|
|
IBM Introduces Next Gen Shark
By Charles King
IBM has introduced the next generation of the
company’s TotalStorage Enterprise Storage server (ESS — code-named “Shark”)
in two configurations that the company says offer significant performance
enhancements over previous models. Both the ESS Model 800 and 800 Turbo are
powered by IBM’s copper microchips, and provide what IBM claims to be the
industry’s first 2 Gbps Fibre/FICON data transfer rates. According to IBM,
the new machines deliver a 50% increase in data backup capability and
improved remote copy performance that is 125% faster than the previous model,
and the company also says the new product’s Turbo configuration is designed to
handle 150% more workload than the Model 800. In addition, the ESS Model 800
features “autonomic” technologies introduced as part of IBM’s eLiza project
including predictive failure analysis and preemptive RAID reconstructs that
are intended to monitor and detect system errors before they occur, which IBM
believes will improve data availability and reduce TCO. The ESS Model 800 is
available with a variety of disk drive options including standard 72.8GB
drives and higher performance 15,000 RPM drives in 18.2 and 36.4GB
capacities, and the new machines are designed to work with a variety of
hardware and software technologies including IBM’s entire eServer family,
UNIX, Windows NT, and Novell NetWare. The ESS Model 800 will be generally
available on August 16, 2002. No pricing information was included in the
announcement.
The introduction of the ESS Model 800 provides an
interesting window into the curious state of enterprise storage. While the
newest versions of high-end storage products including IBM’s Shark, EMC’s
Symmetrix, and HDS’s Lightning all offer some
incremental technological improvements over one another, market leadership
bragging rights are short term, at best. The fact is that as IBM and HDS have
come to high performance products that are roughly on par with EMC’s market
leading storage arrays, the three companies’ competitive positioning has
focused on more slippery storage management software and service issues
rather than Big Iron dominance. With that in mind, what does the latest
addition to IBM’s Shark line bring to this happy party? The new 2Gbps Fibre/FICON
data transfer rates are probably the biggest technological news, though the
size/performance of IBM’s 36.4 GB 15k RPM disk drive allows the company to
deliver products similar to those based on the high performance drives EMC
introduced in April. To our minds, though, the inclusion of eLiza-based
predictive failure analysis and preemptive RAID reconstruct technologies may
be the most interesting wrinkle here. As data storage environments have
become increasingly complex and widely dispersed, every storage vendor has
shifted gears to develop and deliver solutions that simplify and automate
storage management chores. IBM’s long-term strategy of migrating
mainframe-derived technologies and tools across its enterprise product line
could provide the company’s storage group a leg up over storage specialists
who lack similar solutions. That should be good news for enterprise
customers, who are likely to reap the benefits of continuing technological
improvements coupled with what we expect will be extremely competitive
pricing in the months ahead. On the vendor side, this means that bragging
rights, for this month, anyway, go to IBM’s ESS Model 800.
|
|
|
Singing the Blues at the Former
Bluestone
By Clay Ryder
HP has announced its software strategy and focus for
the future with respect to its software suites. The company indicated that it
will redirect its current and future development and go-to-market efforts
toward three software categories where it has already established
intellectual property and customer acceptance, namely: HP OpenView, HP Utility
Data Center, and HP Opencall. Plans for HP OpenView include extending it to
support Web Services as well as providing tighter integration between
business and operations management. HP Utility Data Center is slated to
create virtual global infrastructure resources to allow data centers to
proactively anticipate problems and proactively re-deploy infrastructure
resources to avoid performance or availability impacts. HP also announced it
would continue to invest in Web Services middleware solutions for its UNIX,
Windows, and Linux platforms by strengthening relationships with Microsoft
and BEA Systems to provide middleware solutions to support .NET and J2EE
environments. HP and Microsoft will also work together to accelerate the
adoption of .NET and Web Services in Windows-based environments. In addition,
HP will discontinue the HP Netaction Application Server, HP Netaction Web
Services Platform, and HP Web Services Registry products. Nonetheless, it
plans to leverage the technologies associated with these products to continue
development in selected strategic areas, specifically in the space of Web
Services management and business activity management in order to enable HP to
extend HP OpenView across infrastructure, Web Services, and business
processes.
There is an old saying about the eastern seaboard:
if you do not like the weather, just wait ten minutes. In New Jersey,
changing weather is inevitable; however, the technology industries in said
geography also seem to be suffering from change seemingly unfathomable less
than two years ago. There has been much said about the Telco industry’s fall
since then (with much of it located in New Jersey) but despite the IT market
upheaval, an interesting company that was busily pioneering Web Services and
Application Servers, Bluestone Software, was purchased by HP in part to
bolster HP’s position as a Web Services savvy systems vendor. It seemed that
Bluestone had made it into the big leagues, relatively unscathed. But the
market is a very different place today, and given the marriage of HP and
Compaq, needs and plans do change.
