August 31, 2009 -- EMC and VMware kicked off this week's VMworld conference with news of an expanded business and technology alliance that will have EMC reselling VMware's vCenter AppSpeed software and will tighten integration between VMware's vCenter product family and EMC's Ionix IT management software.
The pair is teaming up to nudge customers down the path toward migrating tier-one applications to VMware's vSphere 4 cloud operating system by using their respective software products to streamline configuration and compliance management and automate IT processes.
EMC will sell VMware's vCenter AppSpeed – a tool for monitoring application performance and dependencies across different tiers of virtual and physical infrastructures – as part of the EMC Ionix IT Management portfolio.
EMC reorganized its IT management software family last month by bringing all of its Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft technologies together under the Ionix brand.
The Ionix software family consists of four main product sets. The first, EMC Ionix for Service Discovery and Mapping, identifies applications and their physical and virtual dependencies in support of Configuration Management Database (CMDB)/Configuration Management System (CMS) population, change management, and application troubleshooting. It also maps servers and applications prior to data center moves, consolidations, and virtualization migrations.
The second, Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, provides automated root-cause and impact analysis and monitors services across both physical and virtual environments. The software allows users to view the relationships between virtual machines (VMs), the VMware ESX Servers they reside on, and the network.
The third is Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance. Aimed at compliance management across servers, storage, application dependencies and networks, Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance tracks configuration compliance against regulatory, best practices, and internal governance policies, including VMware vSphere 4 deployment guidelines and helps users remediate compliance violations across physical and virtual infrastructures.
The fourth and final product set, Ionix for Service Management, allows customers to deploy IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management. Customers can use Ionix for Service Management to build a federated CMDB that is auto-populated with physical and virtual and dependencies.
The companies also announced new physical-to-virtual migration services offerings. The services will make use of VMware Capacity Planner, EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager, and VMware vCenter AppSpeed to speed the vSphere migration process.
The specific offerings related to VMware vCenter AppSpeed include: Enhanced Candidate Selection for VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter AppSpeed Jumpstart, and VMware Infrastructure Performance Health Check.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Xiotech wants to buy your old disks
August 18, 2009 -- What do vendors have to do to put you in a new array today? How about buying back capacity? That's Xiotech's plan under its new "Cash for Disk Clunkers" program.
The company is riding the coattails of the Obama administration's Cash for Clunkers auto industry stimulus program by offering cash incentives for old storage technology in favor of storage systems based on Xiotech's Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) architecture.
As part of the new program, which was announced last week and runs through September, customers can trade in "old, inefficient disk drives" for $1,000 per terabyte cash back toward the purchase of an equal amount of capacity on a Xiotech Emprise 7000, Emprise 7000 Edge, or Emprise 5000 system, or VM Storage Solution.
There is no limit to the amount of capacity organizations can trade in, and consequently no limit to the money they can save on their new storage systems, according to Xiotech's Cash for Disk Clunkers webpage.
You can find more info on Xiotech's website and read the Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) Lab Review on our website.
The company is riding the coattails of the Obama administration's Cash for Clunkers auto industry stimulus program by offering cash incentives for old storage technology in favor of storage systems based on Xiotech's Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) architecture.
As part of the new program, which was announced last week and runs through September, customers can trade in "old, inefficient disk drives" for $1,000 per terabyte cash back toward the purchase of an equal amount of capacity on a Xiotech Emprise 7000, Emprise 7000 Edge, or Emprise 5000 system, or VM Storage Solution.
There is no limit to the amount of capacity organizations can trade in, and consequently no limit to the money they can save on their new storage systems, according to Xiotech's Cash for Disk Clunkers webpage.
You can find more info on Xiotech's website and read the Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) Lab Review on our website.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Where are we with FCoE?
August 4, 2009 -- The Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard is fully baked, but how soon will customers deploy the technology beyond the testing phase?
The FCoE standard was finalized at the beginning of June. The FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard for FCoE. As a result, the T11 Technical Committee plenary session approved forwarding the FC-BB-5 standard to INCITS for further processing as an ANSI standard.
According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), this milestone has a few implications:
1.) BB-5 Frame Format and Addressing schema are the heart and soul of FCoE
2.) Advances FCoE industry with no new spins required for FCoE silicon
3.) FCoE products in OEM qualification today are based on the completed standard
4.) Users benefit from fully baked standardized FCoE solutions from day one
Industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) believes FCoE is still in the very early stage of development within storage organizations at large enterprises.
