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IBM Announces New Grid Vertical
Solutions/Ecosystem Partners
By Charles King
IBM has announced a series of new offerings aimed at
expanding the commercial use of grid computing solutions in four new vertical
industries. For the petroleum industry, IBM is offering grid solutions
designed to improve seismic imaging processing and analysis and to optimize
computing and storage resources. The company has also developed grid
solutions for the electronics industry for aggregating computing resources
from multiple partners and enhancing product design collaboration. For higher
education environments, IBM is offering a collaboration grid to enable
seamless sharing of large amounts of raw data among researchers and across
institutions. The company has also created grid solutions for the
agricultural chemical industry designed to help speed scientific discovery
and maximize the use of data resources. In addition, IBM announced an
initiative to develop a grid ecosystem that currently consists of more than
thirty-five hardware, software, and business partners that will help develop
commercial grid solutions. Among the ISVs that have recently become involved
in the effort are Accelrys, Cadence, Calypso Technology, Force10 Networks,
Landmark Graphics, Mercury Interactive, and MSC.Software. Additionally, IBM
announced that Cisco Systems has joined the grid ecosystem effort, and that
the two companies are working together to enable enhanced grid services for
storage area networks (SAN).
Grid computing has been a hotly contested area for
more than a year, with competing vendors laying claim to a wide variety of
grid-related technologies and strategic approaches. However, while grid has
enjoyed a great deal of interest in research environments and among
academics, widely deployed commercial solutions have been slower in coming.
This is not especially surprising, given the inherent complexity of
enterprise-wide grids, but it does make one wonder what it will take to drive
grid further into commercial markets. IBM’s grid ecosystem initiative offers
one approach to this challenge. In the initial commercial grid-centric
offerings the company launched in January for the aerospace, automotive,
financial markets, government, and life sciences industries, IBM took a
highly pragmatic approach by focusing on five areas (R&D, engineering and
design, business analytics, enterprise optimization, and government
development) that seemed especially ripe for grid solutions. This latest
announcement extends that first group with four more compute-heavy industries
that we believe are sound choices for developing commercial grid solutions.
We expect IBM will continue to develop future commercial grid offerings via
this same industry-centric framework.
Given IBM’s history of efficiently leveraging its
relationships with ISV partners, the grid ecosystem initiative simply
formalizes a new grid-specific focus group that software developers can join
for their own and IBM’s benefit. The fact is that while grid is a highly
geeky subject in the best of times, the technology’s potential success and
longevity in the larger market will depend on how successfully it can be
applied solve commercial problems. For that to work, IBM needs folks to write
commercial apps that end users want or need, and the list of new ISVs who
have signed onto the grid ecosystem initiative contains names well known in
the life sciences, financial, engineering, and petroleum industries. We are
especially intrigued by Cisco’s decision to join IBM’s grid parade,
especially as a developer of storage solutions. While Cisco’s SAN switches
are not as well known as those of specialists like Brocade and McData, the
company’s expertise in network switching technologies could provide them a leg
up in developing enterprise grid solutions. Overall, Cisco’s apparently
deepening partnership with IBM (which resells Cisco’s MDS 9000 SAN switches)
is likely to give the companies’ grid competitors food for thought or,
perhaps, indigestion.
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We Don’t Like Spam!
By Jim Balderston
AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! announced this week that they
have formed a pact to work together to fight spam. The announcement said the
three companies will focus on four areas to reduce the amount of unwanted and
unsolicited email that comes to their customers’ email boxes and that which
is sent from accounts of these three services. In the first area, the three
intend to prevent spammers from using deceptive email headers or other
concealment techniques. The second will limit the amount of email that can be
sent from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! accounts. The third thrust of the plan is to
create a best-practices portfolio for businesses by which to send commercial
email. Finally, the companies said they will be more aggressive in helping
law enforcement against spammers using fraudulent methods. In this area, the
companies propose creating better audit trails for law enforcement and
coordinating with law enforcement to prosecute spammers.
While spam remains most visibly an inbox problem for
the home user, its effects on the larger Internet ecosystem are well
documented as spam absorbs huge amounts of resources in the form of
bandwidth, storage and, of course, time. While most enterprises may be less
affected than most consumers – at least in the area of their users’ inboxes –
we suspect that situation could continue to erode as spammers become more
proficient at scraping corporate email addresses. Of, course the issues of
resource consumption remain well entrenched.
While we – and we suspect those people who go
apoplectic over spam – are heartened by AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!’s announced
intention, it should be noted that a vast amount of spam originates from
their email accounts. If they want to reduce spam, they need to make sure
they are monitoring their own houses. A laudable concept to be sure, but we
wonder if spam is the real issue here. These companies have been aggressive
in marketing to their own subscribers and in many cases are less than
forthright with them about how much personal information they are gathering
and to whom they are peddling that information. In other words, there is a
fair bit of unseen customer abuse that remains hidden behind the
technological complexity of the Internet. In this sense, this announcement
could be seen in the light of saying to customers, “Hey, we really, really
care about you and let us show you how much we care by limiting spam.” Such
measures run the risk of backfiring, as the promise to reduce a widely noted
nuisance could end up being an albatross around the companies’ collective
necks when users see little or no results in the reduction of email offering
low interest loans, sexual enhancement products, and online prescription
medications. The real measure of the success of this initiative will be seen in
the reduction of resource consumption, most notably in the infrastructure of
the Internet and the enterprises that rely on email to actually communicate
something useful amongst themselves and with their customers. Until we hear
from those folks that the spam nuisance has been reduced – it will never be
eliminated – we will take a wait-and-see attitude toward this particular
announcement.
