Archive for May, 2007
May 30, 2007 at 4:05 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/5/prweb529384.htm
Houston, TX (PRWEB) May 30, 2007 — Texas Memory Systems, Inc., makers of the World’s Fastest Storage®, announced that IC Source, Inc., a major clearinghouse for electronic components, has accelerated its SQL Server database with a RamSan solid state disk to give over 3,000 customers instant access to 40 million inventory records.
IC Source brings over 3,000 buyers and sellers of electronic components together online. The company lists over 40 million inventory items, many of which become obsolete after a limited shelf life. Ensuring that component inventory data is accurate and up to date is the key to helping customers pinpoint the best deals. Therefore, real time inventory data is core to IC Source’s business.
…Conventional hard disk drives cannot deal with the simultaneous read and write access requests required by IC Source. 70,000 inventory line items might need to be written to the database while users need read access to search and view available inventories at the same time. A solid state disk, not a hard disk solution was required.
Solid state disks allow IT managers and database administrators to increase the number of concurrent users and simultaneous transactions without adding servers, RAM, or monolithic RAID. IC Source installed a single RamSan-400 solid state disk from the market leader, Texas Memory Systems. The RamSan-400 used by IC Source can deliver 400,000 I/Os per second, 3,000 megabytes per second of bandwidth, and sub-15 microsecond response times compared to above 5 millisecond response times for disk-based RAID systems. With the RamSan solid state disk, IC Source immediately saw a 400% performance improvement in their database…
Check out this article, it talks all about Texas’ solid state storage solution, as the article suggests, this will be great for high performance computing solutions such as a database or maybe a data caching solution for grid/HPC?
May 30, 2007 at 3:20 pm · Filed under environment
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6703679.stm
HSBC is setting aside $100m (£50m) for an initiative to tackle climate change.
The funding by the UK’s largest bank will help charities and environmental groups to research some of the global causes and effects of climate change.
Very cool, corporate social responsibility as a concept continues to gain momentum, HSBC have made the announcement above, I wonder how long it will be for the other banks to follow suit, switching off the PC at night? Follow the sun business to make my IT only be on when I need it for business? A virtual on demand infrastructure following the business day? We’ll see, there are many ways to provide the IT infrastructure whilst managing the climate change demands, whatever works for you and your business is the way forward, whether its low voltage processors, vmware or grid desktop.
May 30, 2007 at 2:50 pm · Filed under How IT works, datacenter
http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2190911/give-hand-datacentre
As datacentres grow more complex, the time is ripe for the IT staff managing them to start deciding which parts of their jobs they could, or indeed should, be off-loading to third parties. Two trends appear to be nudging datacentre managers inexorably towards a re-allocation of responsibility.
One is the emergence over the past couple of years of blade PCs, which both HP and ClearCube are pushing heavily. This relatively recent concept in client computing relocates the system unit to a 1U or 2U card that can slot into a rack system running centralised services. The display, keyboard, mouse and external USB ports are then connected via the network, and can be located anywhere within the company’s network. This puts the guts of the PC into the datacentre and under the direct, close control of IT – probably no bad thing.
It just depends where you’re coming from; operationally it makes sense hand the challenges over to someone else, make everything a fixed cost, strategically we can concentrate on the firm, on business not debating with IT about data centres, however, one point, what’s the annual cost of the data centre space in comparison to buying one? Yes you need to absolve yourself of operational issues relating to the data centre, but as you depend on the data centre more and more, isn’t it a strategic asset? Couldn’t you buy and manage your own data centre and offset the tax owed over so many years? Consider your business, your strategy and how you want to have your data center provisioned, for the telecoms company buying a data center might make more sense, for Mike, the estate agent in Liverpool, co-location might be better, it all depends on you and your business.
May 30, 2007 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Other things
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/24055.php
By 2015, a significant increase in ‘less-time’ roles will increase the total number of knowledge workers and decrease the average number of hours each works per week, according to new research from Gartner.
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As the consumerization of information technology (IT) increases the proliferation of digital devices, content and services, the balance of power is shifting towards individuals in an organisation, according to Brian Prentice, research director, emerging trends and technologies at Gartner.
“As IT becomes woven into the fabric of people’s lives and traditional work-home boundaries are rendered obsolete, digital free-agency will emerge,” said Mr Prentice. “CIOs need to prepare for the arrival of this new work phenomenon, which is being driven by political, social and technology changes.”
Digital free-agency is a term coined by Gartner to describe how people are blending professional and personal computing requirements in an integrated environment.
This is relevant in the support field, do I want my IT guys on site? Surely if I do not all of them? But with this do I still have to pay them the same?
Business continues to change, what we need is to align our support models, the way our IT works with the business, in doing so the home working perception as a concept needs to change - that “I’m an IT professional” doesn’t mean I need a fixed desk, doesn’t mean I need to be onsite - for your server support teams indeed, you probably want 1 or 2 members on site and the rest working from home doing support calls and adding real value.
