VM-Aware

A number of customers have mentioned over the years that surely IBM & HP must be worried about virtualisation impinging on overall hardware sales. I always said that the kinds of servers that people buy for virtualisation are usually significantly more expensive than the customers would previously have purchased. This means that the volume might be lower, but the overall spend has a tendency to be as high if not higher.

This seems to have been the case for IBM at least as they have managed to get back to the top of the server hardware sales tree in the second quarter. With revenues topping $3.9B according to Gartner which means they overtake HP with total sales at $3.8B. The interesting bit to me is how IBM can sell less than half (302,000) that of HP (680,000) and still make more money.

I read about this story over at the Avastu Blog of Tarry Singh. I particularly like this blog for its informative and insightful post.

Principled Technologies have undertaken some hardware benchmarking to compare the new(ish) IBM x3850 M2 with an HP ProLiant DL580 G5.

The IBM machine comes out on top with 27% better performance per watt and 8% more performance
from the vConsolidate tool.  vConsolidate is a tool from Intel

You can read a full copy of the report here.

Just as most people suspected, HP have released a comparable product to IBM’s BladeCenter S product. (more…)