Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

According to IBM, the software will be programmed to "...discover and isolate organic molecules that when combined can convert more sunlight into electricity and thus produce solar cells much more inexpensively." Stanley Litgow, IBM's vice president of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, and the president of the IBM International Foundation, said "IBM believes that this important new study powered by World Community Grid could provide the planet with a smarter solution to the problem of low cost solar technology. This project marks an expanded direction to help our society by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels to make a lasting impact by hopefully finding new sources of clean energy." The team's effort will be capable of computing "in 2 years what would've taken 22 years to run on a regular scientific cluster," according to Alan Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The software wil...

So, Big Blue cranked up its PR machine, and pulled some statistics out of its, er, sales database and wanted everyone to know that more than 5,000 companies worldwide have replaced iron from HP, Sun Microsystems, and EMC since 2004 and moved to them to IBM alternatives. Breaking this down a little, IBM is claiming that in less than one year, more than 150 customers have moved onto its System z mainframes from HP and Sun platforms. When pressed for more details about where these customers were coming from, IBM's PR people said they would get me some answers, but all I got was static. And since the inception of the so-called Migration Factory that IBM set up "several years ago," more than 1,300 customers have been moved to Power-based servers from Sun and HP platforms, and this year alone, another 800 customers have moved onto System x iron (which presumably also includes BladeCenter blade servers). Yes, IBM is mixing different categories and different time scales, but this...

IBM calls it the Resilient Cloud Validation program. Big Blue hopes to work with cloud providers to offer a program that reassures businesses that a cloud doesn’t go down often as well as helping answer other questions that keep businesses from trusting in the cloud model. Coincidentally (yeah, right) companies hoping to gain that seal of approval will need to work with IBM’s cloud consulting practice. IBM is also announcing as part of that practice that it can help answer a question I’ve long bothered cloud providers with — When is it most cost effective to outsource your application to a cloud and when should you build your own, or at least buy your own, servers? IBM has been pretty quiet about its cloud efforts. In part because it didn’t want to hack off large customers buying a ton of IBM servers by competing with them. The computing giant hasn’t been pushing its own cloud business until a half-hearted announcement at the end of July, about a month and half after a company exec had...

ARMONK, NY - 18 Nov 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it plans to acquire Transitive Corporation, a privately held technology company headquartered in Los Gatos, California, with a research and development team in Manchester, United Kingdom. Financial terms were not disclosed. Transitive is a leader in cross-platform virtualization and a pioneer in developing technologies that allow applications written for one type of microprocessor and operating system to run on multiple platforms -- with little or no modification. As a result, the technology will enable customers to consolidate their Linux-based applications onto the IBM systems that make the most sense for their business needs. Transitive's breakthrough technology has earned the company 48 worldwide patents and numerous industry awards. This acquisition is part of IBM's strategy to help clients optimize the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilization of the servers that ru...

And you guys know who he is , right? :-)I've never seen Sam speak personally. There is however an email waiting for him in his mailbox from me. I sent it a few months back. See the video

Here are the latest news on the storage vendors chasing the SMB market. I deal with a lot of SMB scenarios and know for sure that it is not just shipping offerings in the market but also articulating them to sell effectively to the customers, si the key to expanding presence together with the SMB market. The SMB market is a lot punishing and will not spare you, shoudl you screw up: Hitachi : The Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers up to 4x the performance compared to prior generations, and also offers storage consolidation for iSCSI, NAS, and Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) connections. The AMS Series 2000 is comprised of three models: the Hitachi AMS 2100, the Hitachi AMS 2300, and the Hitachi AMS 2500. The entire portfolio of midrange storage systems meets the benchmarking standard "Five 9's" of availability, 99.999 percent uptime. The new Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers the following technology breakthroughs: * The industry’s Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing C...

