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HP Joins the Self-Healing Parade
By Jim Balderston
HP has announced its new Adaptive Enterprise
strategy, in which the company envisions self-healing software, virtual data
centers, and demand-based computing resources. As part of a flurry of
announcements made on the anniversary of the completion of the HP-Compaq
merger, HP announced the HP Virtual Server Environment and the HP Software
Self-Healing Services for HP OpenView. The virtual
server environment is based on the HP Workload Manager and is presently
designed to operate on the HP-UX platform only. HP also announced partners
for the adaptive enterprise initiative, including Accenture,
BEA, BearingPoint Cap Gemini Ernst & Young,
Cisco Systems, Deloitte Consulting, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel
Systems.
We believe this is good news. While HP joins the
self-healing, self-managing IT infrastructure parade already populated by IBM
and Sun, it does so with a fair bit of ground to make up. HP’s
joining of the ranks serves to validate the concept of what IBM has been
calling “autonomic computing” for several years now, making it a more
industry-wide effort. As a result, we believe this reinforces IBM’s position,
complete with its lead in this marketplace, but simultaneously it serves
notice to Big Blue that HP is on board with the concept and will be bringing
potentially significant competitive pressure to bear.
Clearly, HP has to overcome IBM’s competitive lead;
but it faces some serious technical issues to address as it rolls out the
Adaptive Enterprise. First and foremost, while offering its new technology
only on HP-UX-based systems may be expedient in bringing the Adaptive
Enterprise technology to market quickly, for many potential customers it may
look like a vendor lock-in play. This perception is unlikely to sit well in
an environment where IT managers are attempting to stretch and leverage
existing deployments of all stripes. While IBM’s offerings in this area may
work best in IBM environments, they do interoperate with other vendors’
products and platforms. HP’s mainframe offering,
descendant from the Tandem product line, is not part of this initiative; at
least not now. This does illustrate some of the difficulty HP faces in
bringing this initiative to market given the several discrete product
families of varying origins across which HP needs to deploy a uniform set of
capabilities. In our view, not being able to offer a self-healing,
self-managing computing environment inclusive of its mainframe does place HP
at a competitive disadvantage in the present. While we believe HP’s decision to make a concerted effort to offer more
intelligent and self-managing IT resources will benefit the company in the
long run, it would seem that the first order of business will be to close the
gap between itself and IBM. To do so will take a serious commitment of
resources, corporate vision, and steadfastness — something that may prove
challenging given the bloodletting of its organization in its post-merger
rationalization and quest for an immediate return to profitability.
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Cultivating the High End: IBM
Upgrades/Updates eServer p690, p670, and p655
By Charles King
IBM has introduced new versions of its high-end eServer pSeries UNIX servers
that take advantage of the company’s new POWER4+ processor technology. The
flagship eServer p690 has been refreshed with 1.7
GHz POWER4+ processors, 567 MHz L3 cache, and a new I/O subsystem that
triples previous I/O bandwidth and doubles LPAR support to the processor
level. The new eServer p670 features 1.5 GHz
POWER4+ processors, plus the same cache, I/O, and LPAR innovations as the
p690. The cluster-optimized eServer p655 features
either 1.5 or 1.7 GHz POWER4+ processors, plus upgraded L3 cache, I/O, and memory. According to IBM, the new processor and system
enhancements can boost the performance of the p690 by up to 65%, the p670 by
up to 90%, and the p655 by up to 83% over previous
models. In addition to hardware upgrades, IBM announced a quartet of On
Demand features for all three of the new servers. On/Off Capacity on Demand
allows customers to activate and deactivate processors as necessary.
Memory on Demand allows users to activate memory in 4GB increments as needed.
IBM’s new Try and Buy program provides a thirty-day trial at no additional
charge for memory and processor capacity upgrades. The company also plans to
price select software for the pSeries according to
when the customer activates temporary capacity. The new eServer
p690 and p670 will both be available on May 30, 2003, with the p690 priced
starting at $493,386 for an eight-way configuration and the p670 at $190,411
for a four-way. The new p655 will be available beginning in late July 2003,
starting at $50,000 for a four-way configuration.
In truth, the high-end 64-bit server market is a
heady place, whose speed-demon numbers are more evocative of drag strips than enterprise data centers. But in an
industry where performance is often prized above more mundane capabilities,
high-end servers represent the gold standard for many vendors and users. From
that particular standpoint, IBM’s new pSeries
servers look shiny, indeed, with significant performance upgrades in the
top-end p690 and big jumps in the mid-range p670 and HPC-focused p655. If
those numbers hold up well under independent scrutiny, the company should
have a lot to smile about. In a way, the p655’s performance may be the most
significant, since IBM’s recently announced “Deep Computing” initiative
represents a concerted push further into the HPC/supercomputing space where
the company already has a very large footprint. However, we find IBM’s new On
Demand offerings at least as intriguing as the new pSeries
systems’ performance metrics. While it is currently unclear just how large a
market exists for On/Off CoD, the option could
prove extremely attractive to enterprise customers adrift in ongoing economic
doldrums. Additionally, IBM’s Try and Buy program could provide just the elixir
needed to transform doubts into deployments.
