IBM comments on buying Softlayer

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris has a post on IBM and the acquisition of Softlayer.

On buying SoftLayer for $2 billion

“[W]e bought a company. … I’ve bought 120 companies,” Mills said matter of factly, noting that in this case IBM realized it wasn’t capturing certain segments of the cloud market and wasn’t delivering certain capabilities that customers wanted. You can either build those capabilities or buy them, he added, and “at the end of the day you run out of money [to build everything].”

Mills did defend IBM’s cloud legacy, though, going back to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling IBM in 2006 and asking if it would help set up a web-accessible developer cloud “because we had dynamic provisioning and scheduling technology and they did not.”

Analyst Roundtable: ARM in the data center

On Dec 19, 2012 10a will be a webinar discussing the ARM chip in the data center.  The webinar is here.

Power matters: using ARM to reduce data center costsA consumer using a computer to shop, email, search, or any of the other myriad tasks now possible, usually measures power consumption by the dollar figure on the monthly electrical bill. But as two recent, highly controversial articles in the New York Times reiterated, U.S. data centers backing up those tasks consume as much as two percent of the nation’s power consumption. Long before the articles appeared, data centers were aware of the problem and had begun employing various strategies to lower cooling costs, eliminate redundancies, and improve power usage effectiveness (PUE).

Another solution is deploying ultra-low power servers that reduce data center power needs – in a sense, reinventing the server. How does the efficiency of this solution stack up against the alternatives? What are some specific use cases? And, what’s the future for ARM-based server solutions? For answers to these and many other questions, join GigaOM Pro and our sponsor Calxeda for “Power matters: using ARM to reduce data center costs,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, December 19, 2012, at 10 a.m. PT.

I'll be on the webinar and Barry Evans from Calxeda.

Our panel of experts includes:

Om Malik posts on Facebook's Data Centers

We are all so used to reading DatacenterKnowledge, DatacenterDynamics, and Mission Critical that news like Facebook's data center is old within hours.

Gigaom's Om Malik only writes about one post a day, and today he wrote about Facebook's data center.

As Facebook grows, so do its data center needs

By  Apr. 20, 2012, 12:10pm PT No Comments

I often get asked the question of what Facebook will do with the ginormous amount of money it will raise as part of its forthcoming initial public offering that will value the company in excess of $100 billion? I don’t know how they will put all of it to use, but a nice piece of it will go towards maintaining and building out is backend infrastructure. The company on Thursday announced that its second data center in Forest City, N.C., is now serving live user traffic.

I think Gigaom's repeated questions on data centers is what got them to recruit me as an analyst for GigaOm Pro.