IBM

IBM Wins $150M EU Contract for 6,100 System x and Flex System Servers

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

IBM and Business Partner Bechtle AG just won a $150 million contract to supply the European Commission with 6,100 System x and Flex Systems for office and application servers and supporting services.
This is the largest contract ever awarded by the EC, which is the executive body of the European Union institutions and agencies in the EC’s 27 member states.

The contract is significant for both the size of the award and the fact that IBM and Bechtle AG beat out tough competitors including rivals Bull, Dell, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard for the multi-tier/year contract. That they did so is a testament to the EC’s confidence in the performance, reliability and scalability of IBM System x and Flex Systems server line and IBM and Bechtle AG’s ability to deliver top notch technical service and support.

The $150 million contract also underscores IBM’s continued commitment to and investment in the Intel Corp. based x86 platform. Rumors have been swirling for some time that IBM might sell off the System x server line. Given the EC contract win, coupled with several other recent big System x wins and potential System x server deals in the offing, a sale seems unlikely.

In addition, IBM is readying a new line of System x servers for release in early 2014 based on Intel’s forthcoming “Ivy Bridge” EX processor. Sources within IBM said that Big Blue will bolster the considerable performance and reliability features of the upcoming Intel EX processor with significant add-on capabilities that go beyond Intel’s own server specifications. …

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IBM Wins $150M EU Contract for 6,100 System x and Flex System Servers Read More »

Does Infrastructure Really Matter When it Comes to IT Security?

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

Yes, infrastructure absolutely does matter and has a profound and immediate impact on enterprise security.

Server hardware (and the server operating systems and applications that run on them) form the bedrock upon which the performance, reliability and functionality of the entire infrastructure rests. Just as you wouldn’t want to build a house on quicksand, you don’t want your infrastructure to be shaky or suspect: it will undermine security, network operations, negatively impact revenue, raise the risk of litigation and potentially cause your firm to lose business.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These days, many if not most corporate enterprises have extranets to facilitate commerce and communications amongst their customers, business partners and suppliers. Any weak link in infrastructure security has the potential to become a gaping hole, allowing a security breach to extend beyond the confines of the corporate network and extranet. Security breaches can infect and invade other networks with astounding rapidity.

Increasingly, aging and inadequate infrastructure adversely impacts enterprise security. …

Does Infrastructure Really Matter When it Comes to IT Security?Read More »

Does Infrastructure Really Matter When it Comes to IT Security? Read More »

Two-Thirds of Corporations Now Require 99.99% Database Uptime, Reliability

ITIC Reports & Surveys / By

A 64% majority of organizations now require that their databases deliver a minimum of four, “nines” of uptime 99.99% or better for their most mission critical applications . That is the equivalent of 52 minutes of unplanned downtime per database/per annum or just over one minute of downtime per week as a result of an unplanned outage.

Those are the results of ITIC’s 2013 – 2014 Database Reliability and Deployment Trends Survey, an independent Web-based survey which polled 600 organizations worldwide during May/June 2013. The nearly two-thirds of respondents who indicated they need 99.99% or greater availability is a 10% increase over the 54% who said they required a minimum of four nines reliability in ITIC’s 2011-2012 Database Reliability survey.

This trend will almost certainly continue unabated owing in large part to an increase in mainstream user deployments of databases running Big Data Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. These applications are data intensive and closely align with organizations’ main-line-of-business and recurring revenue stream. Hence, any downtime on a physical, virtual or cloud-based DB will likely cause immediate disruptions that will quickly impact the corporation’s bottom line. …

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Two-Thirds of Corporations Now Require 99.99% Database Uptime, Reliability Read More »

IBM Offers Rock Solid Reliability, Best in Class Server Performance

2013, Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

Big Blue Hardware is Rock Solid

IBM hardware retains its status as being best in class in terms of reliability, stability and performance and customer satisfaction. IBM’s System z mainframes recorded the least amount of downtime of any hardware platform. In the server hardware category systems with relatively small market shares, including Stratus Technologies ftServer 6300 and 4500 series and Fujitsu’s Primequest and Primergy Servers continue to score very high reliability.

Stratus Technologies of Maynard, MA offers Intel Xeon-based systems with mainframe-like fault tolerance and reliability with 99.999 % reliability. The Fujitsu Primergy and Fujitsu SPARC systems similarly deliver a high level of reliability and fault tolerance with 48% of reporting 99.999% or just over five minutes of per server/ per annum downtime due to unplanned outages.

The length and severity of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 unplanned outages and the patching actions related to each correspond to specific line item capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) costs for the business. Reliability, measured by downtime, can positively or negatively impact TCO and accelerate or delay ROI. …

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IBM Offers Rock Solid Reliability, Best in Class Server Performance Read More »

IBM, Dell, Fujitsu & Stratus Get Highest Marks in ITIC Reliability Survey

ITIC Reports & Surveys / By

For the fifth year in a row, IBM servers delivered the highest levels of reliability and uptime among 14 server platforms.

Those are the results of the latest independent ITIC 2013 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey which polled C-level executives and IT managers at over 550 organizations worldwide from August 2012 through January 2013.

