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Byte and Switch

Network Computing News


Will 3Par Be Good For HP? The Jury Is OutYesterday
HP has prevailed in its bidding war with Dell for 3Par, a high-end storage vendor, giving HP an important advantage in the converged infrastructure and cloud computing era. Dell withdrew from the bidding war for 3Par on Thursday, after its board voted not to try to counter the $2.4 billion cash offer ($33 per share) that HP made earlier. The bidding war started Aug. 16 with Dell's $18 a share, or $1.15 billion, offer. For coming in second, Dell will receive a $72 million "break-up fee" from 3Par.

The 3Par board "determined that HP's revised proposal constitutes a 'Superior Proposal'" as defined in the original merger agreement with Dell, according to a 3Par news release. 3Par is prized for its virtualized approach to providing multi-tenant storage arrays for private and public cloud computing. It is expected to advance HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy of developing a pool of server, storage and network IT resources for an enterprise that are all controlled through a common management platform. "That makes 3Par a good fit for HP's Converged Infrastructure, which depends on virtualization for many of its benefits," said Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc. "In a very real sense, cloud and utility computing can't exist without virtualization."

The flagship of the 3Par product line is its InServe Storage Servers line that is built with 3Par's InSpire Architecture. "It's a pretty innovative solution," said Andrew Reichman, seni



Isilon First To Offer Scale-Out iSCSI Block And File SolutionYesterday
Primarily known for its file-based, scale-out storage solutions, Isilon Systems is shipping what it calls the first and only, unified scale-out storage platform for the enterprise that consolidates file and block-based applications onto a single, shared pool of storage. It has integrated the iSCSI protocol into its OneFS operating system, and the resulting ability to access both file and block-level data opens up the enterprise virtualization market, which is 70-80 percent block-based. Company representatives claim other vendors like IBM, NetApp and HP are either exclusively block or file, but Isilon is the only vendor who can do both. Isilon's iSCSI functionality is available immediately and is free for existing customers.

Pushan Rinnen, research director at Gartner, agrees that this gives Isilon a leg up on the competition. The most significant aspect of this announcement is that Isilon will be the first major scale-out storage architecture vendor to offer file and block support with iSCSI, so it will bring to the market the ease of use of scale-out NAS into the block storage arena, she says. "The key thing is the simplicity of Isilon storage systems can now be applied to the block side of the world."

North West Geomatics Ltd., which specializes in digital remote sensing and digital aerial photography, has been using the product for three months and was able to consolidate its database usage to iSCSI, says John Welter, vice president of technology. "W



Xsigo Goes EthernetYesterday
The all-Ethernet data center took a step forward this week with Xsigo's introduction of its Ethernet-based IOV solution at VMworld. Xsigo is hardly the first vendor to introduce I/O Virtualization solutions based on Ethernet, which have been advocated for sometime by Aprius, Virtensys and Next I/O. Xsigo is the first vendor, however, to use the existing Ethernet adapter within the server to connect with the external card cage that houses the I/O adapter. Other solutions require replacing the adapter with a proprietary host bus adapter.

By not replacing the card within the server, Xsigo claims to dramatically reduce the time and complexity needed to enter into IOV. Data center managers need to simply plug-in the server to Xsigo's external chassis, load Xsigo's proprietary drivers and then enable IOV as needed. Xsigo contends that with competing solutions, data center managers would need to schedule server downtime, shut down server, remove cabling, de-rack the server, remove existing I/O and install new card and then re-rack server, install cabling, bring server up, load drivers, re-map I/O resources and bring applications back up.

"Be reasonable here," says Craig Thompson, vice president of marketing at Aprius "any virtual I/O infrastructure requires some modification of the environment; you're eliminating cards from servers as part of the move to pooling I/O, so you can't realize the efficiencies of virtual I/O in installed servers without touching so



EMC Beta Simplifies Infrastructure As A Service ManagementSeptember 1

EMC announced the beta program for Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0 at VMworld. The new version of the management software is designed to simplify the transition from physical to virtual to private cloud infrastructures. Ionix UIM 2.0 unifies and automates the management of Vblock Infrastructure Packages, part of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition formed by Cisco, EMC and its VMware subsidiary. Vblock packages offer a modular approach to infrastructure, combining virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies. According to EMC, the new software automates more than 60 operations that would normally be performed manually.

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), says the biggest change to Ionix UIM is the addition of storage. "UIM is significant in its ability to deliver Infrastructure as a Service, a single software package that can provision and configure servers, network and storage--essentially all the compute resources required for new applications. Compared to legacy, siloed and mostly manual configuration/provisioning processes, UIM can dramatically reduce the amount of time to provision new services," he says.

Laliberte says the new software gives EMC a step up on the competition. "Tools to automate the configuration and provisioning of the server domain have been around fo

VMware Shifts Pricing StrategySeptember 1
During the VMworld 2010 conference this week in San Francisco, virtualization software vendor VMware will implement a new pricing structure for its vCenter Server management suite that will be based on the number of virtual machines running on a virtualized server, not on the number of processors on the server. This shift in pricing policy, taking effect Sept. 1, is intended to better align the price of the software license to the value of virtualization technology to a customer. However, the change may cause disruption for some VMware customers who may have to pay more for VMware than they're used to.

The switch in pricing applies only to VMware vCenter, the company explained in a July 13 news release, which includes eight different management software products: vCenter Application Discovery Manager, AppSpeed,  Lab Manager, Capacity IQ, Configuration Manager, Site Recovery Manager, vCenter Chargeback and Lifecycle Manager.

The change in pricing is needed because, while virtualization has become the answer to "server sprawl" in data centers, the popularity of virtualization has created a totally new problem of "virtual machine sprawl," said David Floyer, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wikibon.org, a Web site where industry analysts, vendors and customers share information about tech industry issues.

"Doesn't the world change quickly?" Floyer observed. "Virtualization is a victim of its own success."

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