Archive for March, 2007
March 30, 2007 at 7:31 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm?featureid=3264&pagtype=samechan
The San Francisco Bay Area’s naturally cool weather could help IT managers cut electricity costs. But Mark Bramfitt, who manages energy reduction programs for the high-tech sector at Pacific Gas & Electric Co., knows that most data centres are walled off from green alternatives.
Check out this article, it’s talking about data centers, energy costs and what programs and changes are happening in the Bay area. Very cool.
March 30, 2007 at 7:28 pm · Filed under blades, datacenter, rackmounts
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4759
Dell has been building custom designed servers for customers that are creating new data center architectures in an attempt to cut cooling costs.
Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager data center solutions, said in an interview that Dell is custom designing gear for a handful of customers “willing to try different things.”
The effort is part of Dell’s “Cloud Computing Solution (CSS),” which was explained in a press release earlier this week. My initial thought about Dell’s release was that it was launching services much like Amazon has. However, Amazon is more likely a target customer for Dell. Dell isn’t offering cloud computing services to small companies, but targeting large firms who offer cloud-like IT services. In Dell’s case cloud computing the rough equivalent to utility computing.
Very cool, Dell seem to be making great efforts with their server offerings, it will be interesting to see what new technologies, configurations and processes come out of these efforts.
March 30, 2007 at 7:27 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P2913/22p13/22p13.asp&guid=
With as much as data center and IT managers have to do, preparing for disaster can sometimes get shuffled near the bottom of the tasks list. But as anyone who’s been through severe data loss or network sputtering knows, making sure that a recovery plan is in place can go a long way toward getting an enterprise back up and running. Here are some tips for making sure a company isn’t severely impacted by a disaster and a few ideas about post-disaster recovery.
An article about disaster recovery, you might not do all of the suggestions, but do think what your action plan is, your major incident plans, how you as an organization and an IT team will cope in a disaster scenario.
March 30, 2007 at 7:25 pm · Filed under Consolidation, Other things
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do
command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=networking_and_
internet&articleId=9015143&taxonomyId=16
March 30, 2007 (Computerworld) — Amazon.com Inc.’s Web storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service) recently passed the one-year mark. While S3 has gotten many positive mentions in the press, reports from actual customers have been harder to find. At O’Reilly Media Inc.’s Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in San Diego on Wednesday, SmugMug Inc. CEO Don MacAskill stepped up, giving a kiss-and-tell account of his “love affair” with S3 — the good and the bad.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based photo-sharing site, which competes with the likes of Flickr, uses S3 to host about 192TB of photos.
Founded in 2002, SmugMug formerly ran, according to MacAskill’s blog, “single processor commodity Pentium 4 servers attached to really cheap Apple Xserve RAID arrays” to store all of its photos in-house. Even though they were “high-bang-per-buck hardware” running Red Hat Linux, they were much pricier than S3, which charges 15 cents per gigabyte per month. MacAskill, who is also SmugMug’s “chief geek,” estimates that the company has saved almost $700,000 in its first year post-switch.
SmugMug’s fast growth — it was doubling its storage requirements every year — along with the opportunity to offload hardware management issues and “focus on the application, not the muck,” convinced MacAskill to make the change. In its first year with S3, SmugMug spent $230,000 on storage fees, not including the labor cost of transferring existing photos to the new system. That compares with the $922,000 MacAskill figures he would’ve spent on server and storage hardware in the same time period.
Very cool, compliance issues aside, hosting your data on someone elses infrastructure can be a real alternative, as this article discusses. Check it out.Â
I think you’ll find the small/medium startups will use it, and as the business case, the platform is proven, the banks will slowly dab their toes in the water, compliance and data security issues need resolved internally to the bank and externally to the hosting organization.
March 30, 2007 at 7:21 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=17B7B523-9CF9-443B-A7DA-6D5F812B4333
The deal replaces an existing five-year contract due to expire at the end of this month, which was worth around 30m pounds ($59m) annually to Computacenter.
The scope and coverage of the relationship has expanded from being UK only, to covering 112,000 PCs and laptops across 54 countries, and the latest iteration also includes asset ownership. Computacenter will support BT’s international operation from a centralized helpdesk, but will use partner companies to handle onsite support in countries where it doesn’t have a presence.
