On the surface

Do we need another tablet device? Hasn’t everyone who needs one got an iPad or an Android tablet? What was Microsoft thinking when it announced its own manufactured Surface tablet device this week?

Microsoft has a mixed history with hardware – you perhaps tend to forget about things like the Microsoft mouse, the keyboard, the IntelliMouse, etc, which you see around and were successes. And we all know about the ubiquitous Xbox and Kinect, but conversation after conversation seems to remind us about the Zune mp3 player and the Kin smartphone (which went on sale and disappeared from market in an amazingly short period of time) that weren’t such great successes.

So what exactly has Microsoft announced? Well, we know that the Surface tablet will come in two versions — one that runs on ARM and one on Intel chips. There will be two versions of Windows 8 – one for each chip. We also know that it comes with a USB port and includes a snap-on cover that acts as a keyboard and there’s a kickstand. You can see a picture of it here. It’s 9.3 millimetres thick and it weighs under 1.5 pounds (if I’m allowed to mix Imperial and metric units), which is a bit thinner and a bit heavier than the iPad. The screen size is slightly larger and (like Android devices) uses the more preferable 16:9 aspect ratio – iPad’s use a 4:3 ratio (like old-style TVs). We also know the Windows 8 Pro version on Intel will be slightly thicker and will have a stylus to allow users to make handwritten notes on documents!

That’s about all the detail – the rest is a bit vague, such as delivery dates, prices, etc. If the ARM version is the same price as an Android tablet, and offers much the same capability, what’s the selling point? If it offered Office bundled in, that might work – certainly in a business sense.

If the Intel version actually ran applications rather than cut-down apps – and bear in mind Apple has scaled down applications to add to the apps available with each iPad announcement – then Microsoft will have a winner. The pricing problem is that a laptop could be cheaper than the new Surface tablet. Therefore the tablet has to score points in terms of thinness in order to justify the extra money spent on it. So how much RAM are you going to be able to have? What can you actually run on it? These, along with price, are the questions that businesses are going to ask.

With the soaring sales of tablet devices, Microsoft needs to be in this space. But the fact they are making their own hardware (like Apple) must come as a blow to other hardware companies, like Dell and HP, that build Windows-based tablets.

To be honest, I’d really like an ultra-thin tablet-like PC that I could do real work on using high-end applications (such as Adobe’s Creative Suite). One that I could carry around like a book, that didn’t need its own bag and other baggage. One with battery life that lasts for a long meeting – at least three hours – while I’m doing more than just browsing minutes in Word and forecasts in Excel.

One day!

One a completely different topic, you’ll be interested to know that Mozilla (the Firefox browser people) have announced Thimble, which is part of the Webmaker project. Thimble is designed to help people write and edit basic HTML and CSS in a Web-based code editor. You can start from scratch or pick a project. Like Dreamweaver, you get instant previews. There’s a code editor on the left and your preview on the right. You can then publish your site to the Web in a Webmaker domain with just one click. Have a go at https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor.

Operations management still growing

Gartner has produced figures showing that the Worldwide IT Operations Management (ITOM) software revenue increased by 8.7 percent last year and totalled $18.3 billion.

Why is this important? Let me suggest that we have been in or around recession since 2008, making most organizations try to cut their spending and try to save as much money as possible until the markets start moving again. Clearly, operations management is too important to be left – making it appear fairly central to the sucess (or perhaps survival) of many organizations.

Commenting on the figures, Laurie Wurster, Research Director with Gartner said: “The market showed growth for the second consecutive year, after a sharp decline in 2009, despite slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity. We saw consistent resilience in 2011, with the ITOM software market expanding both in terms of revenue and worldwide markets.”

So which software vendors are benefiting from this growth in the market? Well, it seems there are five that mananged 53.5 percent of the revenue between them. And yet again, in that number one spot is IBM. Second is CA Technologies, at least $1 billion behind the leader. Then comes BMC, Microsoft, and HP.

IBM was in pole position in the combined mainframe management segments, which accounted for 28 percent of its total ITOM software revenue of $3.3 billion.

CA Technologies was in second place for the third year running, with revenue growth ahead of the overall market.

BMC Software enjoyed 8.2 percent growth, with 31 percent of its growth coming from the mainframe. You may wonder whether that makes it a more tastey takeover target!

Microsoft saw impressive growth of 11.2 percent. Most of its sales are associated with its Windows product, of course.

It’ll be interesting to see where HP is next year. The company may be forced to take its eye off the ball as they go to court against Oracle. And then there’s the 25000 jobs that are being cut.

I think the important point to take away from this story is that organizations – whether they’re large mainframe-based sites or Windows sites – are looking to manage their operations in new and developing ways. This must be an indication of their desire to get the world economy moving again, and, more importantly for them, be well placed to take advantage when it is.

