{"id":549183,"date":"2006-06-15T07:19:52","date_gmt":"2006-06-15T07:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/549183-corporate-computing-prepares-to-downsize.html"},"modified":"2006-06-15T07:19:52","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T07:19:52","slug":"corporate-computing-prepares-to-downsize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/549183-corporate-computing-prepares-to-downsize.html","title":{"rendered":"Corporate computing prepares to downsize"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past 40 years, businesses around the world have relied on companies such as International Business Machines and Hewlett-Packard to provide them with huge, custom-built mainframe computers to handle the brunt of their computing needs.<\/font> <\/p>\n

Over the past decade, however, a new paradigm has begun to emerge. Clusters of small servers, based on standardised processors, have begun to take on an increasing number of the complex computing tasks previously handled by their monolithic mainframe cousins. These"industry-standard" servers, based on the X86 processor architecture developed at Intel, have changed the way companies such as IBM, HP and Dell think about innovation.<\/font> <\/p>\n

In the fast-growing market for corporate computer systems, processor speed and computing power are no longer the top concerns; the locus of innovation has shifted instead towards solving customers’ business problems. "I’m not having conversations with customers about ‘how fast is your processor’. I’m having conversations saying ‘help me lower my power bill and labour cost’," says Paul Miller, vice-president of marketing for HP’s industry-standard servers group.<\/font> <\/p>\n

HP, the world leader in the X86 industry-standard server market, will today unveil a new line of machines featuring improvements designed to reduce the cost of powering, cooling and maintaining densely packed server clusters.<\/font> <\/p>\n

The move is part of a broader strategy to simplify and automate the maintenance of high-end corporate computer systems.<\/font> <\/p>\n

Dell, which along with IBM is racing to catch up with HP in the X86 market, last week unveiled its own new generation of servers designed to be easier to install and maintain.<\/font> <\/p>\n

"It’s not about speeds and feeds anymore," says Brand Anderson, a former HP executive who is now senior vice-president of Dell’s product group. "It’s about innovation that is consumer-focused."<\/font> <\/p>\n

Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, says that demand for such innovation is set to increase.<\/font> <\/p>\n

"Because of faster speeds, people can use industry-standard systems for things like web serving and infrastructure, and not just for serving up files," he says. "You see clusters of these systems being used for high-performance workloads, like database management."<\/font> <\/p>\n

Tim Dougherty, head of strategy at IBM’s X86 blade server unit, says the ability to add new servers to existing clusters has allowed the X86 platform to encroach on tasks traditionally handled by mainframes or Unix machines. "We have customers who in the past might have said: ‘I have no other choice, I have to move this to a mainframe’."<\/font> <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the new industry-standard environment, the cost of powering and cooling densely packed racks of hundreds or even thousands of industry-standard servers is one of the most pressing concerns.<\/font> <\/p>\n

"The data centres that were designed in 1999-2000 are already obsolete, just because of the power and cooling problem," says Dan Warmenhoven, chief executive of Network Appliance, one of the world’s biggest makers of networked storage equipment. "As things get more dense, the power consumption goes up enormously."<\/font> <\/p>\n

Companies have also been moving to help customers take better advantage of their existing IT infrastructure. Both IBM and HP have been promoting "virtualisation" software that allows a single server to run more than one computing process. Such systems can dramatically increase the computing power of an existing array of servers.<\/font> <\/p>\n

These advances mean industry-standard systems may soon overtake the mainframe as the dominant platform in the enterprise computer market.<\/font> <\/p>\n

For the moment, mainframes remain the tool of choice for the biggest computing tasks, but the rise of X86 is set to continue.<\/font> <\/p>\n

"The technology is not quite all there yet," says Mr Hewitt. "We’ve moved from having one big computer to this approach where there are several pieces to thepuzzle."<\/font> <\/p>\n

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A shift towards cheaper, simpler building blocks for corporate computer systems is changing the way information technology companies think about innovation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-549183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}