HP recently commissioned Tolley Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolley focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?

I had a conversation last week with a PR company doing research for Netapp. This followed just after Netapp released their Q4 results, with revenue exceeding expectations at just over $1 billion. It’s amazing how in the space of less than 20 years they have developed from nothing to a company selling a single $4 billon product.

One of the major new components in Virtual Machine Hardware 7 is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter. When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.

There’s a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.