Archive for November, 2006
November 30, 2006 at 11:04 am · Filed under blades, rackmounts
PRdomain.com | Seagate Technology| Seagate Savvio hard drives embraced by technology leaders worldwide
“29 Nov 2006 :Â Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX), today announced that its ground-breaking Savvio 2.5-inch small form factor enterprise hard drives have achieved unprecedented levels of adoption among leading system suppliers and solution builders. The rapid adoption rate of this innovative solution marks a new trend in the enterprise as a shift from the 3.5-inch to the 2.5-inch form factor accelerates. “
Very cool, I’m waiting to see though, how long it takes until we move to solid state drives.
November 30, 2006 at 11:01 am · Filed under blades
Techworld.nl
“Financial traders at a London company wear shorts to work because heat from workstations under their desks is so bad. Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has invented technology to take the workstations out from under the desks and replace them with blade-style computers tucked away in a separate data center.”
HP are set to release trader blade workstations, this sounds great, we’ve been having increasing problems with heat and space as some of the traders want more than one pc under their desk, and the trader workstations do use a lot of power and generate significant heat. The main challenge I see here is still the cost. £800 for a trader pc, or £2500 for a blade workstation, plus the remote bits like a screen etc. Until the comfor bit becomes significant enough, we shall continue with pcs, (that coupled with datacenter capacity). Interesting to see how quickly the banks’ adopt this new technology.
November 28, 2006 at 6:08 pm · Filed under blades
The typcial intranet/internet application we look after is three tier. So you have:
Web server connects to transaction server which retrieves content from the database/data server.
Now at the moment, you’ll have typically some medium/small web servers which use similar web servers to connect to something very powerful to handle/store your data.
With the bladecenter, you could have the first two tiers in blades, the web site getting too many hits because your sites’ doing great business, fine, deploy another blade, and have your web support team divert traffic, the transaction time increasing, plug in another blade and add it to the farm.
Obviously there will be the cross charging, the how do we do this, but if we get passed this and work out how we can deliver a scalable/computing on demand type platform.
November 28, 2006 at 5:59 pm · Filed under blades
Byte and Switch - Insider: Storage Boosts Blades - Storage Networking News Analysis
“Vendors have focused on blade servers as a perfect complement to SANs and see the use of blade server-storage combinations as satisfying customer needs,” explains Smetannikov. “Many have launched new products that deliver not just storage functionality, but also applications that have been developed on the assumption of the availability of blade server-storage switch infrastructure.”
Once you’re able to attach storage to your blade infrastructure, their possible uses whether for small departmental projects, or even consolidation become more apparent. An example being IIS, at the moment there tends to be shared infrastructure IIS or individual teams/departments buying their IIS servers, with this comes the hosting and usual growth/capacity planning obstacles, (we’re using a mixture of DL360/DL380 rack mounts.)
From an infrastructure angle, and application a rack/enclosure of blades would be great. 16 dedicated web servers for example, 2 hot standby, the rest easily configurable for the application team and freeing up all those dl380s’, i’ll give you an example, we have intranet and internet applications, we might get up to 25 sites on a server, but we need four for resiliance for tier 1. That means I might have several cabinets dedicated to intranet and internet, particularly since there will be the transversal internet applications and the business specific trading or ‘admin/management tools’, like http://traderisk.intranet or http://onlinepcsales.intranet. All requiring hosting, we could consolidate the 70 or so servers into a couple of blade cabinets with network attached storage, two things would come from this. Reclaimed data center space, and the ability to be proactive with our capacity planning, the ability to say to the business team, your pricing site is getting more traffic, simply rebuild/re-image that blade and deploy the application within hours, even more so if it’s linux.
November 28, 2006 at 10:58 am · Filed under blades
Hitachi launches new-generation blade servers - ZDNet UK
Hitachi has released it’s own blade server range, interestingly they can run itanium or xeon blades, and the article comments that the itanium can run their virtualization tool which will allow the itanium to be split running several operating systems. Interesting to see how Hitachi get on, it’s very competitive in the blade/grid market.
November 28, 2006 at 10:44 am · Filed under blades, datacenter, rackmounts
The move by some companies to a compute on demand solution, a system where I say “I need 2000 servers with hosting and support, what’s the cost”, one where my involvement is to install my operating system, my layered components, and join it to my existing infrastructure.
There are many benefits in terms of flexibility, and most importantly the issues with hosting such a solution now become a managed service not an internal hosting issue for the IT teams. What’s interesting though is we seem to be moving full circle back to the ‘olden days’ computing where i paid for a 1hr or 10 minute slice of the main frame to process my application.
November 28, 2006 at 10:41 am · Filed under blades, rackmounts
INDEPENDENT online
“HP has announced enhancements to its Unified Cluster Portfolio for high-performance computing (HPC) at Supercomputing 2006.
Product updates include support for new HP servers and workstations powered by Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® 5300 series processors. The HP Cluster Platform 3000 system now runs new Quad-Core processor-based HP ProLiant servers that offer customers greater energy efficiency and can improve system performance by nearly 50 per cent.”Â
Interesting to see how the this new product could be used. Very cool, will need to read up.
November 28, 2006 at 10:38 am · Filed under vmware
DABCC | CA Releases Virtualization Management Tool - Virtualization Industry News
Looks very cool, managing a virtual environment can get more difficult as the environment scales up, there is vmware’s virtual center, but I expect that this tool from CA will work well with your existing TNG setup. Will need to take a look.
November 26, 2006 at 9:42 pm · Filed under blades
Grid Computing Planet: IBM Makes Linux and Grid Easier
“IBM has unveiled new service offerings to help ease adoption of Linux and grid computing technologies.
Big Blue said its new Implementation Services for Linux and Grid and Grow Express Implementation are based on a new IBM Research-designed automated Web-based tool that can significantly reduce implementation time and expense.”
Very interesting, the market for grid applications/operating systems and services is increasing as businesses see what they can do with it.
November 26, 2006 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Consolidation, blades
A lot of the banks have been migrating their existing applications on to grid, their batch type calculation applications for risk/reporting etc, are ideal if configured in the right way for grid. In the short term, if the application is windows based, it makes sense to keep it windows, however, in the long term, more banks are moving grid to linux. Why I here you ask, well (from a windows engineer this is rare but), you haven’t got the random windows type errors. For example, oracle client installing but not really, security patching (at the moment less of an issue on linux), registry/dll problems, yes you might be able to rebuild the windows box in 35 minutes, but in my experience linux is a bit more hands off. You build it, install the layered components, and again in binary form, it either works or not. We had problems with the oracle client being installed but not recognized, or ingres installing but not registering correctly with the bank application, again issues which might have been that bit easier without the windows aspect.
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