The Hot Aisle

Is there an option other than Semtex to fix my Data Centre?

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:45:43 +0000

There are a lot of them around, Data Centres. A few of them are designed and operated very well and deliver great Power Usage Efficiency. Some could do a bit better, perhaps an airside economiser or two, or some hot or cold aisle containment, or maybe some DC power. Some are just a nightmare and [...]

Interview with Mike Olson CEO of Cloudera

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:51:21 +0000

Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]

Internet scale log files break scale up architectures

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:26:07 +0000

Recently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]

Has the Government a place in driving IT energy efficiency?

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:05:28 +0000

A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]

Live Efficient Data Centre Summit Webcast 21st April

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:46:11 +0000

Data Centre design is an evolutionary process and we can see the first signs of significant change in the latest sites. Co-generation, liquid cooling, cloud computing, high density are all likely to feature in the 2020 Data Centre. How are you placed with your existing Data Centre investments to take advantage of these changes? Will [...]

Computing has never properly recovered from punched cards

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:47:42 +0000

Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]

Why storage will inevitably migrate to flash and trash

Steve O'Donnell — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:17:08 +0000

If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon) There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and SATA are getting [...]

The washroom attendant’s washroom attendants

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:12:44 +0000

My old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are. In every [...]

Strong results from Seagate and Western Digital signal an uptick in confidence

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:30:57 +0000

Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]

Data Center Predictions for 2010

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:58:22 +0000

Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different from [...]

I bet Mark Hurd is feeling rather pleased with himself

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:50:48 +0000

Today Microsoft and HP announced an expanded partnership in order to deliver fully integrated application to hardware stacks. It’s a brilliant move, absolutely stunningly smart and spot on for HP. I wrote about Oracle VM and the fully integrated stack that Larry Ellison has been promoting to his customers. Superficially it might seem like a piece [...]

Knowledge is Power

PeterWilliams — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:30:17 +0000

Back in 2008, Steve O’Donnell wrote an article here on The Hot Aisle explaining one of the challenges he set his team during his time at BT, the difficult task of getting Asset Management right. To summarise, Steve kicked off an audit of the whole estate, and where owners couldn’t be found for kit on the floor, [...]

What influences IT buying decisions?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:25:51 +0000

My good friend and ESG colleague Terri McClure @esganalysttmac recently blogged about a thought leadership piece I had presented at an analyst call last week. She made a very good job of explaining it and so I thought that I would write a little more about it here: I call the concept the “Golden Triangle” and it [...]

ESG Spending Intentions Survey Summary

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:51:42 +0000

My colleague at ESG John McKnight, just briefed some summary output from our IT Spending survey. The results are presented below hot off the press. Security, Storage and Network see the biggest increases in growth but Virtualization software continues to lead in absolute terms. It would be interesting to know how many Enterprises are looking to [...]

Want to understand the Smart Grid?

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:02:25 +0000

Here is a video from my friend Professor Masood Amin @Massoud_Amin who is the world authority on Smart Grid. If we want to save the planet from global warming, prevent terrorists shutting down our economy and prevent catastrophic failure of our power distribution systems. This is the template of what we need to do and [...]

Data Center Photographs

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:21:29 +0000

For years I have been a prolific photographer of Data Centres all over the world. I have hundreds of images, some brilliant, some out of focus and under-exposed, (I am a data centre guy, not a professional photographer). I thought that I might publish some of the better ones with a bit of narrative about [...]

Gartner Magic Bunkum

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:13:51 +0000

My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie at ESG just blogged about an interesting court case happening in the USA on The Bigger Truth. “An e-mail archiving company, ZL Technologies, Inc., has sued, been dismissed, and re-sued Gartner – basically claiming that ZL’s placement in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” has caused the company damage – namely, that since [...]

What do CIO’s think about Disaster Recovery?

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:23:38 +0000

I attended a very interesting dinner event recently at The Boxwood Cafe in London hosted by Andrew Barnes from Neverfail. The objective was to have a discussion about Disaster Recovery and the implications for IT and business. It was a very well attended event with some great input from the CIO and IT Director attendees. Sarah [...]

