Hewlett Packard

Cisco’s timing for Unified Computing System - a tad off?

Does anyone else think it is a bad idea for Cisco Systems to enter the server market when the industry is experiencing the most significant year-over-year sales decline in history?

Worldwide server revenue declined 24 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and shipments dropped 24.2 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008, and no one went unscaved; all of the top five global server vendors - IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens - saw double-digit revenue declines for the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner, Inc.

Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipment Estimates, 1Q09 (Units)

Source: Gartner (June 2009)

Meanwhile, Cisco is marketing the hell out of its upcoming Unified Computing System (UCS), which is rumored to start shipping in a couple of weeks. The company has been offering tid bits of information about UCS through webcasts for months to build anticipation for the system. For instance, yesterday. Cisco announced it would offer rackmount servers in addition to blades.

But once the drumroll for UCS dies and the system actually ships, who’s buying?

I would love to be a fly on the wall in a Cisco executive meeting to hear their strategy with UCS. Do Cisco executives really think this is a good time to introduce an entirely new server system? And are they arrogant enough to think they can beat IBM, Dell and HP at their own game?

Boston Marathon website prepares for traffic surge

About a million people will visit the Boston Marathon website on Monday to check out the 113th annual race, so the IT pros supporting the website have been hard at work these past few weeks making sure the site doesn’t crash that day.

The Boston Athletic Association (BAA)’s technical director, John Burgholzer, spends three weeks prior to the race building the infrastructure at a colocation facility in Massachusetts to support the BAA’s website and other technologies surrounding the marathon, like the new AT&T Athlete Alert System, which delivers text messages to people who are tracking runners whenever their runners hits a checkpoint.

Burgholzer, who owns a technology consultancy company in North Reading, MA called Information Overload, uses Hewlett Packard (HP) blade servers to run everything. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t go the virtualization route, which would probably be quicker and easier, because he doesn’t know enough about it or trust the technology to handle the surge of users during race time.

“We haven’t tried out virtualization at all and I’m not sure we would. We get about 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent connections at peak time during the race, and I’m not sure virtualization would work for us performance wise,” Burgholzer said.

I’ve heard this apprehension about virtualization before, so it appears the technology is not as pervasive as companies like VMware would have us believe. Mainly because guys like Burgholzer are far too busy to learn about an entirely new technology, especially when their traditional approach works just fine for them.

So, Burgholzer adds seven HP ProLiant blade servers to the two that are typically used to run the website, for a total of nine blades running Windows 2003. HP blade servers were the right choice for the BAA because the servers require little space and are easier to manage that rack mount systems, plus, the organization had been using HP gear even before Burgholzer came on board nine years ago, and HP has always been “extremely helpful” at race time, he said.

Before the BAA moved from “a bunch of pizza boxes” to HP c-class blade servers in 2007, cabling and management “was a nightmare,” Burgholzer said. “We would build the data center up before the race using rented systems and people didn’t really care how it was set up, so we had a rats’ nest of cables in the back of the rack,” he said.

By switching to blade servers, the cabling is not an issue; he just slides new blades into the chassis as needed, and the management software makes configuartion easy, he said. The chassis has one gigabyte Ethernet connections on both the front and back ends of the server chassis, which he says are plenty, and he uses F5 Networks technology for load balancing.

With all of that, he’s confident there won’t be any issues with the website on Monday - knock on wood. “We have a pretty well-tuned website now; there was a bit of a bandwidth problem in 2007 and at the peak of the race we have seen the website running slower, but we have gotten it down now,” he said.

The day after the race, Burgholzer will start looking for ways to improve the website and new features to add for next year.