IBM, HP Ready to Unveil Big Data Center News Sept. 2

UPDATED: Just remember, you read this here first. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, the Nos. 1 and 2 IT system-and-service vendors in the world, will be making big news announcements around blade servers, storage and virtualization on Tuesday, Sept. 2.

IBM will be introducing its first blade server designed specifically to reduce security threats. HP is worried that companies aren’t adopting virtualization and its corresponding tool sets quickly enough, so it is going on a campaign to “educate” enterprises about the business advantages of moving older data center equipment to newer, ready-for-VM servers and arrays.

All this, certainly, translates into a distinct “business advantage” of a marketing sort for HP, which will be very happy to sell you all the hardware, software and services you will ever need to build or retool a data center. As will IBM, too.

In fact, HP has made no secret that it wants to be a “one-stop shop for all your data center needs,” especially following the completion of its merger with EDS.

HP on Sept. 2 will report that global research conducted on its own behalf (that kind of research is always a bit murky) revealed that while 86 percent of technology decision makers have implemented virtualization projects, the vast majority of respondents expect to have virtualized just 25 percent of their technology environments by 2010.

That doesn’t sound as if virtualization is getting much traction now, does it? We would have thought that 25 percent was way too low. So, it is interesting, to an extent.

What is your take on this, by the way? Is this research faulty, or is it on track? How are you using virtualization in your daily duties — or ARE you even using it at all? We’d welcome your comments here below. It’s free and your comments will be seen far and wide.

We’ll have all the rest of the details here on eWEEK on Sept. 2.