Cute retrofit air containment solution launched

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:09:16 +0000

Last week I met with my friend Steve Sole of Nubis who wanted to tell me about the work they have been doing in data centers around improving energy efficiency. Nubis make demountable Aisle Containment systems – they don’t care if it is Hot or Cold Aisle – the objective is to stop the air [...]

BT launches Enterprise Cloud Service

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:33:59 +0000

There is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]

How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:12:39 +0000

Recently The Hot Aisle conducted an online survey asking the question - “How do you currently choose where to place equipment in your data centre?” As usual we got a very large response to the survey with 5,580 respondants. The results are in and it shows quite clearly that equipment placement is (to say the least) unsophisticated. A [...]

Not component optimization but solution optimization

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:17:06 +0000

Everyone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]

Photograph of Vblock

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:49:52 +0000

Here is one of the first real photographs of an EMC / Cisco Vblock.

Next Generation Data announce first tenants

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:02:36 +0000

NGD and BT announced this week that BT has agreed to take 380 racks at NGD Europe, Next Generation Data Limited’s newly-launched 75,000 square metres facility near Newport in Gwent. Rollout began in August and will be ready for customer use by February 2010. This is one of the first large Data Center deals in the [...]

Computacenter strengthens Enterprise offer with move into Mainframe Services

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:55:40 +0000

Computacenter has acquired the assets and customer base of Thesaurus Computer Services (TCS). The sale was agreed last Friday 27th November 2009. The deal was completed for a nominal amount and Computacenter management claim that the acquisition will not have a material financial impact on the company. TCS has been the the mainframe services business since [...]

Elastichosts show how cloud computing should be done

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:41:21 +0000

Today I had a really interesting conversation with my friend and colleague Richard Davis, CEO of Elastichosts a small (but perfectly formed) Cloud Computing company. Richard and I first met when he was a Business Technology consultant at McKinsey & Co and I was his client at BT. We worked together on a major project [...]

Even Dilbert knows…

Steve O'Donnell — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:42:38 +0000

…that cooling data centres using refrigeration is madder than a box of frogs. Maybe he could have suggested, fresh air cooling or the new Iceotope liquid cooling solution and kept his job whilst avoiding the toxic blob.

There is many a new tune played on an old fiddle

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:30:58 +0000

The problem with us old operations guys is that we have seen pretty much everything that is supposed to be new before, sometimes a generation or more ago. Makes us a bit cynical about innovation – so when I heard about some oldie technology doing something really innovative I was intrigued. In the UK we used [...]

Tower of Babel in the Data Center

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:56:43 +0000

Application Developer: My new application needs to store some objects. Can I have a bit of storage please? Storage Administrator: So do you want NAS or Block storage? Application Developer: Is there a Java object library for that stuff, what did you call it nasty blocks? Storage Administrator: (mumbles) stupid code monkey… Who knows – thats your job [...]

New pictures of Iceotope Liquid Cooled Blades

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:23:39 +0000

Iceotope Unveils First Modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Blade Server Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server components and is able to reduce data centre cooling costs by 93%, saving hundreds of thousands [...]

Greenwash or Greenbacks?

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:22:09 +0000

Greenwash or Greenbacks? – an eWEEK Europe Webinar What is the real motivation behind the Green Data Centre movement? Saving the planet… or saving money? …or keeping one step ahead of possible regulations, and saving yourself from a world of legal trouble? Readers of the Hot Aisle will already know that moves to more efficient data centres [...]

Data Centre Dilemmas

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:11:00 +0000

I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies Brian Peterson, VP International Operations, Emulex Tikiri Wanduragala, EMEA xSeries [...]

Innovation obsoletes the data centre

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:48:19 +0000

Next week, Iceotope will announce that it has developed, patented and manufactured an extreme IT equipment cooling solution. The solution tackles the problems of cooling servers in data centres all the way from the actual source of the heat – at the processor and memory component level – to its final destination – outside air by [...]

