Dell's Data Center business outshines End user Computing in Q2 2013 calendar

here is Dell's press release.

Data Center related businesses did well.

Enterprise Solutions Group revenue was $3.3 billion, an 8 percent increase. Operating income for the quarter was $137 million, a 9 percent decrease. Dell server, networking and peripherals revenue increased 10 percent, the fifth consecutive quarter of growth for this business, driven by continued strength in hyper-scale data center servers. Dell networking continued to grow, with a 19 percent revenue increase. Dell storage revenue declined 7 percent.

End User Computing didn't look as good with a 71% decrease vs. 9% decrease for enterprise solutions.

End User Computing revenue was $9.1 billion in the quarter, a 5 percent decrease. Operating income for the quarter was $205 million, a 71 percent decrease. Dell desktop and thin client revenue increased 1 percent, mobility revenue declined 10 percent, and revenue from software from third parties and peripherals declined 5 percent. Dell was the only vendor among the top five worldwide to increase PC unit-shipment share both year over year and sequentially in the past two calendar quarters, according to IDC

CRN reports on overall server shipments - HP vs. Dell vs. IBM.

The IDC data shows Dell's unit shipment share in the second quarter was up 4.8 percent to 552,486 units, just 28,684 units behind No. 1 global shipment winner HP, whose global shipments declined 13.6 percent to 581,170 units during the quarter, sources said. IBM's global unit share, meanwhile, dropped 8.4 percent to 200,985 units, the sources said.

HP remains the No. 1 global shipment provider with 30 percent share followed by Dell with 28.6 percent share, IBM with 10.4 percent share, Cisco with 2.9 percent share and Lenovo with 2.7 percent share, according to sources who have seen the preliminary data.

Do people change when they get promoted? Does Power go to their head? Yes

Being around a long time, over 30 years in the tech industry many coworkers and friends have risen the executive ranks.  Some people change little, some people change more.  And, after a while it is not so much fun talking to the executive as they care more about their agenda.

NPR has a study that provides some data on this topic.

When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart

by CHRIS BENDEREV

August 10, 2013 7:41 AM

...

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them.

So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why?

The point made is power changes how the brain operates.

But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.

Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim.

I have always resisted being an executive.  

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

The paper cited is here.  The conclusion from the paper is as follows.

 Conclusion

Despite these possible limitations, the main results we report are

robust, and strongly suggest that power is negatively related to

motor resonance. Indeed, anecdotes abound about the worker on

the shop floor whose boss seems oblivious to his existence, or the

junior sales associate whose regional manager never remembers

her name and seems to look straight through her in meetings.

Perhaps the pattern of activity within the motor resonance system

that we observed in the present study can begin to explain how

these occurrences take place and, more generally, can shed light

on the tendency for the powerful to neglect the powerless, and the

tendency for the powerless to expend effort in understanding the

powerful.

Here is someone who could design a kick ass DCIM system - Pat Helland Software Architect

One of my software buddies sent me a video link pumped that the presentation discussed the power of immutable distributed systems.  When I saw the presentation I saw it was by ex-Microsoft Software Architect Pat Helland.  In 2010, Pat moved to the Bing team to work on back end infrastructure to support the search environment.  

Last Fall, I switch to work on Bing Infrastructure and have been very, very busy (and having a wonderful time).  The projects I’m working on include COSMOS and Autopilot.  COSMOS is a petabyte store (working towards being an exabyte store) which runs over tens of thousands of inexpensive computers.  In addition to reliable storage, COSMOS supports Dryad based computation with application development in SCOPE which is a SQL-like language.  Some public papers include: SCOPE and COSMOS, and Partitioning and Parallel Plans in SCOPE and COSMOS.  The Autopilot team in OSD (Online Services Division which includes Bing) makes hardware selections for our ever-increasing bunch of servers, networking, systems support, automatic deployment and load balancing.  See  Autopilot.  I have been having a blast working with the team in Bellevue and a team in Beijing with lots of talented people.

FYI, Pat now works as a software architect at Salesforce and this video got me to reconnect to Pat through LinkedIn.

Pat is a guy who could definitely design a DCIM system.  Below is the presentation my developer friend got pumped about. I watched it too and agree Pat describes the ideas it takes to build a system for a complex data environments.

