HP announces new converged infrastructure products.  HP announced new high-performance security solutions designed to prevent network breaches in a converged infrastructure by delivering comprehensive data protection across both physical and virtual environments.  Under the TippingPoint brand HP is introducing the Secure Virtualization Framework (SVF) as a suite of products designed to help prevent network threats from impacting virtualized environments.  The first product announced in this suite is the Virtual Controller (vController) and extends TippingPoint security by routing it through an HP TippingPoint N-Platform Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) appliance.  HP is also introducing a new TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine service (Rep DV) as a means to give IPS solutions up to date and accurate lists of malicious or suspicious websites.  Two new TippingPoint S-series solutions address the core of the data center for both physical and virtual domains.  The new TippingPoint S1200N IPS A7500 Module delivers advanced IPS security inspection in a blade.  The new TippingPoint S1500 SSL Appliance is a dedicated solution for decrypting and re-encrypting Secure Sockets Layer website traffic.  In addition to new security product announcements, HP also announced a new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module for the HP A5820 data center switch.

Oracle unveils Sun Fire x86 clustered systems. Oracle (ORCL) announced its next-generation Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems, including rackmount servers, blades and a 10 GbE cluster fabric.  “We are the first to deliver high-performing application-to-disk solutions that can be managed and supported as a single system. This is a major step forward in providing a completely optimized solution that delivers enterprise-class performance and scale while reducing management complexity and costs for customers,” said John Fowler, Executive Vice President for Sun Systems at Oracle. Oracle says the Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems deliver up to 45 percent improvement in energy efficiency over the previous generation of systems and they double the virtual machine live migration performance with the Oracle 10 GbE cluster fabric.  Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager provides a single point of management interface for all hardware components – blades, servers, storage, networking, power and virtualization.

Avaya prepares one-box strategy.  Network World reports that Avaya is preparing to launch a one-box data center strategy in October called the VSP 9000 switch.  Since Avaya does not have the comparable server and storage assets to compete with a complete Cisco UCS solution, the Avaya box is purely a switch.The VSP 9000 is meant to address the infrastructure piece of the equation and let other vendors cover applications, storage and other aspects.  The device will be marketed to current Nortel switch customers who may be positioned to appreciate the technology.

Boyd Davis, director of marketing Of Intel's Data Center Group, holds up an Intel Xeon 5600 processor

On Tuesday Intel (INTC) launched the Xeon 5600 series processor, blending security, performance and energy efficiency that the company says can significantly improve the economics of data center operations. Intel says one 5600 processor can replace 15 single-core servers, deliver 60 percent better performance than the Xeon 5500 and achieve a return on investment in as little as five months.

The introduction of the 5600 marks the next step in the transition to the Intel 32-nanometer processors, formerly code-named Westmere. The 32nm logic technology uses Intel’s second generation high-k metal gate transistors to increase speed and decrease energy consumption. Processors within the Xeon 5600 family range from a four core L5609 at 1.8GHz all the way up to a six core X5680 running a 3.33GHz.  All chips have 12MB of L3 cache regardless of core count.

“The performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series is so compelling that it’s absolutely justifiable immediately in terms of ROI, to simply replace Legacy service, a whole rack of servers, or whatever it happens to be with a single platform,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Data Center & Cloud, Citrix Systems said. “We did it ourselves for our own IT workloads and reduced 264 servers to 16 and in the process got high availability and agility as a result.”

Two trends tied to the economic cycle may boost interest in the 5600. Corporate cost-cutting has prompted many companies to postpone major purchases, as Intel notes that “80% of the sever install base is up for refresh.” Enterprises that are spending on IT have focused on investments that can bring savings through improved efficiency. The 5600 offers savings opportunities on several fronts: either by keeping the same CPU power but gaining up to 40% more performance per watt, or by lowering power by 30% while retaining the same performance as a 5500 series chip.

The 5600 series processors also deliver two new security features – Intel  Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). These new features enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments.  Intel TXT will provide enhanced virtualization security through hardware-based resistance to malicious software attacks at launch.

