IBM's 2007 '5 in 5'

As we head into 2012 it's been nearly 5 years since IBM's 2007 '5 in 5' selections. How close to the mark were they? 

In December 2007 IBM announced their second annual selection of 5 innovations their brightest sparks felt would change the way we work, live and play over the next 5 years. The selections were based upon societal trends and emerging technologies. 

Here's the 2007 predictions:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSk3zE74W2s

Money is the route of all e-val

At the click of a button IBM now offers clients the ability to analyse the costs involved with running their infrastructures. 

Do busy CIO's have enough time to identify potential savings? IBM obviously thinks not as they've introduced a new smarter computing simulator which demonstrates both areas of better efficiency and potential savings.

Layman's terms are often the best way to lay out areas of improvement. The simulator does just this providing both charts but also in-depth analysis of the data generated. 

The simulator takes into consideration a host of factors, asking the visitor to select either an IBM power system or IBM system z whilst considering workload, the clients industry and their current infrastructure. This can be x86, Itanium or Sun. 

IBM Smarter computing simulator is great for those who might have heard the phrase 'smarter computing' but have yet to fully investigate the message, as it shows exactly how it'll be delivered in any given environment. 

The simulator can be found at the link below: 

http://www.ibm.com/common/sc/simulator/

New System X Models

IBM Announce M4 Systems

IBM have announced new entry level boxes to the System X portfolio. The systems are aimed at SMB organisations but promise enterprise class performance.


The IBM  X3100 M4 becomes the newest member of the tower range, It's a single socket server powered by the Intel Xeon E3-1200 series, which offers performance 30% higher than any other single socket server on the market. 

IBM's newest rack offering has also been announced, the IBM x3250 M4. Aimed at workloads such as archiving, web serving and printing the system is perfect for the small enterprise infrastructure. Exciting new features include redundant power, optional HW RAID and server-level memory with error correction giving businesses 24 x 7 reliability. 

IBM x206M - Flashback

IBM xSeries x206m (8485) 

When? 

The IBM x206m was released the same year that the United Kingdom law banning fox hunting, hare coursing and other sports which kill wild mammals was enforced.... got it yet? that's right, 2005. 

IBM's xSeries 206 was the middle of the scale model out of three new servers that marked IBM's entrance into the lower end of a quite crowded SMB marketplace. The system was pitched at smaller business with a strict budget to adhere to.

What was really good? 

For not alot of cash the x206m offered functionality and tools normally associated with enterprise level boxes. Businesses without 24/7 colocation server facilities must have felt the high-availability technologies such as optional redundant power supplies and IBM's integrated ServeRAID-8e, which enables data redundancy in RAID 0 disk-striping and RAID 1 disk-mirroring configurations were great. 

What was really bad? 

If you were a network admin looking to setup shared printers or directories, this might have been a struggle as no guides were provided. Thankfully these can now be found online. 

Covenco UK Ltd are the brokerage division of the Covenco Group. Specializing in end of life and second user hardware they help clients pro long the life of their existing hardware infrastructure, offering: buy,sell and rental options across the complete IBM system x and storage portfolio

IBM Flashback - x3550

It's been a while since my last post, probably longer than I'd usually like to leave it, but you can put that down to a busy start to Q4.

IBM x3550 (7978) 

When? 

2006, the year that Saddam Hussein's death sentence was carried out and England's 'golden generation' of footballers were dumped out of the German hosted 2006 world cup on penalties to Portugal. This was the year that IBM announced it's first system which would incorporate Intel's highly anticipated Dempsey processor, seen as the savior which could slay the AMD 200 series. 

The X3550 was the first example of IBM's new Systems branding and previewed what was to come across all their tower, rack and blade products. What was previously known as the eserver and Xseries was replaced with the System family name, with the model number indicating what hardware each model possesses.

What was really good? 

IBM spared no expense with the the internal design, it really was second to none. I've just popped the top cover on one of these systems in our warehouse and the first thing you see is the enormous heat-sinks and bays.On powering on, I notice that the fans are all hot-swappable, and noise levels aren't excessive considering the amount of air that needs to be shifted. 

The X3550 also supported fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory, something that not all competitors were using at the time of release and which improved performance due to the use of advanced memory buffers.

What was really bad? 

