SPARC T2 Gets Carrier
Grade Linux
SAN JOSE, CA - April
16, 2008 - Wind River Systems, Inc. today announced it will port its
Carrier Grade Linux and Workbench development suite to Sun's
UltraSPARC T2 processor.
This will be the first carrier grade
Linux for Sun's CMT processors. Sun's Netra Carrier Grade rack servers and ATCA
blades will be the first CMT systems to run Wind River Carrier Grade Linux.
...Wind River
profile,
Operating Systems
for SPARC servers
Editor's comments:- in
SPARC's 20 year
history Linux software hasn't had much close contact with SPARC hardware -
and mainly featured as a competitor.
Despite that, I was surprised to
see that the word "Linux" appears on 24% of pages in
the
SPARC Product Directory.
That's more than I thought but probably 4x less often than in other
"Unix" publications.
In August 2003 (which was not a very
optimistic time for the SPARC market) I wrote an article -
What's the Trigger
Event that will Turn Around Sun's Revenue Decline? - in which I explored
all the technology and business options that could make a significant
difference to how the market viewed and reacted to Sun's SPARC products.
The
analysis in that article is just as relevant now and still makes good reading.
And I haven't changed a single word in this conclusion from that 5 years old
article.
"The future availability of a strong SPARC/Linux product
family will be beneficial to Solaris users - there will be a bigger market for
processors, and so faster SPARC processors will come out sooner and at lower
cost. It will cut down the arguments for users to migrate away from SPARC. It
will also offer a credible platform for Sun to attack HP and IBM. It will be
good for Sun, good for current and future SPARC users, and good for competition
in the computer market."
3 years after that article was published
HP wrote an (anti-Sun) article -
The
Real Story about Linux on Sun's SPARC - with some amusing and interesting
points about what they referred to as Sun's "on again, off again"
approach to Linux. That, and the stats quoted by HP may all be true, but I
think the new combination of SPARC T2 with Linux is going to reduce the bonuses
paid to many HP server sales people in the next year or so.
Sun Doubles SPARC Server Density (Again)
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - April 9, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Fujitsu
Limited today introduced the first dual-socket UltraSPARC T2 Plus based
servers.
The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers feature up
to 128 compute threads in 1U or 2U and deliver up to 16x higher
compute density than competitive dual socket x86 systems.
Meeting the
threat of Solaris
Migration offerings from competing vendors Sun has also addressed the issue
of customers with legacy applications running older versions of Solaris who want
to take advantage of lower cost / faster hardware. Sun announced 2 new offerings
which provide virtualization services to run Solaris 8 and Solaris 9
applications and help enable the simple transfer of applications to the latest
CMT systems running the Solaris 10 OS.
With these new products,
Solaris 8 and 9 Containers for the Solaris 10 OS, multiple Solaris 8 or Solaris
9 environments, or a combination of the two, can be hosted on a single
SPARC-based system. As a result, customers can streamline IT operations,
maximize datacenter space, and save on power, cooling and support costs.
The
move to the latest hardware is now de-coupled from the need to move directly to
the Solaris 10 OS.
Themis Founder, Bill Kehret, Joins VITA's Board
FREMONT,
California - April 3, 2008 - Themis Computer announced today that the
company has joined the VITA organization's board of directors.
William
E. Kehret, president and CEO of Themis Computer was appointed to the VITA board
of directors effective March 1, 2008. William "Bill" Kehret will fill
a position in VITA's expanded board membership. The appointment of Bill Kehret
reflects the organization's desire to strengthen its executive ranks and Bill's
vision will help VITA to continue its leadership role in the embedded computing
market.
As founder and CEO of Themis Computer, Bill Kehret brings a strong
technological background to the VITA board. Bill Kehret is also a member of
Themis' board of directors. Prior to founding Themis in 1989, he spent over 20
years in the embedded computing market, most of it managing the several
companies he helped found.
...Themis
Computer profile, Storage
Industry Trade Associations,
Storage People
Editor's
comments:- as someone who integrated over 100 different types of VME cards
in the late 1980s I never thought that VME would last so long. I didn't think
that SBus would be successful at first either. But within a few years of Sun
launching its SBus
in 1989 - it became a bigger market in revenue than VME.
VME always
supported multiple CPU architectures and operating systems, and it evolved and
has survived to the present day. SBus was never adopted outside the SPARC
market and Sun
transitioned SBus in 1997 in favor of PCI which first made its appearance
in a SPARC system in the SPARCengine Ultra AX.