Storage and expertise – the PureSystems box

On Wednesday 11 April, IBM introduced to the world the PureSystems family of data centre infrastructure products. The idea behind them is that they will simplify the management, automation, and running of enterprise applications on a range of virtualization technologies.

This new line of integrated systems has the ability to automatically handle everyday tasks such as configuration and updates, which reduced the amount of time needed to get applications up and running and also reduces the management overhead. Therefore, IT staff are freed up to get on with other work. Users gain the expertise of 125 independent software vendors (such as VMware, SugarCRM, Infor, and Juniper Networks) who developed what IBM calls “patterns of expertise” that automate many common IT and industry tasks such as deployment, configuration, and upgrading of applications onto the appliances. “For example, a customer relationship management program that used to take three days to deploy can now be deployed in under one hour”, claims IBM. In addition, companies can scale their operations very quickly, allowing them to go from a small number of computer systems in one site to service on the cloud, with systems that can be accessed around the world.

IBM proudly described its PureSystems family as one of the most significant announcements of the last 20 years, and said it is the result of $2bn research and development spend over many years.

The announcement might be viewed as a way for IBM to match competitors Oracle, HP, and Cisco Systems, who have all been promoting converged infrastructure – integrating server, storage, networking, and other technologies into a single managed architecture. As a sweetener, IBM says it will buy back servers, ie those sourced from HP and Oracle, from clients who migrate to PureSystems.

As mentioned above, each PureSystems package combines servers, storage, networking and virtualization technologies into a single appliance, with additional services from IBM. The PureSystems initially come in two versions – PureFlex System (which is a basic infrastructure platform for self-service private clouds), and PureApplication System (which includes IBM’s WebSphere middleware and DB2 database and can be used for Web and database applications). The systems support the Hyper-V, KVM, Power-V, and ESX hypervisors from Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM and VMware, respectively, and are based on either Intel or IBM Power processors. Storage is provided by IBM’s Storwize V7000 appliances, and networking can be a choice of either Brocade, Cisco, or Juniper kit.

IBM has included a cloud self-service and provisioning interface in the PureSystems, based on the same technology used in IBM’s public SmartCloud services, giving customers a ready-to-go cloud computing system in a box, they said.

Customers are able to define the PureFlex configuration, while the PureApplication System is available in four configurations ranging from 96 CPU cores and 1.5TB of memory, up to 608 cores and 9.7TB of memory.

IT departments will be pleased to know that IBM is offering a single support hotline for the entire system, whether an issue is with the hardware or software, while there is also just a single procurement process for the entire system.

“You can order just one box with one pin number, and it has on it all you need to get an out-of-box experience straight away with the software, the middleware, the hardware, storage, the network fabric”, claimed Graham Spittle, chief technology officer for IBM in Europe.

There is also just a single management console, according to IBM, although they can also integrate with IBM’s Tivoli platform for customers who’ve standardized on that for management.

Pricing for the PureSystem family starts at about $100,000.

Lumbering sluggers come out ducking and weaving

OK – that’s as far as I intend to go with sport metaphors. I’m talking about IBM and Oracle and where their long-term war is taking them next.

You’ll remember that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems early last year for $7.4 billion. Since then, IBM has been hoovering up customers. In August, market researchers IDC were saying that IBM had grown its Unix revenues by 15 percent in the second quarter and its market share by 6 percent. Adding that Oracle had lost share.

IBM claims that in the second quarter, its Power Systems unit acquired 334 customers from competitors, with 210 of those coming from Oracle. And, just to show that they are on a war footing and it’s not just friendly rivalry, IBM says that its formal migration program, which entices customers to move to IBM systems, has gained 7,210 server and storage customers from rivals since its inception in 2006.

There is a third player on the pitch – HP – which has been experiencing pretty dire times itself recently. IBM’s saying it’s acquired 110 users from HP. HP recently announced that Meg Whitman, the former CEO at eBay, will take over from Leo Apotheker, who’s only been there a year. Why dump Apothekar? No other reason than the company losing half it’s market value in the time Apothekar has been in charge!

There were even rumours (and, who knows, it might still happen) that Oracle would scoop up HP and add it to its own portfolio. Others suggest that the problems Oracle experienced with Sun’s SPARC hardware business may convince it to keep away from HP’s Itanium. Perhaps IBM might buy HP? That last sentence should come enclosed in tags!

But after a longish period of haemorrhaging its Sun SPARC users and having to put up with IBM’s suitably smug grins, Oracle has now announced its high-end SuperCluster system powered by its new T4 SPARC chip. With an estimated 50,000 SPARC customers, it’s a business well-worth hanging on to.

The SuperCluster T4-4 is a general-purpose system offering a claimed 33 percent more price/performance than IBM’s largest Power servers and (again claimed) more than 50 percent more price/performance than an Itanium-based Integrity server from HP.

