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.