Micro-finance

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:45:37 +0000

I have been contributing to Kiva ever since I noticed a tweet from Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree) Cisco’s CTO mentioning the micro-finance site. Getting a business loan in the western world is tough enough, it’s pretty impossible in the third world. So that’s where micro-finance can help. Kiva collects lots of $25.00 “investments” from lenders (don’t [...]

How important is Object Storage?

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:50:59 +0000

The Hot Aisle ran a poll recently asking you all about Cloud Storage and we got some very interesting results from over 5600 respondents: We asked the question – Does Cloud Storage have to be delivered as an Object Store? Here are my observations:- A surprising number of folks don’t know what Cloud Storage is! Most people thing that [...]

Next Generation Data start to fill Newport Site

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:57:22 +0000

Next Generation Data have started to fill up their massive 180MVA data centre site at Newport Gwent and are celebrating with a new website. NGD 1 is offering large scale space only contracts and managed service options for the small to medium business. The massive site has a space allocation of 75,000 SQ metres arranged over [...]

Where does the power go?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:08:53 +0000

From the coal or oil delivered to the power station all the way through to the energy that drives our business applications the efficiency story is woeful.

Letting customers leave makes them want to stay

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:46 +0000

Google Docs now has a batch export facility for their documents created by the Data Liberation Front, a Google team setup to help customers leave. “Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any [...]

VCE – the VMware, Cisco, EMC alliances

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:18:08 +0000

I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light. I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was hot [...]

Zero emission datacenters

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:47:23 +0000

I met with Dr. Bruno Michel who is IBM’s, Zurich based, advanced thermal packaging manager yesterday. We spoke about IBM’s view of cooling technology in the 5 to 10 year horizon and what I heard was interesting and credible. IBM have been working with liquid cooling for some time, in the HydroCube, in the new [...]

Verari FOREST populated with Cisco UCS and Nexus

Steve O'Donnell — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:02:07 +0000

Anyone following the news will have seen that Verari and Cisco are working closely together on developing the highest density UCS deployment so far. My friend Dan Gatti at Verari just sent over the latest photograph from the Verari manufacturing plant. A FOREST Data Center Scale container full of UCS and Nexus. This really demonstrates the [...]

Is Virtualisation ready for production yet?

Steve O'Donnell — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:48:15 +0000

In a recent Hot Aisle poll of 2326 respondents, 80% say that they run some production workload on their virtualised environment, however only a tiny minority (2%) do this without restrictions on the application’s criticallity. 29% of respondents say that they run “all but the most critical applications” on their virtual platforms. 51% of respondents only run [...]

Is HP’s storage business looking a lot like EMC these days?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:02:06 +0000

Chris Mellor over at the Register reports that that Randy Seidl (ex SVP Sales for Sun in North America) is leaving the Oracle Sun family to become VP of HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers (ESS) and Networking operation in the USA and Canada. Randy will report to ex-EMC storage head David Donatelli. Well some simple research uncovers [...]

Cloud soup

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:06:56 +0000

I posed the question about why readers of the hot aisle were running more than one hypervisor. An earlier poll had shown that 44% of respondants behave in a non-intuitive way and run two or more hypervisors. Early results are in – with a poll size of 1021 1141 readers and discounting those who only use [...]

Hypervisor Poll

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:17:02 +0000

A recent Hot Aisle poll about the use of hypervisor technology in enterprises offers some interesting insights. 96% of respondents use at least one hypervisor 44% of respondents use two or more hypervisors 16% of respondents use three or more hypervisors 98% of Hot Aisle readers know what a Hypervisor is (we are a smart bunch) * The poll was [...]

Back to the future for the z11 Mainframe

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:36:16 +0000

I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series. IBM [...]

Could this halt cardholder data leakage?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:26:50 +0000

My old firm, First Data, have teamed up with RSA, the security division of EMC (NYSE: EMC) to provide a new service called First Data Secure Transaction Management which is engineered to enable merchants to secure payment card data and remove it from their environment while allowing access when needed. Regular readers of the hot aisle will know [...]

Anarchy to Visualisation

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:57:06 +0000

I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV. Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do. Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages in [...]

