HP woke up the IT world this morning by announcing their acquisition of IBRIX, a maker of scale-out file servers. The purchase will presumably be integrated with HP’s existing clustered file system technology acquired with PolyServe in 2007. The move demonstrates HP’s commitment to continue to be a major player in the enterprise storage market.
In case you were wondering, Cisco isn’t playing games with the Unified Computing System. Their aim is to take on IBM, HP, and Dell and become a major player in the data center server market.
Cisco today announced a new Unified Computing System (UCS) server form factor: The C-Series rack-mount server. The C-Series features the same features found in the existing B-Series UCS blades but starts much smaller and cheaper. Cisco hopes to extend the UCS vision into small businesses, remote offices, and other locations where a blade server chassis would not make sense.
EMC (NYSE:EMC) started a gunfight in the storage world today by offering an astonishing $1.8 billion for data deduplication sweetheart, Data Domain (NASDAQ:DDUP). This $30 per share offer one-ups rival NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) by $5 per share, which looked to have sealed the deal with a solid $1.5 billion offer on May 20. EMC’s offer is all-cash, while NetApp had mixed cash and stock.
It has been two days since HDS introduced High Availability Manager (“HAM” to us), disappointing some and confusing others. Now that the dust has settled some, it has become clearer just what HAM is and how it works, and we come away more impressed. HDS has taken simple, proven technologies (path management, clustering, synchronous replication) and remixed them into a super-high-availability solution for the largest enterprises. Perhaps this is not what many expected, but it’s certainly a worthwhile addition to the company’s family of products.
HDS: Hello, I am HDS man/Would you like some HDS HAM?
Bloggers: I’d like to know ’bout HDS HAM/What is it, oh HDS man?
HDS: HAM moves bits from here to there/Available anywhere!
Bloggers: My data has replication/Your brain must be on vacation!
HDS: HAM automates operation/Don’t you want that long vacation?
Bloggers: This sounds like what we had before/Amuse me now before I snore!
HDS telegraphed that a big announcement was coming today. They even made it fun, with a (literally) cryptic blog entry to make sure we were all watching. But the announcement of High Availability Manager, a software product to manage existing HDS USP-V and USP-VM arrays, underwhelmed. It isn’t HDS’ answer to the EMC Symmetrix V-Max and it’s forthcoming FAST technology.
What is the cloud? What will become of it? I spent May 17 and 18 in Prague at the Sys-Con Cloud Computing Conference and Expo exploring these questions with some of the smartest cloud-focused folks in Europe. Theconsensus: The IT world is changing and remote managed services are a big part of it. Another discovery: […]
When folks upgraded from VMware’s version 2 products into the ESX 3 world, the first step most took was to update their old VMFS 2 datastores to the new version 3 of VMFS. With all of the new storage capabilities introduced in the vSphere 4 family, many wondered if a similar upgrade hassle would be required.
Cisco Systems took some heat in the blogosphere about their Unified Computing System (UCS) vision. Many sites, including Gestalt IT, suggested that the admittedly impressive combination of hardware might not be all that welcome in corporate data centers. We at Gestalt IT applaud Cisco, and especially Wendy Mars, for their straightforward responses to our concerns, but we remain unconvinced.