 The x3550 systems shipped with Intel's Dempsey processor. At time of release the new low power Woodcrest 5100 wasn't to far away. I don't personally understand why anyone would have bought into Dempsey. The 5000 chipset did allow an upgrade path to the Woodcrest 5100 series, however, Dempsey take up was limited, as some of IBM's main competitors skipped it completely in favour of Woodcrest. 

Covenco UK Ltd are the brokerage division of the Covenco Group. Specializing in end of life and second user hardware they help clients pro long the life of their existing hardware infrastructure, offering: buy,sell and rental options across the complete IBM system x and storage portfolio

IBM Flashback

I spend 8 hours a day in a museum. It's not located in one of the worlds largest cities, nor is it under threat from the increasing digitization of information that other museums are seeing at the moment. In fact , it's not even open to the public. 

Maybe I've been guilty of neglecting some of the antiques that I see on a daily basis, writing them off as pre-historic and no longer relevant. Perhaps I'm just getting old and look back more fondly on the past, but of late I've had a real change of heart and have taken alot from being able to understand the path that leads us to the present, in some cases I think it can even help with understanding what's to come. 

I'd like to share some artifacts from the museum with you in a 'Flashback series' 

IBM xSeries 226 (8488)

When? 

In the same year that Pope John Paul passed on (2005) and 4 million mourners fled to the Vatican, IBM announced the IBM Extended Design Architecture initiative. The x226 was one of the first machines to deliver on this promise, providing 'affordable 2 way performance' 

What was really good? 

Not having the ability to install 2 processors may now seem unthinkable, but the x226 was one of the first in its range to offer this. Dual core processors and upto 6 hot-swappable drives were just some of the extensive components available for the x226 which also offered fantastic management functionality through the use of IBM Director. 

What was really bad? 

$2950 was considered alot of cash for a system which was aimed primarily at small businesses that were looking to make their way up the ladder. Having said this, if a business had already endured the pains of growth the x226 would happily cater for more than 20 employees. 

Covenco UK Ltd are the brokerage division of the Covenco Group. Specializing in end of life and second user hardware they help clients pro long the life of their existing hardware infrastructure, offering: buy,sell and rental options across the complete IBM system x and storage portfolio.  

Every silver lining has a cloud

With cloud being the current buzz, and not wanting their client base to stray, it was only going to be a matter of time until IBM announced their cloud offerings. And boy did they announce, in fact, I can't remember a bigger set of announcements from IBM all year? 

Whether you're a business looking at deploying a private cloud within your own firewalls or you're looking to tap into a public cloud, IBM has got your back, catering for both. 

My personal favourite (no bias) was the IBM starter kit for cloud. I remember seeing businesses take the early steps of dabbling with virtualisation in a small test environment 2 years ago, they're now at the point where 80-90% of their estate is virtualised, cloud ready and like 2 years prior they're wanting to dip their toe in the cloud shaped water. 

As it says on the tin, the IBM starter kit for cloud will give businesses the building blocks to create first time private clouds on virtualised system X and Bladecenter hardware. It doesn't have to stop there though, once comfortable with the cloud environment that they've created, IT managers can quickly and efficiently scale to more advanced cloud environments as the businesses demand for cloud computing increases. 

I read somewhere that only 33% of businesses have trialed cloud computing, so whether IBM's estimate of supporting 200 million users by the end of 2012 is ambitious,I'm not sure, but they're certainly putting some good foundations in place. 

IBM starter kit for cloud is available from Nov 18th 

Do you remember the first time?

Often considered the premium choice, unless you were scouring ebay or gumtree, you'd do well to buy an IBM system for less that £500. It appears, however, that this may no longer be the case with the news earlier this month that a pair of new, entry level systems will hit the market.

It's clear that the systems are aimed at first time server buyers, this is reflected when it comes to cost,  the x3100 M4 tower offering will retail from £430.00 Exc VAT. As you would expect, the x3250 M4 rack offering comes in slightly higher at a starting point of £975.00 for a basic config.

The tower box gives 32GB of memory capacity across 4 slots and will allow upto 12TB of storage using the new 3TB drives. The rack systems will provide identical memory but will allow only 6TB of internal storage across 2 hard drive slots. Those on a real budget will also be able to lower the base costs by opting for the pentium dual core processor option.

HP and Dell both have similar offerings which arrived earlier in the year, by simply logging onto the Dell site you can pick yourself up a basic power edge tower server for as little as £200.00.

