Compute

I have been speaking about ICPs during a series of events across the country and received a fantastic question: “What do I do if it breaks?”

Moonshot is going to be used as a pivot point in the company to demonstrate technology leadership, validate that HP can and will innovate in a rapidly changing market, and, if all goes as planned, execute in delivering a new breed of servers into today’s modern data center.

A lot of organizations think the cloud can help them save money and improve IT service delivery.  And they’re right—for many, it can transform operations. But often the biggest questions are “How the heck do I get there?  Where do I begin?  What will it actually get me?” 

A good place to start answering those questions is to see what companies with successful clouds have done. ESG has been following EMC on its cloud voyage since 2004, and we recently completed our IT Audit on the topic. While the first two were more about the journey, this last one focused on their achievements—which are, quite frankly, stunning.

Privatization will afford Dell the opportunity to try different avenues. The question remains will they break new trail, or continue driving down the same old roads?

In the case of Dell, there no longer is any value in dealing with Wall St. for Mr. Dell, et. al.  He/they already have all the money they could ever want, so why bother to suffer fools if they don't have to?  Now he/they can operate the business with a long term strategy - focus on products, customers, and employees instead of the 28 year old controlling a billion bucks of stock without ever having a real job, and try to get something done.

In order to assess IT spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 540 IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America and Western Europe. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2012 IT spending as well as their 2013 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level.

Everything in IT is software-defined. This term concerns me. It is not a term that is going to make its way into strategic IT conversations. True, from a pure definition perspective, it is accurate, but risks confusion as it gets translated with IT management and executive teams.

Enterprises collect terabytes of data on a monthly basis. What makes security data “big data?“ One place to start is simply security data volume.

Your pager goes off and wakes you at 4:00 AM to let you know that the power is back on at the office, and you think, “Oh Great.” You look out the window and see the ground covered with snow as you fire up the home computer to see if you can send an e-mail -  nothing. The drive to the office is quicker than usual, because there’s no traffic. It’s dark as you walk down the hall past the empty cubes, swipe your security card past the reader and open the big steel door.  Ah, the familiar sound of cooling fans as you flip on the lights and walk to one of the many computer racks in the room. You jiggle the mouse in front of the console, and it lights up with a blue screen and a half booted system. The only option is to hit the power button.

Powering Next-generation Analytic Applications in a Unified Big Data Architecture  

Big data analytics is taking center stage among large midmarket and enterprise organizations that are looking to capture, refine, and analyze all types of data available to them on customer interactions and business operations. Driven by increasing data volume growth and the need for fast data processing and analytics, an emerging technology based on the open-source Apache Hadoop project is growing in popularity based on its ability to address big data needs with a cluster of industry-standard servers. Users are challenged to determine where Hadoop adds the most value in unified data architecture with best-of-breed components in the technology stack.

This ESG Lab Validation report aims to inform decision makers who are considering options for a big data analytics platform and illustrate the complementary value of Teradata Aster and Hadoop as key components in a best-of-breed technology approach. ESG Lab compared Hadoop with Teradata Aster—since both platforms support MapReduce processing—to explore and contrast their strengths as components of big data architecture. ESG Lab assessed the ease of use, performance, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and analytic-readiness of Teradata Aster and Hadoop running multiple large data sets on real-world data models. 

Integrated Computing from NEC and Egenera

This ESG Lab Validation documents the hands-on testing of the NEC SIGMABLADE server systems with Egenera PAN Manager software, a fully integrated foundation for integrated computing environments. The report focuses on the benefits an integrated computing environment can provide to IT organizations, including streamlined operational procedures, more efficient resource utilization, and greater management flexibility for both physical and virtual resources.

What did ESG learn while at Oracle OpenWorld early in the autumn of 2012? That Oracle has every intention of having customers adopt as much of the “red stack” as possible, not just software, but also Engineered Systems and cloud. 

Check out my latest video blog on how vendors' approach to customer service and support needs to change, moving away from a product-focused model to an integrated approach for increasingly complex environments.  This new model needs to address the total customer experience, helping organizations to improve their processes and achieve their business objectives.  Customer service and support will be a major differentiator going forward--and increasingly a reason to choose one vendor over another.

Larry Ellison’s keynote proved to be packed with announcements to open Oracle Open World 2012.

NV-DIMM is a new memory technology that offers to resolve the volatility problems of DRAM, the longevity limitations of flash,  and the headaches associated with the clunky batteries that are often needed for back-up power. Although—as always—there are many new memory technologies in development, NV-DIMMs are essentially here today and should start appearing in x86 servers and appliances early next year.This brief helps IT professionals understand what NV-DIMMs are, what they can do, and whether they may be the right choice for their organization’s applications.

An Automated, Fast Path to Virtualization

This ESG Lab Validation documents the hands-on testing of HP VirtualSystem VS2 for VMware 2.0, optimized for VMware vSphere 5. This system was designed to provide holistic management for both physical components and virtual environments. ESG Lab tested with a goal of validating virtualization of business-critical workloads, providing businesses a fast, simple path to virtualization as well as a cloud-ready platform. VirtualSystem architecture, optimized for mixed workloads and highly scalable in multiple dimensions (compute, network, and storage) was also examined, as was ease of use and tightly integrated management.

Maybe the hardest part of IT's role in a distributed organization is providing services to users in far off corners of the world.  Not any more.  IT needs to quickly let folks know that they can be loved, protected, and enabled - with whatever devices they want, wherever they want to use them - every time, all the time - lest they keep running away into the open arms of others.

The IT industry is littered with acronyms and buzz words that change at such a rapid pace that few can actually keep up with what they truly mean. Just as one settles in to our conversations, another one pops up to keep us on our toes. IT professionals can be bombarded by these terms, leaving them with a great buzz-word bingo fodder, but not with any meaningful value.