ExtremeLabs, Inc

This is going to be easy.

#1: ARM gives Intel/AMD/VIA a run for its money

Yes, lowly RISC processors are coming in huge densities, all using much less power. Seems counter-intuitive, but there’ll be multiple OS changes to accommodate the density possibilities, mostly in interesting server combinations.

#2: Social Sickness

Twitter, Facebook, G+, all interesting. A unified user interface that just does it will become popular, and will separate the truly social from the casual. The client piece will be fought tooth and nail because it disrupts the business models of the social site vendors.

#3: The Great Server Makers Will Fall and NOCs Will Change Forever (for the better)

Servers aren’t what they used to be. High density servers will steal the market. NOCs will start to look like clouds, and many skies of clouds. Traditional server makers will have some problems getting to market and learning how to make margins based on differing densities.

#4: Client Hardware Will Become: Anything

I want my (fill in this blank) to work on the darn network. Make it so. Desktop hardware doesn’t go away, there is no death of anything. Instead, accessibility will become the huge challenge for large organizations, who will become driven by user pressures. This will lead to

#5: Security Rethought

Unified security will become the norm with (gasp!) interoperability. Lacking that, we have chaos. Maybe the government will wake up, too, but I doubt it.

And finally, Obama wins, and someone will owe me yet another beer to pay me off.

The acquisition of Sun by Oracle means Oracle gets hardware that’s had a difficult time in the marketplace: Sun’s UltraSparc technology. The SPARC family has had a long life and competes head to head with Intel and AMD’s processors. While Sun doesn’t manufacture their own hardware (and this CPU) any more, the design of the UltraSparc family is important.

The question is, can Oracle continue to develop the family when fewer and fewer organizations are buying it? The advantages of the UltraSparc family might be strong (lower power consumption and sparse architecture), but few organizations seen to be buying into the idea of a single-vendor processor platform, which is what the UltraSparc-driven server family is– despite the fact that Fujitsu also produces hardware using Sun’s UltraSparc platform.

It would be bad to see still another CPU maker and their architecture die. The computer industry needs the diversity of components and competition to thrive.

We have four shiny new AMD Shanghais in the lab. We had to buy thermal paste. We’re waiting for new BIOS/firmware to get started. The HP 585 G5 in our lab blew papers across the room when we fired it up. They should supply earplugs with it…… and maybe a city block worth of solar cells, too.

Soon we’ll be testing with it to compare it to Intel’s Xeons. I wonder if it’ll be Xeoff, or Xeon, afterward.

It’s a beautiful day. Time to twiddle our thumbs and wait for updates.