Kind of a strange situation on the press/analyst call after the joint Sun/IBM press conference (see separate post for details)a reporter (or analyst, I’m not saying which or using any names) asked a question. In the background, we could clearly hear a busy street scene and distant sirens. As he (or she) asked his (or her) question (yeah, I’ll knock the him/her stuff off now), we could hear stress in the voice and the sirens growing constantly closer. After the question was finished, we could hear the sirens come alarmingly close even more street sounds.Then the person on the phone said “oh sh*t”and dropped off the line.

I did my scheduled NGDC (Next Generation Data Center) virtualization tutorial session yesterday morning. It went the full three hours, five minutes over in fact, but I scheduled two breaks to keep it from becoming a total PowerPoint death march. We covered a lot of ground, beginning with current data center problems (server sprawl, complexity, power/cooling/floor space challenges, etc.) From there we discussed how virtualization, particularly in an x86 server context, can go a long way towards solving the problems or at least relieving some of the pain. We looked at benefits real customers are getting from x86 consolidation talked through a few case studies, and then took a relaxing break. We then covered the various methods to virtualize x86 boxes (hypervisor, O/S virtualization, non-native virtualization, etc.) and wrapped up with the GCG vision for data center peace, harmony, and efficiency.

Sun Microsystems publicly detailed their new Niagara II processor yesterday. Sun announced the processor with an intro presentation titled “ULTRASPARC T2: The Highest Performing, Most Energy Efficient Processor”. Typical understatement from Sun; when will these guys get develop some self esteem? Niagara II is an 8-core, 64-thread cpu that shows considerable improvement over their Niagara I processor. Each core now has its own floating point unit, which bumps FP performance by 10x, according to Sun. They also state that the 1.4GHz Niagara II provides double the throughput of Niagara I, at the same clock speed. In addition, Sun highlighted Niagara II’s meager energy requirements, benchmark performance, and integrated I/O. All the details are here.

Sun’s overarching theme (and value proposition) is that Niagara II offers industry leading power per core

I received a press release today that was different from the usual stuff that relentlessly flows through my inbox. IBM was touting the fact that their POWER chips are playing a key role in the upcoming (tomorrow) launch of NASA’s newest Mars mission. The goal is to fly the spacecraft 423 million miles, safely land a rover on the surface, and then direct it towards the North Pole region where it will collect and analyze samples to see if there is (or was) life in the red rock of Mars. It will also give us a chance to see if the Soviets have claimed the Martian North Pole as their property.

A story in eWeek today showed just how bad a data center migration can get. Hostway, a large web hosting company with as many as 600,000 customers, was moving 3,700 servers (representing roughly 3,000 customer accounts) 270 miles from one facility to another. They prepared their customers, many of them small businesses, for 12 to 15 hours of downtime. This was on July 28; many of the customers were still down on July 30th, and a significant number are still down today. For a small business, even anticipated downtime can be costly in terms of lost business and communications. When the length of the outage goes from hours to days, the level of pain goes from bad to excruciating. What’s worse is that the company isn’t communicating with the affected customers, tech support lines are down, and frantic emails are going unanswered.

A strange and disturbing battle of wits has developed between me and my neighborhood UPS delivery guy. It seems that the standard customer-delivery guy relationship has inexplicably changed over the past several months. My expectations have remained the same: I buy things from various places, and the delivery guy brings them to my home and/or home office. Usually there is someone here to take delivery, but if there isn’t, they have been explicitly authorized to leave items at the door. This has all worked out brilliantly over the past ten years. Everybody is a winner: I get my stuff in a timely manner, and UPS gets paid.
Now it seems that this successful relationship has changed into a competition with winners and losers.

We were on hand for Sun’s industry analyst call today as they provided the details behind their FY07 financial results. It was a banner year for Sun, with the company healthier than any time since, let’s see, probably 2000. Overall revenue was up a little over 6%, even though overall product revenue was down from last year – mainly due to reduced storage sales (down 10%).

Sun didn’t provide a breakdown of individual product sales or unit numbers, but they did throw out a few numbers briefly, here are some of the highlights

I’ll be speaking at the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) conference, which is being held in conjunction with LinuxWorld San Francisco in early August. I’ll be running a virtualization tutorial from 9:00 am to noon on Monday, August 6th. We’re…

Sun Microsystems and Senator Charles Grassley crossed swords over the prices that Sun is charging the Feds. At issue is the government contention that Sun has sold products to non-GSA customers at prices lower than the current GSA contract. The contract requires vendors to give the government their best pricing. Violation of this clause isn’t trivial and can have substantial negative consequences, ranging from steep fines to suspension of rights to sell to federal entities.

VMware press released their benchmark suite today. The new benchmark, cunningly named VMmark;, is the first publicly released x86 multi-workload system performance test. Briefly, the suite tests server performance by running six common workloads simultaneously – including email (Exchange), a java server, a standby server, an Apache web server running on Linux, an Oracle database, and a file server. More details on workloads, methodology, and metrics are here…