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

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.

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…

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…

This is the first post on the new GCG blog on the new GCG website. It’s almost embarrassing how long it has taken us to put up a truly interactive web site that includes a blog and access to our research. (Correction to last sentence: it isn’t “almost embarrassing” – it’s truly embarrassing, particularly for an IT analyst firm.). But now is not the time for recriminations and blame plenty of time for finger pointing and show trials later, when we run out of stuff to blog about. So, let’s move on and talk about this shiny new site.

…..in the Nude! That’s right… buck nekid.