Although cost cutting is seen as a popular path to
profitability right now, we suspect that the new HP made a simple choice:
either continue to invest in NetAction, which is not in a market leading
position, or take advantage of BEA’s technological position and commitment to
the HP platform. The choice of the latter is not surprising given BEA’s
previously announced support for HP’s new Itanium-friendly UNIX OS and
long-time BEA partner Sun’s decision to integrate its SunONE Applications
Server into Solaris 9. Ironically, BEA’s independence and specialization in
Web Application Servers and related software may have allowed it to more
easily adjust to changing market conditions, whereas the former Bluestone is
now a part of the much larger HP. Specialty technologies such as Web Services
have matured to the point where much of their gloss and mystery have been
eroded by common use, but the technology of Bluestone will live on, rather
logically, as part of the greater HP software initiative, not as discrete
products. While BEA may seem to be the short-term winner, we believe it will
find itself in an increasingly precarious position where Sun bundles
competitive technology at minimal cost, and IBM makes
a tidy profit on competitive technology, leaving HP as the remaining systems
vendor without its own product to ply. Thus, BEA may ultimately be
surrendering some of its independence through the necessity of deeper
relationship with HP or face the onslaught of IBM’s magnitude and Sun’s low
cost alternatives standing alone.
|
|
|
Symantec at Your Service
By Jim Balderston
Symantec Corporation announced this week that it has
acquired three security companies for a total of $355 million. Symantec has
agreed to acquire SecurityFocus, Recourse Technologies, and Riptech.
SecurityFocus offers what it describes as proactive early warning to a
variety of IT security threats — detecting and then delivering patches for
security holes — as well as the Bugtraq community-based threat alert mailing
list. Symantec will also sell SecurityFocus’ threat database to third
parties. Recourse Technologies offers ManHunt, a gigabit speed network
intrusion detection system that Symantec says it will combine with it own
offerings. Riptech provides managed security services for 500 customers in
more than 30 countries. The combination of Symantec and Riptech will give the
company a network of operations centers in Virginia, Texas, the UK, Germany,
and Japan.
While there never seems to be an end to the latest
and greatest in the world of IT security technology, this set of
announcements has much more to it than the acquisition of new IT security
gizmos. While security technology is important, and ever escalating in
complexity, we believe what is most notable about this announcement is it
signals Symantec’s desire to offer security as a managed service. While it
already offers such services, the acquisition of Riptech strengthens
Symantec’s hand in a time when we believe that such moves are imperative in
the IT security market.
Managed security services, run by specialists with
no other mandate than to maintain a secure computing environment, offer a
much better chance at the development of a integrated, coherent security
schema than enterprise IT departments bolting on another technical layer onto
an already overburdened network architecture using skilled IT professionals
who only do security part-time. Symantec’s three acquisitions offer some
tantalizing opportunities to develop new security frameworks that could make
the ideal of an integrated security environment a reality. Bugtraq is an
example of what we foresee as one aspect of this new environment, with a
network — or GRID — of security monitoring sites that can offer what amounts
to a combination of early warning and neighborhood watch, giving security
services the opportunity to anticipate new threats based on activity
elsewhere. While Symantec today remains primarily a security products vendor,
its expansion of its managed security services will, in the coming years, be
seen as one of its more prescient and insightful decisions as managed security
services become the norm, not the exception, within enterprise IT (and
probably the consumer market as well).
|
|
|
EMC, HP Exchange Storage System APIs
By Charles King
EMC and Hewlett-Packard have announced an agreement
to cross-license certain storage system application programming interfaces
(APIs), saying that the technology exchange will facilitate the development
of applications capable of managing each company’s respective storage
systems. The two companies claim the technology addressed under the agreement
represents more than 70% of the combined market share for networked external
RAID storage and more than 50% of the overall external RAID revenue market
share for 2001. Under the terms of the agreement, EMC is licensing APIs to
support discovery and control functions of EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON
storage systems. HP is licensing APIs to support discovery and control
functions of HP StorageWorks Virtual Array (VA) systems and HP StorageWorks
XP systems. The new agreement expands on a previous API cross-licensing
agreement between EMC and Compaq announced in November 2001, and also
includes plans by EMC and HP to define cooperative support levels to insure
product support for one another’s configurations. According to the two
companies, the agreement can serve as a model for agreements with other
companies, thereby accelerating progress toward solving customers’ storage
interoperability concerns.
