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July 30, 2007

Linksys go bye-bye...

this is no big shock:

Cisco will ditch the Linksys brand to bring all SMB and consumer gear under its single networking omnicorp banner.

CEO John Chambers blabbed the plan to journalists at a European roundtable last week.

Chambers opined: "The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."

Cisco bought Linksys four years ago, and it made a lot of sense to keep the brand around. Home users trust the Linksys brand, and if they had even heard of Cisco, they associated it with high-end routers that cost a lot more than they were willing to spend. So long as Cisco maintains the pricing on the home networking products, this isn't a bad idea.

A good example of where maintaining separate brands makes sense is when you can increase your retail display space with different brands. This is why Compaq still exists as a brand. In stores like Best Buy or CompUSA, HP branded machines are on the floor next to Compaq. That allows the company to present double the product compared to Toshiba, Sony, et. al.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 12:53 PM | TrackBack

July 27, 2007

Never battle the Dark Side alone.

EMC is making the right moves in terms of virtualization. Two weeks ago, they Intel to buy in big-time to VMware, this week, it's Cisco:

Cisco today announced a $150m investment in the virtualization software maker through the purchase of VMware's Class A shares. Should the investment meet the usual closing conditions, it would give Cisco a 1.6 per cent stake in VMware. EMC is in the midst of selling off 10 per cent of VMware via an IPO.

EMC is shutting out two of the big hardware vendors in this arena, HP and IBM. Both companies make the blade servers that are so popular with virtualization customers, but they also have their own agenda in the storage arena. HP has its StorageWorks line for mid-range, and they OEM Hitachi for the enterprise side. IBM does their own storage subsystems. So, rather than give a piece of an EMC company to direct competitors, they're looking for allies from the periphery.

This cash influx plus the buy-in from two big players will help should Microsoft truly get serious in the virtualization area.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 11:34 AM | TrackBack

July 25, 2007

a plausible explanation...

I'm inclined to believe this report, although 365 Main denies it:

365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? You won't believe it.

A source close to the company says:

"Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum."

As this article points out, datacenters such as this have multiple levels of power redundancy, not so much so a customer can keep their operations running indefinitely, but long enough that they can get in and shut down their stuff cleanly. That would explain why it took so long for 6A to get operations back up.

Of course, PG&E was no help here, either, but these datacenters charge $50-$100/month for 1U of server rack space, and there are 40 units of space in a rack. If 40 racks were affected, that's 1500 or 1600 servers.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 6:14 AM | TrackBack

July 16, 2007

EMC upgrades!

EMC2 is rolling out a lot of upgrades to their overall storage product line, most importantly to an enterprise-level person like me, on the Symmetrix product line:

The big deal for me is the Symmetrix DMX-4 Product line, which will make some huge leaps over the already-formidible DMX-3 line:

Additionally, there will be a several feature enhancements related to SRDF in the new microcode released for the DMX-4s that will also be available as upgrades for DMX-3s.

EMC Control Center (ECC) is also upgrading this summer as well, from 5.2 to 6.0.

El Reg has the details on the rest of the product line in the article, but the Symm stuff is near and dear to my heart, since I teach TimeFinder, SRDF, and Control Center.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 2:27 PM | TrackBack

July 9, 2007

Intel ponys up on VMware

Full disclosure: I teach for EMC2's Global Education division about 30 weeks a year.

when EMC2 acquired virtualization leader VMware, a lot of us who know EMC first thought, wow, they're going to totally bollix this product up. As a huge VMware fan, I'm very happy to see EMC playing it very smart:

Reinforcing its status as the software darling of the moment, VMware has secured a whopping $219m investment from Intel.

Intel will pay $23 per share for close to 10 million shares in the virtualization software maker, giving it a 2.5 per cent stake in all the outstanding common stock. In addition, Intel's deep pockets have purchased a board seat at VMware. This deal comes as VMware, an EMC subsidiary, approaches an IPO (initial public offering).

To put things in context, EMC bought VMware for $635m back in Dec. of 2003. Since that time, VMware has doubled its revenue just about every year.

EMC is only selling 10% of VMware, and Intel is stepping up. That's a wonderful sign for the long-term health of the product pipeline.

In the arena of computer training, virtualization makes a lot of sense and is very profitible, and that's just one of the many applications where VMware is an attractive to racks and racks of servers.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 7:54 PM | TrackBack

this really isn't anything new...

Back when Iomega first introduced the "ZIP" and "JAZZ" drives, I've known techs and consultants who kept an extra cart or two with them, ostensibly to "back up" the client's system, but they were really looking for software to swipe. It's a little more serious with a large enterprise like Geek Squad, though:

Best Buy Geek Squad workers are a caring, sharing, diligent bunch.

In fact some Geek Squaders are so meticulous they will even take a backup of your nudie photos and MP3s while repairing your home PC, without being asked.

According to Consumerist.com, which carried out what it described as a "three-month sting operation", some Geek Squad technicians like nothing more than to take a copy of a customer's personal data, apparently for their own, er, personal use.

It's so easy to do, too. People trust their computer guy way too much. Keep that in mind next time your IT guy works on your PC.

Posted by Edward J. Branley at 8:50 AM | TrackBack