SPARC Product Directory
featured VMEbus SPARC SBCs from over 10 oems in SPARC's history. These
were:- Auspex Systems, DTK Computer, Force Computers, General Micro Systems,
Integrated Micro Products, Ironics, Men Mikro Electronik, Solflower, Solbourne
, Sun Microsystems and
Themis Computer,
the last of which is the only company to have stayed the VME SPARC SBC course.
SSDs are as hot a subject
today as SPARC was in the blazing years of the dotcom boom. 7 companies make
VMEbus form factor SSDs. I added a new entry for another VME SSD in our
SSD Buyers Guide
only a few days ago.
On the subject of
SSDs and things that have
been around a long time - Texas
Memory Systems celebrated 30 years making SSDs this week.
the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q1 2008
Editor:- April 2, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published the 4th edition of - "the Top
10 Solid State Disk OEMs."
Covering the quarter ending
March 31, 2008 - the article also looks at market milestones and comments on
changes since the earlier quarters.
Inevitably - over 60
SSD oems couldn't make it
into the top 10 SSD list (and that includes
enterprise rackmount
SSD wannabe EMC which
lay just outside at #11.)
If you're choosing
SSD suppliers or strategic
partners - this is the must-see predictive list of the top companies that
matter - based on hundreds of thousands of readers searching for SSD content
on the site rated most highly by SSD companies themselves. ...read the article
Solaris Migration - New Theme for SUSE 11
Editor:- March 17, 2008 - Novell
today announced its development plans for the next generation of its enterprise
Linux platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.
Solaris
Migration is one of the 11 key themes listed in the press release about
this.
To eliminate the expensive lock-in that comes with traditional
UNIX installations, customers are migrating to Linux on multiple hardware
platforms. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 will focus on meeting or exceeding
performance benchmarks of Solaris and providing best-in-market toolsets and
features from the kernel on up.
Novell anticipates that advances in the
Linux kernel and the supporting toolset will establish SUSE Linux Enterprise 11
as the industry-standard platform for UNIX migrations.
Novell will
focus on an upgrade to the latest Linux kernel (currently planned to be 2.6.27),
leading-edge storage management technologies such as the OpenAIS cluster
communication infrastructure, a fully POSIX-conforming cluster file system
(Oracle* Cluster File System 2) and distributed replicated block device (DRBD)
support.
Diagnostic and system management features such as improved
kernel instrumentation, enhanced crash dumping and hardware monitoring, and
support for embedded service processors are expected to distinguish SUSE Linux
Enterprise as a reliable and robust operating system for mission-critical
computing.
...Novell
profile
SPARC Users - Heads Up Alert! - Re Data Storage Reliability
Editor:-
March 5, 2008 - a few years ago I set up a directory page on the theme of
storage reliability
- which I anticipated would eventually become as big an issue as the
Y2K
bug of a decade ago.
I often publish 3 to 7 year ahead
technology
and market projections - so don't worry if you haven't missed it. The impact
on end users hasn't happened yet.
Unlike the Y2K bug - which harmed
budgets rather than data - I expected that the storage reliability problems
wouldn't be anything can users would immunize themselves against. But one bright
morning - as with bird
flu - you would find the floor covered with dead data in the deepest
safest parts of your server farm (or archive vaults) because surprise!
surprise! they actually housed a species of data storage device which turned out
to be a turkey.
Some of the problems were already being researched
by a handful of specialists but it was a subject which most people didn't worry
about. At the time my list of candidates for the trouble spots were
hard disk drives (where
uncorrectable data corruption was already starting to appear - for those with
the tools sensitive enough to recognize it) and maybe one those forever emerging
(but never quite emerged) optical
storage technologies.
But regarding the most likely first wave of
the big data storage pandemics - I admit I was wrong on 2 counts.
First
- you can see it coming... It's months away for some companies - rather than
years away.
Second - you can actually do something about it.
I
know that you use SPARC servers because you care about the smooth running of
your enterprise - and don't like to fire fight foreseeable, avoidable irritating
glitches.
Something which you or your organization may do (for what
seems like perfectly valid economic reasons) could soon result in unwittingly
letting the vulnerable data turkeys into your server farm.
If you read
my new article - you'll be better placed to make those much needed budget cuts
and performance upgrades - without falling foul of the uncorrectable data
corruption pests.
