| Pure Sun
Sites are Less Likely to Use SSDs |
Editor:- January 26, 2005 -
the results of the STORAGEsearch.com Solid State Disk Buyer Market Survey
are published today.
This is a market where performance counts for
a lot. When asked the question - Why do people use Solid State Disks? - The #1
reason given was - Application Speedup - cited by 76% SSD buyers.
So is there a difference in SSD usage related to platforms ?
We
asked SSD users and those actively looking to buy SSDs to ask how they would
describe their environments. Among the results in the report.
- 14.9% - server - heterogeneous (mixed)
- 8.5% - server - mostly Windows
- 6.4% - server - mostly Linux
- 4.3% - server - mostly IBM
- 4.3% - server - mostly Sun
- 2.1% - server - mostly Apple
This suggests that users with
heterogeneous environments are 3.5 times more likely to look at SSD speedup
compared to those with networks which are "mostly Sun."
It
makes sense if you think about it.
In a mixed environment you can
invest in a single black box turbocharger which will accelerate all
your servers and deliver a lot of bang for your buck compared to spreading the
same money thinly around a lot of different types of server. Whereas in contrast
- users in a pure Sun environment can redeploy their heaviest applications onto
a new high end server (or more processors within a SPARC mainframe) while
shifting lighter apps onto older and slower machines (or less processors) -
because they're all compatible.
STORAGEsearch has been
charting the
rise of the Solid State Disk Market for a number of years. In Q4 2004 we ran
the industry's first major market survey designed to learn more about buyers
needs and preferences. This article provides a summary of highlights from the
survey results.
The survey has identified technical gaps which
require new product solutions and service gaps which require changes in the
marketing plans of SSD vendors who need to change the way they do business. SSD
vendors must take note of the signals flagged in this survey if they wish to
transform this market segment from a niche technical market into a mainstream
multi billion dollar pillar of the storage market. ...read the article,
Solid state disks,
Market research
Sun Announces Open Source License for Solaris
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - January 25, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
announced that the source code for Solaris 10 will be made available under the
Open Source Initiative approved Common Development and Distribution License.
The company has established a community Web site at opensolaris.org. Buildable
source code for Solaris will be available at this site in the second quarter of
2005.
...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- as there are no independent makers of SPARC chips for servers any
more (Fujitsu and Sun are more like technology partners than competitors) the
only market Sun's open source move could make a difference to is the Intel
Architecture server market. Will making Solaris x86 open source impact Linux or
Windows sales?
According to IDC market research data (disclosed
recently by HP) - "Solaris on x86 (Opteron and Xeon) has not been
widely accepted by the marketplace. It has just 0.25% share of total
x86 units shipped world wide."
Sometimes doing the right thing
with the wrong timing has little or no effect. For example - slamming your foot
on the brakes just after your car hits a brick wall.
Sun's open
source move would have had a very significant impact on the server market if
they had done it 5 years ago while their credibility was still high or even 4
years ago when it might have slowed down their revenue slide. There was a
time in the darkest days when analysts were speculating if Sun would survive as
a company - when the open source move might have reduced the anxiety of some
users about availability and support if Sun went under.
But now? Sun's
revenue is on an upswing again. They're profitable again. Users don't need that
kind of safety net any more. Sun users who were going to defect to other
platforms have mostly already done so. The products and price / performance in
the SPARC/ Solaris space are getting better. Open source Solaris x86 may be a
solution to a problem which only academics and geeks worry about. And the
military - who were going to buy it in low volume anyway.
Themis Computer Announces New Subsidiary in Germany
FREMONT,
California - January 20, 2005 - Themis Computer announced the opening
of Themis Computer GmbH that will sell its embedded server and
single-boards computers into communications, commercial and government markets
in Europe.
Themis has found increasing success for its products
worldwide. Under the direction of David G. Earwaker, sales manager of Central
and Eastern Europe, the new office will provide sales support and other key
operational functions to customers in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The
Netherlands, and the former East Block countries.
"I am pleased to announce our new subsidiary that will help us to
expand our direct presence in Europe at a time when will be announcing new
boards and systems solutions," stated William E. Kehret, president of
Themis Computer. "Our new office will allow us to better serve our European
existing customers and support the increased demand for our products and
services, " he added. "The formation of Themis Computer GmbH
demonstrates our commitment to this important market and will allow us to expand
our business in the region."
For more information regarding
Themis Computer GmbH at embedded world 2005, please contact David Earwaker at
+49.89.64919197 or david.earwaker@themis.com.
...Themis
Computer profile, VME
SPARC SBCs, SPARC
Resellers in Germany
Sun VARs Asked for their Views on Solaris x86 Business Prospects
in 2005
Editor:-
January 20, 2005 - SPARC Product Directory is conducting a confidential
online survey to ask Sun VARs how they rate the business prospects for
Solaris x86 during the next 12 months.
