It is hard to find numbers for just how many converged systems are shipping into the market. I asked John Fowler, SVP of Systems at Oracle, if he could say what the run rate was for Exadata, Oracle’s converged infrastructure product range, in the context that Michael Capellas, the chairman of VBlock supplier VCE had said in June 2012 that Vblock had a US$800m run rate and Cisco said UCS was running at $2bn.

He declined.

However, in its Q1 financial statement Oracle President Mark Hurd said on September 20th: “Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics and our other engineered systems grew more than 100% in the quarter. For the full year, we expect to double engineered systems sales to well over $1bn.”

Fowler was also asked to split out the percentage split of product running on Intel Xeon x86 processors versus Oracle’s own Sparc. He said Oracle would not split out these figures.

The main market analysts put numbers on the unit shipments and revenue generated in the x86, Unix and mainframe markets but not yet numbers for converged systems.

IDC expects to have some solid projections soon but in the meantime, said: “IDC expects combined spending on server, storage, and data center network hardware by public cloud service providers of all types will be $13.9bn in 2012, up 23.5% from 2011. Worldwide IT infrastructure hardware spending by public and private cloud service providers is forecast to reach $21.3bn in 2015.”

In global server market terms, converged remains a nascent market. In December 2011, market analyst Forrester issued a report titled CI, Attitudes and Acceptance. This predicted a surging market and a rapid user acceptance for converged infrastructure.

Its questioning of CIOs, however, showed complexity and integration issues were high on the list of experiences of those who had deployed converged systems and were considerable barriers to adoption.

This may explain the management emphasis in some of the latest announcements.

OUT OF THE BLOCKS

There has recently been a surge in activity in the converged systems world. IBM relaunched Puresystems, Dell began shipping its first converged system, as did Hitachi.

And, as already noted, not to be outdone, Oracle went on a major PR blitz with President Mark Hurd and John Fowler pitching up in London and Paris to bang the Exadata drum.

Exadata is closer to Puresystems in profile with the components all coming from the same stable. Hitachi and Dell are combining systems from third parties.

Starting with IBM, the latest Puresystems range is shipping in workload-specific versions. These are transactional, operational and operational analytics. These are not simply badged differently but have different chip architectures and operating systems.

POWER PROFILES

Starting with PureData Operational Analytics. It runs IBM AIX 7.1 on its Power chip architecture.

The form factors are extra small, small, medium and large. Extra small consists of one foundation rack and one module. This 32-core model has a power maximum on the foundation rack of 6,196W. Typical cooling (BTU/hour) on the foundation rack: 14,160. At the opposite end the large is a 96-core model with a foundation and full rack, one foundation node and three data nodes.

The power maximums are; foundation rack: 6,196W; data rack: 10,454W. For typical cooling; foundation rack: 14,160; data rack: 27,467. And for voltage drops/rack 200-240V ac; frequency: 47-63 Hz.

The IBM Pure Data System Transaction confi gurations running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on a base of two Intel Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.6 GHz are small (quarter rack), medium (half rack) and large (full rack).

Quarter rack power for 96 core is 5.6kW, 132 core 9.0kW and 384 core 16.6kW. Cooling (BTU/hour) 19K BTU 31K BTU and 57K BTU.

The Power supply across the range is (US) 4×60 amp, three phase and for Europe power supply 4×32 amp three phase.

The final model range is IBM PureData System which comes in single rack systems and multiple rack systems.

Specifications for single rack specifications are Watts maximum/rack, 2,820; 3,960; 7,635.

For two racks 7,400 and for three racks 7000.

DELL’S POSITION

Dell continues its push to be accepted as a serious enterprise server supplier and shake off its image as purely a low-end commodity server player.

Its converged pitch is the Active System 800. The latest model was launched in October. Much emphasis has been placed on its Active System Manager, which it says streamlines configuration and ongoing management with template-based provisioning and user workflows and workload migrations from a single console.

Active System Manager is the product of some R&D but is more about Dell’s acquisition strategy of companies such as Scalent, in the management space and storage firm Equallogic and Force10 networks.
 

Dell is being seen as taking a less prescriptive approach to converged systems than say, vBlock. Its challenges, however, include changing the market perception of exactly what type of company it is.
 

The Gartner Report: Dell’s Data Center Strategy from Chassis to Fabric-Based System, says: “Dell’s aggressive acquisition strategy indicates a determination from the top down to become recognized and accepted as a full-fledged data center vendor. However, Dell’s later entry presents challenges in building strong and positive market perceptions against established competition.”

UNIFIED HITACHI

The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Pro is a pre-configured system built with HDS servers and storage and third party networking. The initial UCP Pro offering is for VMware vSphere, featuring the vendor’s Unified Compute Platform Director software to provide integrated management and orchestration.

Hitachi’s UCP runs embedded vSphere or bare-metal MS HyperV. On the management front, vCenter is integrated with UCP Director. Server options are from Hitachi’s own CB range or Cisco UCS server. Networking is through Brocade or Cisco top-of-rack Ethernet switches or in-rack fiber channel from the same suppliers.

The other model is the Select option, which offers pre-validated reference solutions that can be configured using the same storage, server and software management but with a wider range of top-tier applications.
Technology partners for the product include, Intel, Arrow, Avnet and ViON.
Ashish Nadkarni, research director of Storage Systems at IDC says: “This market has been served by either solution providers including all components from the same vendor or by pre-confi gured and pre-tested packages comprised of best-of-breed components from different vendors woven together by a mandatory management framework.”

Expect vBlock enhancements next year.

UPGRADE PATH?

That just leaves one question for all of these converged systems makers: How do you upgrade a collection of best-of-breed components in a single system?