Here's the link.
Squeak! - Are
MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
PRC Becomes New OpenSPARC Incubator
Beijing,
Santa Clara, CA - February 27, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the
Ministry of Education for the People's Republic of China today announced a 3
year collaboration agreement designed to meet China's demand for cultivating IC
engineering talent.
The agreement is based on Sun's
OpenSPARC program which MOE said it
selected because it is the fastest microprocessor in the world, and Sun is the
only major processor vendor to freely offer its designs to the open source
community. As a result over 100 educators each year in selected universities
will be trained and qualified on OpenSPARC technology. ...Sun Microsystems
profile
TSMC SPARC CPUs will Have Even More Cores
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - February 19, 2008 - Sun Microsystems Inc. today
announced that it had selected Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
as its foundry partner for processors based on a 45-nanometer design as well as
future generations.
Sun will continue to design its chips while
long-time Sun partner TI
will continue to test and build the 45-nanometer processors in TSMC.
"After a lengthy evaluation we selected TSMC for one reason:
they're simply the best at turning complex processor designs into silicon,"
said David Yen, Sun's executive vice president, Microelectronics group. "TSMC
is already fully engaged with engineers from both Sun and TI and I expect we'll
all benefit from the cross-pollination of ideas among these three companies."
Sun, which currently designs processors based on 90- and 65-nanometer
processes, is moving to the smaller 45-nanometer to allow more circuitry to be
squeezed onto the same amount of silicon. The result: chip designers are free to
add new features such as processing cores or encryption engines that improve
overall chip performance.
The 45-nanometer design process also allows Sun to increase the
number of threads per processor. storage chips
XML Firewall Supports Solaris on SPARC
Vancouver,
Canada - February 11, 2008 - Layer 7 Technologies announced today its
XML Firewall and XML Networking Gateway software products support Solaris 10
on SPARC platforms from Sun Microsystems.
The SecureSpan
XML Firewall provides advanced identity and message level SOA security for
cross-domain, B2B and portal applications, while the SecureSpan XML Networking
Gateway adds support for complex SOA message routing, mediation, virtualization
and Service Level Agreements. In addition to gateway software Layer 7 also
offers a family of turnkey, hardware-accelerated XML appliances for the data
center.
"To meet the growing demand for enterprise SOA and Web
2.0 deployments, Sun and Layer 7 are expanding their initiatives to accommodate
large scale and diverse audiences," said Juan Carlos Soto, VP of Market
Development, Sun Microsystems. "As these initiatives change to meet
customer requirements, we are positioned to meet these demands effectively by
offering flexible governance on the open source Solaris OS for both SPARC-based
and x86-based servers; a platform known for running some of the world's largest
data centers."
...Layer 7 Technologies,
Storage Security
How Many Apps on Solaris? etc
Editor:- January 24,
2008 - an article published today on ITJungle.com discusses how many
ISVs actually support Solaris.
An interesting part of the article
is speculation about how some other OS's which were important in SPARC's infancy
have fared since. According a Sun survey cited in the article most ISVs still
love Solaris.
That's in stark contrast to IHVs. Most IHVs which
strongly supported the SPARC platform in the 1990s exited the market many
years ago. Although there are genuine opportunities for leveraging Sun's newer
processors many IHVs are safer with Intel architecture processors because of the
availability of alternative sources.
That's the coffee which helped
create the buzz about SPARC in the early 1990s - when many chipmakers made
SPARC chips which could be used in workstations. It could happen again. When
someone is prepared to go public on this I'll let you know on these pages.
AMD Processors Inside Sun Storage
SUNNYVALE,
CA - January 23, 2008 - AMD announced today that it continues to see
strong demand among its commercial storage customers.
AMD said
there are currently more than 20 commercial storage systems available on the
market today that rely on AMD's Direct Connect Architecture.
"Many of Sun's storage servers are powered by AMD Opteron
processors - including the Sun Fire X4500 and the new Sun StorageTek 5800 - and
have already started to change the way customers store and retrieve data on a
large scale," said Graham Lovell, senior director of storage servers &
IPTV marketing at Sun Microsystems. ...AMD profile
Sun Reports Preliminary Results
SANTA
CLARA, CA - January 16, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
preliminary results today for its second quarter of fiscal 2008, which ended
December 30, 2007.