The results will be used in
the next part of our major series of articles "Surviving the Solaris x86
Wars" and will provide unique insights into the thinking of the Sun channel
community.
I've spoken to over 1,000 Sun VARs and IHVs about business
and future prospects in the Sun market in the time that I've edited the
SPARC Product Directory -
and that's been helpful to me in understanding the market. But whenever I ask if
someone would like to have their views aired on these pages - the answer is
usually "No!"
Fear of reprisals from Sun, or just the
competitive need to keep quiet about good opportunities which vendors don't
want the competition to learn about - all play a part in this conspiracy of
silence.
By capturing the mood of Sun VARs worldwide in our anonymous
online survey form - they can more freely air their views and help users, VARs,
IHVs, ISVs and Sun itself get a more accurate representation of what they're
thinking.
The survey takes just a couple of minutes. If you're in the
business of selling Sun or compatible systems please take part by
clicking here.
See
also:- Market research
companies & analysts
BiTMICRO's E-DiskSAN Certified Solaris Ready
FREMONT, Calif.
- January 18, 2005 - BiTMICRO Networks today announced it will support
the Solaris 10 OS on both SPARC and x86 platforms.
Additionally,
it has achieved Solaris Ready certification from Sun Microsystems, Inc. for its
line of E-DiskSAN Fibre Channel rackmount solid state disk systems.
"Sun
is pleased that BiTMICRO continues to deliver world-class SAN solutions that
support Solaris 10 for both SPARC and x86 platforms," said Juan Carlos
Soto, software CTO and senior director, market development engineering, Sun
Microsystems, Inc. "BiTMICRO's work with Sun to deliver tested and approved
Solaris-based SAN solutions also enables the companies to offer our customers a
more extensive storage alternative for volume hardware platforms than Windows
and Linux."
...BiTMICRO Networks
profile, Solid state disks,
Sun VARs
worldwide directory
Sun Fails to Convince IBM that Solaris x86 Has Momentum
Editor:- January
17, 2005 - a new article in eWEEK says Sun is unhappy that IBM
won't be supporting Solaris 10 for x86 with applications like DB2, WebSphere and
Tivoli.
Frankly you don't need to be IBM to see that Solaris x86 is
more a marketing concept which Sun has been using to deflect criticism of its
flawed Linux strategies and past weaknesses in SPARC horsepower, than a viable
market segment which is worthy of long term support.
My own view is
that if the Solaris x86 base gets big enough Sun would lose less money by
reselling Sun branded Dell servers with Solaris preloaded, or maybe just paying
Dell to host a special Solaris server page on Dell's web site.
Sun
will not make money in its x86 server business for years, if ever. And it's
likely that long before that, SPARC will once again leapfrog the performance of
Intel Architecture processors making Sun's x86 hardware business irrelevant.
See
also:- article:-
Surviving the Solaris x86 Wars
Dataram Doubles Memory Capacity of Sun Fire V210
Princeton,
NJ January 13, 2005 Dataram Corporation today announced that it has
successfully completed validation of a 4GB upgrade for Sun Microsystems'
Sun Fire V210 server.
The upgrade, DRS240/4096, doubles the
current maximum memory capacity from 8GB to 16GB and is not currently offered
from Sun.
"This is another example of Datarams commitment to its Sun
customers," stated Lars Marcher, president of Dataram. "The 4GB memory
upgrade delivers the highest memory capacity available in the industry for the
Sun Fire V210 - a powerful 16GB - and further supports advanced technical users
running complex applications."
The Sun Fire V210 entry-level server is a feature-rich, all-in-one
solution system offering high performance, reliability and security in an
ultra-dense, 1U rack-optimized package powered by up to two 1 GHz UltraSPARC
IIIi processors. Dataram also offers 1GB and 2GB memory upgrades for the V210
and provides customers with substantial savings of up to 50% when compared to
the cost of Sun branded memory. Dataram is licensed by Sun Microsystems to
incorporate Suns patented technology. All Dataram memory products for Sun
systems are guaranteed to be 100% compatible and are backed by a lifetime
warranty and free technical support.
...Dataram
profile, Sun
Compatible Memory
Sun Reports Profit with Slight Drop in Revenue
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - January 13, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal second quarter, which ended December 26, 2004.
Revenues for the second quarter were $2.843 billion, a decrease of
1.6% as compared with $2.888 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2004. Net
profit for the second quarter of fiscal 2005 was $19 million or $0.01 per share
as compared with a net loss of $125 million or a net loss of $0.04 per share for
the second quarter of fiscal 2004.
