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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »August 24, 2006 — CIO —
IBM has added new four-core processing capability to the low end of its System p Unix servers.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled a new quad-core system, the System p5 505Q Express, which IBM is billing as its first 1U (4.4 centimeters thick) system with four processor cores. IBM also announced processor upgrades to its dual-core and quad-core Express systems.
IBM is targeting mid-sized enterprises with these Express systems by offering the more powerful machines that it says are priced competitively with x86-based servers. IBM also is offering special pricing on preconfigured "Solution Edition" servers when they are paired with popular enterprise software such as that from Oracle or SAP.
"For us, this is a market share gain play," said Charles Bryan, a team lead for IBM’s System p integrated offering and independent software vendor marketing.
IBM has encountered some customer resistance to its servers that may be powerful and feature rich, but can be pricey, Bryan said.
By bundling preconfigured hardware designed to run enterprise software at a special price, "we can neutralize the price issue and the customer can consider the other variables," he said.
For example, a System p5 model 510 Express server with a single-core processor carries a base price of about US$4,200 while the same model with a four-core processor lists at just over $5,500. Other configurations of the volume market segment servers are priced in the mid-teens to more than $20,000. The models preconfigured to run certain software will carry discounts of 10 percent to 15 percent from build-to-order servers.
By pairing hardware and software, IBM is "attacking the high cost of integration" for enterprise customers, said Joe Clabby, president of research firm Clabby Analytics. Enterprises may buy a standalone server but then incur additional costs to install a particular software program on that server.
"They are trying to reduce the cost of deployment and are saying, ‘I don’t want any hidden costs,’ " Clabby said.
With this announcement, IBM adds to the array of servers featuring its four-core processor technology, which enables the CPU to handle up to four tasks simultaneously. A single-core processor may be idle while waiting for another task to be performed, such as retrieving data from a storage device. With multiple cores, the processor can perform other tasks while waiting for that data. Combining multiple independent processors into a single integrated circuit is a more efficient design than putting multiple microprocessors in separate physical packages.
Although dual-core processors are available from other vendors, IBM says it offers the computing industry’s only four-core processor.