BM has jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon. The company launched Bluehouse, a Web-based social networking and collaboration service designed for business. It incorporates social networking for business, contact sharing, online meetings, joint projects, and many other online community features. Bluehouse is intended as a way for businesses to connect with partners, agencies, suppliers, customers, and outside experts. Source

With a flood of announcements and investments in cloud computing, it's clear the concept is more than a flash in the pan. In fact, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, said organizations concerned about cloud computing's disruptions would rather disrupt themselves than let another company do it for them. "Every day that the economic crisis grows, there's going to be added emphasis on IT departments to do more for less," Gardner said. "If the delta that is the difference between what certain baseline computing functions and services cost to provide for yourself versus what you would pay on a cloud infrastructure, then any sizable delta like that can't be ignored for any given time." IBM has significant clout in the IT and business worlds and possesses all the pieces to put together its own cloud offering. Gardner predicts a horse race to see which company can come up with the best set of business-specific and low-risk services. ...

IBM today opened four new cloud computing centers in emerging markets. They are in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea; and Hanoi, Vietnam, where there is an increasing demand for Internet-based computing models and skills to help companies compete in highly competitive environments. With previously opened centers in both emerging and mature markets, IBM now has 13 cloud computing centers, the world's largest network of expertise on cloud computing. At a time when organizations of all sizes are facing extreme data overload, skyrocketing energy costs, increasingly complex regulatory requirements and competition from more nimble economies, cloud computing is emerging as a significant shift across all industries. This computing model allows businesses and consumers alike to remotely access a vast computing resource that can be tapped on-demand to deliver next-generation services that consumers demand, like online medical records or mobile stock portfolio management. It a...

Breakthrough Storage Performance: Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250 percent. IBM has demonstrated, for the first time, the game-changing impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals manage and access information. The results were achieved using Flash solid-state technology coupled with IBM's industry leading, highly scalable storage virtualization technology. Under the codename "Project Quicksilver," IBM achieved groundbreaking results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over one million Input/Output (I/O) per second -- with a response time of under one millisecond (ms). Compared to the fastest industry benchmarked disk system, Quicksilver improved performance(1) by 250 percent at less than 1/20th the response time...

While analysts are all fretting over the VMware vs Microsoft , which in my opinion is oh-so-boring by now, IBM stealthily penetrates the SMB market globally with its pre-cloud offerings. The Missing Link installed 42 IBM HC10 blade workstations, coupled with the IBM BladeCenter E Chassis and Cool Blue technology. Students can now access applications running from any one of the blade workstations across the campus, saving time and resources. The school runs the blades in a 1:1 set-up, with one blade for each user. Normally, one blade caters for multiple users. Patrick Skagerfalt, IGS facilities manager said the school needed the hardware power to run Photoshop, PremierPro (movie editing), SolidEdge and VectorWorks (3D design) software applications. Source

Because they are not there yet despite the fact that they may be in most of those data centers. Just look at the Wikipedia definition of cloud: Cloud computing means Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology ('Computing'). It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”[1], allowing users to access technology-enabled services "in the cloud"[2] without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them[3]. It is a general concept that incorporates software as a service, Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data is stored on the servers. And then go ahead and do a search for EMC, Cisco or VMware. They aren't...

IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) plans to spend $300 million this year to build 13 "cloud computing" data centers where businesses can store information for quick retrieval in case their computer systems are destroyed in a disaster. Cloud computing refers to services accessed via the Web that seem to exist in a cloud over the Internet. The computing giant, which will unveil the plan on Wednesday, is building the sites in 10 countries, including China, Japan, Turkey, Poland, France and the United States. Source

This is a massive statement, given that we are looking at a company that has shown us the direction to virtualization and and research powerhorse that constantly thrives for the aggressive (and vital) injection of academic rigour in the consulting business (which also makes a firm like IBM a great place to work for), I must say that this business is about to take off in a big way! We will do a quick analysis of the market direction where I will explain in detail why Cloud Computing will make the virtualization an essential and yet an irrelevant layer (i terms of which hypervisor) in the GDM-aware data centers. I also will explain in detail how several functional areas from multiple domains (business, IT primarily) will eventually converge to make it a BizBulk (as I've called frequently in my keynotes and speeches). Anyways, for now here's the news: IBM has announced a massive expansion of its cloud computing, with plans to create two centres to power the next era of computing....

