BeachRider

HP’s Acquisition Further Pits Tech Giants Against One Another

3Com's 8800/7900/7700 offerings aren't typically favored over CSCO's 6500/4500 strategy. Management of 10+ switches also favors CSCO (mainly due to software). HP even had CSCO switches for its blades, because their proprietary switches got into management problems interoperating with CSCO.

It is clear the CSCO 'declared war' when they issued blades, so some response from HP was needed, there just needs to be more on the planning-horizon to justify 3Com as the best response.

Dell Is Going Down the Wrong Path with Perot Systems

DELL/PER is a bigger risk than ORCL/JAVA was. These companies are trying to broaden their brand & increase services. The physical proximity of DELL/PER (just like ORCL/JAVA) is giving them a sense of 'alignment'. If they pull it off, then they move-in on IBM's services business in a broad way. The 'alignment' seems far-fetched, from some perspectives.

As a customer of services like these, I wish them the best of luck.

The Netbook as Cannibal: But Not for Apple

The article quickly swings between 'what is good for consumers' and 'what is good for vendors'. That is hard to do in an article this short.

Netbooks were a new low-end Windows/Linux platform, and now MacOS device. It plugged a gap between iPhone and laptops. If APPL didn't do it, they would have lost the segment to MS. It doesn't really overlap existing APPL products, so the sales cannibalism is limited to people that 'had enough money' to buy a Laptop, but 'only needed' this machine.

Worldwide Server and Storage Market Continues Its Worst Run

IBM's p-series numbers were certainly improved by merging in the i-series stuff onto a common platform. HP is waiting for their EMC big-giant-brain guy to clear his no-compete timeframe, so that he can bring magic to their storage. Sun is probably is more trouble. If the NY Times is right and Rock is cancelled, there could be an accelerated erosion in market share. Rock was their white-knight to stemming use impatience with progress of SPARC.

Virtualization Out, Expense Management In

Don't forget the virtualization also include disks. It is no mistake that VMWare is owned by a Disk-company. VMWare enables thin-provisioning of CPUs, memory, cable-infrastructure and disks. VMWare greatly improves the Windows capability to expand a filesystem on-demand and without service interruption.

Sun: Oracle Bid for Software Assets and Who Was 'Party B'?

Don't forget Fujitsu. They could have gained a lot from a Sun acquisition. They already know a lot about SPARC and the UNIX server environment. The IA32-blade stuff was the strangest part of Sun for them. This filing shows that Oracle found the hardware purchase to be the most difficult. It also shows that Sun had no other suitors for SPARC (or that deal would have worked). As it played out CSCO and DELL are unlikely because of the STK storage business.

Data Center Survey: Cisco's Server Push Sparks Interest

UCS has promise, because CSCO could do switch-tricks that others might not anticipate. It has risk, because they don't have the background in blade-server design and lifecycle. They are hoping that VMW will bridge their obvious deficiency in storage.
They are awfully closely tethered to VMW's ability to cope with any fancy wiring that they hope to deploy, though.
CSCO stock could go up on this kind of news, but only for non-short-term investors (I think the last two or three of them still have some uninvested capital!).

Oracle CEO to IBM, HP: Don't Get Your Hopes Up, We're Keeping Sun's Hardware

Remember that Intel has had significant difficulty in pushing much-higher-performance out of an IA32 CPU. Their recent performance gains have all come from parallel processing. They have been stuck at 2.2-3.5 GHz for five years. Sun has been stuck at much lower GHz limits. Niagara is nice on parallel processing, but they have run the chips at 0.7 to 1.8 GHz for the same time period. The 128 threads does NOT equate to 128 cores of throughput.
Let us see some SAP benchmarks (or something like it) from Niagara!

Oracle CEO to IBM, HP: Don't Get Your Hopes Up, We're Keeping Sun's Hardware

In the past, Oracle's could follow up such an announcement with 'Let us qualify what Mr. Ellison meant in his May 8 announcement'. Larry is the company's First-Visionary, but Oracle is also pragmatic in their follow-through.
I don't get the server-cost vs electric-cost claim. A 1kW T2000 uses no-more than $876/yr in electric. It costs ten-times that.
This kind of talk could scare companies (like mine) away from Oracle, if their interest is not focused on HP and IBM servers.

Sun-Oracle Deal Remakes the IT Landscape

I don't get why ORCL wanted SPARC or the IA32 business. I don't see HP as being interested in it, at all. IBM would expect ORCL to struggle with it.
I agree on the tape/disk stuff. It just aggravates HP (a traditional ORCL ally).
Did Ellison just need to bail out Sun's board of directors?

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

Raising the capability of the high-end is a good thing for Intel. They will create price pressure on IBM, existence-pressure on SPARC and judgment pressure on HP (for choosing Itanium in the UNIX market).

This isn't widely applicable to home-machines. Perhaps 5% of home computer users will have much use for this. Not trivial, but not a game changer.

These are still IA-32 chips. Acceptance/Understanding of x64 is a problem. Intel must make it clear that they have a long term solution and sever-off Itanium. Then the future will be clear.

Technically the Core i7 at 45 nm is still substantially slower than the Power 6 at 65 nm (core-per-core). Both are available as true quad-core setups, for several months now.

Saving electricity on a by-core basis will always be in SPARC's favor. The just run the thing at low GHz and cram 8-16 cores in each CPU. I am not sure how that translates into server-buy decisions, though.

Sun Micro: Put Spreads to Play Merger Arb?

JAVA and IBM are a culture clash, as seen here.

From a market perspective, it is better. JAVA, MySQL, Solaris and the UNIX development community bring value/cache to Sun, from IBM's perspective.

There never was a question that both Sun and IBM should aim their guns at Microsoft, not each other. Will they do that?

Overall Storage Revenue Slips, But EMC Remains on Top

Sun is losing ground here. From being a customer, I can also tell that they are losing their internal capability to build this market-share back up, should that opportunity arise.

Cisco's Odd, But Logical, Move into Servers

...Blade Servers that are optimized for virtualization...

I don't get it. You are either for blade servers, to minimize the footprint for physically isolated environments, or you are for significant virtualization.

Blade servers can be lashed together or made easily adaptable to chainging IP addresses, etc., but that isn't virtualization.

Servers for Virtualization are larger than 95% of all blade servers. They have extra memory and CPUs. They have faster-than-average I/O throughput.

Both are technologies worth pursuing. They are going different directions to accomplish a purpose, though.

Top Ten Tech Surprises in 2009: Low Probability, High Consequence Edition

Isn't Cisco trying to enhance their Intel-blade offerings? Doesn't Sun have a substantial knowledge of doing that from their Intel/AMD blade products? I don't know how the Sun/STK disk stuff would sell at Cisco, they don't have any offering in that area (could be good, though). The freeware might be useful to Cisco to augment existing Cisco products for Network monitoring that presume the use of Sun/Solaris. Purchasing Sun can't really be that expensive, anyway.

I would like to see these two get together.