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Market Roundup IBM Announces New System i and ERP Solution Bundle Sun Unveils Its Latest X64-Based Servers |
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This announcement is interesting as it addresses several issues in the marketplace that for some had become a concern. Firstly, Oracle support for the JD Edwards software it acquired has been articulated, and this latest solution bundle illustrates that the product line is far from dead. Secondly, the support of and for this software on the latest System i platform is an important notice that System i’s role in the SMB ERP marketplace is assured. Third, the price performance of this solution nixes the notion that the System i platform is not cost-competitive with x86-based solutions for the lower end of the market. We believe this announcement will address some of the concern in the marketplace with respect to JD Edwards, System i, and technology acquisition cost for the less-than-100-user organization. While we have seen the System i platform scale considerably upward with the 595, we are heartened to see that the small business is not being overlooked. The 520 is a well scaled offering for the small business and its emphasis on price competitiveness with x86 based servers may give some small organizations another reason to consider the value proposition of the System i. Further, long-time JD Edwards users on earlier System i models will likely find this offering to be a compelling upgrade path when their need for technology refresh is reached. Overall, we see this bundled solution as another example of how the small business marketplace need not be ceded strictly to x86-based solutions: a little creativity and partner support can lead to considerable customer value.
Sun Unveils Its Latest X64-Based Servers
Sun Microsystems made three announcements at its most recent
NC event in San Francisco this week. Sun announced the Sun Fire X4600 server,
the first 16-way x64 server in a single 4U chassis; the Sun Fire X4500 data
server, a hybrid data server; and the Sun Blade 8000 modular system, Sun’s
entry into the blade server marketplace. The new x64 servers are all powered by
For those who have studied the Copernican Company for a long time, these latest offerings from Sun are interesting in how at one level they position the company in a direction that is seemingly divergent from its past trajectory while at the same time illustrating that the basic tenets of the company are remarkably unchanged. True to form, Sun has invested considerable resources in developing leading-edge technology, especially with respect to energy efficiency, systems management, and performance, but it is remarkable that this was accomplished absent SPARC and a lesser supporting role afforded Solaris 10. It would have been difficult to imagine such a collection of servers being unveiled by the company a scant few years ago.
These offerings are a good lesson in the economics of standard components and volume of scale. The price points of these servers are competitive or even better than other offerings in the market today and the support of operating system such as Linux and Windows Server substantially broadens the potential market for Sun’s latest. Green is a color to wear and envy this year if one is an IT vendor, and the emphasis on resource efficiency will likely resonate with datacenter managers who are trying desperately to cope with electrical, cooling, and physical resource limitations. All said, these are admirable accomplishments and ones that Sun will doubt find no trouble in telling the market all about.
The launch of the SunFire X4500 as a data server is a
product whose time we believe is overdue. We have for some time posited that
the storage solutions from
While the high-end positioning of these products is not totally unexpected, it does raise an ongoing issue for Sun. With so much of the market, especially in SMB, being served by patch quilts of x86 machines, or more recently some of the first- and second-generation blade systems, the emphasis on highly scalable, high-throughput, high-end positioning would seem to leave out a market segment with less than stratospheric computing needs. Smaller scale organizations tend to be more focused on achieving operational sanity than being able to scale to moon. Granted Sun’s latest offerings address this need, but with the current positioning, a smaller-scale business might find itself wondering if said solutions would simply be overkill. Sun would be wise to carefully segment these offerings’ positioning to emphasize their substantial value afforded organizations aside from the high performance for which Sun is often associated.
CA Enhances Business Recovery Capabilities
The big IT suppliers continued to spend money this week as CA announced that it has acquired the privately held XOsoft Inc. As is now customary, financial details of the deal were not revealed. XOsoft specializes in supplying software tools for managing data replication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), and automatic failover. The company has acquired patents for its technologies in areas such as Application Awareness, Assured Recovery, and Soft Installation with more pending. As an organization XOsoft has attracted over 1,000 customers around the world, ranging from Fortune 1000 organizations to Small businesses, and has achieved growth rates of around 25-30% sequential quarterly for over three years in succession. The company’s products deliver uninterrupted access to a wide range of data commonly utilized by organizations including those found in Microsoft Windows Servers, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft IIS, and Oracle platforms. Of more importance to customers is the capability of the various tools to provide near-instantaneous recovery of information where business requirements so demand. CA has stated that not only is it committed to retaining all 100 XOsoft staff but that the company will increase investment in product development. CA has also stated that it will continue to market and sell the entire range of XOsoft products. In addition CA has plans to integrate XOsoft’s technologies with existing BrightStor ARCserve tools to expand its business information and critical application protection capabilities. XOsoft’s patented technologies will be used to develop CA’s next-generation information protection platform and to simplify recovery operations.