In a recent paper, "Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE): Storage Pro Perspective," Rob Stevenson, TIP's managing director of storage, and Anders Lofgren, chief research officer write:
"It is clear that FCoE and server virtualization are becoming more tightly linked and end users are waiting for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be fully deployed throughout the data center before moving forward with FCoE adoption, which we expect in two to three years."
TIP also believes FCoE adoption should start to accelerate following the implementation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet among storage organizations.
They continue: "All of the storage teams we speak with indicate that FCoE will be the dominant storage transport for the future, but the roles of host connectivity, FCoE initiator certification and topology management are still being debated."
The vendors are arming themselves to the teeth with FCoE-capable networking gear, most notably IBM. Big Blue beefed up its Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet networking portfolio through a series of expanded OEM partnerships with Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper Networks just last month.
According to Cisco's latest data on FCoE, customers are "rapidly adopting" Cisco's FCoE-capable Nexus 5000 series switches and more than one-third of those customers are planning to implement FCoE.
Cisco claims that it "leads the FCoE market" based on shipments. The company now has more than 900 Nexus 5000 customers and has shipped more than 100,000 ports. The Nexus 5020, which is FCoE-capable, has been shipping since June of 2008.
Cisco says 35% of Nexus 5000 customers purchased systems with FCoE enabled, representing: government, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, media, financial services, telcos, and service providers.
Brocade, another big player in the FCoE space, is taking a realistic view of the subject. In an interesting talk from Tech Day 2009, Brocade's CTO, Dave Stevens, said today's FCoE technologies are changing the landscape of the data center, but only in the first five feet of the network infrastructure. (See Brocade's video: FCoE Reality - Brocade CTO Dave Stevens from Tech Day 2009)
Stay up to date on all of the latest FCoE news by visiting our FCoE topic center page.
The FCoE standard was finalized at the beginning of June. The FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard for FCoE. As a result, the T11 Technical Committee plenary session approved forwarding the FC-BB-5 standard to INCITS for further processing as an ANSI standard.
According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), this milestone has a few implications:
1.) BB-5 Frame Format and Addressing schema are the heart and soul of FCoE
2.) Advances FCoE industry with no new spins required for FCoE silicon
3.) FCoE products in OEM qualification today are based on the completed standard
4.) Users benefit from fully baked standardized FCoE solutions from day one
Industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) believes FCoE is still in the very early stage of development within storage organizations at large enterprises.
In a recent paper, "Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE): Storage Pro Perspective," Rob Stevenson, TIP's managing director of storage, and Anders Lofgren, chief research officer write:
"It is clear that FCoE and server virtualization are becoming more tightly linked and end users are waiting for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be fully deployed throughout the data center before moving forward with FCoE adoption, which we expect in two to three years."
TIP also believes FCoE adoption should start to accelerate following the implementation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet among storage organizations.
They continue: "All of the storage teams we speak with indicate that FCoE will be the dominant storage transport for the future, but the roles of host connectivity, FCoE initiator certification and topology management are still being debated."
The vendors are arming themselves to the teeth with FCoE-capable networking gear, most notably IBM. Big Blue beefed up its Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet networking portfolio through a series of expanded OEM partnerships with Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper Networks just last month.
According to Cisco's latest data on FCoE, customers are "rapidly adopting" Cisco's FCoE-capable Nexus 5000 series switches and more than one-third of those customers are planning to implement FCoE.
Cisco claims that it "leads the FCoE market" based on shipments. The company now has more than 900 Nexus 5000 customers and has shipped more than 100,000 ports. The Nexus 5020, which is FCoE-capable, has been shipping since June of 2008.
Cisco says 35% of Nexus 5000 customers purchased systems with FCoE enabled, representing: government, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, media, financial services, telcos, and service providers.
Brocade, another big player in the FCoE space, is taking a realistic view of the subject. In an interesting talk from Tech Day 2009, Brocade's CTO, Dave Stevens, said today's FCoE technologies are changing the landscape of the data center, but only in the first five feet of the network infrastructure. (See Brocade's video: FCoE Reality - Brocade CTO Dave Stevens from Tech Day 2009)
Stay up to date on all of the latest FCoE news by visiting our FCoE topic center page.
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