Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 4:40 PM
HP tries to squeeze everybody out
Is HP getting too big for the footware?
HP proudly boasts now of being the largest IT company in the world and that thrilling breakthrough as inspired HP execs to come out with bigger and more grandiose claims.
The latest, from Tuesday's Tech@Work conference in Barcelona is that the company "sells more x86 servers than IBM, Fujitsu Siemens and Dell combined". At least that was the boast of HP's vice-president of marketing for what HP calls, industry standard servers, Paul Gottsegen.
Such a claim demands further examination. "Yes, it's true," he told ZDNet.co.uk, "by a very tiny margin."
According to Gottsegen, HP has 42 percent of the x86 server market, which is a fairly stunning position to be in. While their servers have been steadily increasing market share, it is fair to say that HP's main target was IBM, but shifted for a time to Dell. Now it is difficult to see exactly who the company is going after in the industry standard server space.
But also note that this market leadership position is based on measuring servers by their value and not by pure numbers. In the number of servers installed, HP fares less well. No, instead it has to be satisfied with most of the cash.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 4:30 PM
Fujitsu, blades and virtualisation
Fujitsu Siemens has launched a BladeEngine for its PRIMERGY Blade Servers that offers virtualisation features along with unified network communications and a combined 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN Mezzanine card, according to the company.
Designed for use in data centres, the card has a dual capability with its 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN controller for virtualised operations so that an individual machine can operate in, say, VMware and Xen environments. The card can execute both Ethernet and iSCSI protocols on a single fabric within the BX600 Blade Servers. According to Fujitsu Siemens, the BladeEngine card allows any blade to boot any supported operating system from the IP-SAN, "meaning that individual Server Blades can be both diskless and stateless", the company said in a statement.
"This dual-capability 10Gbit controller is a milestone because it enables multiple Server Blades to share a high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet network fabric with iSCSI for block storage," according to Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Server Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "PRIMERGY Blade Servers can now deliver state-of-the-art data transfer and back up demanded by mission-critical systems, even within virtual machines."
The blade server has Intel BX620 S4 and AMD-powered BX630 S2 models which up to 32 GB of onboard RAM and capacity for up to 2x 2.5-inch 146 GB SAS hard drives. You can find details on the Fujitsu Siemens web site.