Solid State storage takes another turn

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:42:56 +0000

This week we have had two announcements about extreme (and I mean extreme) high performance storage arrays that follow the same basic approach. What they have in common is that they both use solid state (Flash) memory with a twist. Oracle announces the Exadata Storage Server v2 their new Sun built OLTP Database machine and makes [...]

Technology – it will never take off!

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:52:26 +0000

Telephone has Shortcomings – It was printed in a memo at Western Union in 1878 that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us” Electric Light will Close as well – Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that “When the Paris Exhibition [of [...]

What is special about Oracle / Sun Exadata v2?

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:33:52 +0000

The Exadata uses Flash, lots of Flash and it uses Infiniband, not Fiber Channel, Ethernet or FCoE. Exadata uses PCI Flash memory modules not Solid State Disks. Actually it is not a general purpose storage controller and it doesn’t support non Oracle Database workload. It is designed from the outset to host Oracle Databases and [...]

The weakest link

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:51:05 +0000

I just picked up a neat blog post by Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) discussing a double disk failure in a RAID 5 array which (apparently) caused lost data. RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks and the number refers to the type of protection offered. RAID 5 means that there is an extra disks in the group [...]

Come join the virtualization tour

Steve O'Donnell — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:01:05 +0000

At ESG we’ve teamed up with Dell, Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, and Intel on the Virtualization Tour show that’s all over North America (for now)! From September 29th pretty much every day through the end of October, we’ll be in a US city! The content is excellent – based on some killer ESG research and [...]

Storage Connectivity and why it is important

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:53:08 +0000

The Storage Area Network (SAN) is now a key component of most reasonably sized IT Infrastructures. The SAN we rely on today evolved from very humble beginnings into a mission critical Enterprise IT component. The first SANs were introduced to handle small numbers of enterprise scale systems (zSeries and iSeries computers from IBM) being connected [...]

Cleansource UPS – No batteries – Just a flywheel

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:14:53 +0000

Sometimes the IT business and technology in general gets it right by looking back into history for sensible solutions to intractable problems. By combining modern engineering with old designs we get something extremely smart. To provide stay up power whilst our engines get up to speed we can now use flywheel technology to store kinetic [...]

Is FCoE just for the access layer?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:17:42 +0000

I received a very thought provoking article about the relative merits of FCoE and Fibre Channel storage networks from Christian Illmer, Senior Director Application and Solution Management Enterprise, ADVA Optical Networking – 8G FC versus FCoE – distinguishing myth from reality. I publish the article here in it’s entirety and add a bit of analysis myself [...]

Standing in the cold aisle

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:57:01 +0000

Here is a photograph of my ESG colleague Taya Wyss and Cesar Orosco from NetApp in Sunnyvale standing in a smart cold aisle containment system. This is an aftermarket fitting in a relatively old data centre but nevertheless a useful improvement to cooling efficiency. The photograph shows cabinets facing front to front so that the air [...]

Anyone going to SNW Europe?

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:47:21 +0000

I am giving the Cloud Summit Keynote at Virtualization World (co-located with SNW Europe in Frankfurt on the 27th and 28th October), my subject will be a familiar theme to readers of the hot aisle – The Data Center of the Future – M&E plant to Cloud. I am also chairing a couple of panels, [...]

Inside the Verari FOREST Container

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:06:29 +0000

My friend Dan Gatti who runs worldwide marketing at Verari sent me this picture showing the inside of a FOREST Data Center Scale computer rigged out with 26 Petabytes of disk storage. Verari are market leaders in Data Center Scale compute platforms and have shipped significantly more of these storage and compute units than other vendors [...]

Verari win Qualcomm Deal

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:58:36 +0000

Containerized data center provides flexibility to balance capital expenditures and operating expenses while rapidly meeting needs for incremental, scalable capacity delivering Total Value of Ownership Verari Systems, a premier developer of data center scale blade-based computing and storage platforms with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced that Qualcomm selected Verari’s [...]

NetApp lined up for wins in the enterprise cloud?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:23:16 +0000

For some time I have been saying that a real IT shop would be ill advised to attempt consolidation to a single hypervisior. Why? My sense is that we have two types of workload, the mission critical, drives the business applications and services that cannot fail. These are the Fedex Logistics platform, the eBay portal, the [...]