Warning this video can be hard to watch if you don't already think about software designs and believe immutability changes everything.  Other great points are "normalization is for sissies" and "accountants don't have erasers."

Immutability Changes Everything - Pat Helland, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

I hadn't chatted with Pat for probably 5 years to discuss data centers.  He was just getting started studying data centers, and he gave a presentation on green data centers in 2008.

Green Computing through Sharing
Reducing both Cost AND Carbon

Data centers consumed 1.5% of the total electricity in the US in 2006 and are on track to double as a percentage every five years. It is about 2% of the US total in 2008. Western Europe’s use is increasing at a slightly faster rate (from a slightly lower base percentage). The consumption of electicity within data centers is of significant financial and environmental importance.

Where the heck is all this power going? Why is the electrical load increasing so much? What can be done about it?

This talk will examine both traditional and emerging data center designs. We will start by examining how a data center is laid out, constructed, and managed. We will show two emerging trends: the change to designing data centers for the optimization of power and the emergence of new economies of scale in data centers which is contributing to the drive towards cloud computing. Microsoft is actively moving to compete in the space of cloud computing as we are seeing at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a few weeks before TechEd EMEA Developer.

Next, we will examine the sources of waste in the system today and examine why so many of our resources are underutilized. Because we are reluctant to share computing resources, they are left idle much of the time. Why is this currently the dominant choice? What can be done in the design of applications, systems, and data centers to make them more green (both carbon and cash)? What can developers do to make a difference?

It was a pleasure chatting with Pat 5 years ago, and I look forward to connecting with him again, and discuss how immutability changes everything.  :-)

How to cost effectively increase efficiency in the data center by me

I was going through the gigaom site, and saw a post on cost effectively increase efficiently of the data center, and then saw I wrote it.  I worked on the post so long ago I lost track of it.  (Note: you need to be a subscriber of GigaOm Pro to read the full report.

How to cost-efficiently increase efficiency in the data center

• by Dave Ohara
• on Aug 14, 2013

This report underwitten by: Telx

Today’s data center managers must not only satisfy customer demands for around-the-clock availability from anywhere in the world; they must also contend with demands from within their own organizations to help reduce operational costs.

Customers and internal stakeholders alike expect and ask for the same availability as the traditional “plain old telephone service” (POTS). In days gone by, providers such as AT&T engineered their dial-tone service to be available 99.999 percent of the time. This dial-tone reliability has become such a well-known benchmark that it is commonly known as the “five nines” standard, which is the equivalent of having a dial tone available for all but five minutes a year.

However, high expectations translate into increasing pressure on data center managers, who can quickly find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they must keep their facilities operating at peak performance. On the other hand, they have budgetary concerns from within their own companies because external regulatory bodies are demanding that energy usage be reduced.

This paper is intended for executives who determine their organization’s business strategies and IT policies. If you are looking for ways to decrease data center costs, and are considering a variety of options, you require knowledge of the possibilities that are available as well as the successes that others have had.

Going to PuppetConf, DevOps IT Automation

Next week is PuppetConf.

PuppetConf is the one can’t-miss annual conference for the IT industry, and it’s taking place
August 22-23 in San Francisco. The best minds in IT will be meeting at PuppetConf 2013 to
discuss leading-edge thinking in DevOps, cloud automation and continuous delivery. By
attending, I’ll have access to:
 Educational sessions and hands-on experience. With two full days of keynotes,
presentations and hands-on labs, I’ll learn how IT professionals are using Puppet
Labs technologies to deliver business results faster, with higher quality and greater
efficiency.
 Product research and analysis. The tradeshow will give me access to 40-plus
sponsors - a great opportunity to see what’s available in the rapidly changing IT
marketplace. I’ll be able to choose from more than 70 sessions led by IT thought
leaders on new tools, methods and strategies that can help our company gain a
competitive advantage.
 Networking with industry experts. More than 1,600 sysadmins, architects,
engineers, developers and IT managers will convene at PuppetConf. Informal, lively
discussions between these professionals offer excellent opportunities to learn how
smart people are solving difficult IT problems. More than 120 Puppet Labs
employees will also be on hand to answer questions and offer insight into future
product developments.

I am looking forward to catch up with many of the DevOps thought leaders.  Here are the speakers.