Thursday, June 30, 2011

Virtual Machine Company Server replacements lower cost of service delivery

These guys are starting to pop up a lot in the UK.  Their Hyper-dense virtualization appliance is a turnkey replacement for commodity servers and being able to run more VMs in less power and cooling is a great message for these tough times in the hosting world.  Worth a look

Virtual Machine Company announces next-generation virtualization appliances

The following release was sent today to coincide with the release of our latest range of Hyper-dense server virtualization appliances
  • outperforms all current commercial and custom-built servers in independent Geekbench power and performance testing1
  • comfortably runs more virtual machines and delivers class-leading savings on energy, cooling, software licensing, and datacentre real estate
  • the worlds fastest, most cost-effective, and environmentally-friendly commercial computing platform
April 12, 2011 Cambridge, UK
The Virtual Machine Company (VMC) today announced the launch of the next generation of its server virtualization appliances.
Built around the latest AMD 12-core processors, with highly-optimised RAM options up to 512 gigabytes, and fast and cool solid-state storage, the two new servers can host unprecedented numbers of virtual machines running the most demanding commercial computing applications.
The new VMC appliances use less power, require fewer software licenses, and take up less rack-space space than anything else on the market.
For example, a mid-range 24 Core, 192 Gb RAM VMC virtualization appliance comfortably accommodates 50 or more virtual machines running processor and memory-intensive applications of the kind usually confined to non-virtual environments; tasks such as rendering video, enterprise-scale databases, and huge FTP batch operations. All of this while consuming less than 307 watts (1.43 amps) at peak loading. Average power consumption for competitor machines delivering this much firepower is more than 900 watts.
Virtual Machine Company Head of R&D, Nick Hutton, said:
This is exciting, high-performance computing meets boring stability and cost-effectiveness. The top of the Geekbench league table is usually dominated by "custom rigs" built by clever enthusiasts or researchers. I am proud of our development team for productising and normalising unrivalled power and performance with such impressive stability and economy.
AMD Head of Commercial Marketing EMEA, Stefano Chiavegati, commented:
We developed the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor to meet 21st Century commercial computing demands for the optimum balance between power, reliability, cost and environmental considerations. The Virtual Machine Companys Server Virtualization Appliances tick all of those boxes and more.
1 http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/top

Fewer software licences

VMware requires an expensive licence for every pair of processors. Because the new VMC virtualisation appliances use AMDs processor core-dense CPUs, the licence-to-virtual-machine ratio becomes much more favourable. For example, when virtualising an estate of 240 servers running Windows Server, one customer saved an additional £180,000 in year-one capital expenditure by using VMC Virtualisation Appliances to deliver a hyper-dense solution.

Models and configurations

Two standard appliances are available with additional configuration options
  • VA 1200 Series Server Virtualization Appliance: 1U, Dual Processor 24 Core minimum configuration 64GB RAM
  • VA 2400 Series Server Virtualization Appliance: 2U, Dual Processor 48 Core minimum configuration 128GB RAM
  • For detailed technical specifications please visit: www.virtualmachineco.com/virtualization_appliances.htm

Pricing and availability

The new VMC 1200 Series Appliance is available immediately with a base configuration price of £9,500. The VMC 2400 Series Appliance will ship at 2011 with prices starting at £15,500.
VMC Appliances are available in through VMC's exclusive distributor, Computerlinks http://www.computerlinks.co.uk/

Support

Five-year, next business day on-site and 24 x 7 support contracts are available.

Whois Lookup
Zip Code Maps

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Orange Huawei so good you pay for it twice!

Sorry for the lack of recent posts but we're up to our ears in the latest development project - A complete profile of the Fortune Global 500.  We are busy profiling the telecoms & IP services used by the 325,000 companies, subsidiary companies and regional offices that make up the index.

But I couldn;t let this one pass.

Well here is a great story on TelecomTV.  Huawei and Orange are offering a Signal Booster service on all the new Huawei Android phones that switches the cellular traffic out via your wifi, so if you have no phone signal in the house you can still use your mobile... Genius you cry!!

Except it's not - you have to pay for the call, at your normal network rate even though you are using your own broadband connection saving Orange a packet (sic).

I use Skype, a lot, and when I am in the house I route my DDI calls to the Skype on my iPhone and I make international calls outbound same way.

Give it a go it works a treat