Bladewatch.com

A big thank you to Mike Laverick and the team at VMware Press for sending me this complimentary copy of his latest book titled “Administering VMware Site Recover 5.0″, I’m genuinely very pleased to have been sent it, I wish Mike and the team all the very best of luck with this latest publication.

http://www.amazon.com/Administering-VMware-Recovery-Manager-Technology/dp/0321799925 or http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=9780321799920

I got sent this through the post to read and review and have just started reading it, I’m excited to see what’s covered and read more up on VMware Recovery Manager. Do check it out if you’re looking for a book about VMware Site Recovery Manager, as I complete more pages, I will update more, there are some pictures below in the meantime.

As I write this there are only 8 left on amazon.co.uk, so you might want to pay a visit sooner rather than later to get a copy:

The back of the book is as follows:

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IDC

Western European Organizations Prepare Tougher IT Budgets for 2012, According to IDC Survey

LONDON, January 23, 2012 — Western European organizations on average are drawing up cautious budgets for IT hardware, software, and services spend in 2012, with fewer organizations this year planning to raise their spend, according to a survey of IT decision makers by International Data Corporation (IDC).

In November 2011, IDC carried out a “Pulse” survey of spending intentions among 590 organizations in six territories across Western Europe. The findings are analyzed in the report IDC European Enterprise Pulse 4Q11: Organizations Batten Down the Hatches for 2012 (IDC #Q11T, December 2011). Key findings include:

• Some 40% of organizations expect to raise external IT spend on hardware, software, and services, and about 17% expect external IT spend in 2012 to decline. The remainder expect to hold spend steady. Only a quarter of those planning to increase spend in 2012 are planning to raise spend by 5% or more.
• In 2011, some 43% of organizations raised their external IT spend over the whole year, according to survey respondents, while around 20% lowered their spend.
• Western European organizations are therefore heading into 2012 with external IT budgets that tend on average more toward stasis when compared with actual IT spend patterns in 2011.

“These spending plans may seem optimistic at first sight, given the economic environment, but in fact total external IT spend budgets for 2012 are well down on the equivalent budgets for 2011,” said report author Douglas Hayward, research director, IDC European services research.

There certainly are tough trading conditions for both consumers of IT and their suppliers, that said there are still opportunities for both in leveraging new technology to deliver enhanced functionality and capacity for revenue generation, sufficient customers that need to renew and upgrade their infrastructure. IT spending might be declining in some respects, but there are still customers with the day to day challenges, reliability and scalability, the customers that might not be getting ready for cloud or even think about, as ever, we need to keep the momentum between next generation technologies and bridge with legacy customers to see how we can help them keep the lights on and move towards empowerment and revenue generation through effective deployment and management of their existing infrastructure with the right combination of cloud services (both private and public as appropriate).

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http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/solutions/datacentersolutions/pod/index.html

The HP POD 20c and 40c offer can be deployed within weeks instead of months or even years. The HP POD can ship with fully integrated and tested IT from an HP factory in as little as six weeks.

It comes to you as part of a complete data center solution, with services available for strategy and site planning to innovative products and comprehensive global support. For more HP POD information, go to hp.com/go/pod.

Whether it’s the HP offering or an alternative one, I’ve often thought that for me what the data center in a container is not only extra on demand capacity, but it’s also the mobility combined with capacity. It’s that as an enterprise running legacy data centers with immediate capacity and cost reductions requirements, being able to lease or buy one and deliver it to a specific location, virtualize and migrate workloads to it, freeing my teams to do the following:

• Rework the data center from a load and layout standpoint – move servers, storage and networks kit around to extend the capacity and lifespan of the existing data center
• Rework the patching in general and the patching frames so that we can better identify network routes, and at the same point reclaim cabling without causing an outage
• Decommission legacy platforms which are now running on the POD servers, un-rack and dispose, install new cabinets and start build out of rows or individual cabinets
• Verify the air flow, cooling and energy distribution to check it meets my requirements, guidelines and is as efficient as it can be
• Re-inventory and identify assets and fix broken kvm’s or even remove them to reduce power consumption and rely on lights out and crash carts as required
• Re-rack new infrastructure comprised of new servers, network and storage as appropriate
• Migrate workloads back from POD to improved data center and replicate in other locations or ship the container to other locations to do so.

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I have been looking at another server for Bladewatch after HP kindly sent us a new style HP Proliant MicroServer to play with (the N40L G7 edition to be precise).  During this research for a new server I was comparing features of the HP Proliant MicroServer and their entry level HP Proliant ML series server.  The ML is their tower based server, and is designed with expansion in mind, their MicroServer has expansion features but is also referred to as the Just Right First Server. With this in mind, I thought I’d dig deeper, the major differences are below, I’ve quoted the quickspecs but sometimes you find things like memory support change as different configurations become available so do check out the HP site.