Curtains in Sunnyvale

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:59:24 +0000

I am on the West Coast of the US this week visiting with NetApp in Sunnyvale again. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a couple of NetApp’s internal data centers (B11 and the impressive B2 sites) with Cesar Orosco, NetApp on NetApp IT Architect. Cesar is charged with using NetApp technology in [...]

Monitoring the Data Center properly

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:18:17 +0000

Some time ago I wrote an article called How do I know if my Data Center is about to fall over. This has proved to be very popular because it talks about risk, the risk that our investments in highly resilient data centers can be worth nothing if we fail to operate them properly. By [...]

Vendor Consolidation

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:49:14 +0000

My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie over at Steve’s IT Rants just recently wrote about Enterprise customers consolidating vendors. At ESG we have been conducting a Spending Intentions Survey for years and one of the recent outputs is that 34% of enterprise IT operations have a stated corporate objective to “reduce the number of vendors we [...]

It’s not about the hardware anymore

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:45:47 +0000

Have you been noticing how unimportant hardware has become? Having the biggest. fastest, most reliable piece of equipment in the data center doesn’t cut it anymore. A few weeks back I was talking to Dave Hitz, one of the founders of NetApp and author of How to Castrate a Bull. He explained the phenomena really [...]

There is no cloud, only a fog

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:21:01 +0000

In the end content drives adoption. I refer you to Apple’s iPhone platform and the game changing nature of the AppStore. For those of us old enough to remember, look at Betamax and VHS and Sony’s subsequent acquisition of much of Hollywood to make sure they didn’t loose a technology war again. We are now in [...]

Carbon Neutral Nonsense

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:01:50 +0000

Data centers are energy hogs, so anyone who tells you differently is talking out of the wrong orifice, so when I read about a hosting company launching a Carbon Neutral data center, it really annoyed me. I got a press release from Attenda’s PR agency informing me that – easyCar.com, Fulham Football Club, Datamonitor and TM [...]

Disappointed, but I should have known better

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:25:14 +0000

Yesterday I took a day off being on holiday at Martha’s Vineyard to drop in to Foxwoods, a casino complex on a native american reservation that is apparently the most successful such establishment in the USA. I didn’t go to gamble, (I don’t) I went to work, to sit on a panel with some end [...]

Integrating hypervisors – we need a secret sauce

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:46:45 +0000

The hypervisor is the new critical area of focus in the cloud. Enterprises cannot afford to adopt a “single hypervisor solution fits all” approach yet they do need to understand and manage the many problems and issues that this outcome exposes. Early virtualization adopters will have a large VMware ESX estate largely accomodating the massive unstructured Windows [...]

Enterprise Data Migration Software

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:10:16 +0000

Next week I am in Marthas Vineyard visiting with my friend, colleague and fellow blogger Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group. For a few weeks Steve has been telling me about an Enterprise Windows Data Migration tool called AutoMove from AutoVirt. So I have been looking at the details it is pretty good. I have done a [...]

IBM and the story of the vanishing salespeople

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:00:27 +0000

After my recent articles on XIV, I got invited out to lunch to meet with some of the UK XIV Sales team this afternoon. Lots of interesting stuff came out but I stumbled into a really strange story. One of my contacts claims that IBM have recruited an extra 400 salespeople (so far) to promote [...]

Microsoft drops a stinker

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:01:13 +0000

Microsoft just posted shocking year end results refelecting weakness in almost every area except for operating expenses where costs are also down by 10% reflecting strong fiscal management: -Revenue down 17% y/y -Revenue of $13.1 billion vs. street estimate $14.4 billion -Net income down 29% y/y -Operating expenses down 10% y/y -Weakness in the business PC and server hardware markets -Client [...]

Is software licensing for virtualization fair?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:15:04 +0000

Software licensing just hasn’t caught up with the realities of the modern IT Operation. Software vendors rightly need to monetize the customers valid use of their intellectual property, however it is in neither parties long term interests to increase operational costs by doing this. Many software licensing terms focus on an actual link between the application [...]