We did see Dell's name come up in the Group discussion earlier but Dell continues to attempt to get the TM on the Cloud Computing. Two giants of the computing industry have demonstrated their own commitment to ‘cloud computing’ a week after a joint research project from HP, Intel and Yahoo! was unveiled. IBM today revealed plans to spend $350m on two high-density cloud computing platforms in Tokyo and North Carolina. The facilities will be 50% more efficient than standard data centres, the company said, thanks to extensive server consolidation. Meanwhile, it emerged today that computer manufacturer Dell has filed an application in the US to trademark the phrase ‘cloud computing’. More here

For the quarter, IBM’s worldwide server revenue remained $3.9 billion but Gartner revised its numbers and reduced HP’s estimated revenue sales from $4 billion to $3.8 billion. The numbers for the other top server vendors – Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu-Siemens – remained the same. Gartner’s server shipment number remained the same. HP shipped more than 680,000 servers during the quarter, while IBM shipped about 302,000 systems. The numbers for the other vendors also remained the same. In a statement, Gartner offered a vague explanation for why it changed the numbers in favor of IBM. The research firm also indicted that overall revenue only increased 2.5 percent instead of the 4.3 percent it originally calculated. Now, Gartner estimated server revenue for the first quarter topped $13.3 billion worldwide instead of $13.6 billion. Source

With the Hong Kong SAR Government seeking a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 percent by 2030 1 , local business leaders are under increased pressure from stakeholders to employ green initiatives. At the same time, CEOs are planning to increase their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments by 25 percent over the next three years 2 as customers pay careful attention to their suppliers’ CSR profiles, including “green” initiatives. With the rising expectation that suppliers are socially responsible, and the increasing realization of the importance of energy efficiency, IBM’s comprehensive set of solutions are perfectly timed to meet market demand. “Project Big Green reflects our commitment to the environment and to delivering energy efficient solutions to help our clients tackle the escalating energy and rental costs challenge in their data centers,” said Dominic Tong, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “With a blend of hardware, software, technology and...

In 2001, IBM coined the phrase ‘autonomic computing’ to describe systems that can fix themselves. Virtualisation wunderkind VMWare brought that vision of self-healing IT a significant step closer to reality in May 2008 with its acquisition of Israeli application performance management vendor B-hive. B-hive’s Conductor tool monitors application performance and produces alerts when a bug or performance deterioration threatens service level agreements (SLAs) – even within virtual environments, where the relationship between software and hardware can be convoluted. More here...

The message from HP is that it wants to deliver more efficiently used assets. "Everything has to be saved now," says Phil Dodsworth, director of HP Datacentre Solutions. That means energy efficiency, power and cooling and lowering operating costs, he adds. "Our strategy is all about managing risk for our clients, and we manage risks through these processes. It's not a silver bullet." HP sees virtualisation as an important strand in what it wants to deliver - but that is a long way from the full story. "Every other supplier seems to imagine that virtualisation is a cure all for everything," says Dodsworth, "but some applications don't lend themselves to virtualisation at all." HP's strategy is very much cost-driven rather than technology-led. "That's what our customers have been telling us," says Dodsworth. "It's the cost of the datacentre that is crippling companies, not the strategic advantages that technolo...

An important part of the new skills program will be certifications in three new enterprise data center disciplines -- virtualization and consolidation, business resiliency and green/energy efficiency. For example, certified IBM Business Partners will have the ability to measure the energy consumption of a data center before and after a project, providing clients with information to help them claim subsequent energy efficiency credits. Once the program is established, there will be two unique specialty levels. Those who reach the highest level will be eligible for a number of marketing and sales benefits that could include funding for co-marketing activities, education, pre-sales assessments, pre-sales proposal development, as well as technical assistance. In addition, to better align other IBM programs to the New Enterprise Data Center opportunity, IBM has announced that the Business Partner Innovation Center program will be aligned with the new specialty program. Link