Some interesting analysis from the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando last week. Gartner expects 20% of corporate email seats to be either SaaS- or cloud-based by 2012.
The transition is well under way and is led naturally by smaller organizations, but larger enterprises are following. The decision to move email into the cloud is mainly based on the promise of 50% savings.
As reported by Computerworld, MySpace announced this week that it has switched from using traditional hard disk drives in its servers to using Solid-State-Disk (flash drives) as primary storage instead. The new SSD drives are actually PCIe cards, from Fusion-io, containing the solid state chips.
“MySpace said the solid state storage uses less than 1% of the power and cooling costs that their previous hard drive-based server infrastructure had and that they were able to remove all of their server racks because the ioDrives are embedded directly into even its smallest servers.”
The cards currently come in 160GB, 320GB and 640GB capacities and a 1.28TB card is expected later this year.
In recent years the trend for email servers has been to consolidate and centralize. A massive n-way server or cluster is often hosting tens-of-thousands of user mailboxes using massive and expensive NAS storage arrays. Some of our customers are already rethinking this approach by taking lessons from the cloud.
Ken Gartner, reporting from the monthly NE Lotus User Group meeting. (Caution technical lingo ahead.)
Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA. A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers. The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1. Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us. We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.
Today is Earth Day and incidentally it feels as if spring is finally coming to New England. What a perfect morning.
Apropos green initiatives: Michael Osterman wrote a blog post last week with some surprising findings. He questioned respondents in his most recent survey whether “green” computing was a criterion in their decision-making process for new messaging server purchases.
The answer was “not much impact at all”: 53% of organizations said that green computing would play little or no role in their purchase decisions; only 2% told us that it would be a critical part of the decision-making process.
That is remarkable, since many companies are investing heavily in server consolidation and virtualization, which often significantly reduces their overall power consumption. According to Osterman, servers consume about 1.2% of the total power output in the US alone.
Perhaps it proves the point that market forces are still the best drivers for environmental progress. Just as SUVs became less popular with rising fuel costs, the push for greener data centers is largely driven by the need to improve a company’s bottom line through savings on power and cooling.
Only a few months following the reply-to-all tidal wave bringing down the email infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department experienced a massive self-inflicted assault on their mail servers last week as well.
A few days old, but noteworthy: In an interesting twist, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of Notes/Domino at Macworld, only two weeks ahead of Lotusphere – IBM’s own product showcase held annually in Orlando.
I think, this signals two things:
Stefan Mehlhorn is the CEO of Permessa Corp. a Waltham, MA based company providing enterprise messaging management solutions and consulting services to many of the worlds largest corporations.
Latest Messaging News
Recent Comments