September 16, 2009
Intel takes biggest slice of market pie since 2005
Channel Register
John Oates writes about where Intel sits in the PC processor market.
“The chip giant scored 80.6 per cent of world chip revenue in the second quarter of 2009, up from 79.1 per cent in the same period of 2008 and up 1.5 per cent from the previous quarter. Matthew Wilkins, analyst of compute platforms research for iSuppli, which crunched the numbers, said: ‘Intel benefitted as the global PC market took a first small step toward recovery in the second quarter, with global shipments rising by one per cent from the first quarter.’”
Cisco pumps up small business line
Channel Register
Austin Modine provides details around Cisco’s new Small Business Partner Development Fund track partner offerings.
“As part of the hardware rollout, Cisco conjured up five new Small Business Partner Development Fund tracks covering Cisco Registered Partners, Cisco Specialized Partners, online resale partners, and service providers. Each track offers quarterly payments to qualifying partners based on how much Cisco swag they purchase. Because SMBs can be difficult for Cisco to reach and expensive to service, the company relies on resellers to push their product to the market. A little sweetening of the deal apparently goes a long way.”
Stop Designing Data Centers from the Bottom Up
Network World
Tony Bishop offers some advice on how to effectively design and build a data centre.
“In order to effectively design data centres today – whether internal or in the cloud – you need to start from the top down. That means understanding the business at the most fundamental level; how does it make money versus what it does just to keep the lights on. What application & systems support those functions? And only then drive down to the physical resources that these systems run on. When laid out like this it makes sense, right? So why do we, as a community of IT professionals, always start data centre projects by counting servers and bytes of storage?”