The SuperCluster is powered by Oracle’s eight-core T4 chip, which Oracle claims offers five times the performance of the current 16-core T3. The SuperCluster also includes the capabilities of Oracle’s existing Exadata database system and Exalogic cloud-in-a-box offering, both of which are powered by x86 chips from Intel.

The SuperCluster runs the current Solaris 10 operating system or the new Solaris 11, and will run any applications that its SPARC customers might run.

We can only wait and see what IBM will produce when it comes out of its corner. It certainly knows that the fight is back on.

Johnny head-in-the-clouds

Almost everyone is predicting 2011 will be the year when cloud computing becomes a reality for many organizations. CA produced surveys towards the end of last year showing this to be part of the planning of most of the organizations they surveyed. Other surveys, like BMC’s and the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook found that cloud computing wasn’t quite on the radar of many of the people who actually do the day-to-day systems work.

This week has seen a report from IBM suggesting that 70 percent of small and medium businesses – perhaps not its usual massive mainframe users – are either planning to, or already do, deploy cloud-based IT infrastructures to improve their performance and reduce costs. For the report, IBM surveyed 2,112 business and information technology decision makers at midsize businesses around the world, and the publication is called Inside the Midmarket: A 2011 Perspective.

Also in the report was a finding that these same SMBs were moving from cost control to growth in terms of cloud computing. The report says that 62 percent of surveyed organizations are planning to increase their IT budgets in the next year or so. Now one spin on that would be that the world is out of recession and all’s good with the world. An alternative way of looking at it is to say that most sites have reduced or kept spending the same for the past two years and there’s a huge amount of pressure – like a boiling kettle – to update hardware and software.

The survey also found that 70 percent of respondents are actively pursuing business analytics to help give them some kind of insights into the huge amounts of data they’ve generated. The survey also found that 66 percent of respondents say they are embracing the benefits of cloud computing to optimize costs and redundancy while increasing uptime and scalability.

Obviously cloud computing is new to so many of the organizations surveyed and perhaps not surprisingly it was found that more than 70 percent are looking for local business partners with industry expertise for more of a consultative – rather than a purely transactional – relationship.

In other news (as they say) the new CEO at HP, Leo Apotheker is looking to make his company a leader in the development of infrastructure and platform Cloud services with an open Cloud, which many people assume will compete directly with Google's similar Cloud-based offering.

My final words of ‘wisdom’ on this matter is that we all think we know what we mean by cloud, but for many organizations it might be like shopping for a ‘car’ or ‘automobile’. You could end up with a Rolls Royce or second-hand Reliant Robin! As you work your way down into the nitty gritty details of what your organization needs, you can find cloud computing to be a fairly nebulous term!

DB2 – faster than a speeding bullet?

Last week, IBM sent out press releases saying that it has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute. And in case you don't realise just how fast that is, the press releases goes on to inform us that it beats HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35%!

We're told that: "The results place IBM in a unique position as the undeniable leader. With these new clustered results (and with the long-standing single system result), IBM has demonstrated its ability to scale up to handle higher transaction loads and to scale out to optimize more types of workloads than the competition."

This result is the largest ever TPC-C result published (dated 17 August 2010) and was obtained on a cluster of three IBM Power 780 servers featuring a storage subsystem with 116TB of Solid State Drives (SSDs) and running DB2 9.7.

Just to rub in the fact that it beats the Old rival, Oracle, the press releases goes on to inform us that: "The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction. IBM's performance is also more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result, 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance."

The new TPC-C benchmark result uses standard IBM software. DB2 9.7 has been around since June 2009, and AIX 6.1 was released in November 2007. IBM says that the selection of software versions reflected levels currently in use by a large number of their clients.

IBM highlights the fact that the IBM TPC-C results on POWER7 technology shows off IBM Storage technology in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs), which enable higher throughput and lower response times. SSDs also provide reliability, lower energy usage, less cooling requirements, and the ability to reduce data centre footprints. The total storage used was over 800TB while the Oracle/Sun configuration had 686.6TB of total storage.

The Oracle/Sun cluster is 71% more expensive based on published price/performance relative to the IBM Power 780 cluster result. The total system cost of the Sun cluster is 26% greater than the total system cost of the IBM cluster. Because of different discount structures, care should be taken in comparing individual price components.

As a result of these differences, the TPC does not allow comparisons using TPC price information on anything other than the total configuration. The IBM Power 780 with DB2 9.7 result yields greater than 10 million tpmC for IBM (a feat Oracle hasn't accomplished) and significantly better price/performance for the IBM solution.

The configuration for this benchmark achieves an estimated consumption of 65.1 kWatts or 6.3 kWatts per million tpmC, 35% better than the Sun cluster energy consumption estimate of 73.9kWatts or 9.7 kWatts per million tpmC.

You get the idea anyway – there's more of the same in the press release. The bottom line is that IBM can now claim to provide performance in excess of double-digits (10 Million Transactions Per Minute), which, they say, no-one else can do.