to their ThinkServer through virtual media.

Servers are a critical IT mechanism at the heart of many businesses. That’s why Lenovo’s server solution provides total support for both hardware and software to help customers without IT departments quickly set up, update and manage their servers.

In addition to its standard warranty, Lenovo offers ThinkServer customers a 90-day trial of ThinkPlus Priority Support services so customers have the complete support they need during the critical first days after their server purchase. This provides services such as next business day warranty service, 24×7 hardware and software phone support as well as priority call routing to advanced technicians. For customers who need on-site hardware installation and online training, Lenovo also offers the ThinkPlus Productivity service plan.

The RD210 and RD220 are available immediately, and TD200 and TD200x will be available starting July 2009. The ThinkServer RD210, RD220 and TD200x are available worldwide through business partners and Lenovo sales representatives. The TD200 is available through Lenovo sales representatives for special bid. Pricing for the RD210 starts at approximately $1,699 and $2,199 for the RD220. The TD200x starts at approximately $2,699.

Intel Hearts Virtualization

April 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

In a piece on Channel Insider, Steve Dallman, Channel Chief at Intel, says he and the company’s channel partners are seeing incredible growth in the server market, despite – and even thanks to – the increasing use of virtualization technology which should help reduce the number of servers.

“You would think with virtualization that you’d see fewer servers, but that’s not happening. The need for servers and server capacity is phenomenally large,” especially from the SMB (small and midsize business) market, Dallman said. “SMBs just don’t need to consolidate server farms,” he added.

Research firm Access Markets International said in January that global SMB server spending will reach $19.8 billion in 2008, a double-digit growth over 2007. While growth in the server space is still accelerating, Dallman said without virtualization, the growth in the space might be out of control.

“All virtualization is going to do is to moderate the growth in the server space to a level that’s manageable for both vendors and partners”, he said.

[Source: Channel Insider]

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.

Analyst Says Virtualization May Have Impact on Desktops … In 2010

March 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tim Luke, an analyst from investment bank Lehman Brothers, claims the impact of virtualization technology on desktops won’t be significantly felt until at least 2010 although he acknowledges its impact may already be limiting growth in the server market (then again, Gartner says it performed just fine in 2007).

As for the mainstream desktop market, Luke forecast the virtualization trend there may remain “subdued” in the near term. According to the analyst, the economic case for desktop virtualization is not as compelling and also cited user reluctance. Luke estimated about 1 % of desktops will be virtualized by 2010, and 4 % by 2012. However, Luke said that the virtualization of individual desktop applications “may see better traction in the medium term.”

[Source: CNN Money]

BT Global Services To Virtualize Its Data Centre Network

February 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Interesting case-study from BT, delivered by Stefan Overtveldt, BT Global Services Vice President and Head of IT Transformation Practice at VMworld Europe (check our video coverage) today: they’re using virtualization technologies to run its network of data centres around the globe more effectively, improve service customer service delivery and save no less than 50 % on its overall running costs.

Having already deployed its virtual data centre (VDC) concept to 11 of its 58 data centres around the world, Stefan Overtveldt said the ongoing work and savings would also ultimately help it serve its business customers better. He said VDC first became attractive when BT began to run out of data centre space at the same time as the management of its 3,500 internal and 1,400 customer platforms – made up of applications, operating systems and an average of 10 servers each – became increasingly complex.

BT developed a classic server consolidation strategy in response, which relied on deploying VMware’s virtualization technologies and its competitors in the data centres to reduce its reliance on multiple physical servers. In doing so, it was able to take advantage of the dynamic provisioning capabilities running a virtual infrastructure within a standardized, distributed environment can offer at the same time.

Overtveldt concluded:

“We managed to reduce our overall costs by 50 % and the time it takes to provision new server, storage and network capacity down to hours from days. And our model of extreme standardization means any new internal application requirements outside of the virtual data centres have to have a strong business case first.”

[Source: ITPro]

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.