XOsoft brings a wide range of highly desirable capabilities to CA’s already broad portfolio of data and application protection systems. These include facilities in the WANSync,WANSyncHA and WANSyncCD tools to replicate data held on Microsoft Windows File and Exchange Servers, Microsoft SQL Servers, and IIS systems along with Oracle systems over Wide Area Network (WANs) thereby providing organizations with the ability to meet offsite recovery requirements, storage consolidation, or branch-office IT consolidation projects. In addition the CDP capabilities of XOsoft Enterprise Rewinder allow organizations to better protect information that changes frequently over the course of time and that would be vulnerable if protected only with traditional scheduled backup and restore systems. XOsoft’s Assured Recovery software helps to assure that backups are in a state to permit information held on them to be recovered. Too many organizations today work on the assumption that information once backed up can be retrieved, without actually testing the ability so to do, and frequently with catastrophic consequences.
However, it is perhaps in the areas of automatic, scheduled testing of recovery compliance, without the need for service interruption, that organizations might find most interest. Organizations, large and small, are now frequently faced with a barrage of requirements, frequently of a legislative nature, to demonstrate that they can continue to function in the face of system interruption and if challenged by any form of disaster. Moreover, it is now the case that even those businesses that do not have direct legal obligations to show their ability to function when facing disaster scenarios are often under shareholder or customer pressure to work with perceived IT best practice. These pressures should ensure a healthy market for recovery compliance tools and testing capabilities, preferably those that do not impose a need to suspend service or to build mirror image production/testing environments.
This acquisition by CA is but the latest in an impressive chain that the company has undertaken in the last few years. Staring with the well regarded BrightStor ARCserve platform CA has added ILumin (email archiving) and more recently MDY (records management) to its expanding storage and information management capabilities. It is very clear that CA has a well thought out strategy to develop its storage management platform and to acquire complementary solutions to ensure that it can bring business-focused storage solutions to the market as quickly as possible. However, with its rapidly expanding portfolio CA is now faced with the linked challenges to bring on board the new staff and to educate its existing workforce. The company must also address the need to inform its potential customers, who span the Globe geographically and range in size from the largest enterprise to almost the smallest business, of how they can utilize these new capabilities. It will be interesting to see how CA tackles these matters.
Opsware, an IT automation software provider, has announced
that it has signed an agreement to acquire Creekpath, a developer of storage
management software. Opsware
intends to use Creekpath’s technology as the foundation on which it will build
its upcoming application storage automation solution, which is scheduled for
launch in the first half of 2007. This storage automation will join the
company’s server automation and network automation systems to become one of the
most comprehensive platforms for data center automation, and will focus on the
application perspective rather than on the underlying infrastructure. Opsware
will pay about $10 million in cash with a maximum potential earnout of an
additional $5 million in cash. Creekpath’s traditional strength
includes storage resource management (SRM) which discovers and maps an
organization’s storage infrastructure, from database to file systems, volume
managers, servers, fabric switches, array controllers, and disk drives. Opsware plans to
add full auditing, compliance, and change impact analysis capabilities and will
integrate these capabilities with those of its other products. Opsware plans to close Creekpath’s
offices in
Most of the management players have been focused on
infrastructure, particularly those in the storage management arena. Most of these
companies have software, but they come from a hardware background. Symantec’s
Veritas is one exception to this, but Symantec does not have the extensive
range of hardware infrastructure capabilities that
We believe mid-market companies or larger companies with limited specialization of IT staff will benefit most from this approach. In the largest organizations, there are too many specialists managing, although this may become a way to break down stovepipes and bring greater efficiencies to the data center. Mid-market companies have fewer specialized IT staff—if any at all—and they need solutions that can help them manage their environments in ways that make things less complicated rather than more complicated. Customers with key applications that require preferential treatment for IT resources will also benefit from this approach as it will allow them to tie the importance of the application to changes in the infrastructure. Too many companies are just now beginning to make the distinction between data as an amorphous blob to be managed and as a group of separate data sets with various levels of performance and security requirements. We look forward to seeing what Opsware will create out of the Creekpath technology.