Archive for April, 2007

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/13444/

Fastmac today announced the first & only sub-$500 Blu-Ray drive burner for Apple’s Mac Pro & PowerMac G5 computers. The new 5.25-inch, tray loading drive uses one of the fastest & most compatible Blu-ray mechanisms to provide up to 50 Gb of storage on 1 disk, without sacrificing compatibility with standard DVD & CD recordable media. Fastmac’s Blu-Ray optical drive has been tested and certified compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 video production software. The drive is available now for order from http://www.fastmac.com for a special introductory price of $499.95. Each drive carries a 1-year warranty and a 30-day money back guarantee .

Very cool, there are no doubt some people that will find this new opportunity very useful, that it works on the Intel and G5 mac is a good thing, the G5 remains a great platform, and many people I know are waiting for the Intel based macs to bed down a while, in the meantime, G5 me up…

http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/04/27/are-blade-servers-still-too-hot-to-handle/

As seen by most IT managers, blade servers are hot little power-suckers. Cooling hassles and power costs are the main reasons why IT managers don’t buy blade servers, according to the new TechTarget Data Center Group survey of over 250 IT professionals. In fact, most of the respondents’ companies aren’t using blades today. I’ll be presenting that bad news and some good news from our 2007 Server Decisions Survey next week at the Server Blade Summit in Anaheim, Calif., which focuses on blades and virtualization.

While there I’ll be asking blades proponents, users and prospective users about power and cooling issues with blades. Just to give you a preview, here’s a quick look at both sides of the story.

We have to be careful with these kind of issues, granted blades from an off the shelf viewpoint due require more power than say a rack mount server, but let’s look at the volume aspect, I get say 16 servers in the space to two midrange DL585 type servers. Blades can be a really effective vehicle for virtualization, however, we need to ensure that the data center is right, that the blades chosen are right for the customers needs, do we really need the 95w super fast chip? Surely the 68w one which is 200mhz slower will be fine right?  When putting in blades you need to look at the big picture, move the blade enclosures around so they aren’t all in one concentrated area and focus on the air flow. Do check out the article though, its a great read.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6605535.stm

A Dutch court has deferred until Thursday a crucial decision on whether banking group ABN Amro, the subject of a bid battle, can sell its US business.

Dutch investor VEB is trying to block the $21bn (15.4bn euro) sale of LaSalle to Bank of America, arguing this would be illegal without investor approval.

The outcome could be key to deciding which of Barclays or Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) succeeds in their bids.

Barclays has bid £45bn for ABN while an RBS-led consortium also intends to bid.

Very interesting, we’ll need to see where this goes, in the meantime, the vendors, the IT contracting community and I suspect the markets will watch and see what business (or businesses) come from this change. The vendors I mention, because what if ABN Amro’s new owners/partners don’t buy HP, don’t use Emulex, they use IBM and Q-Logic, all these kind of things aren’t huge to the market, but they’re significant to the vendor account manager trying to make a sales target..

http://web.mac.com/martinmacleod/iWeb/Site/Blog/drivefailure.pdf

Got a question by email, what happens if my server drive fails.  With this in mind, I’ve posted one of the pages I did as a training document for one of the teams I worked with.  Keep in mind, it’s meant to be not too technical and more about the steps involved. The next slide would cover the on-call processes, what we need to log a call, and who should be informed.  Anyway, here’s the semi technical bit, any questions/comments email me.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=8667&pagtype=all

Hewlett Packard is introducing a range of new services and products intended to help accelerate business growth, lower costs and increase operational efficiency.

The new services focus on business intelligence, data centres and overall IT management, coupled with reference architectures for ready-to-deploy offerings for Microsoft Exchange Server, Oracle and SAP.

Reducing the cost of IT, the barrier to entry has to be a good thing, however, let me ask the following question.

I have a range of internal applications, with specific requirements running on legacy platforms, which lack the original source code, I need these supported, can I ask what the cost is?

Let me guess significantly more than my internal IT right? Everytime they charge me, I get emotional, I can’t do that with a vendor, they’ll post me the invoice instead.

IT is expensive absolutely, but its a double edge sword, internal IT should be moving away from box selling/buying to service provisioning, but underlying all this is the investment time needed to improve the application, better application logging, platform/severname/ip address independent, you’d be surprised what’s out there.  The box, the actual IT bit is expensive, but take any large clearance/back office application running on legacy platforms, and tell me how much does that cost in application and infrastructure support?

Statements aside, check out the article, it does look interesting, IT as a business line, as a service provider needs to continually improve, to maintain delivery, less it be compared with whoever else can provide that service or functionality.