The Oracle Application Stack – One Support Model

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:27:55 +0000

I have just finished a call with Adam Hawley, Oracle’s Director of VM Product Management, the guy who owns the whole Oracle Virtualization story and technology. It got me thinking about the Hypervisor marketplace, the players, product strengths and weaknesses as well as ability to execute. My colleage and friend, Mark Bowker (the Virtualization Guru) [...]

Data Center Scale Computing

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:02:44 +0000

I am doing some work on understanding the size of the market for Data Center Scale systems. Sytems like SGI (Rackable) Ice Cube, Verari’s FOREST, HP’s POD, Sun’s Container and AST-Global’s dual container solution. Talking around the market my sense is that although the unit value is quite high ($4-$6M per container) the volumes are [...]

Clean Analysis launches with a Data Center Innovation Survey

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:13:04 +0000

This week CleanAnalysis – the research and analyst arm of my friend, Dan Ilet’s Greenbang (www.cleananalysis.com) – will be officially launched. CleanAnalysis be looking at all sorts of cleantech products and markets with an aim to telling the public and private sector about what will really have an impact on their sustainability, marketing and bottom line [...]

Chris Mellor at the Register picks up the XIV Story

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:45:49 +0000

Chris has picked up on the story on XIV and pubished a very good story in The Register – worth a read for sure.

IBM XIV feedback

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:07:55 +0000

I have spent most of the day taking calls and answering mails from Hot Aisle readers who have an opinion about XIV. One of the most interesting was from an IBM insider who tells me that he has a ton of great salespeople, customers who love the product when they buy it but no marketing support [...]

Are you an XIV Customer?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:35:11 +0000

My recent article on IBM’s XIV product has created a real torrent of calls and mails from competitors, analysts and others in the industry saying I am completely barking mad and that IBM storage (particularly XIV) is a joke. It is true that IBM have been really bad at communicating their storage message and even worse [...]

Efficient IT – The journey continues

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:44:06 +0000

I am used to writing online here at the hot aisle but yesterday, the 14th July 2009, I managed to deliver the lead story in a supplement on Efficient IT that was included in the Times, the UK’s leading newspaper. In the article, I discuss where efficient IT goes from here and point to a new “super-charged” approach. I advises CIOs to look deeper [...]

XIV surfaces at last

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:44:02 +0000

As a further takeaway Anix stated that the configuration work of the XIV during the Proof of Concept was very simple, taking minutes to complete – “far quicker then using the existing EMC and IBM infrastructure ” Today I spoke to a UK based Infrastructure Consultancy Anix (now part of ACS) about an XIV storage solution [...]

It is the simplest ideas that are always best

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:58:26 +0000

Today my friend and colleague Peter Hopton gave me the neatest piece of software I have seen in a long time. Software that knows if you are sitting in front of your computer or not, and if you are not shuts down the display to save energy. As soon as you sit down again, the [...]

EMC, NetApp and Data Domain

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:47:27 +0000

Perhaps it’s old news now but the EMC acquision of Data Domain is big news in the IT Industry (despite a week been a very long time in technology). I had lunch with Rena Fallstrom from NetApp today and asked her what the impact was on NetApps business in Europe. Given the huge customer acquisition opportunity [...]

Data Center Scale Computing

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:08:04 +0000

Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]

How long before the US national power grid fails again?

Steve O'Donnell — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:00:15 +0000

It’s a pretty good question given the perilous state of the US power distribution network, the ever increasing load and the ever increasing dependance (around the world) for US based IT and network systems. My friend Professor Massoud Amin (the global authority on what is wrong and how to fix it) is running a free webinar [...]

Fujitsu offer nice Dynamic Cube Blade Server

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:34:52 +0000

Fujitsu just announced a new blade server system using a custom designed motherboard optimized for the form factor of the chassis so that they have been able to fit 18 blades with two CPUs each into a compact 10U package. This contrasts with the rather weak Cisco design that manages to fit all of 6 [...]

IBM claim that water cooled servers are the future of IT at scale

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:08:58 +0000

I am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water). In a recent statement IBM claim that direct [...]