Sun expects to report revenues for the second
quarter of fiscal 2008 of approximately $3.60 billion, an increase of
approximately 1 percent as compared with $3.57 billion for the second quarter of
fiscal 2007. Net bookings for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 were
approximately $3.85 billion, an increase of approximately 7% year over year.
Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis is
expected to be in the range of $230 million to $265 million.
Editor's
comments:- at one time most people thought that the shape of the Earth was
flat. That's the essential shape of Sun's year on year revenue performance.
One of the predicted
effects of network storage
storage standards in the past decade has been a decoupling of customer spend
when it comes to servers (processors) and storage.
As storage has
become a bigger slice of the overall IT budget Sun's various attempts to do more
in this segment over the past 5 years or so (including buying StorageTek) have
looked prudent. But Sun has executed much worse than the
storage market as a
whole, due to not anticipating customer needs and bland / overpriced
me-too products.
Unfortunately Sun's other
announcement
today that it is acquiring MySQL is another me-too move that will do little
to change Sun's relative success compared to other OS companies who also have
had their own pet database products for many years.
Don't get me wrong.
"Me-too" strategies can be very successful if you're following the
right trends and execute smartly. Sun's SPARC is a leader in multi-core
processors - but many other parts of Sun's business do too little, too late,
or do the wrong things altogether.
QLogic Supports Solaris SAN Targets
ALISO
VIEJO, Calif - December 12, 2007 - QLogic Corp. today announced the
availability of its first Fibre Channel host bus adapters with target mode
capabilities for OpenSolaris.
This makes it possible for
developers to build SAN-based
storage systems based on Solaris.
...QLogic profile
Editor's
comments:- in the late 1990s
many Sun compatible
oems got burned by getting too close to
Sun. But nowadays the "OpenSolaris"
initiative provides an insulating layer for most vendors.
Sun Chooses Emulex Fibre Channel AMC
COSTA MESA, Calif -
December 4, 2007 - Emulex Corp today announced its LightPulse adapter cards
have been selected by Sun Microsystems for its new Netra family of
blade servers.
The new Sun StorageTek 4Gb/s
Fibre Channel ATCA HBAs
are based on the Emulex 4Gb/s LightPulse LPe11000 family. They were
designed for use within Sun Netra Blade Servers, and use an AMC (Advanced
Mezzanine Card) form factor which supports the ATCA chassis.
...Emulex profile
Sun's Server Revenue Grew 11% in Q3 - Says Gartner
STAMFORD, Conn - November
26, 2007 - a report from Gartner, Inc. says worldwide server revenue
for the 3rd quarter of 2007 grew just 2.6% to $13.4 billion - compared
to the year ago period.
Ranked by revenue the top 4 server oems
were:- IBM, HP, Dell and Sun.
Sun's SPARC Enterprise servers boosted
revenue results in the quarter which resulted in an 11.4% growth in revenue but
Sun experienced a 4.5% decline in server shipments. ...Gartner profile
Dell Will Offer Solaris on PowerEdge Servers
SANTA
CLARA, CA - November 14, 2007 - Dell and Sun Microsystems have
signed an OEM agreement for Dell to make the Solaris OS and Solaris support
services available directly to customers for select Dell PowerEdge servers.
"Dell's offering of Solaris redefines the market opportunity
for both companies," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO, Sun
Microsystems. "The relationship gives Dell broader reach into the global
free software community with Solaris and OpenSolaris and gives Sun access to
channels and customers across the volume marketplace."
Editor's comments:- back in the late 1990s (while Sun's star
was shining at its brightest) Dell did once offer Solaris as an option on its
website. The route that Sun took getting back to a position that it gave away
by shooting itself in the foot for many years over Linux and Solaris x86 denial
- was long and
tortuous. But in this case stubborn determination seems to have paid off.
Sun Launches T2 Telco Blade
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - November 13, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
introduced the first UltraSPARC T2 powered blade server the Sun Netra CP3260
ATCA.
The NEBS Level 3 Certified product family delivers
massive compute density with more than 2,300 threads per rack. ...Sun profile
Sun Storage VP is New CEO at Mendocino Software
FREMONT, Calif - November
6, 2007 - Mendocino Software today announced that Kathleen Holmgren,
a former top storage executive at Sun Microsystems, has been named the
company's new President and CEO succeeding Steve Colman who now takes
over as Chairman.