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EMC Updates PowerPath: Envisioning and
Enabling Holistic Storage
By Charles King
EMC has announced new product features and
technologies designed to optimize, simplify, and automate end-to-end
management of the data path, factors the company said are key to delivering
its vision of intelligent information infrastructures. Principal in the
announcement was PowerPath Volume Manager, an integrated volume management
solution that provides users the means to strip, mirror, and slice volumes,
as well as allocate physical storage into logical or “virtual” pools for
online storage volume reconfiguration. According to EMC, the new feature is
designed to take advantage of Power Path’s intelligent path management
features, making it the industry’s first “network aware” volume manager. The
new Volume Manager is included with EMC’s PowerPath at no additional charge.
EMC also announced that application-transparent data mobility, which will
allow customers to move online application data from one storage array to
another without affecting performance or availability, will become part of
PowerPath in Q3 2003. EMC plans to integrate aspects of PowerPath into
existing and emerging intelligent switches, an effort which the company
stated is focused on simplifying and automating automated networked storage
environments. Additionally, EMC said that a new version of PowerPath
available later in 2003 will provide support for heterogeneous storage
arrays.
While some might regard EMC’s latest PowerPath
announcement as a mere clanging and tooting of this quarter’s bells and
whistles, we believe it provides evidence of the company’s ongoing efforts in
driving enterprise storage evolution. The fact is that the challenge of
heterogeneous storage is a bit like the weather: vendors all like to talk
about it but it is often difficult to see just what they are doing about it.
Solutions can range from vendor agreements that provide simple, mutual
support for one another’s products to more complex API exchanges to
overarching strategic solutions such as IBM’s oft discussed Storage Tank. All
of these efforts share the goal of simplifying increasingly complex heterogeneous
storage environments without detrimentally affecting management efforts,
cost, and overall storage performance. What we find particularly interesting
about EMC’s improvements to PowerPath is its deceptively incremental
appearance. Enhancing the movement of data volumes is hardly a subject that
keeps most folks up at night, yet combining effective volume tools with
PowerPath’s existing data path management capabilities should significantly
ease data management tasks without negatively impacting data performance
across networked storage environments. In essence, PowerPath Volume Manager
and the other features EMC plans to offer later this year provide tangible
evidence that the company’s approach to providing effective heterogeneous
storage solutions consists of building them one well-formed and well-placed
brick at a time.
What is missing from EMC’s announcement is any
reference to the “virtualization” features of which most of its competitors
are preoccupied. EMC’s conception of intelligent information infrastructures
might be a more technically accurate and even honest description of the
approach required to conceive, design, and deploy management solutions for
heterogeneous storage environments. But accurate or not, most storage vendors
and customers appear to be migrating toward virtualization as a catch-all
phrase for long hoped for (if also long in coming) heterogeneous storage
solutions. By seeming to avoid this increasingly disseminated if often murky
term, EMC risks confusing its allies and comforting its enemies.
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Apple… by the Slice
By Jim Balderston
Apple has announced the availability of its iTunes
Music Store, in which customers can browse and buy more than 200,000 songs
that have been licensed from various music industry labels, including the top
five labels. The new service will allow Apple users – and Apple users only
for the time being – to purchase single songs at 99 cents each. Those songs
will be encoded in a new format, which makes the files smaller in size than
MP3 files. The new service allows users to browse titles and to listen to thirty-second
clips of a song at no charge. The service will allow users to play purchased
music on up to three computers and to burn CDs as well as play the music on
iPods. The service is presently only available to U.S. residents.
While the music industry seems ready to compromise
on the idea of paid downloading, they apparently continue to take a timid toe-in-the-water
approach, considering that the Apple computer market penetration remains at
about 3%. Having said this, we must note that even as this tiny portion of
the market now gains access to legally downloaded music files, something
significant is afoot here.
While no one is ready to say there is breakthrough
technologies at work – one industry executive said the technology for this
service was in place five years ago – there is still the feel of a real
innovation at work here. By innovation we mean a development – in this case
Apple CEO Steve Jobs getting record industry buy-in – that will have a
profound effect on behavior of not only customers but eventually the
recording industry itself. Now users are free to pick out music by the song,
avoiding “B” side music or other unpopular flotsam that is thrown onto a CD.
In short, this kind of service could change the economics of producing and
distributing that “B” material. In this sense, the legal downloading service
that Apple is offering breaks the existing pricing models for the recording
industry. Such developments are not limited to bits representing music, of
course. Just as the downloading of music – both legal and illegal – has
opened people’s eyes to new ways of distributing content, so the Web Service
model is challenging the enterprise software and systems vendor pricing
models. We are sure to see more and more companies looking to minimize their
commitment to large scale application suite installations, preferring instead
to pick a la carte functions that meet their needs without a lot of “B” side
functions or applications. The ripple effect now moving through the music
industry is poised to make its way through the enterprise hardware and
software vendor community. Pricing models are under threat as tight-fisted
customers now overburdened with huge monolithic installations which may be utilized
at one-half or one-fifth their functionality look to avoid their gluttonous
overspending of the past decade. For the enterprise IT vendor, the music
downloading phenomena is a lesson to be heeded. Adapt to new customer needs
and be ready to break things into pieces or risk having them broken for you.
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