Very cool, BT can let computacenter take over the desktop support/ownership aspect and focus on its core businesses, it’s a large project and a great opportunity for computacenter.
March 30, 2007 at 6:56 pm · Filed under Other things, rackmounts
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62000476,00.htm
Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview last week, Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager at Intel’s server platform group, said the chipmaker has 150 customers in the pipeline that are “seriously investigating moving off the mainframe onto the Itanium architecture”.
Very cool, will be interesting to see what opportunities these changes will bring, I know one of the security vendors was offering a solution based on Itanium, whether you like Itanium as a platform or not, it’s an interesting read, I still think they remain an interesting platform for the right application/use.
March 30, 2007 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Other things, environment
http://www.ewire.com/display.cfm/Wire_ID/3791
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, Mar. 30 -/E-Wire/– Top corporations gather in Boston on June 6-7 to discuss the climate change challenge and the best ways to respond to it at this cutting edge conference.
Against the backdrop of growing consumer and investor awareness of climate change, risk and opportunity Ethical Corporation, global CSR magazine and conference organizer, is launching its first Climate Change Strategies and Environmental Communication business conference.
Â
Topics to be covered at this in-depth conference include:
- Climate change strategies: Why be concerned and how to respond
- Corporate reputation and climate change: Are you at risk?
- Emissions reduction and disclosure: How to save money and manage financial risks
How cool does this look, I’d love to see if they mention the datacenter, the IT within the corporation and its carbon footprint, small changes can make a big difference to your carbon footprint, the blank screensaver being the prime example.
March 30, 2007 at 6:44 pm · Filed under Other things
http://software.seekingalpha.com/article/31169
The VAR Guy submits:Memo to Steve Ballmer: It’s time for Microsoft to rethink its Windows Vista marketing plan. Sure, Vista has sold 20 million licenses. But everyone from Wall Street to Main Street U.S.A. knows Vista isn’t living up to its hype. Here are 10 logical steps Microsoft should take to jump-start the Vista sales engine..
Very cool and interesting article about windows vista, on the system requirements front, I would have thought anything below 2.0ghz, 1gb ram and a proper video card some kind of ati or nvidia thing, is going to provide a poor experience. With that in mind why allow the system specs to say 800mhz and 512mb ram? Isn’t that what you need for XP to run office?
March 30, 2007 at 1:44 pm · Filed under Other things, blades, datacenter
http://bladesystemsinsight.com/
BladeSystems Insight is the first national summit focused on the ROI, TCO and bottom-line business benefits of blade-based systems and virtualization solutions for today’s data center. The event invites and hosts a pre-qualified audience of IT executives to interact with peers, preview new technologies, meet best-of-breed Vendors and learn from industry thought leaders.
Very cool. So I’m actually attending this and will be covering what’s going on, what’s being discussed, so anyone that is also attending and you read the blog, say hello, it’ll be great to meet people.
The conference does look very good and I’m looking forward to it.
March 30, 2007 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.verivox.de/News/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=47952&pm=1
(pressebox) Stuttgart, 30.03.2007 - Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced together with IBM and VDEL, a leading IT services distribution company in Eastern Europe and Russia, that state certification has been awarded by the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on various IBM solutions. Russian Government institutions can now use IBM System x, IBM BladeCenter, IBM System p, IBM System i and IBM System z servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Following the joint efforts of IBM, Red Hat and VDEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and WS 4 Update 1 + Audit Pack 1 has been certified on all IBM hardware platforms to the EAL4 and UDF4 levels.
This specific Russian security certification allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux, running on IBM servers, to be used for work with confidential data within government bodies in the country. The process of certification involved recompilation, analysis of related documentation and all aspects of development, testing and support for the product that was performed by the Center for Security of Information (CBI). With the open source software, CBI had to rebuild over 700 packages to determine that the binaries are 100 percent produced from the corresponding source code.
Very cool, Open source would be a great new alternative for the Russian agencies to evaulate against the other platforms whatever they are, this news also brings new credibility or recognition to the Red Hat platform.
Next entries »