Holmgren joins Mendocino after more than 2 decades at Sun where she
most recently was Senior VP of Sun's Disk Systems Business and played a key role
in Sun's integration of
StorageTek.
Holmgren also formed the original Storage Product Group at Sun and grew it into
a major strategic business for the company. She graduated with highest honors
with a Bachelors of Science degree in Engineering from California Polytechnic
State University San Luis Obispo and an MBA from Stanford University. ...Mendocino profile,
...Sun profile,
...Sun
bio (2002) - Kathleen Holmgren,
Storage People
Sun's Sales Flat
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - November 5, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal first quarter, which ended September 30, 2007.
Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.219 billion,
an increase of approximately 1% compared with the first quarter of fiscal
2007. Net income was $89 million.
"Growth remains our top
priority for fiscal 2008 as we look to capitalize on our UltraSPARC T2 servers,
delivering outstanding Solaris and Linux performance with extreme energy
efficiency."
...Sun
Microsystems profile
Editor's comments:- even if Sun's SPARC
business grows 20% a year Sun it would Sun 5 years to get back to the SPARC
revenue highs it achieved in 2000.
It's unlikely - but not impossible.
It depends on various factors:-
- how long SPARC's lead in multicore processors prevails,
- how the demand for telco style servers grows,
- and what other technologies or technological accidents occur meanwhile.
In the last category - "accidents of the shooting in own foot variety"
include Sun's
cache reliability problems in 2001 (or something similar by rivals - such as
Intel's 1997 floating
point bug).
Re the impact of "other technologies" the
combined impact of fast
flash SSDs and lower cost
RAM SSDs will depress
the future demand for enterprise servers - as users fill part of the performance
gap with accelerated storage.
While the market's future is uncertain,
heavily invested SPARC users can breathe a sigh of relief that they got another
generation of SPARC chips recently and so can put off the daunting prospect of
Solaris
Migration for another couple of years.
Themis Signs New VAR in Italy
FREMONT,
California - October 24, 2007 - Themis announced a reseller agreement
with Primeur headquartered Genova, Italy.
Through this
reseller agreement, Primeur will offer Themis's
Quorum server
availability appliances to its international base of VMware customers. ...Primeur,
...Themis profile
Sun to Benefit from Data Center Virtualization
London, UK -
October 23, 2007 - Infiniti Research today published a list of the top
5 emerging trends in the adoption and implementation of virtualization
applications throughout the data center.
Virtualization is
expected to boost the move toward network delivered computing or what is being
termed PC-over-IP. This in turn will place vendors such as Cisco, NEC and Sun
at the heart of the market, but interestingly leaves the door open for a host of
innovative start-ups.
...Infiniti Research
profile, Market
research companies
Spectra's Upgrade Program Targets Wrinkly Tape Libraries
SNW,
DALLAS - October 17, 2007 - Spectra Logic expanded its T-Series tape
library line today.
Spectra preserves data storage investments in
its new midrange Spectra T200, T380 and T680 tape libraries by offering a
seamless growth path from 1 to 24 tape drives, 50 to 680 slots of tape media,
and up to 136TB of disk storage
in a single rack mount unit. Spectra's TranScaleT architecture enables
customers to complete an upgrade and return to
backing up in half a day
or less-guaranteed.
"World-wide, there are literally tens of
thousands of libraries
installed that have reached the end of their economic service life" said
Jeb Bolding, a product manager for Spectra Logic. "In our analysis,
customers will often have a payback period of less than a year when replacing an
obsolete library with our new T200, T380 or T680." ...Spectra profile
Sun Launches UltraSPARC T2 Servers
LAS
VEGAS, NV - October 9, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Fujitsu
Limited today introduced the first servers using the new UltraSPARC T2
processor.
The new SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers
double the number of processing threads (to 64 per processor chip) and increase
floating point capabilities 8x over the previous generation, and are the first
servers to integrate 10GbE technology and I/O directly on the chip. They are
available immediately with pricing starting at $13,995.
...Sun
Microsystems profile
Editor's comments:- It was a long
forgotten company called Solbourne Computer which shipped the industry's first 8
way multiprocessor SPARC systems running SunOS - the 6/900 (8x 800MIPs SPARC
processors) in 1992.
Earlier scientific array processors using SPARC,
from companies like the CS-2 from Meiko (with 8 to 32 way SPARC processing
elements) didn't run SunOS - but a proprietary OS.
