The opposite of the Amazon Kindle Fire, your Cable HD Set Top box

The Amazon Kindle Fire is getting lots of news, and part of the excitement is storing your content in the cloud, and not on the device.  But, let's be clear, much of the content that will be stored will simply be a small unique identifier that says  you have rights to a book, music, or movie.  Storing, thousands of copies of the same MP3 music file in individual could accounts is wasteful and costly.  Store one copy and point to the copy in individual accounts is a greener way.

Look at a device that is in millions of homes consuming as much power as a refrigerator, your cable STB.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has conducted a study that places the spotlight on how inefficient cable boxes and DVR's are in American homes.

These boxes, which guide cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions, run at a constant rate and can utilize more power than a new refrigerator or air conditioning unit.

There are millions of these STBs.

According to the study, there are 160 million set-top boxes in the U.S., and this number is increasing. These boxes run 24 hours per day, even when they're not being used. The study found that add-on DVR's use an additional 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

The Natural Resources Defense Council found that these boxes consume $3 billion in electricity per year in the U.S., and 66 percent of this power is drained when no one is even using it. Also, one high definition cable box and one high definition DVR use about 446 kilowatt-hours per year, which is 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator that is energy efficient.

Maybe the Amazon Kindle Fire will gradually replace the cable STB.  It is a much more energy efficient and storage efficient device.

The cable industry has pushed the STB a high energy cost to the consumer.  Turning off the power to STB is a pain as turning it on means the device needs to reload the channel content which can take an hour.  Doesn't this sound like an Enterprise IT solution?  a monopoly?

An energy efficient green data center changes your strategy.  Think of what the cable providers have vs. what Amazon has.

Michael Dell, end-to-end, PC to the Data Center

Michael Dell gave a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, and there is blog post summarizing his presentation.

Michael emphasizes they go embrace the PC.

2. We Still Love Hardware: Without mentioning Hewlett-Packard by name, Dell took a few shots at HP’s potential PC division spin-out. Dell said his company has rapidly evolved from PCs to servers to cloud solutions.

“There are many reasons to stay committed to the PC, he said. “There will be two billion PCs in a few years.” Dell estimated that 95 percent of disk drives are in PCs, and five percent are in servers. A company without PCs can’t gain volume pricing advantages for server components, Dell asserted. “The client offers enormous scale,” said Dell. “Give up that scale and you need to raise your prices.”

Data Center is not specifically mentioned, but implied in this statement.

3. Total Picture: “Dell is not a PC company,” he said. “Dell is an end-to-end solutions company, and we understand the endpoint is a huge part of the solution. We are more than just hardware.”

Since it was Oracle's event, there is the Oracle statement.

6. The Dell-Oracle Relationship: JP Sarkis, VP of packaged applications for Dell Services, joined Dell on stage. Sarkis said Dell had been spending 70 percent of its IT budget on maintenance on 30 percent on innovation. More recently, 52 percent of Dell’s IT budget focuses on innovation, with 48 percent focused on maintenance. What drove the shift? Standardized business processes that leverage Oracle on Dell, plus a service oriented architecture (SOA), Sarkis claimed.

Servers are mentioned of course.

7. Dell PowerEdge Servers: Dell said his company is preparing the 12th generation of its PowerEdge servers. Dell asserted that the company will continue to offer the most comprehensive family of x86 servers. Dell said the PowerEdge systems will benefit from the little-watched acquisition of RNA Networks.

The last point that RNA Networks is a little-watched acquisition that I happen to visit 2 years ago and wrote this post.

So why not virtualize memory across multiple servers?

While in Portland I was able to visit with RNAnetworks and discuss their latest announcement.

RNA networks Brings Memory Virtualization Into the Enterprise Data Center

RNA Memory Virtualization Transforms Memory into a Shared, Networked Resource

Portland, Ore. – February 2, 2009 – RNA networks, a leader in memory virtualization software that transforms server memory into a shared network resource, today announced the launch of its Memory Virtualization Platform(MVP) and first product, RNAmessenger, based on the MVP.  Memory Virtualization unleashes high-performance computing from existing commodity hardware by decoupling memory from the processor and server.  Uniquely, the RNA Memory Virtualization Platform is transparent to existing applications and operating systems allowing enterprises to leverage their existing IT assets with no changes. 
“Reliance on fragmented local server memory has been a key roadblock to optimizing performance in data center clusters, but memory virtualization eliminates size limits and slashes access times by providing distributed shared memory for all CPUs in a cluster,” said Eyal Waldman, Chairman, President and CEO, Mellanox Technologies. “By combining RNA Networks' Memory Virtualization with Mellanox Technologies' unrivaled connectivity performance, data center architects can achieve new levels of performance with high efficiency and lower costs.”

The concept is simple.

RNA’s innovative Memory Virtualization Platform works by pooling or aggregating available memory across nodes, and making the memory pool available as a shared network resource available to all servers in the data center.  Servers can access the pool, contribute to it or both.

image

Where is the money savings? This is another problem I see with Cisco and VMware’s uber virtual data center solutions.  Where is the money savings?

I asked RNAnetworks CEO Clive Cook how much could be saved with memory Virtualization, and he said in grid computing type of scenarios where there is a high throughput requirement across multiple machines they have numbers below.

Bottom Line Economic Advantages

Performance Improvement 
10-30X

Cost Savings

Fewer Load Balancers 
$44,500

Less Aggregate Memory 
$64,500

Storage Savings 
$163,000

Power Savings 
$39,500

Additional Benefits

  • Efficiency
  • Simplicity
  • Reliability
  • Resource Sharing
  • Low TCO
  • Consolidation

 

Dell Channel Growth 33% to 50%, huge opportunity for Data Center Solutions

CRN has an article that discusses The Michael Dell difference.

