IDEAS Insights

HP Introduces Collaborative Support for the Integrated Era

As part of a recent “Always On Support Services from HP” announcement, HP has formally introduced a new combined hardware maintenance and software support offering called Collaborative Support. Although HP has been active introducing new services in the proactive services space over the past few years, the introduction of Collaborative Support is the first new reactive maintenance offering to be added by the company in a very long time indeed. So, what is this new service, and how does it differ from what HP already offers?

Figure 1. DL380 G7 Three-Year Support Costs – Traditional HW + SW vs. Collaborative Support

EMC Takes Clouds to the Channel with VSPEX

Storage and server vendors alike are ramping up their efforts to deliver converged infrastructure systems, which combine storage, servers, and networking into a single, preintegrated solution. EMC has targeted this opportunity through its VCE partnership with Cisco and VMware. However, VCE products such as Vblock Infrastructure Platforms have appealed mainly to larger enterprises demanding improved ease of use and fast time to deployment, as well as service providers building out cloud services. Now, EMC has announced VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, a set of prevalidated configurations that includes servers, storage, networking, and virtualization. Delivered exclusively through the channel, VSPEX is aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that prefer more flexibility of choice in server, network, and virtualization technologies than is offered in Vblocks.

IDEAS Releases Free Storage Hypervisor Evaluation Tool

Server hypervisors have introduced a new level of efficiency to the IT environment, and many enterprises are eager to virtualize storage in similar fashion to maximize their productivity. To facilitate this process, IDEAS has created a storage hypervisor scorecard – a deep functional evaluation of storage hypervisor products from DataCore, IBM, and Virsto – in an effort to identify key storage hypervisor differentiators.

Multinational Server Parts Pricing Is Tricky

The implicit exchange rate, calculated using the price of Intel processors as sold by HP in different countries, shows surprising deviations from what one might expect. When identical goods are denominated in two different currencies and the economies in which the goods are sold are indistinguishable, the exchange rate, on average, will mean the goods are priced equally. This concept is called purchasing power parity (PPP). For example, The Economist magazine publishes a famous index to illustrate PPP using McDonald's Big Mac. If all economies were the same, the price of a Big Mac in one country's currency divided by the cost of the Big Mac in US dollars (USD) should equal the exchange rate. In reality, it doesn't, because economies are different. Asymco (a popular blog focused on Apple) recently illustrated this point by comparing the prices of numerous Apple products in Finland and Brazil with their prices in the United States. IDEAS has now extended the exchange rate analysis concept to the enterprise tech space by examining Intel processor prices from HP in different countries.

Figure - Percentage Differences in Processor Prices with the United States

Cisco UCS No Longer a Newcomer

Coincident with the third anniversary of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) launch, Cisco has announced three refreshed servers, plus new UCS networking and management components. Although UCS still lacks the brand recognition of ProLiant and System x, Cisco has established itself as a top-tier server vendor alongside Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, and Oracle.

IDEAS Trends Analysis Shows Server Efficiency Doubles Every Seven Quarters

IDEAS has followed up its recent release of the first update to the Server Performance Trend with the Server Efficiency Trend, which tracks industry server efficiency over time. The Server Efficiency Trend provides a “whole market” view of server efficiency and is powered by RPE2, the atomic unit of compute. The Server Efficiency Trend’s first update shows that long-term server efficiency, defined as server performance per watt, is doubling about every seven quarters.  So, what does this mean in practice, and how does server efficiency growth compare with server performance growth (as measured by the IDEAS Server Performance Trend) during the same period?

 
( Figure 1. IDEAS Server Efficiency Trend )
Source: Ideas International

IBM’s New Servers Bring Large Performance Gains

IBM's new generation of servers delivers sizeable performance gains, with the new x3650 M4 leading the TPC-E, SAP, and SPECvirt benchmarks at the time of the announcement. The IBM System x3650 M4, x3500 M4, and x3550 M4 are now in the fourth generation of production and utilize the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) product family. The new chips offer big gains over the previous Intel Xeon 5600 family. With the super-powerful E5-2600 as fuel, most of the M4 servers have a similarly enhanced performance profile. The new servers also deliver huge performance-per-dollar gains, giving customers more for their money.

Configuration Name	Release Date	Relative Performance	Date Price Recorded	Price	Inflation-Adjusted Dollars	Normalized Performance/Dollar
IBM System x3650 with Xeon X5470 (2 chips / 8 cores)	Jul-06	1	Oct-09	$9,108.00	$9,495.77	1
IBM System x3650 M2 with Xeon X5570 (2 chips / 8 cores)	Apr-09	2	Dec-10	$8,769.00	$9,004.59	2
IBM System x3650 M3 with Xeon X5690 (2 chips / 12 cores)	Mar-10	3	Mar-12	$9,343.00	$9,343.00	3
IBM System x3650 M4 with Xeon E5-2680 (2 chips / 16 cores)	Mar-12	5	Mar-12	$10,529.00	$10,529.00	4

Figure 1. Performance and Price/Performance of Different Generations of System x3650 Servers

Symantec Takes Lead in Snapshot Integration with NetBackup

The increasing demand for 24x7 availability of data can wreak havoc on backup operations. Advances in backup software technology have shortened backup windows, but such windows still exist and frequently disrupt host operations by disabling write access to achieve consistency. Snapshots provide a method to avoid consistency and host-disruption issues while delivering superior recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO), compared to traditional backup methods. Thus, snapshots are becoming the first line of defense in data protection. With the new Replication Director feature in its popular NetBackup software, Symantec has recognized this trend and stepped up efforts to further integrate snapshots into backup and recovery.

 

New Server Performance Trend Analysis

Many people have their own rules of thumb on how technology performance, price, and efficiency improve over time. But such estimates are often based on a “gut feeling” or small subsets of data. IDEAS is in a unique position in being be able to measure what is happening using a database built up over many years, and so provide input to the industry using a solid foundation of data. IDEAS has released the first of its new IDEAS Trends research focusing on server performance trends and plans to release similar efficiency and price trends in the coming weeks.

So what is the Server Performance Trend, and what is it telling us?

Intel’s Romley-EP Ratchets Up Performance and Energy Efficiency

On March 6, Intel launched its latest platform for two-socket servers. The Romley-EP platform consists of the E5-2600 Sandy Bridge-EP processors and the C600 Patsburg chipset. Following Intel’s Tick-Tock development model, the E5-2600 is fabricated using the same 32-nm process as the previous chip generation, but it incorporates substantial enhancements to help deliver better energy efficiency, higher performance, more security, and more intelligent management.