"The second quarter delivered
many positives, including x64 and x86 server unit volume growth, positive cash
flow from operations, and stunning market reviews of Solaris 10 OS. It feels
good to ring up a modest GAAP profit," said Scott McNealy, chairman and
chief executive officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Sun has one of its most
rock solid product line-ups in history today. Innovation is increasingly marked
by business models as much as technology. Sun's $1 per CPU/hour and the Sun Java
Enterprise System are emerging models for recurring revenue. We are clearly
reestablishing relevance in key markets." ...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- I expected that Sun would report a 3rd consecutive quarter of year on
year revenue growth, so the drop of 1.6% is a little disappointing. Offset
against this however Sun has stemmed its losses. That means its pricing and
business model are back in balance and sustainable for the first time in 4
years. I still expect to see revenue growth in the next quarter - partly fueled
by server sales and partly due to better storage sales - because Sun has signed
oem agreements with a record number of storage companies in the last year to
resell their products. And while Sun's Linux server business is still small in
absolute revenue terms, Sun is a credible supplier of storage to users of other
Linux platforms.
See also:-
article:- Sun, SPARC
and Solaris Highlights and Lowlights in 2004
Sun Completes Acquisition of Sevenspace
SANTA
CLARA, CALIF. - January 11, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
announced that it has completed the acquisition of SevenSpace, a
privately-held company based in Ashburn, Va.
SevenSpace services
are expected to enhance Sun's Managed Services offerings to include
heterogeneous environments, adding support for Hewlett-Packard's legacy HP-UX
and IBM's AIX systems, along with Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux.
SevenSpace delivers remote system monitoring and management with high
levels of operational efficiency and committed service levels. The services
provided include rapid identification, assessment, notification and resolution
of system events as well as change control all within a best-practices
framework. The services are designed to improve customer environment stability
and availability while potentially reducing IT operations costs.
SevenSpace manages enterprise applications, including SAP, Oracle
e-business suites, PeopleSoft and Siebel; databases, including Oracle and
Microsoft SQL Server; operating systems, including Solaris OS, Windows and Linux
platforms; and network devices.
...Sun profile,
Acquired, dead, renamed
etc STORAGE companies
Silent Spring for Linux Cell Phones?
Editor:-
January 6, 2005 - in case you missed it, yesterday at the Consumer
Electronics Show -
Microsoft
announced a killer app for mobile consumer devices like cell phones and
entertainment nodes that will blow away Linux, Palm OS and leave only Apple's
ipod still standing after the shockwaves have settled.
Microsoft's new
killer app will accelerate the growth in demand for Windows Mobile storage
intensive devices. In the same way that in the 1980s wordprocessors were the
killer app which fueled the growth of the PC market, and in the 1990s enterprise
connection to the Internet was the killer app which fueled the growth in
Sun's SPARC servers.
What
is the new mobile OS terminator?
It's
MSN Video Downloads. Let's call
it downloadable web based TV.
Microsoft, the worlds' #1 super meta
integrator and conductor of new software and hardware from tens of thousands of
oems and ISVs in the Intel Architecture market, has assembled an impressive
array of content providers to launch the service which starts today.
The
clever part Microsoft's marketing strategy is that the service will increase
the demand for the Windows Mobile OS - which is intrinsically compatible with
the new service. (By the way it will also increase the market for
flash memory and small
form factor hard drives.)
Even if Microsoft publishes the API for the new service - it will put Linux
based cell phones and portable gadgets about 6 to 9 months behind the needs of
the consumer market. So that's a good way of killing competitors without
breaking any laws.
Although you might argue that Microsoft's dominant
market position created by its monopoly in the PC market is part of the leverage
which gives the new service a head start - they can simply reply - that Apple -
with its ipod and itunes is already the market leader in downloadable
entertainment and that the new service is merely competing in an already
competitive market.
But it's going to be a Silent Spring for Linux
cell phones and pdas. You can kiss them goodbye.
And it's not going to
harm Windows server sales either as hundreds if millions of consumers sign up to
the new TV on the move.
See also:-
the story of Silent
Spring - how Rachel Carson warned the world about the dangers of DDT.
I read her book in the 1960s as a young teenager and although it didn't turn me
into a raving tree hugger - it did help me think about environmental
boundaries. So I don't spray the fields in the farm where I live and I use
mechanical methods of weed control instead. (The exercise is cheaper than a gym
but has the disadvantage of being seasonal - hence a little weight gain over
Christmas.)
Carson's book probably influenced my generation in the
same way that the recent movie - The Day After Tomorrow may impact the adults
of tomorrow. By a spooky coincidence I watched it for the first time on DVD
during the recent holiday just hours before the news of the real life Tsunami
catastrophe in Indonesia broke. In fact that's nearly made me stop watching the
news. It's just too painful.
Korea's Daegu City Deploys DataCore to Manage Storage for Sun /
Intel Servers
FT.