As most of the major hardware vendors line up to offer the new chips, Intel boasts 12 new world records for two-socket servers and workstations. Here are some of the related vendor announcements and stories about the new 5600 line of processors:

• SGI announces immediate availability of Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series.  The new processor will be available across the entire scale-out server lineup, and boast increased performance, core density and power efficiency up to 60 percent.
• Dell refreshes its PowerEdge server portfolio.  Dell introduced nine PowerEdge blade, rack-mount and tower servers and three Dell Precision tower workstations updated with the new Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.
• Hewlett Packard (HPQ) refreshes the ProLiant line.  HP announced it has updated its ProLiant G6 portfolio of tower, rack-mount , blade and scale-out servers with the newest processors from Intel, the 5600 series.
• ZT Systems announces new server solutions.  ZT Systems announced the ZT Systems 1250 Ri Series 1U data center server featuring the powerful new Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series. The 1250Ri is the first of several server platforms that will support the new processor and provide ZT’s custom integration and delivery capabilities for precision-fit solutions to the unique technical and business requirements of individual data centers.
• Supercomputer provider Cray Inc. announced that its Cray CX1 line of deskside supercomputers will now ship with the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series.
• Super Micro Computer (SMCI) announced that it has launched a complete, optimized selection of server, workstation and blade solutions to support the new generation Intel Xeon Processor 4500/3600 Series.
• The Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers will offer up to two Intel Xeon Series 5600 multicore processors.
• IBM will update its HS22 and HS22v blade server lines to offer the new Intel Series 5600 processors.

During the long wait for approval from the European Union many speculated on exactly how, or if Oracle would integrate mySQL, Java or Open Office. Here’s a look at some areas where we learned more:

Cloud Computing
The Open Cloud Platform Sun introduced last year is dead, according to The Register, “We have no plans to build something like Amazon’s EC2,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect. “We don’t plan to be in the rent-by-minute computer business. We plan to provide technology for others that are in the rent-by-minute computer business and lots of other business you might call cloud computing.” Sun cloud was to be hosted at the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas operated by Switch Communciations, which also hosted Sun’s Network.com cloud service.

Java
Oracle will continue to to innovate and invest in the Java platform.  Oracle has been involved with Java since 1995 and will continue to advance the platform that powers 2.6 billion phones and over 40 million televisions, game consoles and blu-ray devices. The Java ONE conference held annually in San Franciso will be expanded to Brazil, Russia, India and China.  Glassfish will remain a Reference Implementation, while Oracle Weblogic remains as a strategic enterprise application server.  See oracle.com/java for additional information.

Open Office
Managed as a separate business unit OpenOffice will continue to receive investment dollars from Oracle. StarOffice will continue to be licensed for commercial use and migrate into the Oracle Office product family.  A web office version was mentioned, as Open Office was positioned as the first desktop to web to mobile solution centered around the ODF open standard.

MySQL
Oracle announced it would maintain the open source MySQL database, as well as increase sales and marketing development teams.  MySQL was a major point of review for the European Union and it is no surprise that Oracle announced that MySQL would be maintained as a totally separate business unit.

Some operational announcements were made as well, such as a 2011 combined research and development budget of $4.3 billion.  There was a lot of speculation over Sun layoffs, however the New York Times reports that Larry Ellison said Oracle planned to lay off fewer than 2,000 people, while hiring more than 2,000 people in engineering, sales and other roles.  Many top Sun executives, including Jonathan Schwartz will not make the migration to Oracle.  Sun co-founder and chairman Scott McNealy issued a memo titled “Thanks for a great 28 years” where he said Sun and its people and technology had potential to be at the center of yet another industry and game-changing inflection point.

Larry Ellison told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that Sun will add $1.5 billion to Oracle’s bottom line in the first year, as it gets out of businesses “that don’t make money.” Specifically mentioned were the Sun low end commodity servers. In a Wednesday New York Times Dealbook article Mr. Ellison is quoted as saying that “Sun has wonderful engineering, but they didn’t seem to like selling very much.”  He also said “the partner model was disastrous, and we are immediately changing that.”

Oracle will hold worldwide welcome events to learn more about the integration throughout the rest of 2010.  For complete details and webcast sessions covering integration pieces go to oracle.com/sun.

