Archive for January, 2007
January 31, 2007 at 12:49 pm · Filed under How IT works
Every year around October/November time life kind of stops for a while at the large banks. You see it’s getting close to budget time, this is the time where write down everything we want, four Sun servers a DL585 and two more headcount.
Getting what you want on the budget is important, so if you know that you will need to replace your servers next year, it’s time to put it on the budget and get it signed off.
Once set the budgets tend to be set in stone, yes there’s the business need part, but in terms of projects, once they are set putting something into the budget will result in something being taken out.
One giant wish list is generated and the account managers/application managers will attempt to get it signed off. When all is done, the debates have been had you result with a budget, a list of projects associated with it, so you’ve got budget allocated of 60k for your servers, whether thats four sun servers or three and a DL585 is up to you.
As part of this you will be given say £400 for people, £100 for servers, £100 for costs, and £200 investment for fixed projects on the list, create capitalmarketspricing.bankname.com website.Â
The budgets are done for a reason, to forecast expenditure, to get approvement for investment projects, to try and reduce the number of financial surprises, the number of quick we need a new server to fix production, kind of issue.
January 31, 2007 at 1:12 am · Filed under blades
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/969291
Gartner Dataquest (Quote) Tuesday said worldwide blade server shipments will increase dramatically, growing from the 84,810 units it expects will ship in 2002 to more than 1 million in 2006. The IT research firm also anticipates that revenue from blades will reach at least $1.2 billion during this time.
With the major hardware vendors now jumping on the server blade bandwagon, blades are becoming big business and are one of the few segments of the server market still experiencing rapid growth.
“For vendors to gain any competitive advantage and enjoy market share from this cycle disruption, the blade product offering must include demonstrable advantages for customers over rack-optimized servers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, principal analyst covering servers for Gartner Dataquest’s Computing Platform Worldwide group.
It will be interesting to see how we can start using blades more, how the technology will evolve, I still think they’re a great way of hosting ESX for virtualization projects, the article discusses blade servers and where they’re going, check it out.
January 31, 2007 at 1:08 am · Filed under Technical stuff
Vista does look good, it’s an improvement over windows xp which has been looking quite old. However, I have a few issues with it:
- Too many windows derivatives - home, home premium edition, ultimate, business etc
- Rather expensive - It’s suggested most will buy it with a pc, but what if I buy an apple mac instead?
- Difference from XP - Take away Aero and I feel (though am probably mistaken) it’s very similar to windows xp
- The system requirements are horrific - yes you can run it on a Pentium 800 - but would you?
For businesses, many have just completed or completing their windows xp upgrade projects, they’ll want some time to settle and recover from it, so Vista will be a while. Oh IT will play with it, but it will be at least a year or so before we see the big banks start look at it, unless they’re after a set feature.
January 31, 2007 at 12:44 am · Filed under Technical stuff
http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1790
Jan 30 — EMC Corp. has announced that Praetorian Financial Group Inc., a national specialty insurance provider, has improved the speed of application recovery, decreased tape backup windows, generated significant cost saving, and consolidated its server environment using EMC recovery management and VMware Infrastructure Virtualization Software. The deployment will help the insurance company to shrink recovery windows from weeks to about 24 hours, and earn a 600 percent return on investment (ROI) in four months, EMC said last week.
Very impressive, it’s nice to see what other organizations are doing, often change happens when someone here’s that another firm did it and they got it to work. EMC continue to offer an impressive range of products and services, when used together and implemented properly can provide real benefits to your business, SAN storage, coupled with their backup products and virtualization through vmware would be an example of this.
January 31, 2007 at 12:31 am · Filed under Consolidation, datacenter, vmware
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,52073.shtml
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ — VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced that SearchWinComputing.com has named VMware Infrastructure 3 the 2006 Disaster Recovery Product of the Year. VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of the industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software suite, provides hardware-independent recovery, reduces hardware and infrastructure requirements and simplifies the steps in disaster recovery, enabling faster, more reliable and cost-effective disaster recovery.
Using VMware to provide your disaster recovery infrastructure and application servers does make sense, it allows you to be more efficient with the datacenter space rented for disaster recovery, whilst reducing the total power utilization by consolidating the physical servers on to fewer ESX servers. I know it’s been done by some firms in the US, I’m waiting with interest to see if any of the banks start considering it. You can’t virtualize everything (grid engines for example) but what you can virtualize, do and obtain the power/thermal benefits.
January 31, 2007 at 12:26 am · Filed under Consolidation, datacenter, vmware
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,52074.shtmlÂ
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ — VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced that IXIS Capital Markets (IXIS), a New York-based financial services firm, has implemented VMware Infrastructure to achieve high availability for mission-critical trading applications that allows financial operations to occur without disruption during peak trading hours. With more than 450 front, middle and back office users depending on highly available systems to ensure financial operations are completed successfully at any time, the ability for the IXIS IT team to eliminate downtime while performing necessary system maintenance is a top priority.
