IT Blog Last time on As the Benchmark Turns, we saw NetApp pull a fast one on EMC. This week's episode brings us into the torrid realm of server virtualization and Hyper-V. It began with a press release from QLogic and Microsoft lauding benchmark results showing "near-native throughput" on Hyper-V hosts at...
IT Blog Pillar Data Systems has published its first system test benchmarks for the Axiom 600 disk arrayvia the Storage Performance Council (SPC). It tested a system with 42 total TB, including10 TB used and mirrored to allocate a total of about 20 TB. The results were 64,992 total IOPS. These numbers...
SAN, Strategic storage vendors, Storage market research reports IT Blog For some time now, Linux has been the dominant operating system in high performance computing. For everything from IBM, with its rockstar status supercomputer Blue Gene, to NEC or U.S. HPC players SGI and HP--the bulk of the leading HPC clusters today are Linux-based. Four of the top five HPC sys...
IT Blog (And by "more fun," of course, we mean more expensive, frustrating, damaging and high-risk) We recently gave you some insight into five business challenges cloud resellers must anticipate when partnering with a cloud provider. Some news out of the UK cloud market is making me wonder if we're due fo...
cloud partners, cloud channel, cloud resellers IT Blog Big players in the virtualization world griped about the absence of performance benchmarks for virtual machines on CIO Talk Radioyesterday and discussed some of the issues surrounding virtualization standards. Guests on the show included: Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualizati...
hardware, Networking, Virtualization IT Blog One of the peculiar properties of the security research community is the reflexive reactions of some of its members to new work by other researchers. In most cases, researchers tend to compliment one another when they've produced something new. But there always seems to be a small subset of research...
IT Blog A long standing standards body is taking a stab at measuring SOA performance. TheSPEC benchmark groupis interested in hearing from people on this topic. Current SPEC member companies committed to developing a new SOA application measurement standard include IBM, Oracle and VMware. The benchmark...
IT Blog The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC)is preparing to release a newbenchmark to measure server energy consumption, anddetailed the benchmarkina video this week. The TPC's four active benchmarks are TPC-C and TPC-E for online transaction processing, TPC-H for decision su...
IT Blog Your largest customer called and asked for your SAS70 audit report and which type of audit was completed? Do you perform a Type I or II? Dont flip a coin; you must consider your objectives. A SAS 70 Type I audit report provides an audit opinion of your Companies operating environment. ...
IT Blog And tonight on Friday Night Company-Fights: The Undercard: AMD vs. Intel, Windows vs. Linux, and Pepsi vs. Coke. The Main Event: XenSource vs. VMware. Ok, here's my beef. I hate all industry wherein marketing rules over substance, and in this case, I'm calling out both XenSource and VMware for being...
Uncategorized, VMware, Xen IT Blog Flash doesnt need to constantly refresh the data on the chip the way that DRAM does, so it consumes about a tenth of the power when handling a gigabyte of data. Stacey Higginbotham, In a Flash Spansion Cuts Power Traditionally, the way to handle more information has been to buy more serve...
IT Blog Heweltt-Packard has fired the latest shot at EMC in the battle over performance benchmarks. HP this week posted records formegabytes per secondand price performance in SPC-2 performance benchmark testing of its XP24000 enterprise SAN array, and immediately called out EMC for its refusal to sub...
IT Blog In mysoftware testingwork, I've found that video configuration consistency is a critical factor in a systems performance and behavior under test conditions andan important factor in delivering technology in the intended fashion.Naturally, traditional resolution requirements for a c...
IT Blog Anyone with five minutes of IT experience knows that vendors sometimes publish bogus benchmarks that portray their products in the best of all possible lights. Virtualization guru and Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf recently uncovered a particularly spectacular example of this, courtesy of QLo...
Uncategorized, Virtualization, Virtual machine IT Blog This week I wrote a follow up story on VMware Inc.'s virtualization performance benchmarking tool, VMmark, and found it is mainly used by vendors as a way to market their servers. Server vendors run the VMmark test under a set of guidelines and submit results to VMware for posting. It is my suspici...
IT Blog Rackspace has commissioned a set of benchmarks to highlight performance differences between Rackspace and Amazon EC2. "Benchmarks!" you explode, your exquisitely sensitive logical faculties coruscating in outrage. "Benchmarks are vendor-driven popularity contests that cherrypick tests for results! ...
cloud benchmarks, cloud metrics, sick man in a sack race IT Blog Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published a story about an increase in business travel expenses. It cited data showing that corporate employees were spending more on meals, entertainment and hotels, and doing it in style. The data all came courtesy of Concur, maker of an online expense manag...
SaaS, NetSuite, benchmarking data IT Blog Holy moly! Firefox 4 hit the streets on Tuesday, March 22, and quickly blew away IE 9 download numbers from the previous week. By the end of the first day, the count topped4.7 million (ahead of IE 9's 2.35 million in its first 24 hours, as tallied in this CNET story), and it topped10 million by ...
Firefox 4 downloads blow IE 9 completely away, Firefox 4 first-day tally double IE 9's take (4.7M vs 2.35M) IT Blog How do you estimate the size of SOA or EAI projects? I am not a metric expert, but I think use case point (UCP) and function point (FP) are not suitable for SOA and EAI. UCP and FP are referring to the users view of system rather than a technical aspect. SOA and mainly EAI are not about the users ...
IT Blog In case you needed any more evidence that virtualization is making serious inroads in the enterprise, the Center for Internet Security this week released a set of benchmarks for securing virtual machines. The guidelines are generic, non-vendor specific suggestions for locking down virtual environmen...
IT Blog CommVault, a New Jersey-based customer data management firm, recently conducted a benchmark survey of its contact center support services and achieved a 97% customer satisfaction rating, far above the rates similar sized organizations score, according to the Help Desk Institute benchmarks.. Robert ...
IT Blog As we see more companies begin Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, we spend more time explaining storage issues related both to server virtualization and VDI. VDI deployments depend heavily on the intelligent usage of storage and on high-capability storage systems. The typical VDI pro...
IT Blog Which is correct? According to some privacy experts, Google's use of Web bugs violates the company's __________ injunction against "being evil." a. long standing b. long-standing Answer: b Explanation: The reason to hyphenate long-standing is the same as for a lot of other compound words --...
CIO, long-standing or long standing, hyphenation IT Blog Responding to [Intel's proactive] announcement Thursday that it was severing ties with the One Laptop Per Child project, Mr. Negroponte said, "They've been doing damage in the marketplace with countries since the day we started. And after we made peace with them, they did more damage." Steve St...
IT Blog I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job. John C. Dvorak, The Sun-MySQL deal stinks Let's begin by putting MySQL in perspective: It's the most competitive and bigge...
Oracle, Sun, conspiracy theories 