Sun's own first
multiprocessor server - the SPARCserver 600MP - launched in 1991 - was a 4 way
VMEbus system.
These paved the way for the first commercial 64
way SPARC CPU servers in 1993.
These were:- Cray
Research's 6400 (64 x 60MHz SPARC CPUs running Solaris-2) and (Fujitsu owned)
ICL's GoldRush Megaserver (64 x 66MHz HyperSPARC running Unix SVR4). The
GoldRush Megaserver was rated at 6,000 transactions/second.
Today's
new SPARC servers pack just as many operating processors (at clock speeds which
are 30x faster and bus widths which are twice as wide) into a single
motherboard. And they can still run the same old software. That's a true
Scalable Processor ARChitecture.
The Storage is the Computer
Editor:- October 2, 2007 - Jonathan
Schwartz revealed this week in his blog that Sun will combine its
Storage and Server product teams.
For
several years
I've been disappointed with Sun's failure to integrate new storage thinking in
its products. Storage network performance is fundamental to the success of new
high end servers.
Architecting the server separately to the storage
just doesn't make sense. So the new move is better late than never. ...Sun profile,
Squeak! -
Charting the Rise of the Solid State Disk Market | |
| . |
 | |
SPARC T2 Gets
Carrier Grade Linux
Sun Doubles SPARC Server Density (Again)
Themis
Founder, Bill Kehret, Joins VITA's Board
Solaris Migration - New
Theme for SUSE 11
PRC Becomes New OpenSPARC Incubator
TSMC
SPARC CPUs will Have Even More Cores
XML Firewall Supports SPARC
Solaris
How Many Apps on Solaris? etc
AMD Processors Inside
Sun Storage
Sun Reports Preliminary Results
QLogic Supports
Solaris SAN Targets
Sun Chooses Emulex Fibre Channel AMC
Sun's
Server Revenue Grew 11% in Q3 - Says Gartner
Dell Will Offer Solaris on
PowerEdge Servers
Sun Launches T2 Telco Blade
Sun Storage VP
New CEO at Mendocino Software
Sun's Sales Flat
Themis Signs
New VAR in Italy
Sun to Benefit from Data Center Virtualization
Upgrade
Program Targets Wrinkly Tape Libraries
Sun Launches UltraSPARC T2
Servers
The Storage is the Computer
earlier news -
archive |
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 |
Déjà
Viewing Storage
History
Editor:- Here are some examples
of archived
news stories from the
month of April in years gone by. | |
2 years ago -
April 2006 -
Scott McNealy gave up the CEO hot seat at Sun.
I had first
suggested that Sun might do
better with a change of CEO way back in 2001. (Maybe that's why you don't see
any Sun funded ads here any
more.
...Later:- as Chairman of Sun McNealy is still heard
from just as often in
the
web news. His comments are always entertaining.
Sun has
consistently wasted many opportunities in the storage market for uniquely
leveraging OS, CPU and storage architectures and apart from some legacy
products now appears to be more like a shadow of storage things past
rather than a beacon of storage's bright future.
3 years ago -
April 2005 -
IBM announced it would
become a reseller for Network
Appliance's
NAS and
ISCSI storage systems.
At the time I called this a "sound strategic move." and predicted
that "This market will get too competitive for most manufacturers to stay
in the race and make money."
...Later:- this was a good
choice for IBM as events would prove.
In Q4 2007
IDC reported that Network
Appliance was the ISCSI market leader with 19.6% market share. Meanwhile IBM
was #2 in external disk storage systems overall (only a handful of points behind
EMC.)
6 years ago -
April 2002 - the
judge ruling on the Hewlett family dispute with the HP-Compaq merger, ruled in
favor of the company.
...Later:- a few day's ago (at the end
of March 2008) I finished reading Carly
Fiorina's book - Tough Choices.
I have to admit I was neutral to
lukewarm about the
HP-Compaq
merger back in 2001/2. And I didn't know anything about Carly Fiorina or her
background. But I did agree that HP needed a good shake up.
Having now
read her book I think her biggest mistake was probably in not being
ruthless enough in stirring the dust in the various HP mausoleums / business
units.
And the part in her memoir which describes her early career
brings back to mind the neanderthal climate for women working in high tech
companies in the 1970s and 1980s. (My wife worked in semiconductor sales and
marketing at that time - and also found much common cause in the book). Let's
hope things are better now. | | |