The ML110 G6 features:

Selection of Celeron to Xeon processor

Smart Array for striping data over disks

Integrated HP ProLiant 100 G6 Lights Out 100i Remote Management standard

4 expansion slots

DVD ROM drive standad

Memory support is 16GB

The MicroServer

AMD Turion II Model Neo N40L processor only

RAID controller for RAiD 1,0

Remote Access Card is optional

Two expansion slots

Memory support is 8GB

The main difference then?  The HP Proliant MicroServer will be more than good enough as a small business server, a starter device which I can use for file and print, as well as an ESXi test lab or even a mini application server dependent on the requirements.  The Proliant ML110 G6 or G7 brings further scalability, further upgrade potential when it comes to expansion slots, memory and the inbuilt lights out card makes it that little bit more manageable out of the box as it’s standard, where as the MicroServer you need to fit it or order it with it fitted.  That said both are ideal starter servers and which one you choose will depend on you and your requirements, I’ve got colleagues running both as media servers, VMware or virtualization test labs to name a few scenarios.

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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/refs-ntfs-file-system-windows-8-server,14501.html

ReFS, short for Resilient File System, will initially debut with Windows 8 Server, but is expected to make its way through to Windows 8 client system to support the full feature set of Storage Spaces, which will allow users to create storage pools from multiple physical and virtual storage devices.

According to Microsoft, ReFS will be an always-online file system “for the next decade or more” that is architected for “extreme scale” with large volume, file and directory sizes, as well as data verification and auto-correction via checksums while maintaining compatibility with a “wide subset of widely adopted” NTFS features.

Interesting, there were meant to be improvements to the file system in Windows many years ago with Vista if I recall, I wonder what ReFS will bring, I’m off to read up more about it, do check it out.

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http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/sme-servers/2012/01/20/fujitsu-primergy-rx100-s7-40094873/

Check out this review of Fujitsu’s Primergy RX100 S7, one of their rack servers, it does look like an interesting review and offering from Fujitsu, I’m off to check out more on the Fujitsu site.

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http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/servers/372277/ibm-system-x3100-m4

Check out this review from PC Pro for the IBM System X3100-M4, it’s always great to see what other people think about the different vendors servers, an interesting read, I’m off to read up more about IBM’s server through their excellent Redbooks here.

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http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/fusion-io-punches-through-one-billion-iops-barrier-53263

Storage specialist Fusion-io continues to improve the latency of flash storage devices after it achieved one billion input and output operations per second (IOPS) in a demonstration.

The company made the announcement just one month after a test involving its solid-state memory storage subsystems, showed how a single server test system reached 1.11 million transactions per second (tps).

In the most recent demonstration however, the company used eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets.

A great article talking about Fusion-io’s impressive announcement and achievements in their IOPS demonstration, with the right system configuration and an optimized application can create an impressive platform for revenue generation especially in low latency and high performance platforms. I’m off to read more about it.

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The standard MicroServer comes with a hard drive, memory, network port and USB so that you can connect your USB DVD drive to load the operating system or run FreeNAS or ESXi, none of the options I have listed below are necessary to get started, though I did find having the DVD drive that bit easier to load Windows 2008.

The options I would look at:

• Internal DVD Writer (624192-B21)  – this is to allow you to install software as normal (for example Windows/Linux or to install any applications that you might have rather than use the network connection) – if you’re deploying remotely you might not want the DVD Writer for security – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06c/A1-329290-329233-72841-72841-3626683-4275665.html

•  HP External backup device (AJ766A) – this is to allow you to backup your server, you might choose an online back up tool, or already have a backup solution in place (even using Windows Backup to disk/DVD might do initially) – http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/disk-backup/product-detail.html?oid=3741010

• HP MicroServer Remote Access Card (615095-B21) – this allows you to manage the MicroServer remotely, this could be ideal if you’re planning to use them in remote sites or have them stored under the desk rather than in an easy to access location – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06c/A1-329290-439740-241590-241590-4275610-4275612.html

• There are of course extra disks dependent on your storage requirements and thoughts for future growth going forward, you might for example choose to have one disk for Windows and another for your network shares, so that someone copying all their files to the ‘share drive’ need not affect the stability of the server.

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HP very kindly shipped us (658553-421) for us to test and see what we thought of it.  This is the G7 edition featuring the updated AMD N40L processor, it comes with 2GB

The specs are here:

So what’s in the box?

• HP Proliant MicroServer
• European power cable
• US power cable
• Documentation and DVD with documentation

So what is included inside the MicroServer:

• 1x 2GB memory chip
• 1x 250GB 7200RPM hard drive
• Extra screws so that you can install an additional hard drive
• Key to allow you to use screws for additional disk, also to remove the system board

So what upgrades could I fit to the existing server?

• An additional RAM chip to improve performance and available memory
• An additional three hard drives (SATA non hot plug hard disk drives) – currently therefore you could install 12TB (4x3TB hard drives)
• DVD Writer/DVD ROM drive or HP tape drive
• Remote Access Card (in one of the slots)
• Network card (in the other slot)

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