A key differentiator for the IBM offerings are that they will use Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors - the E3-1200. A model which it's claimed will offer a 30% uplift on previous models.

I'm still waiting to see these systems first hand and as of yet have no idea of any benchmarks, hopefully I'll have the chance to get  hands on in the coming months.

Intel Xeon E5, what do we know?

With more businesses adopting the cloud, it was only a matter of time until a chip was designed to cater for the high-performance computing required by cloud providers.

The Xeon E5 will take over from where the Westmere architectured x5600 CPU's left off. So far, Intel have only released a few details, keeping their cards close to their chest no doubt, but what do we know for certain?

1) Cores: The new chip will have upto 8 cores.

2) Hardware: With manufacturers chomping at the bit, Intel have already agreed in excess of 400 server designs which will encorporate the new technology.

3) Throughput: Expect to see a huge enhancement in the throughput inside E5 based systems due to the PCI-E bus built into the processor.

4) Competition: The E5 will go head to head with the recently announced AMD Interlagos chips which will have upto 16 cores and has recently started shipping to server makers.

5) Target audience: It will be aimed at x86 servers with between two and four sockets.


We don't know for certain any details around the likes of clock speed or cache but I would expect to see the first IBM systems encorporating E5 around Q1 next year.

What next for IBM Watson?

IBM Watson hands down destroyed the two Jeopardy world champs, but what does the future hold for the super computer?

Watson, named after the IBM founder Thomas J, was built upon a cluster of 90 commercially available 750 Express systems and is so powerful that it rivals a humans ability to answer questions with confidence and accuracy.

It's the sheer horse power the system provides that allows it to incorporate a number of IBM exclusive technologies for the particular demands of processing a very large number of concurrent tasks, meaning it has the ability to search through 200 million pages of data in just a few small seconds.

But after it's game show exploits, where could such a clever piece of technology be used next? well, the answer   according to IBM could be the health care sector, after initial discussions with Well Point health plan who have agreed to begin designing suitable apps with IBM.

Imagine how great this could be? the ability to scan thousands of doctors notes at one time, identify vital sign patterns which may otherwise be overlooked by a busy doctor and prevent the next stage of an illness before it even occurs, I should imagine it'd also save a few pounds too.

But it doesn't have to stop at healthcare, I think if it's a success in this field we'll also see many other sectors taking an interest. For instance, technical call centres and help desks would definitely find a use for such analytics.

Testing is due to start early next year, It'll be interesting to see the results.

Reduce the hardware cost of virtualisation with AMD blades

The cost of current generation, 2nd user AMD blades are dramatically cheaper than their Intel counterparts. In many cases offering an average of 70% off their original list price. 

I'm finding more and more clients are taking advantage of the cheaper AMD offerings when purchasing new. They may not have the power or raw speed of some of the intel chips but with less cash available it appears that this is a sacrifice many are willing to take, this in turn has meant more and more creeping into our 2nd user stockholding, offering some very affordable solutions.

The BL685 is our most popular AMD blade across our second user stock holding. The G6 model provides 4 processor performance, perfect for virtualisation and also offers some of our deepest blade server discounts for example, a 2 Processor, Hexcore 2.4GHZ HP BL685 server, with 8GB of base RAM is available at £4,500 GBP, a 4k discount of list price.

If you're considering virtualising on blade hardware, please speak to us, we will reduce your hardware costs and can offer full consultation and design.

VDI without the use of a server?

Virtualization of the desktop simplified further with the use of client-side virtualization.

Desktop virtualization has always relied on the use of a type 1 or type 2 hypervisor to get the ball rolling. The use of said hypervisors means adding a virtual layer across each client which in turn puts a strain on its performance.

Manufacturers spend alot of time nowadays developing products and technologies which aim to simplify the user experience. Everybody is trying to remove a 'pain' , a fine example of this is the idiot proof GUI's we're now used to as standard on every SAN project. Anybody, it now seems, can be a storage admin.

A quite unique technology called Zirtu provides a low cost VDI option which will appeal to both enterprise and small to medium sized businesses. Aiming to expell the high costs and complexity many businesses still associate with VDI; Zirtu was designed from the ground up on the client side. Based on type 0 hypervisor technology, Zirtu will allow much more per-server density and performance comparable to enterprise priced package (at less than 150 USD, this certainly is not)

We'll no doubt see more and more of solutions based on type 0 hypervisors, let's have a look at this technology further in coming weeks.