LAUDERDALE, Fla. - January 6, 2005 - Daegu City, the third largest city in
Korea with a population of over 2.5 million citizens, has installed DataCore's
SANsymphony to manage and consolidate its storage network of Hitachi and Samsung
storage arrays.
Daegu City, driven by new government regulations,
needed to quickly implement a storage-based disaster recovery solution. However,
they soon found that their existing storage arrays did not offer common storage
services, such as point-in-time snapshot copies and remote IP mirroring, that
would work with dissimilar types of storage from different vendors. Each
existing vendor actually proposed a swap-out approach so that all storage would
be the same to avoid the interoperability issues involved. While this solution
would benefit the winning vendor, this was not what Daegu wanted. Not only would
it add substantial cost to buy new storage arrays, it would add a great deal of
time and disruption to replace the existing systems already in place. Daegu City
decided there must be a better way to get the job done while maintaining
the use of their existing storage investment. After researching the marketplace,
they turned to DataCore's SANsymphony.
"As a direct result of SANsymphony, I now have in place a storage
networking architecture with the flexibility to employ different models of
Hitachi storage and Samsung disk arrays and make them all coexist and work
together, " stated IT manager, Hea-Chan Park. "With DataCore we got
the 'best of both worlds', we maximized our existing investment, and we achieved
an affordable IP-based network solution."
Daegu's main computing center hosts a large number of
Sun Microsystems
and Intel based servers
to run city government and public service applications. Prior to DataCore, the
city used a number of directly attached storage arrays, which limited the IT
department's ability to meet the growing data requirements. Therefore, Daegu's
IT manager Hea-Chan Park knew it was time to deploy a storage network to better
consolidate and manage storage resources and add the necessary flexibility to
expand and meet future requirements. The challenge was obvious: find a way to
maximize the use of existing storage investments, network them all together, and
add the capability to do remote site disaster recovery of data. Due to cost
concerns, the city also needed a low cost approach that leveraged existing IP
networking infrastructure. Beyond cost and investment protection, a major
objective was to reliably protect the city's data storage by mirroring critical
operational data to a dissimilar storage array at the disaster backup site
located over 20 kilometers away.
...DataCore Software
profile
Arkeia Chooses Sun Veteran for Business Development
CARLSBAD, Calif. - January 5, 2005 -Arkeia
Corp today announced that Dave Elliott has been appointed to the newly
created position as director of business development, responsible for
partnerships and OEM business in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
Prior to joining Arkeia, Elliott was responsible for strategic
development at Iomega
where he drove partnerships with enterprise software companies. Before that, he
oversaw business development for Blue Martini Software, and led the team that
forged technology partnerships with IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO and SAS
Institute. Elliott has also held marketing management positions with
Sun Microsystems,
and consulted with technology companies on strategy and marketing while with
management consultant A.T. Kearney (EDS). Dave holds an MBA from the University
of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BA in Economics from
the University of California, San Diego.
"Arkeia has a dominant and defensible position in a fast growing
market: data protection for Linux systems," said Elliott. "Customers
such as Lockheed Martin, Bacardi and NASA already rely on Arkeia products, and I
am thrilled to be part of the aggressive Arkeia team."
...Arkeia profile
McNealy Interview Confirms Sun is Optimistic About Continued
Growth
Editor:-
January 2, 2005 - in an interview of Sun's CEO Scott McNealy published
today in the The Sacramento Bee - we get independent confirmation of two
key trends we discussed in previous articles and analysis here in the SPARC
Product Directory.
- The recovery and growth in telecoms (Sun's biggest customer segment) is a
key factor driving Sun's revenue growth today.
- Sun is projecting a 3rd consecutive quarter of revenue growth
Articles about Sun | |
Pure Sun
Sites Less Likely to Use Solid State Disks
Sun Announces Open Source
License for Solaris
Themis Computer Announces New Subsidiary in Germany
Sun
VARs Asked for their Views on Solaris x86 Business
BiTMICRO's E-DiskSAN
Certified Solaris Ready
Sun Fails to Convince IBM that Solaris x86 Has Momentum
Dataram
Doubles Memory Capacity of Sun Fire V210
Sun Reports Profit with
Slight Drop in Revenue
Sun Completes Acquisition Of Sevenspace
Silent
Spring for Linux Cell Phones?
Korea's Daegu City Deploys DataCore to
Manage Storage
Arkeia Chooses Sun Veteran for Business Development
McNealy
Interview Confirms Sun's Optimism |
 |
| the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs |
Repeating write
operations in some apps
and some flash SSDs can take orders of
magnitude longer than predicted
by
IOPS specs. Time does indeed go by -
potentially discrediting a
long established
performance modeling metric. | |
|
|
| . |
| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
| | |