Public Relations: Pick A Busy News Cycle
In what looks like PR strategy, Oracle has scheduled an all day live event to detail an integration strategy – on the same day that Apple is expected to announce its new tablet product, an event certain to dominate the day’s tech news coverage. Larry Ellison is set to host the live event next Wednesday for customers, partners, press and analysts to outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps and how customers will benefit from the hardware and software integration.

Unwanted Attention
Two other items relating to Oracle surfaced on the net Thursday. The first, covered by All Things D and GigaOm regarded a memo sent by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.  He prepared Sun employees for the completed takeover by discussing the impact that change in control will have on Sun, including the exit of some employees. He also urged employees to “emotionally resign from Sun” as a mechansim to smooth the transition to Oracle. 

Later in the day the New York Times reported that Oracle President Charles E. Phillips admitted an affair after a series of mysterious billboards appeared in New York and other cities showing romantic photographs of him with a woman.

The future of Sun Software
Ever since the acquisition news was released in April 2009 many have questioned the ultimate fate of MySQL, Java and the OpenOffice suite.  A statement from the European Commission said:

The Commission also examined the potential impact of Oracle’s acquisition of the intellectual property (IP) rights connected to the Java development platform in the context of the proposed transaction. It found that Oracle’s ability to deny its competitors access to important IP rights would be limited by the functioning of the Java Community Process (JCP) which is a participative process for developing and revising Java technology specifications involving numerous other important players in the IT industry, including Oracle’s competitors.”

Many other tweets and articles came out Thursday regarding Sun software as well:

• The VAR Guy blog interviews Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt about his analysis of the Oracle-MySQL combination.
• InfoWorld’s Developer World discusses the uncertain future for Java under Oracle’s grip.
• Father of the Java programming language James Gosling has a blog entry with a single R.I.P. tombstone for Sun – with a long list of user comments.
• The Register – comments from Rod Johnson – Java pioneer and general manager of VMware’s new Spring Source division.

Jan. 27th will be the all day live event for Oracle. Further details can be found at oracle.com/sun

• Force 10 demonstrates at Interop. Force 10 Networks partnered with AFORE Solutions and Sun Microsystems at INTEROP in New York last week to demonstrate data center virutalization products and cloud computing initiatives focused on driving greater network agility. The 3 vendors demonstrated virtualized resource allocation for cloud-oriented applications as well as the AFORE ASE3300 Virutalization Extension Platform.  The ASE3300 and Force 10 switch and router solutions combine to enable a multi-site, virtual data center enabling migration to cloud computing environments.
• Avocent upgrades data center management software. Announced at Interop last week, Avocent is upgrading its MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer to include several new management capabilities.  The company said these enhancements will provide a unique view into capacity planning, bringing additional return on investment and total cost of ownership benefits.  Avocent CTO Ben Grimes said that the software will allow “customers to know where their assets are, as well as plan for different ‘what if’ scenarios, and manage their data centers to reduce risk -  all while bringing improved ROI and total cost of ownership benefits to customers.”  New features include rack timeline and an enhanced change management and capacity search capabilities.

• Deutsche Telekom Buys Strato: Deutsche Telekom has acquired German web hosting provider Strato from Freenet, the companies said on Friday. Deutsche Telekom reportedly paid $409 million for Strato, which hosts 4 million domains, “This step boosts our position on the highly interesting market for hosting solutions,” said Niek Jan van Damme, Member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom for fixed-network and mobile business in Germany. “Strato complements our activities in the hosting area perfectly and will make a positive contribution to net profit and free cash flow from the very first day of consolidation,” said van Damme.
• Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. Several news stories shed light on popular Web 2.0 sites last week.  Bloomberg estimates that common stock valuation for Facebook jumped 42% in the past four months to $9.5 billion.  The valuation comes after increased trading activity on stock service sites that allow current and former employees to sell shares of stock. Twitter COO Dick Costolo spoke at a conference last week and said that Twitter is getting more than $4 million a year in revenue from companies that use Twitter data.  Costolo also said that “you will see an advertising strategy from us in the very near future.” Cnet News reports that MySpace has aquired social-networking music site Imeem. Sources with knowledge of the deal say it is worth $8 million.
• Meanwhile, original web power-house company AOL has cut local headcount in northern Virginia by 2,400.

In other recent executive moves, Michael Manos moved from Microsoft to Digital Realty Trust, and Kevin Timmons shifted from Yahoo to Microsoft.