So when all is said and done, does this announcement
represent anything more than a performance bump in
the 64-bit computing road? We believe so. While the 32-bit market is largely
a done Wintel deal (though Linux and AMD’s new Opteron
offer fascinating game-changing scenarios) the 64-bit game continues to be
very much in play. HP may have bought its way into 64-bit market leadership
via its Compaq acquisition, but in year two of the merger, the company’s enterprise
product strategy remains disjointed. HP, Intel, and Microsoft continue to
funnel the Itanium platform further into the market, but just how well their
efforts are playing among critical Alpha and Non-Stop/Tandem clients is
anyone’s guess. On another side of the net, Sun’s attempts to extend its
relevance and reinvent its market leadership remain unfocused, with the
company offering continuing and confusing strategic retrenchments. While IBM
is portrayed by many as stodgy in the extreme, the company’s unflappability
amidst the chaos engulfing the larger market may appear as a beacon of
serenity by nervous customers. The fact that IBM is reinvigorating and
reinventing its high-end enterprise solutions in sync with its greater On
Demand strategy is likely to discomfit and even distress the competition.
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The Old School Try
By Jim Balderston
IBM has announced that it is building an interactive
digital media infrastructure on the Marist College campus which will be used
to provide access to digital media content, Web-based campus portals,
bulletin boards and IM services, orientation materials for new faculty, and
college credit bridge courses. The project will deploy a number of recently
developed IBM technologies including the Rich Media Distribution Utility,
Enterprise Media Beans, and Xcast, a technology
that lets unlimited numbers of small groups receive broadcast data.
Specifically, the infrastructure will be deployed to access the college’s
Emmy Awards Collection as well as the FDR Library Collection. IBM indicates
that the Marist College system could be deployed in more traditional
enterprise settings, such as advertising agencies or industries using
Computer Assisted Design (CAD) technologies.
While in many cases one could dismiss such an
offering as a good promotional self-attaboy
project, we believe there is more to this than IBM simply trying to do
community work. The Marist College needs are challenging to say the least, requiring
access to large files of digital content that must then be delivered reliably
to a wide number of recipients on a daily basis. In other words, no delivery,
no class.
While some students might cheer the advent of more
days away from class, we believe that IBM’s little experiment with Marist
could yield significant dividends down the road. Using a fixed, largely
self-contained network as a laboratory, IBM has the opportunity to tinker
with ways to make bandwidth-hogging content behave more, well, collegially.
While the closed Marist system may have a certain amount of bandwidth set for
this specific type of content delivery, in all probability it does not have
endless bandwidth availability due to nothing more than budget restraints.
Assuming the IBM system is successful and heavily used, there will be
built-in incentives to find ways to shove more “heavy” content down existing
tubes while maintaining the quality of the content presentation. Simply
stated, but this is no small technical feat in our eyes. IBM has a chance to
go to school itself at Marist, and perhaps bring forth not a diploma but some
real world solutions to digital media distribution that could be a real money
earner in the future. This would not be the first time something like this
happened, as it was not all that long ago that a campus network deployed in
Palo Alto became a little company known as SUN.
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Plumtree Launches Enterprise Web
Suite
By Myles Suer
Plumtree Software this week announced its Enterprise
Web Suite, which includes new versions of the company’s portal, search,
collaboration, and content management software along with a new Enterprise
Web Developer kit for creating composite applications from applications
executing on J2EE and .NET application servers. The company claims that the
suite’s features will help organizations reduce the time needed to adapt
traditional packaged applications for in-house customization and business
specific applications. Plumtree is positioning its integration technologies
for enterprises that seek to combine resources from traditional applications
and application servers including with content management, collaboration, and
search services. The Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite is now available in a beta
release form with general availability expected later this quarter. Pricing
information was not released.
Enterprise portals have been a veritable application
kitchen sink and marketing catch-all for many vendors seeking relevance in an
Internet standards-focused marketplace. Although providing a unified
interface to multiple enterprise applications and content is laudable, the
goal has left many organizations pondering whether such solutions offer
demonstrable ROI. Nonetheless, the ability to build and distribute
applications from existing systems has the potential to change how
enterprises think about and deploy enterprise applications. Reducing the cost
and time for customizing ERP or CRM applications offers a significant but not
a uniquely perceived opportunity. Plumtree’s approach may cause some
companies to reconsider their application deployment plans in favor of a
broader vision that seeks to not only create Web based applications but to
integrate applications designed for both J2EE and .NET environments.
At present, it is not clear how application server
or business intelligence vendors would respond to Plumtree’s strategy, or if
they would respond at all. For players such as IBM who are well established
in the application server and content management marketplace, will the
efforts of a vendor with the size and scope of Plumtree dictate a change in
their strategy? Probably not. But for vendors seeking a market niche to
address specific enterprise pain points, i.e., integrating .NET and J2EE
applications through a unified portal, Plumtree is positioning itself to
raise the bar in this regard. This could lead enterprise IT professionals to
rethink the customization of discrete stovepipe application mentality pursued
by many vendors and instead look to solutions such as Plumtree’s to define a more comprehensive
integration platform for their enterprise applications.
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