System News for Sun Users - The Blog

IDC White Paper Discusses How Sun’s Solution Addresses Customers’ Pain Points

An IDC white paper written by Jean S. Bozman examines the rise and needs of high availability in a virtualized world. Spotlighted is the Solaris Cluster and how it addresses many pain points experienced by IT operations looking to improve availability for applications and databases, while utilizing virtualization technologies.

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Despite Decline in Third Quarter Sales

Server sales are beginning to stabilize, reports IDC and Gartner in analyses on the July-September period. The IT research and advisory firms both found revenue down in the worldwide server market during the third quarter of 2009, however the decrease was less than anticipated and demonstrated an increase over the first and second quarters of this year.

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Don’t Let Virtualization Get Out of Hand

To be sure, virtualization cuts real estate costs drastically since the practice eliminates the need for incremental growth of datacenters. But, if users create one virtual machine after another, they are doing little to ease the task of provisioning, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing workload performance across both their remaining physical and growing virtual resources. That’s where Sun Ops Center 2.5 comes in handy, as Jean Bozman, Gary Chen and Mary Turner point out in their brief IDC paper, “Sun Ops Center 2.5: Managing Mixed Environments in Virtualized Sun Infrastructure.”

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Market Conditions Expected to Stabilize in 2nd Half of ‘09

Factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 30.1% year over year to $9.8 billion in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09), according to the latest numbers from market-research firm IDC. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue decline and the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC began tracking the server market on a quarterly basis back in 1996.

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Business Ready HPC Solutions for Small- and Mid-sized Organizations

Sun can deliver complete HPC clusters for small- and mid-sized organizations, offering an end-to-end HPC architecture that is designed to grow from a single rack up to tera- and peta-scale deployments. In a white paper entitled “Building HPC Systems for Business-critical Workloads,” readers can learn about the Sun Rapid Solutions Sun Compute Cluster that provides easy-to-deploy clusters with a choice of components including compute, storage, network, software and services.

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Bladed Server Solutions: Easier, Cheaper to Implement and Manage

The IDC white paper “Virtualizing the Infrastructure with Sun x86 Blades” by Jed Scaramella and Jean S. Bozman examines the ongoing customer requirements for server platforms and the concomitant upward pressure on power and cooling costs as datacenters become increasingly crowded with computer systems.

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Join the Debate

Long-time chronicler of benchmarking results BM Seer adds his voice to the chorus of Forrester critics Noel Yuhanna, Mike Gilpin and David D’Silva, who contend, “TPC Benchmarks Don’t Matter Anymore.”

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Reports IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker

For the first time in five years, storage sales have fallen year-over-year, reports IDC in its Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. Sales of external disk storage systems declined 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, while total disk storage system sales dropped 5.9 percent.

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IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker reported worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues rose 9.8 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2007 (4Q07) for a total of $5.3 billion.

Total disk storage systems market also increased by 7.6 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2006, for a total of $7.5 billion. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reach 1,645 petabytes, growing 56.3 percent.

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Total Disk Storage Systems Factory Revenue, Fourth Quarter of 2007 (Revenues are in Millions)

• 1. IBM: $1,720 in revenue 4Q07 for 22.9% market share; $1,670 in revenue 4Q06 for 23.9% market share; totaling 3.0% in revenue growth

• 2. HP: $1,362 in revenue 4Q07 for 18.1% market share; $1,349 in revenue 4Q06 for 19.3% market share; totaling 1.0% in revenue growth

• 3. EMC: $1,200 in revenue 4Q07 for 16.0% market share; $1,059 in revenue 4Q06 for 15.2% market share; totaling 13.3% in revenue growth

• 4. Dell: $671 in revenue 4Q07 for 8.9% market share; $595 in revenue 4Q06 for 8.5% market share; totaling 12.7% in revenue growth

• 5. Sun: $428 in revenue 4Q07 for 5.7% market share; $369 in revenue 4Q06 for 5.3% market share; totaling 16.1% in revenue growth

• 5. Hitachi: $410 in revenue 4Q07 for 5.4% market share; $356 in revenue 4Q06 for 5.1% market share; totaling 14.9% in revenue growth