“I am very excited to help eBay achieve its vision of the future,” Dean writes. “I am absolutely on-board and ready to rumble.  I’m also excited about what this means for Data Center Pulse. We’re killing two birds with one stone here. The work that I am responsible for in eBay, is perfectly aligned with the industry efforts we are pushing for in DCP.  We will be accelerating our efforts and uniting end-users to drive innovation and direct the future of the datacenter market.”

Nelson’s departure also continues the brain drain at Sun, whose pending acquisition by Sun has been held up by a regulatory review by the European Commission.  

“When the official announcement came through that Oracle intended to purchase Sun, it caused many people to rethink their future,” Nelson wrties. “I have always believed that if I am challenged in my job, being stretched to continuously learn, have a solid team, executive support, and of course good compensation, there isn’t a reason to look for something else.  But with uncertainty, I also believed it was prudent to see what options were out there.”

Any sentence that includes the phrases “suggested” and “might” strikes me as pretty speculative. The chatter has since spilled onto financial blogs but doesn’t appear to have had a meaningful impact on the shares of any of the companies involved.

For what it’s worth, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the record saying he intends to keep the Sun hardware business intact. “We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business,” Ellison said in May. ”While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”

That hasn’t cooled persistent speculation that the hardware unit is for sale. In June The Register cited a source close to Oracle as saying that the company “has continued to shop Sun’s hardware business around to potential buyers” but was seeking an “unrealistic” price.

For additional information, check out our SuperNAP Channel and Sun Microsystems Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

For additional information, check out our SuperNAP Channel and Sun Microsystems Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

• Steve O’Donnell at The Hot Aisle says the deal could be disruptive for the storage sector. “If Oracle becomes a horizontal storage systems supplier, this announcement does not bode well for NTAP, PAR, and EMC as 40% or so of corporate data is stored in databases and these companies’ sales reps look for database implementations/upgrades as buying catalysts,” O’Donnell writes. “If Oracle sees all of these transactions first, they will capture a portion of the storage spend easily.”
• Forrester analyst James Staten writes that Sun’s server and storage businesses “don’t fit (Oracle’s) model and certainly don’t justify the further investment in the SPARC microprocessor that will be needed to keep this business healthy … expect Oracle to shop these units tout suite.” Staten sees Dell and HP as likely bidders.
• The Burton Group says the deal is good news for customers. “The bad news is the uncertainty this creates around the long term future for Sun’s hardware products, particularly its UltraSPARC high-end servers,” writes Nik simpson. “The question is, ‘What does Oracle plan to do with the hardware business?’, because lets face it, the reason for the acquisition is Java, not hardware.”
• The 451 Group examined Oracle’s track record on open source technologies. “While Oracle has displayed an ability to participate in and benefit from open source software, I think its expectations and aspirations for open source software are limited,” writes Jay Lyman. “You can’t blame a company making billions for not getting to excited about millions, especially when sometimes the millions are simply numbers of users.”
• Om Malik also focuses on the fate of MySQL, expressing concern but concluding that “Oracle will keep MySQL going mostly because it can act as a funnel for further business opportunities.”

• Among end users, there was much interest in the response of Matt Mullenweg of Auttomatic, whose ubiquitous WordPress blogging software runs atop MySQL. “Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software,” Mullenweg writes. “Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us.”
• Todd Bishop at TechFlash looks at what the deal might mean to Microsoft, concluding that the Oracle-Sun combination “may be marginally better for Microsoft than the previously proposed IBM-Sun deal would have been, but it still promises to create stronger competition for the Redmond company in key areas of its business.”
• Bob Warfield looks at Oracle’s numbers, and concludes that they can’t be good news for Sun employees. “There will be wholesale carnage at Sun, he writes. “The company had not been especially healthy before the acquisition, but Oracle is pledging to deliver a 15% margin in the first year. I don’t doubt they can achieve that number, but doing so will require a vigorous shake up.”
• Vinnie Merchandini warns that a deep shakeup could wind up being part of the problem. “When it comes to their acquisitions, they cannot retain or easily replace the entrepreneurial talent,” he writes of Oracle. “John Chambers is probably chuckling this morning that his move into servers was well timed.”