May 30, 2007 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger
http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=mergersNews&storyID=2007-05-30T081049Z_01_L30280529_RTRIDST_0_ABNAMRO-TAKEOVER-UPDATE-1.XML
AMSTERDAM, May 30 (Reuters) - ABN AMRO’s (AAH.AS: Quote, Profile , Research) supervisory board is getting more involved in the Dutch bank’s takeover battle after a consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L: Quote, Profile , Research) launched a bid, ABN said on Wednesday.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L: Quote, Profile , Research), together with its partners Fortis (FOR.BR: Quote, Profile , Research) and Santander (SAN.MC: Quote, Profile , Research) launched a 71.1 billion euro ($95.6 billion) bid on Tuesday, trumping Britain’s Barclays (BARC.L: Quote, Profile , Research) in a battle for the world’s biggest bank takeover.
ABN AMRO’s (ABN.N: Quote, Profile , Research) supervisory board has formed a transaction committee to deal with the offers made by Barclays and the RBS-led consortium, ABN said in a statement.
Very cool, hopefully the deal will move along, the board will put the deals out to the shareholders and we’ll see what decisions are made.
May 30, 2007 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Other things, vmware
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=654318
Disclaimer : I have no association with BlueLane.
I came across a news item about BlueLane’s VirtualShield product for VMWare protection. See http://www.bluelane.com/products/
This looks very useful, labeit pricey for my “one-man” show. I was wondering;
1) Any knowledgeable reader aware of a similar “hypervisor layer” protection product, especially one that is not so expensive?
2) Anyone able to comment on BlueLane’s offering?
3) Any recommendations on how best to protect a bunch of VMs running on one host, without wasting cpu on having firewall/anti-virus/anti-spy on every guest OS?
Check out this forum post from the vmware community site, it’s discussing Blue Lane’s VirtualShield amongst other products, its always good to see what other people think about securing the virtual infrastructure as well as the products/solutions to the issues involved.
May 30, 2007 at 12:48 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/business/news/article_1311051.php/Consortium_19000_jobs_cut_following_ABN_Amro_takeover
Amsterdam - Some 19,000 jobs would disappear if banking consortium Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Fortis and Santander take over Dutch ABN Amro bank.
In the Netherlands alone, 7,500 jobs would be lost, the consortium told Dutch unions during a meeting Tuesday evening.
I found this when finding out what’s been going on with ABN Amro merger debate. Interestingly there will be job losses from the Barclays deal as well. Unfortunately from a shareholder standpoint, its the cost of doing business, the shareholders need to equate which deal provides them with the most return and then consider their concern about the job losses.
May 30, 2007 at 12:43 pm · Filed under How IT works, datacenter
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/05/29/224385/global-law-firm-improves-datacentres-with-outsourcing.htm
Global law firm Linklaters has signed a worldwide IT services contract with Unisys to improve the performance of its datacentres.
Unisys will take responsibility for the support and maintenance of Linklaters’ global datacentre and office server, printer and storage infrastructure.
Unisys will also look after the firm’s UK desktops, laptops and mobile devices. Linklaters’ datacentres are spread across the US, UK and Hong Kong.
Very cool, the law firm appears to be using Unisys to provide its IT services, in doing so it can offset the desktop and infrastructure costs and with Unisys reduce their operational costs, very cool, and good news for Unisys.
May 29, 2007 at 11:44 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.tophosts.com/articles/005342.html
May 29, 2007 – (TopHosts News Brief) – 3Tera, Inc. released version 2.0 of their award-winning AppLogic grid operating system, which adds comprehensive application monitoring and support for multiple CPUs per appliance.
With Release 2.0, SaaS and Web 2.0 providers can obtain greater scalability, improved resource utilization, unprecedented visibility and control over application performance. AppLogic’s solution eliminates the need for co-location, private racks and managed services by enabling the assembly, deployment and management of infrastructure and applications using only a browser and basic IT skills.
This sounds very interesting, I confess I need to read up on the AppLogic grid offering, but anything 3Tera and the other grid computing providers can do to ease the transition to grid, to show how the technology can be a business enabler has to be a good thing, off to check out their ‘10 minute demo’, very cool…
May 29, 2007 at 11:39 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2161&Itemid=39
May 29 — QLogic Corp., a provider of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, has announced it is shipping a combined expansion card that supports both Ethernet and Fibre Channel for IBM BladeCenter servers from IBM Corp. This design increases I/O (input/output) flexibility for enterprise data centers, QLogic said last week.
Very cool, these kind of options bring new possibilities to the blade platform which has to be a good thing for the client and the industry alike, the more solutions and configurations that can be developed, the more we can use the technology to be a business enabler, whether its a blade with 1 IDE notebook disk or a blade using SAN boot and virtualization. Check it out, the article tells you all about the new host bus adapters and switches.
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