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Market Roundup August 24, 2007 IBM to Distribute Solaris on System x and BladeCenter EMC Smarts VoIP Performance Manager and Performance Reporter |
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IBM to Distribute Solaris on System x and BladeCenter
IBM and Sun have
announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System and Solaris
Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. The
agreement extends IBM’s existing support for the Solaris OS on select IBM
BladeCenter servers, and IBM and Sun’s support of interoperability through open
standards. As part of the expanded support, Sun and IBM will invest in testing
and system qualification so customers will realize Solaris’s leading
performance and reliability on BladeCenter and System x servers. The Solaris OS
includes unique functionality such as Solaris ZFS, Predictive Self-Healing and
Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) to help organizations improve their system
uptime while reducing costs and speeding time to market. Solaris provides
BladeCenter and System x customers excellent
application performance on present and future multi-core 64-bit x86 processors.
IBM servers that will support the Solaris OS include IBM BladeCenter HS21 and
LS41 servers; and IBM System x3650, System x3755, and System x3850 servers.
Solaris is supported on more than 820 x86 platforms and runs more than 3,000
unique x86 applications including IBM Websphere, Lotus, DB2, Rational
and Tivoli.
This is an interesting
announcement in that it illustrates just how much the market for systems and
operating systems has changed in the past few years. Not long ago, most any
UNIX purchased was an integrated software and hardware affair. With this
announcement, we see one of the most popular UNIX platforms expanding its reach
not by additional platform support but rather through a strategic vendor
partnership… my, how things have changed. Granted, IBM Global Services has
plenty of experience and revenue to testify to Big Blue’s ability to deploy
Solaris solutions; however, with this announcement we see a new level of
cooperation between two firms that in the 1990s were sworn enemies, at least
with respect to RISC- and UNIX-based computing. The decoupling of Solaris from
the SPARC platform has been a reality for some time, although the decoupling
from Sun was less pronounced until now.
With this announcement,
we expect to see IBM become a strategic partner to Sun and vice versa and ironically,
at the same time become an even more agile competitor. As organizations begin
to flex their muscles choosing on which vendor’s x86 hardware they will deploy
Solaris, both Sun and IBM will find themselves exposed
to more competitive pressure from another. Nevertheless, we see this not as a
zero-sum outcome, but rather a “rising tide raises all ships” scenario. Since
Solaris is already by itself a zero-revenue solution, competition will thrive
on the hardware beneath and the services associated therewith. It is this
segment of the market that is enjoying the growth not only in revenue but in margin
as well. As IBM is the first major x86 vendor to have
such an agreement with Sun, Armonk and Co. are well positioned to take
advantage of its first-mover relationship with the Copernican Company. We
expect to see some initial traction on System x; however, we believe that the
BladeCenter may ultimately gain the most acceptance for Solaris given the platform’s very
network-friendly while data center-friendly physical, power, and heating
attributes.
Given the
acknowledgment of both firms regarding initiatives to bring Solaris on the
System z mainframe, we are left pondering just if and when Solaris may find
itself on Power architecture platforms such as the System p and System i. If this were to come to pass, it would indeed be a
significant event, one with potentially far greater impact on the sales of UltraSPARC and POWER6-based hardware. Such a total
decoupling of the OS from RISC hardware could shift the competitive environment
dramatically at one level, but also provide Sun another opportunity to showcase
its multi-core agility. However, since this is simply conjecture at this time,
we will wait to ponder further what might happen.
Overall, we are excited by this announcement and look forward to see just how the marketplace will react. While such an announcement would have been unfathomable a scant few years ago, it serves as a reminder as to the fluidity of the marketplace and just how much the business of selling servers and operating systems has changed since the odometer rolled over into the 21st century.
FTI Enhances Capabilities with Attnex and Integration of Recommind’s Axcelerate eDiscovery Technology
FTI Consulting, Inc. has
announced the availability of the Ringtail A2R Connector to integrate two
complementary ediscovery applications, Attenex Patterns and Ringtail Legal 2005 litigation technology. The
Ringtail A2R Connector will take email and electronic documents that have been
processed and reviewed in Attenex Patterns, and migrate those documents into
Ringtail Legal 2005 for case management and/or production. The Ringtail A2R
Connector creates a repeatable and auditable means to leverage the power of two
essential applications during the electronic discovery process, promising savings
in time and money. Developed by FTI Consulting, the wizard-like Ringtail A2R
Connector provides a step-by-step graphical interface to guide users through
the process of exporting email, electronic files, metadata, and attorney work
product from Attenex Patterns to Ringtail Legal 2005. FTI Consulting is a Attenex Advantage partner and provides law firms and
corporations a secure, managed hosting environment for matters in Attenex
Patterns in addition to end-to-end electronic discovery consulting. The A2R
Connector touts benefits including a complete audit trail for sensitive
corporate data from processing through to production; automation of data
conversion from the Attenex Patterns database format to the Ringtail Legal 2005
format; and the ability to create standardized and repeatable ediscovery and document review processes with the industry’s
leading applications.
