Archive for October, 2006
October 30, 2006 at 11:04 pm · Filed under Consolidation, datacenter, vmware
“Virtualisation and x86 make sense from a price-performance perspective†- Express Computer
This article mentions the issues we’ve had with blade costsings “Anybody with 15 servers or more is a candidate for this technology, whereas those with only 5-10 servers will get benefits but may prefer to stay with rack mounts due to cost considerations” That said, the next trick is to do the following, from rackmount, to vmware on blades. We need to start using the blade technology more effectively to consolidate and at the same time virtualize, the trick is not to use the proliant for a blade, or rackmount to blade, that fixes your datacenter for the short term. We need to look at what infrastructure we have out there, what it’s doing and how we can provide that within a virtual session. That said, it requires IT to work in a different way from a service delivery and a costing angle, the network/the storage all need to be in place as well as the costing so that there is an incentive not only to talk smart, but be smart. Our biggest challenge with vmware was rarely technological.
October 30, 2006 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Consolidation, datacenter
HP Looks to Nature for Data Center of the Future
The datacenter needs to evolve in capacity and design as much as the hardware, as power requirements/cooling goes up, the datacenters in place need to be able to grow and meet these demands. Part of the problem with the deployment of blades, is that many firms are deploying blades into their existing infrastructure. We’ve found in tests that the best way to approach hosting blades is to think of them as another server, another box to be supplied and cooled. With that in mind, we know the requirements, we know our environment, and where a ‘batch’ of blades can be hosted. That coupled with a degree of due diligence and caution, the manual may say 70/96 blades in a rack, and when done with ample time, management and consideration they can be hosted and cable managed effectively. Many banks/companies don’t work like that, most are deploy now, fix it later. A new design of data center, fantastic, as we move to a lights out way of doing business with our IT though, wont that make the server less of an issue? Why do I care where my risk calculations are calculated as long as they work?
October 30, 2006 at 10:49 pm · Filed under Consolidation, blades
HP to Introduce Dedicated Storage Blade
HP are “to Introduce Dedicated Storage Blade”, a blade that either allows you to start building blades with 876GB storage, and allows you to start using blades as file servers for small medium sized markets. This could prove interesting too for the larger enterprise markets. Traditionally, shared storage (your notes/outlook and file space) was provided by infrastructure, at a fixed cost, this was fine in the days of netapps filers when 200GB was ample, but as business requirements change, we need to re-address this. The driver is more space, at less cost, but with redunancy. The blade might introduce lower cost, the reduandancy might be the issue here. Selling the blade and parts at “a base cost of $1,599″ is smart, but the drives and enclosure can make the real cost higher. Check out the quickspecs: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12513_div/12513_div.html
October 27, 2006 at 12:56 pm · Filed under blades
‘Blading’ a new trail - INQ7.net
This is a very interesting article, and I agree blades can provide real value, the benefits obtained from a blade as opposed to a rack mount server are numerous, the only thing to remember when discussing the suitability of blades for your business are: what’s the growth likely to be? what cooling facilities do you have? What’s your budget? The blade itself might be similar or cheaper to a rack mount, but the associated infrastructure isn’t. To deploy a blade server, you need the enclosure (which can be expensive), any integrated networking, the benefits to blades are in volume.
October 27, 2006 at 12:51 pm · Filed under blades
Blade Servers in the Enterprise
This is an interesting article about the main players in blade servers. Blades are a great way of deploying servers particularly if you’re wanting to consolidate your infrastructure. A blade would be an ideal mid range type server for web hosting in most cases, the san support means you haven’t got to worry about disk capacity. The real players though are using blades to consolidate and virtualize at the same time. Blades running vmware hosting several applications/servers within one blade.
October 27, 2006 at 12:47 pm · Filed under blades
Bank invests in blade servers and on-demand - Financial Services - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com
It seems that this investment bank has bought another tranche of blades for it’s derivatives businesss. My experience with the blades is that the banks want the benefits of the blades, but the challenge is the hosting, the blade racks are power and heat intensive thus costly to host. It will be interesting to see if any of the other banks start to outsource their hosting facilities.
