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Dell To Buy EMC For $67 Billion (nytimes.com)
im_thatoneguy writes: After days of rumors, the NY Times is reporting that Dell will in fact be acquiring storage company (and VMWare parent) EMC in a record $67B deal being financed by a consortium of banks. Dell has confirmed the deal on their website.
Under the deal, Dell will pay $33.15 a share, which represents a premium even on top of EMC's current value, which had already jumped on initials rumors of a $50B acquisition last week. However, insiders say the deal won't be a straight forward cash buy-out of stock holders. Instead, EMC investors will receive about 70% in cash and the remainder in what's called a Tracking Stock, which will track the performance of just the VMWare Division within the new organization.
Under the deal, Dell will pay $33.15 a share, which represents a premium even on top of EMC's current value, which had already jumped on initials rumors of a $50B acquisition last week. However, insiders say the deal won't be a straight forward cash buy-out of stock holders. Instead, EMC investors will receive about 70% in cash and the remainder in what's called a Tracking Stock, which will track the performance of just the VMWare Division within the new organization.
The auto industry paid most of the money back. Depending upon accounting rules, the U.S. lost approx. $9.8 billion to $16 billion. However, this does not count the dent in the U.S. economy and ultimately the tax receipts of NOT bailing out the auto industry (actually, just GM and Chrysler). That dent would have been very large and many people thrown out of work, not least the supply chain for that industry. There is a similar story with the banks paying their wad back.
Whether you like it or not, a government is a giant insurance policy. We use it to protect the people from getting whacked, something the whiners about the ACA conveniently forget (would that we were all rich and employed). One can argue the banks and Wall Street are too big, and I'd heartily support breaking the former up and reducing the influence of the latter or at least taxing those leeches a lot more.
VMware was a separate, publicly traded company, with EMC holding the majority of stock. They are still a separate, publicly traded company, but, with Dell holding the majority of stock.
So this and other comments like it seem strange to me. The VMs run on actual servers, not virtual ones. The actual servers have to be high availability before any software that runs on them. And how can you virtualize additional OS's without adding more CPUs, RAM, and disk space without making a joke of what you are running?Presumably you add OS's to actually do something. And in my experience those somethings happen concurrently with what happens in multiple virtual OS's on the physical box. Otherwise you wouldn't need multiple OS's now, would you? And they all require resources. And a host is a host is a host, VM or not. When was the last time you only had to patch one host? You normally will have to patch all of them. Unless of course you run a different operating system for every one of your servers. And I don't know many places that do that (at least not any place of any size). Sure there is some economy of scale virtualizing machines and there are virtues in virtualizing; you can share some resources and save on hardware where appropriate. But I'm surprised to hear anyone say it is for high availability. If anything, it seems like one *huge* point of failure is being described here.
Yes to a point but if you HA the ESX Hosts (that run the VMs) you can patch and failover/failback your ESX Hosts and so your VMs. You can also move your VMs that happen to be using more resources to ESX Hosts that have more resources available.
As to running different OSs in VMs, that is more common that you think. We have plenty of end users that run third party apps or custom apps that require certain versions of older or different *NIX hosts that can now all run on 'commodity' Hardware virtualized by VMware (or Hyper-V or XEN).
It does make managing Servers simpler - they still need managing but it is simpler. The amount of power and hardware is cut drastically, remember that in the old days those 50 servers requiring all that HVAC and Power (and space) were not always running at 100% of their capacity. Now you have a handful of high-end servers that can manage all those 50+ VMs with less power (and space) and it doesn't matter if they aren't running 100% of their capacity, the other VMs will take what is not being used thankyouverymuch.
It isn't the be-all-and-end-all as people make out - there are still horrendous potentials for performance bottlenecks for things like SAN attached storage and much more understanding of how your virtual networking and virtualized storage connections all tie together, but overall for many, many cases it is a huge cost saver.