Very cool, nice to see an organization benefiting from vmware, using the technology to achieve the business requirements, check it out, it’s interesting to see how they’re using it. With tools like virtual center and vmotion, you can create an effective high availability infrastructure, without the datacenter power and hosting issues.
January 31, 2007 at 12:15 am · Filed under Consolidation, Grid
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/01/30/221464/merrill-lynch-on-the-grid-in-race-to-speed-up-apps.htm
Merrill Lynch has developed an enterprise computing grid that allows it to run applications 800 times faster than previously by putting to work the power of disaster recovery servers and other under-utilised resources.
The investment bank plans to use the grid…
… to run simulations and risk analysis for high value derivatives trades. Ten applications are currently being run, but the bank plans to have 30 running by the end of the first quarter of 2007.
How fast crucial calculations can be made has a material impact on profitability. “If you are looking at a £200m deal and it takes 600 hours to run the calculations, you need to get this down to an hour,” said Juan Lando, who heads up the grid centre of expertise at Merrill Lynch.
Another example of how grid technology is being used in the commercial world, Merrill Lynch seem to be using the technology very efficiently, it’s very impressive, and discusses the business implications of grid.
January 30, 2007 at 5:32 pm · Filed under Technical stuff
Infrastructure provide everything you as an end user needs to work, they provide the network infrastructure, dns/dhcp, the windows infrastructure, active directory, user accounts, domains, wins etc, NAS and SAN storage for your personal and departmental drives as well as finally the messaging and printing infrastructure, your email/calendar and a printer to print to.
Development/application support write or modify bought in applications for your use, their job is to make sure that when you click submit on your rail ticket request form, that the information is submitted to the right people as expected. They support both your internal applications like railticketrequestor, and the bought in ones like business objects, websphere or bankname.com.
So when you here we need to make IT more aligned, what do we mean? Is it not that we want the following:
One voice - one strategy for IT
One IT service – I pay for the servers and the application
One group to speak to - accountable service managers
Responsive to business needs and transparency with costs
Is the issue not though that IT and development are in separate business lines? That development typically resides within equities for example, writing/supporting applications that equities need, allowing both infrastructure and development to walk in different directions.
If your development community were driven by the infrastructure CIO, might they not consider open source? Could application support not become an extension of the infrastructure support, on a first/second line level anyway?
By having business line specific development, doesn’t this prevent you from allocating the best development resources to the most difficult tasks?
By transferring development into infrastructure, you can switch to service provisioning model, “We need a currency trading system, what’s the cost…â€
Since development typically still resides within a business line, IT failure reports become political statements as much as they do incident reports, “the server was available” (it couldn’t do anything but it was physically powered on and not reporting errors), when they should be - “IT failed you, next.”.
Whether its application or infrastructure the user typically doesn’t care, the causal factor is immaterial, what matters is that it’s resolved/worked around and dealt with to prevent it happening again.
January 30, 2007 at 5:03 pm · Filed under Technical stuff, environment
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/12/zerofootprint_b.php
Let’s think for a moment about something we never notice - our screen savers. Around the world, right now, complex geometric shapes and patterns are bouncing around screens in empty offices and quiet suburban basements. Even when you’re gone for lunch, your screen saver labors on….
Does this sound like an exaggeration? Let’s put it this way. It takes about 100 watts an hour to run a screen saver on a graphics card. (Obviously, that’s the same as keeping a 100W light bulb turned on.) Some systems will use a bit less, some a bit more. But let’s say 100 watts.
Now, there are over 600 million computers in the world, many of which never get turned off. For the sake of argument, let’s say their screen savers are running around the clock.
That’s 60,000 Megawatts an hour. Just to keep shapes bouncing around a screen.
Just to put that in perspective, the largest wind turbines out there are rated at 10 MW.
A large coal-fired plant generates about 300 MW.
Even China’s Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, which is so huge that filling its reservoir actually made the Earth wobble on its axis, is rated at 30,000 MW…
An excellent article about something I confess to not considering.
A very small change that could be applied in the corporate world, allowing companies to save on energy costs, reduce their carbon footprint, good for the environment, good for business costs.
January 30, 2007 at 11:29 am · Filed under blades
http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com/Â
Blade technology is ushering in a whole new era of computing solutions for data center professionals and advanced systems users. For today’s large and midsize enterprises, blades mean higher performance, lower power consumption, and superior TCO.
BladeSystems Insight is the first invitational summit focused on the multi-vendor technology and bottom-line business benefits of blade-based systems. The event brings together senior-level network, data center and IT professionals to interact with peers, preview new blade technologies, meet best-of-breed Vendors and learn from industry thought leaders.
This looks great, found it on google, the event is set to talk about blade technologies, what they offer, and how they can help your business, of interest in particular is that it’s bringing together not just the server engineer, the datacenter manager, but also the networking guys, the decision makes - everyone that’s involved in the blade deployment process. Take a look will be worth attending if you want to know what’s happening in the blade world, and an opportunity to meet with vendors such as IBM/Cisco and ask them any questions you have.
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