The company also
announced the integration of Recommind’s Axcelerate eDiscovery technology into
the Ringtail Legal 2005 document review platform, designed to reduce the time
and expense of electronic discovery. The technology can handle hundreds of
users, thousands of cases and millions of documents in over 200 languages
including Russian, Japanese and Korean, and includes First
Pass Review and One Click Coding functionality. First Pass Review automatically
organizes multi-terabyte document sets by myriad parameters including
responsiveness, issue, privilege and concept group, making review organization
and document batching simpler, more accurate, and quicker. One Click Coding
makes a computer-generated judgment—with explicit confidence score—about each
document’s relevance, responsiveness, and privileged nature, expediting the
actual review process while improving accuracy and lowering the risk of missing
key documents. The Axcelerate integration enables Ringtail Legal users to
leverage First Pass Review and One Click Coding technology from the Ringtail
interface. This integration also provides de-duplication, near-duplication,
email threading, and filtering functionality, while also automatically
identifying key documents, people, phrases, and concepts in the document
collection. The resulting clustering and auto-coding is intended to allow
attorneys, paralegals, and experts to quickly gain insight into any document
collection. Attorneys then complete reviews using Ringtail’s security and
multi- lingual redaction and production features.
Nascent and complex
markets require teamwork and innovative approaches. This is especially true in
the new and growing world of electronic discovery (ediscovery).
As the mass of electronically stored information grows, it becomes more and
more difficult to perform manual processes on that data. Large organizations
are quickly realizing that their data growth is almost beyond their control.
When organizations are confronted with the need to produce ESI for legal or
compliance reasons, a sense of urgency combined with the a subconscious dread
of potential liability puts the pressure on IT to step up to the plate and work
with their counterparts in the legal department to properly resource the
organization to deal with legal eventualities in a cost-effective manner.
These two announcements by FTI hit on some key principles for users and vendors alike. First of all, no one company can solve all the problems associated with complex issues such as ediscovery and sorting through mounds of ESI in general. Second, in today’s global economy there is a need to deal with multiple languages. In fact, there is likely to be a need to deal with multiple languages even in many single countries. Canada has adopted a dual-language legal framework, and the proliferation of Spanish throughout the U.S. is likely to cause some jurisdictions and regulators to look askance at organizations that ignore linguistic realities. Third, the announcements bring to bear features that many users are going to find quite useful such as making the tedious job of redacting a bit easier. Consequently we applaud the efforts of FTI and its partners as needed steps in the ediscovery market.
EMC Smarts VoIP Performance Manager and Performance Reporter
EMC Corporation has
unveiled EMC Smarts VoIP Performance Manager and EMC Smarts VoIP Performance
Reporter, targeted at organizations that are seeking to maximize the
availability and performance of business-critical VoIP services through
comprehensive monitoring, alerting, diagnosis, and reporting on all aspects
that may impact IP telephony services. Smarts software scales to manage
hundreds of IP PBXs and hundreds of thousands of phones. With EMC Smarts
software, enterprise and managed service provider customers can model IT
components and their relationships across network, applications, and storage to
understand how service levels are affected. While other VoIP management tools
provide only network-centric or event-based information, Smarts software
provides in-depth, realtime views and flexible reporting on telephony
infrastructures, while demonstrating how that detailed information relates to
the end-user experience. Smarts VoIP Performance Manager and Smarts VoIP
Performance Reporter deliver realtime information about phone extensions, phone
calls, voice quality, availability of the telephone service, and
interconnections to telecommunications providers. Additionally, the solutions
monitor call volumes, call quality, and route patterns to ensure service levels
are being met and offer both realtime and historical performance and trend
reporting. At present, the Smarts solutions offer support for the following
systems: Avaya Communications Manager, Cisco Unified
Communications Manager, Cisco Unified CallManager,
and Cisco CallManager. Both Smarts VoIP Performance
Manager and Smarts VoIP Performance Reporter are now available.
This announcement is
the latest example of how EMC has continued to broaden its market position
first as a storage device vendor, then a Storage Infrastructure provider, and
now an Information Infrastructure provider. As in the past, this announcement
illustrates the ever broadening scope of what might be considered storage, or
rather now information infrastructure. Perhaps we are witnessing another
marketplace blurring of the lines this time between what would be considered
information and what would be considered the network. The uninterrupted flow
and movement of information, whether it is application, data, or what would
often be considered a network service, is fundamental to business operations.
