IBM has long done a better job than most IT vendors at pitching its offerings in terms of customer business value, rather than just technology. Yet, even at IBM, System x announcements have still often led with speeds and feeds, capacities and technologies. The latest eX5 generation takes a very different approach. It’s not that IBM won’t (happily!) sell you individual eX5 boxes if that’s what you want, but its lede is that something that’s tailored for a specific type of workload is where value most lies.

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. “Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year” you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude. Consider:
Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it’s hard to find a metaphor to describe it. [...]

Over time, technologies mature and move from the periphery to the core. Server virtualization is making that move today. It’s moving up to virtual infrastructure and even to a sort of datacenter meta-operating system as it morphs from point product for an individual server to one that spans many. And it’s gaining the maturity, performance, and other features needed to run resource-intensive business applications and to be trusted to do so reliably. This Spotlight tracks one product set, Sun’s latest Sun Fire servers based on AMD’s “Istanbul” generation of processors, as it scales up for virtualizing heavy-duty workloads.

Warning: This post is larded with acronyms. Sorry, it can’t be helped.
Fusion-io recently announced SMLC flash memory. What is SMLC? To understand how Fusion-io coined this acronym (and it is all theirs), you need to first become familiar with two more—SLC for Single Level Cell and MLC for Multi Level Cell. Both refer to types [...]

Until recently, Power blades did not really share in the clear upward trajectory of IBM’s Power-based servers–a shining light of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group (STG). However, the JS23 and JS43 take things up another notch. With these products, IBM now has a full-fledged Power blade product line for the first time. It also has a very compelling two-socket to four-socket blade upgrade story.

In “Storage Performance: The Coming Train Wreck,” we examined a number of mounting trends and forces that are putting seismic pressures on how both hardware and software are structured. But calamitous breaks are not inevitable. Relieving pressure at architectural stress points by modest increments

Performance gains in the IT components that process information continue to alarmingly outpace those used to store information. The resulting

Recently, Samsung’s semiconductor CEO Dr Chang Gyu Hwang implied that hard disk technology will soon go the way of the dodo. Paralleling (and even exceeding) Moore’s well-known law, Dr. Hwang has predicted that memory density will double very 12 months. And who could predict this better? Samsung is, after all, the largest manufacturer of memory [...]

Microprocessor performance has largely kept pace with Moore’s Law, which predicts that performance should double roughly every 18 months. Disk drive performance has not, however, improved at anywhere near the same pace. Today’s CPUs thus spend more and more time waiting for data to be read from disk into local memory, wasting much of the additional microprocessor muscle that spools out every few months. This growing gap increasingly diminishes performance and capacity gains for applications — limiting the productivity and capabilities of those applications’ users. The currently-prevailing trend towards server and storage consolidation, despite obvious benefits in easier manageability, only makes matters worse. A breakthrough in design is needed for high-end commercial and technical information architectures to continue meeting ever-growing demands upon them.

The largest single solid-state disk (SSD) sale ever — a whopping 2.5 terabytes — was recently delivered by Dynamic Solutions International, an OEM for Texas Memory Systems. But it will not, contrary to what one might expect, be used for some new, specialized, technical application. Instead, it’s being installed to accelerate access to an existing storage farm that has grown to more than 300 terabytes–and serves such pedestrian commercial applications as relational database software.

SSDs are at least two to three orders of magnitude faster than hard-disk drives, yet have nonetheless been limited to niche applications. Does this sale mean SSDs are going mainstream? No, not by itself. Three trends in the storage industry could, however, help SSDs become far more practical and attractive in mainstream datacenters than they’ve been since their appearance in the late 1970s.