The Michael Dell Difference

By Steven Burke, CRNSeptember 23, 2011
No CEO has been more engaged and fired up recently about making gains with the channel than Dell Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell.

Dell, an industry icon who pioneered the direct sales model for the PC business, has remade himself and his company over the last four years into a charged-up, channel-centric partner. In the process, Dell himself has become his company’s No. 1 channel advocate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What caught my eye is the focus on the channel and data center solutions.

Dell’s channel conversion didn’t happen overnight. Michael Dell and Greg Davis, the company’s global channel chief, have been building the channel effort one partner at a time, and Dell himself has played an active role in that channel sales effort, reaching out to partners directly and helping them close deals. The Dell channel business now amounts to about 33 percent of the company’s $62 billion in annual sales. And Dell sees it growing to 50 percent.

The fact is Dell has grown its channel business by being a consistent and predictable partner with a channel-neutral sales compensation model aimed at incenting its direct sales force to work hand in hand with partners. That’s not to say that there are still not issues with channel conflict. Many partners want to see more joint sales engagement between Dell direct and partners. And if Dell starts opening enterprise customer doors with data center solutions partners, it could prove to be a huge windfall for the company.

Michael Dell gets it that in order to scale he needs partners.  A direct sales force has difficulty scaling.

Partners that decide to take on Dell as a partner can be sure that they will find in Dell himself a passionate, channel-savvy leader that gets their business and the power of delivering solutions -- hardware, software and services -- to customers, and is willing to get his hands dirty helping them in the sales trenches. Michael Dell gets the channel. And he gets IT. That’s a lot more than can be said of many CEOs in this business.

It is amazing to think that Michael Dell started with a direct sales model, and now he is focusing on growing his channel.

Microsoft Deploys Samsung's Green RAM in Technology Center, demonstrating Performance and Energy Efficient Private Clouds

Back when Mike Manos worked at Microsoft the both of us went to a Microsoft Technology Conference in Barcelona and met Frank Koch, one of the early believers in Green Data Centers.  It's been four years since Frank made the early efforts, and I just saw this press release between Microsoft and Samsung.

Microsoft and Samsung Collaborate to Enable Optimized Performance and Power Efficiency for Server Systems

...

Frank Koch, infrastructure architect and Green IT lead of Microsoft Germany summarizes the joint efforts: "The world notices a dramatic increase of energy usage in data centers with more and more people leveraging their IT and moving to a private cloud. With the innovative memory modules from Samsung, we do not only measure higher throughput and performance for our hyper-v cloud solutions but a lower power consumption of the involved server systems, too. This is a great win-win situation for everyone."

The specific power savings was 15% for a 30 watt per system decrease.

Samsung's 30nm-class Green DDR3 was tested in eight gigabyte registered dual inline memory modules, installed on server systems running virtualized environments with the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system. They delivered power conservation levels of up to 15 percent for a 30-watt per system decrease, compared to systems using 50nm-class DDR3.

This gives a good reason to reach out to Frank and get more specifics on the energy efficiency projects he is working on.

Michael Dell vs. Meg Whitman who will win the Enterprise battle? Dell is favored over HP

HP has some seasoned enterprise executives that could be CEO.

Better choices would include HP enterprise chief Dave Donatelli and PC head Todd Bradley, two names that had also made the rounds in Silicon Valley for the top job after Mark Hurd's ouster in August 2010, he added.

But, it is too late now, and HP's Board has made their decision.  And, wow they actually listened to the employees and shareholders.

In late August, some board members began looking into how employees, investors and others viewed the CEO, one of the people said. They learned that the CEO failed to rally his troops well and staffers believed "he was not clear on the strategy, not articulating clearly what the direction was,'' this person said.Board members also learned that some H-P investors were upset over the proposed Autonomy takeover because Mr. Apotheker privately promised them that H-P wasn't "going to make any big acquisitions that will make you lose sleep,'' this person said.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903703604576586753827390510.html#ixzz1YnIgItCT

So, the HP board picked Meg Whitman who has been a major purchaser of HP enterprise products.

"Some might be saying maybe Meg Whitman isn't the right person, either. She's not a hardware person," said Auriga analyst Kevin Hunt. But HP "just needs someone to set the direction."

Defending her track record, Whitman said as head of eBay she had been a major purchaser of HP enterprise products.

"So I actually understand this space relatively well," she told Reuters in an interview. "What I bring to this table is leadership, management skills, strategic vision, communications and an execution orientation to deliver the result."

Meg has a few tweets.  One today.  Another Aug 13. and another July 4th.


Meg Whitman
Excited and honored to lead HP. I'm a true believer in the future of this Silicon Valley icon.
13 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply
Meg Whitman
Yesterday was the 30th birthday of the PC. Happy birthday! Where would we be without you? 
13 Aug
Meg Whitman
Happy 4th of July!
4 Jul

Compare this to Michael Dell's tweets over the last 2 days.


Michael Dell
Thanks to our customers for the trust and confidence you place in us! ...Dell is the clear winner if there is no 
3 hours ago
Michael Dell
Looking forward to speaking at Oracle OpenWorld in a couple of weeks! 
16 hours ago
Michael Dell
Check out fun Dell  videos from . These are visually amazing! 
21 Sep
»
Michael Dell
Check out the latest servers in our Dell Modular Data Center
21 Sep Favorite Retweet Reply

Who has more credibility in the enterprise?  Michael Dell or Meg Whitman?