Why legacy thinking costs performance, reliability and cash

Steve O'Donnell — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:30:17 +0000

I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers and how to make them better, more efficient, more reliable, higher performance , easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Lots of very smart and experienced people have been doing the same for many years and whilst there is no single, agreed best practice, model [...]

I’ve just seen the future of Virtualization for SMEs

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:57:13 +0000

Cloud computing changes things, it makes administration and management of an X.86 environment easier and more automated. But until now the real goodies of VMWare’s product set, VMotion and VSphere have been limited to the small number of organizations that can afford to install a SAN. You see shared storage is a necessity in VMWare’s [...]

Why have all of the IT Vendors Polarized?

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:34:20 +0000

There are some pretty big movements happening right now resulting from the Cisco announcement of California – Unified Computing System (UCS) – their networked server offering. Politically this has partially alienated HP and IBM, who have big Server businesses and also buy a ton of Cisco equipment. So we are seeing a polarization of network [...]

Teenage mindset in the Data Centre

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:02:39 +0000

I always enjoy reading posts on my friend and colleague Steve Duplessie’s blog. Todays is exceptional. Steve has the rarest of talents, the ability to cut through the noise and get straight to the real issue. That’s why Enterprise Strategy Group is the best analyst firm in the world and has a client list that [...]

Avoiding Outages in the Enterprise Data Center

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:40:42 +0000

For some time I have been working on and thinking about a Data Center Efficiency Maturity Model to help us poor operational folks work out just how well or badly we are doing on a scale of one to five. I have also been doing some thinking about a Continuous Migration Architecture (CMA) that recognizes [...]

Is your Genetic makeup part Asian and part Caucasian?

Steve O'Donnell — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:42:45 +0000

If that sounds like a description of your heritage then you might be able to help and get an all expenses paid trip out to California as well. Nick Glasgow is 28 and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has Leukemia (AML). He quickly needs a bone marrow transplant from a compatible donor, otherwise he dies. Here is the [...]

EMC World

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:16:43 +0000

I have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived. There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with lots [...]

Why would NetApp buy Data Domain for $1.5B?

Steve O'Donnell — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:42:31 +0000

The storage wars are hotting up with EMC the clear leader in block oriented product and with a huge portfolio of software that places them as the seventh biggest software company on the planet. NetApp hold onto the leadership position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with a technically advanced set of products. Why [...]

The VMWare vision of the private cloud

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:49:38 +0000

This week I am at EMC World in Orlando picking up a sense that cloud is the message, private cloud, public cloud, storage cloud, compute cloud. It’s a strong message that resonates with the CIO and the business as it holds the promise of computing on demand and maybe even the utility computing that we [...]

Angel Investor with a Conscience?

Steve O'Donnell — Sat, 16 May 2009 17:01:08 +0000

I met with Phillip Petersen of Adinfa at a Green Data Center (what an oxymoron) event recently and he briefed me on the progress he had been making with his product – InSite that does real time power monitoring for Data Centers. He told me that they had really started to get some traction, real life big [...]

Watch out Cisco

Steve O'Donnell — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:40:30 +0000

Just had a very nice lunch at Boisdales in London’s finance district, with my old friend and ex BT colleague Chris Brandon now Technical Director at Xsigo. Chris took me through what Xsigo do and why they think they have something to say. You will remember a few weeks back the Cisco California announcements and the [...]

The future – Methane Atmosphere and Acid Seas – Is this hell?

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:11:35 +0000

The BBC reports that the UK government has launched an £11m ($16m) five-year research programme into ocean acidification. Researchers say seas are becoming more acidic as a result of CO2 from human activities being absorbed by seawater, which alters the oceans’ chemistry. Ministers say acidification of the oceans will be one of the major environmental concerns of [...]

Fujitsu to pull out of the disk business

Steve O'Donnell — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:00:59 +0000

Long time disk manufacturer Fujitsu have pulled out of the disk business, selling their design and manufacturing facilities to Toshiba. Toshiba and Fujitsu have concluded a definitive agreement on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu’s HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales [...]