In order to achieve this, organizations must be able to model the
infrastructure, and be very open to new definitions of the components as they
undoubtedly consider to morph over time.
From a best-practices or compliance perspective, this announcement makes a great deal of sense coming from EMC. Ensuring reliable use of VoIP is essential for organizations that are migrating from POTS as the potential value derived from integrated communications and information-sharing over IP is enormous. However, the information delivered from Smarts regarding the VoIP operation offers more than just simple operational data; it also offers a look into some aspects of the behavior of the business through the call-related activities. Although VoIP traffic may not be commonly be thought of as information like that in the database, file server, or email system, it is high time that it should. The contents of a VoIP conversation, provided that the organization choose to store the contents of said conversation, just as it might store email, could be just as valuable in the case of legal discovery as other documents stored within the organization. For less stringent matters of documenting operational activities, it still makes sense that VoIP would begin to fall under the scope of information as opposed to simply a network service. In either case, the complementary nature of other EMC technologies, such as content management, starts to become clear as do the opportunities for organizations to leverage these solutions in their daily operations and overall IT and datacenter strategy.
Sun Launches New Eco Innovation Initiative
Sun Microsystems has
announced a comprehensive suite of programs and solutions to help customers
design more energy-efficient, eco-responsible datacenters while saving money.
The Eco Innovation Initiative is an extension of Sun’s Eco Responsibility
Initiative, which was launched in November 2005. Among the tools announced are
three Eco Ready Kits. The Sun Eco Assessment Kit provides a methodical approach
to analyzing data center energy efficiency; the Sun Eco Optimization Kit helps
customers optimize, consolidate, refresh, and recycle their hardware
infrastructure; and the Sun Eco Virtualization Kit offers virtualization
solutions that enable better asset utilization and datacenter energy
efficiency. In addition, Sun announced the new Sun Eco Services Suite to help
customers improve their data center energy utilization, and tune their cooling
air distribution and other infrastructure systems that can impact both
operational costs and service levels. The Sun Eco Services Suite encompasses
four service offerings. The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Basic is
specifically designed to maximize power and cooling efficiency in the IT
infrastructure running Web-based services. The Sun Eco Assessment Service for
Datacenter, Advanced is a comprehensive datacenter service providing a
technical evaluation of datacenter energy use, cooling capacity, rack
placement, air distribution, and other environmental factors. The Sun Eco
Cooling Efficiency Service for Datacenter helps recover misused air
conditioning capacity and direct it to the areas where it is needed, improving
hardware cooling and increasing redundancy while helping reduce capital and
operating costs.
The Sun Eco
Optimization Service for Datacenter provides direct assistance with
implementation of corrective actions outlined in the Eco Assessment Service.
The greening of the
data center has been a very top-of-mind topic and we have seen many vendors
announcing products focused on raising datacenter energy efficiency. With this
announcement, we see Sun ratcheting up its competitive positioning to highlight
its holistic service strategy that exceeds the tactical approach of merely
releasing point products for specific segments of the larger datacenter energy
management and efficiency equation. Sun, along with Hewlett Packard and IBM, has
helped drive the discussion of energy efficiency in the data center, but for
Sun in particular, this announcement shows some of its unique technological capabilities
in its processors and systems. The inherent efficiencies of Sun’s latest
multithreaded multi-core processors can attain system utilization rates of up
to 80% (according to Sun), which implies substantial reductions in energy
consumed per processing task.
We believe the various
service offerings are especially important for organizations with limited IT
resources finding themselves up against the same space, power, and cooling
limitations as other perhaps larger organizations. In order to grasp the
reality of these limitations, objective assessment is an indispensable tool in
helping educate IT professionals as well as top-level management. Once
organizations have a clear understanding of their power and thermal envelopes
in the data center, then follow-on services such as optimization would become a
no-brainer for the data center manager. Although the reduced cost of power
should be welcomed, the reclamation of power and cooling capacity is ultimately
more important. In an era of blades, and other high-density form factors, this
headroom for growth is more important than ever. This is a winning scenario as
operations cost can decrease in the present but CAP EX for facilities in the
future can be reduced as well.
Overall, we are glad to see continued emphasis by the major systems vendors on the topic of energy efficiency in the data center. As each strives to put its best foot forward, the marketplace is enjoying some unparalleled R&D activity related to energy efficiency and are also being blessed by competitive pressures that are focusing the major players on their customers’ very real need to achieve more while spending less.