datacenter

Despite the threat of another recessionary period, Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Jason Maynard believes that IT budgets will hold up through 2011 and that the summer spending spottiness hasn't translated into meaningful expense cutting.

In today's e-mail newsletter, Maynard and team make the case for a positive call on IT spending despite the global macroeconomic fear permeating the market. This is based on first-hand qualitative feedback the team aggregated from CIOs and the 100 largest enterprise hardware and software vendors.

Obviously there is still a scenario where we have a repeat of the dramatic spending cutback of … Read more

Networking giant Cisco Systems and storage area networking company EMC may be teaming up to form a new joint venture to provide technology services to big companies, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Citing unnamed sources who have been briefed on the plans, the Journal story said the new joint venture, code-named Alpine, would target large businesses and would focus on installing Cisco server and networking gear and EMC storage equipment into data centers.

It's unclear when the joint venture might be announced, according to the newspaper. So far, Cisco has declined to comment on the speculation. And an … Read more

CANNES, France--Virtualization specialist VMware has introduced its next generation of data center virtualization tools, called vSphere.

Speaking on Tuesday at the VMworld Europe 2009 conference here, VMware president Paul Maritz said vSphere would let companies virtualize all their workloads.

"VMware vSphere will gradually replace our existing generation of infrastructure products," Maritz said, adding that the first elements of the new suite will be delivered later this year. "On top of vSphere will be the new vCenter Suite. The idea is in a series of steps to move closer and closer to the management of service levels."… Read more

The idea of shipping-container-as-datacenter was floated early and loudly by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. It's easy to see how he got enamored with the whole shipping container theme. For a boring steel box, the history of the shipping container is a fascinating story about labor relations, standards, and globalization. (I highly recommend Marc Levinson's book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.)

However, it's always been a bit unclear to what degree Sun viewed its "Project Blackbox" initiative as a serious business opportunity, as opposed to just … Read more

Despite high-profile pledges by major tech companies to green the grid, efforts to improve efficiency in data centers remain stunted, according to two recent studies.

Fifty-one percent of companies have a solid plan to green their IT operations, down from 55 percent in 2007, according to a study released Monday by Digital Realty Trust. The company owns and manages corporate data centers.

But highly publicized efforts to improve data center performance and design include those of the Green Grid consortium of tech bigwigs such as Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices. The Climate Savers initiative, backed by Google, the World Wildlife … Read more

We often talk about silos in IT. The storyline usually goes something like this. The server guys (computer gear) don't talk to the storage guys (SANs and Fibre Channel) don't talk to the network gals (all that Ethernet and other comms stuff). It's all true enough, of course. But notice something? Facilities doesn't even tend to get mentioned when bemoaning IT silos. All that HVAC and power gear is just part of the landscape. IT folks didn't need to know about bricks. Why should they need to know about power and cooling? Maybe a little UPS here and there, but the big stuff is Someone Else's Problem.

I suspect that part of the issue is language.… Read more

When we talk about pervasive computing, we're usually talking about mobile devices like cell phones or, if we're being really exotic, the various sorts of wearable gizmos that get made fun of in Dilbert cartoons. But I look at pervasive from the other end of the pipe. Hence, The Pervasive Datacenter, the name of the blog that kicks off with this post. From my point of view, it's the datacenter, the software that it runs, and its connections that are everywhere just as much as the peripherals out at the end of the network.

This blog will have its home base in the datacenter itself and will cover topics from servers big and small, to multi-core processors, to operating systems, to virtualization, to power and cooling concerns. However, it will also look at the software and the services out in the network cloud that are consuming datacenter computing cycles and storage and thereby determining the future of the back-end. I'll also spend some time on the bigger questions: Is Software as a Service the next big thing or merely Application Service Providers warmed over? What's the future of Open Source in a Web-delivered software model? Do operating systems even matter any longer?… Read more