Industry analyst IDEAS has released a number of enhancements to its Competitive Profiles (CP) and Server Consolidation Analysis Resources (CAR) services. Enhancements span IDEAS' cost of ownership tools for storage, blades, and servers; systems and storage street pricing for EMEA; and a productivity booster for importing server asset data.

The latest enhancements include:

New - Storage Cost of Ownership Tool: Spanning disk and tape technologies, the tool enables subscribers to model the 3-year cost of ownership of over 3,000 discrete configurations. Initially, the service addresses the U.S. market. Expansion into other geographies is planned.

Enhanced - Blades Cost of Ownership Tool: The new Blades Cost of Ownership tool in CPService allows users to build custom blade solutions by combining multiple blades in an enclosure. This new tool marks a considerable improvement over the previous one, which used set configurations consisting of a chassis with a single blade. With the new tool, users add multiple blade configurations to an enclosure configuration to create a blade solution. Enclosure configurations are available for all major chassis offerings from Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun. Blade configurations are available for all blades offered by these vendors with each available processor option at every scaling point.

Enhanced - Server Cost of Ownership Tool: Coinciding with the introduction of cost of ownership tools for storage products and blade servers, enhancements have also been made to the cost of ownership tool for servers. It has been renamed to “Server Cost of Ownership” and now features a new selection wizard, which vastly improves the process of selecting configurations for comparison.

Enhanced - Street Pricing for EMEA: IDEAS is extending its Enhanced Street Pricing coverage to include insights into EMEA discounting practices, based on locally researched street pricing. Previously, Enhanced Street Pricing coverage was only available for the US marketplace. Enhanced Street Pricing for EMEA is available in both the CPSystems and CPStorage modules and includes coverage of the following major product families: » Dell PowerEdge Server, Dell|EMC AX/ CX Disk Arrays, PowerVault Disk and NAS » HP ProLiant and Integrity, Storage Works, Disk, MSA, EVA and NAS » IBM System x and BladeCenter, DS3000 » Sun X64 and Blade, Workgroup and Modular Disk

New - Smart Import Tool Added to Server CAR: The Smart Import tool provides an essential productivity enhancement to Server CAR subscribers by automating the import of server asset data into a Server CAR project. Practitioners maintain that the majority of the time spent in planning a server consolidation project is consumed by gathering asset data, cleansing the content, and entering the information into a planning and analysis tool. Smart Import, in conjunction with Server CAR, dramatically streamlines this timeconsuming process, offering productivity gains typically in the range of four-to tenfold over manual entry.

About Ideas International

Ideas International (IDEAS) is the leading global supplier of comparative intelligence on enterprise IT infrastructure. Servicing both IT vendors and large-scale IT users, IDEAS products focus on: servers; storage; virtualization and consolidation; and software and infrastructure services. IDEAS online products are backed up by expert industry analysts who can also deliver specialized advisory and consulting services.

» Story on Analyst Firm Website

comments powered by Disqus