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Numbers, Volume 26

Hilton Chicago Elevator monitoring

The Week in Virtualization Conferences

This week saw both VMworld and the RedHat Summit. The RedHat folks told me they’d settled on and announced the date before VMworld, and I’m pretty sure they’d have liked to avoid having it during the same week as VMworld is currently the virtualization conference. See Stephen’s report from VMworld. In the numbers world, though, how about attendees? RedHat didn’t too bad considering (I was there, and it seemed well populated).

From John Fontana:

RedHat this week began to weave together that message at its annual Red Hat Summit, which attracted 1,500 attendees.The addition of KVM, a hypervisor that is part of the Linux kernel, is key to that process.”

From Timothy Prickett Morgan:

There were 12,500 attendees at the VMworld virtualization fest in San Francisco this week, and apparently half of them were peddling software to help companies cope with virtual machine sprawl or otherwise manage virtualization in the data center or on the desktops.

The Smart Phone Numbers Game

AdMob released their mobile metrics report for June and Android usage continues to grow. Request from the Android operating system grew 25% month over month. This now gives Android a 5% worldwide OS share and marks the first time they have pulled ahead of Windows Mobile.

Via James.

SMB Survey from Spiceworks

Some highlights from their report:

These findings were uncovered in a Q3 2009 survey of over 1,000 IT professionals, which was designed to investigate current technology purchasing, usage and staffing trends among small and medium businesses (SMBs) worldwide. The survey was fielded in July and August.

Small and medium businesses are squeezing an extra year out of their hardware. The average planned life of hardware, which includes desktops, laptops and servers, increased 26 percent from 40 months to 50 months.

57 percent currently use one or more “cloud computing” services. The three most popular cloud computing services in use or on the purchase list include anti-spam (43 percent), hosted email (25 percent), and online backup (20 percent).

Box Movers

Unboxing The Beast

Meanwhile, from Gartner:

According to the latest figures coming out of Gartner, global server revenues fell 29.4 per cent to $9.69bn and shipments fell by an equally bad 28 per cent to 1.69 million units.

Rendering

The conference also featured Derek Chan, head of digital operations at Dreamworks Animation, who touted the company’s use of cloud and grid computing in movies like “Monsters vs. Aliens.” The company has built a compute grid with more than 9,000 cores, he said. “Monsters vs. Aliens” took more than 40 million render hours to complete, he said. Cloud computing provides quick scalability and efficiency, he said.

Well, that was a weird ride

The new investors will buy approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion US.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Spiceworks are clients.

Categories: Numbers.