The last day of March 2009 Intel officially unveiled its brand new Nehalem core architecture under the Xeon 5500 product name umbrella. There is not much to say about it other than it's impressive from a performance perspective. Just to give you a sense of what we are talking about the new product - only available for …

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On Monday 16th Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System (UCS). A few days ago I have been briefed by some local Cisco guys about the product (err, the architecture as they stressed). I assume that people reading this post know what Cisco is doing and are familiar with the announcement. In a nutshell they have …

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A few weeks ago I wrote a tutorial on how to deploy Hyper-V R2 on the IBM BladeCenter S where I demonstrated, among other things, how to LiveMigrate from one blade to another. I didn't spend too much time commenting on the implications this will have in the market. In this article, I'd like to comment on some of those …

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I have just got back from VMworld 2009 Europe in Cannes. It was an interesting week and not just because we were in Cote D'Azur (Azur, not Azure like in Windows Azure). There have been a few interesting announcements, demo and breakout sessions going on at the Palais de Festival during the week so it would be difficult …

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My good friend at Microsoft, Giorgio Malusardi, noticed my post "Enterprise Virtualization in a Box" which was essentially an example of how to create a BladeCenter-contained VMware-enabled data center in a box (including servers, storage and networking). Giorgio challenged me with the task to create …

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VMworld 2009 Europe is coming (last week of February). I was planning to go and I have just found out that they have also accepted one of the two topics I submitted for the break-out sessions. The title of the session that got selected is: Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors? This …

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In this post I am going to talk about a specific piece of hardware technology that is intercepting a specific virtualization industry trend. This piece of technology is called BladeCenter S. Those of you that have been reading my blog know I don't usually talk about IBM specific stuff (I work for IBM) but this time I …

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Early in 2007 I wrote a post whose title was "Will Microsoft Sunset VMware?". You can read it here. The closing of that post was: > This analysis is as of April 2007. I am sure many things can and will change and I might be proven wrong. Let's see what happens. I went through it this morning and I have to …

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I have been working in IT for about 17 years now, 14 of which at IBM. Since the first day I was immediately exposed to the concept of a centralized IT where everything is fully controlled, fully secured, fully automated and easy to manage within the data center boundaries; on the other hand whatever sits outside of the …

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I think he did but, relax Paul, I am not going to sue you... ;-) Joking aside I was sitting at the VMworld 2008 Keynote in Las Vegas back on Monday last week and I was somewhat surprised (perhaps even pleased) to see Paul touching on many innovative concepts I have been talking about last year at VMworld 2007 in my …

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