At one level, the EMC/HP API deal qualifies as
little more than a minor, if necessary expansion of a previous
cross-licensing agreement inspired by HP’s merger with Compaq. The original
agreement’s significance was based largely on EMC and Compaq’s combined
storage market share, and the inclusion of HP’s StorageWorks Virtual Array
and XP systems to the deal does not lend it enormous additional weight.
However, the agreement does bring up a couple of issues we think are worth
further consideration. First, vendors tend to lead their sectors by
developing mindshare and/or market share. Though EMC’s once commanding lead
in the enterprise storage space has eroded as other vendors aggressively
entered the market, the deal with HP demonstrates how the company can retain
or expand market influence through cooperative agreements with other vendors.
We also believe that while this agreement holds
obvious attractions for both EMC and HP, it is also likely to be embraced by
the two companies’ customers. Over the past year, the notion of providing
easier management of heterogeneous storage systems has become gospel among
storage vendors. But the race to develop industry standards to support such
solutions has turned glacial, and individual efforts (such as EMC’s WideSky initiative)
have run into resistance from less than enthusiastic competitors. Until
industry standard APIs become available or are supplanted by widely accepted
proprietary solutions, the most efficient, effective methodologies for
managing and supporting heterogeneous storage systems are likely to arise via
cooperative vendor agreements such as the one announced by EMC and HP. From
where we stand, such agreements have the potential to be good for vendors,
good for their customers, and good for developing workable solutions for
managing heterogeneous data storage environments.
|
|
|
IBM Launches New eBusiness Hosting
Services
By Joyce Tompsett Becknell
IBM Global Services has announced expanded
application hosting capabilities for Europe and the U.S. Application hosting
which began in 2001 with Hosted Ariba Buyer and WebSphere is now being
expanded to cover new solutions with Siebel and SAP as well as updates to the
WebSphere offering. IBM stated it believes that the market for application
hosting will grow from $3.2 billion in 2001 to around $10 billion in 2005 and
that hosting Siebel and SAP will allow them to grab a more significant share
of the pie. This strategy now focuses on strategic ISV partners, with e-procurement
solutions from Ariba and i2, CRM and ecommerce from WebSphere and Siebel, and
enterprise resources from SAP and Lotus, encompassing mid-market and large
enterprise needs.
IBM is quick to differentiate itself from the
traditional ASP model; in fact, its model turns most of the conventional
wisdom of outsourced applications on its head. This
is not a surprise, seeing how most ASPs have yet to make their model work
outside of a PowerPoint presentation. They are focused on large enterprise
accounts rather than the mid-market (although some will work with partners to
provide solutions to the mid-market). These ASPs are focused on a few ISVs
with whom they have proven relationships, and with whom they have extensive
professional services experience. IBM is avoiding
the message of lower TCO and instead focusing on profitability delivered
based on the needs of that account. This is the Concorde as opposed to
easyJet approach to customer service. IBM promises to offer each customer the
latest functionality, skills, security, and quality of service it will need. All of this individual attention will be very necessary
since applications such as Siebel and SAP tend to be highly customized — remote
hosting with these products is not the sort of thing one undertakes lightly. This
would be a valuable service with a correspondingly valuable price tag. However,
for enterprises who are fed up with trying to make such applications function
on their own, this may indeed be welcome relief. Just as over 120 enterprises
in EMEA have already availed themselves of this service and we suspect more
will sign on with this announcement.
IBM believes that between its worldwide centers of
competency, its range and experience of IT services beyond application
hosting, and its reputation, that it can provide a superior offering to that
of its competitors. Of course IBM also promises everything else in this
announcement, including improved ROI, lower risk factors, and that most
important of features these days, a financially stable partner. While news of
hosted applications in and of itself is not that interesting, what does
matter is that IBM views this as the next step on their way to providing
ebusiness on demand. Through their Global Services division, IBM is gaining
the skills and experience needed as the Web services, GRID computing,
autonomic computing, and other visionary aspects of high tech continue to
develop. While IBM software and hardware continue to focus on the individual
pieces that are necessary to make ebusiness on demand real, IGS is learning
the processes, pratfalls, and possibilities of creating and running an ebusiness
utility. While other competitors are talking about how good it’s going to be,
IBM is building the necessary skill base and resource centers one customer at
a time to make it a reality. Whether it can
transform this highly individualized service into a utility with all the
implications of more generic offerings and less customization at utility
prices will be the trickier part. We shall be watching developments in this
space with great interest.
|