Among the high-end mainframe class systems, both the IBM System z and the Stratus Technologies’ ftServer 6310 delivered the highest inherent reliability: both had no instances – 0% – of the most severe Tier 3 outages lasting four hours or more of duration. Among the mainstream “work horse” servers, IBM’s Power Systems recorded the least amount of unplanned downtime, approximately 13 minutes per server/per year. By contrast, some 6 percent of organizations using Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems) x86-based servers experienced of over four (4) hours of per server/per annum downtime. This was the highest percentage of lengthy Tier 3 server outages among the 14 platforms surveyed. …

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IBM, Dell, Fujitsu & Stratus Get Highest Marks in ITIC Reliability Survey Read More »

IBM Intros New Power Servers for SMBs, Enterprises

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

IBM’s latest generation of Power Systems introduced this week are all about “power,” emphasizing:

  • The power to support compute intensive workloads
  • The power to deliver business analytics
  • The power to drive business efficiencies through server consolidation
  • The power to conserve resources by consolidating floor space and lowering energy consumption
  • The power to cut costs by reducing the number of licensing core requirements
  • The power to leverage new product features and capabilities that simplify the IT experience

IBM’s new Power enterprise and entry servers also align with the company’s strategy to address organizations’ need to support compute-intensive workloads and more complex application environments, which include physical, virtual, cloud and mobile environments.

The new solutions – which support IBM’s AIX, and IBM i operating systems, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise operating system environments – use the same underlying advanced processor technology that powers its Watson supercomputer, the system so famously displayed in 2011 when it trumped Jeopardy! grand champions during a nationally televised match. …

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IBM Intros New Power Servers for SMBs, Enterprises Read More »

Microsoft: Bullish or Bottoming Out? Part 2

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

According to some press and industry, you’d think that Microsoft was all but dead. Microsoft’s tactical and strategic technology and business missteps are well publicized and dissected ad infinitum. Less well documented are Microsoft’s strengths from both a consumer and enterprise perspective and there are plenty of those.

Microsoft Strengths

One of the most notable company wins in the past five years is the Xbox 360 and Kinect.

Xbox 360 and Kinect: Simply put, this is an unqualified success. The latest statistics released earlier this month by the NPD Group show that Microsoft has a 47% market share and sold 257,000 Xbox 360 units in the U.S. in June, besting its rivals the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii for the 18th consecutive month. But Microsoft and indeed all the hardware games vendors find their sales shrinking due to the sharp increase in the numbers of users playing games on their smart phones. In Microsoft’s 2012 third fiscal quarter ending in March, Xbox 360 sales dropped 33% to $584 million. The consumer space is notoriously fickle and games users are always looking for the next big thing. Microsoft’s ace in the hole is the Kinect motion-controller, which still has a lot of appeal. The company is banking on that as well as slew of new applications and functions like the Kinect PlayFit Dashboard which lets users track the number of calories they burn when they play Kinect games. …

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Microsoft: Bullish or Bottoming Out? Part 2 Read More »

Facebook IPO Flops; Can it be Fixed?

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

The honeymoon is over for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, it ended before it began.

Facebook’s long-awaited and much hyped IPO is less than a week old and the blame game is on as the company has lost nearly 20% of its value since the initial offering.

After three days of trading Wall Street’s take on Facebook has gone from jubilant to jaundiced.

The stock ended its first full day of trading at $38.23 – essentially flat from its $38 opening price though it did manage to set an IPO record for the sheer volume of trades — 567 million shares on opening day last Friday. Investors hoped for a turnaround. That never materialized. On Monday, a selloff prompted the shares to fall by nearly 11%, ending at $34.03. The news worsened Tuesday. The stock sank another eight percent down trading in the $31 – $32 range. …

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Facebook IPO Flops; Can it be Fixed? Read More »

IBM Powers Up New PowerLinux Products, Strategy

2010, Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

IBM this week unveiled its latest generation of industry standard Linux-only servers optimized for its Power architecture along with a new strategy targeting specific x86 applications and workloads.

IBM has been a longtime Linux proponent, supporting industry standard distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise – on its Power Systems line for the last 12 years. This week’s announcement reaffirms Big Blue’s commitment to Linux and broadens its scope with offerings designed to drive more growth for the Power platform in the lucrative x86 arena. IBM will fuel this growth via its mantra, “Tuned to the task,” which emphasizes delivering higher quality and superior economics than rivals.

According to Scott Handy, vice president of IBM’s PowerLinux Strategy and Business Development, “This is an extension to our overall Power strategy to address the Linux x86 space and drive more growth for our Power Systems servers.” …

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IBM Powers Up New PowerLinux Products, Strategy Read More »

National Advertising Council Tells Oracle to Discontinue Misleading IBM Ads

2012, Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

The always heated ongoing rivalry between Oracle and IBM, just got more contentious, with the recent news that the National Advertising Division (NAD) has called out Oracle for publishing misleading ads in The Wall Street Journal and The Economist claiming Oracle’s T4-4 server is 2x faster and 66% cheaper than IBM’s comparable P795 server.

NAD, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, based in New York City recommended that Oracle discontinue “certain comparative performance and pricing claims” in the national newspaper ads and on the www.Oracle.com website. Specifically, the NAD took exception to Oracle advertisements claim that “Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 system retails for $1.2 million whereas IBM’s P795 high end server costs $4.5 million – an improbable $3.3 million price discrepancy.

The NAD functions as an objective and impartial self-regulatory forum for the advertising industry. In its official determination, the NAD took pains to remain objective. It noted that both the advertiser (Oracle) and the challenger (IBM) produce high quality computer systems. …

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National Advertising Council Tells Oracle to Discontinue Misleading IBM Ads Read More »

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