Archive for May, 2007

http://www.sda-asia.com/sda/news/psecom,id,16389,srn,4,nodeid,1,_language,Singapore.html

A recent study done indicates that IT professional worldwide struggle with the increasing complexity of data center management while at the same time facing sever budget and personnel constraints. And to ease management challenges, they are relying on several different technologies and initiatives including storage capacity management, virtualization and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks.

The survey — The State of the Data Center study– is a two-part research series highlighting top trends and challenges for data center managers. Conducted in April 2007, the first part of this study included more than 500 respondents from enterprise-class companies in the North American, European and Asia Pacific markets.

Conducted by security company Symantec Corp the responses of the study indicates that the growing volume of servers, applications and operating systems in today’s data centers is contributing substantially to data center complexity.

Check out this article, its talking about a data center study by Symantec which talks about the growth in server volumes, applications and operating systems, how the IT infrastructure is getting more complex, even though I might virtualize the operating system, I still need to administer and support it, how we deal with this will be the issue. The problem being that for each operating system or suite of operating systems I might have one management tool, that there still isn’t one platform through which I can easily manage the different virtualization platforms, Microsoft, ESX, Virtual Iron and Xen Source, these things will come, in the meantime, speaking with people to see what they’ve done seems the way forward, an interesting article, check it out.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm?featureid=3394&pagtype=samechan

Despite the consolidation trend, some companies are continuing to branch out with their data centres for reasons including redundancy of the centralised data centre for backup, a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan and better uptime at regional offices.

Indeed, some companies actually prefer this approach, and experts say it makes sense for organisations such as those with branch employees who can act as IT technicians or firms with locations dispersed on different continents.

Deciding how and where to deploy your data centers is an important strategic decision from a cost and a business strategy process viewpoint, having everything  in one location might expose you to unnecessary risk, at the same time, having many different data centers for each location or business line might introduce unnecessary cost, you need to balance the costs/risks as with anything, the interesting thing is how virtualization will change this - will it allow my IT to follow the sun with the business? To have my Singapore users use my London servers when the electricity is cheaper and I have people on site?

http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024843,39167294,00.htm

IBM has unveiled a data centre which it claims uses up to 15 per cent less power than a traditional data centre.

The modular data centre can be designed in eight to 12 weeks with 210 blade servers sitting in each rack.

John Moseley, IBM’s UK site and facilities business manager, said the steel infrastructure of the data centre comes in “flat pack boxes” and can be put up anywhere.

Check out this article about IBM’s example of its setup to help reduce data center power by up to 15%, anything any of the vendors can do to assist with energy utilization in the data center has to be a good thing, do check it out, its an interesting read and has some pictures - very cool.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9021259&intsrc=hm_list

May 24, 2007 (Computerworld) — Apple Inc. today unveiled the year’s fifth major security update for Mac OS X to patch 17 vulnerabilities, but fewer than one-third of them could lead to hackers injecting their own code into a compromised system.

It appears it’s time to patch my Mac again, have done my duty, clicked the update button and rebooted it, in the meantime Computerworld have done a document about it explaining all the patches etc.

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=22044

Server vendors will continue to be winners but the microprocessor vendors will see their sales decline with greater server consolidation occurring among end users. That is the conclusion of the latest server report from IDC, said Matt Eastwood, program vice president of enterprise platforms at IDC.

Even with server sales down to a 4.9 per cent worldwide growth in the first quarter of 2007 and previous 10 to 15 per cent growth patterns for these machines a thing of the past, vendors like Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM and Dell are still better equipped to find new revenue sources with virtual machines, courtesy of the customer demand for increased memory, I/O sub systems and storage, as well as software and services, he explained.

The article raises some interesting topics about virtualization and memory being a key opportunity in the market. It’s right in some respects ensuring that you have adequate memory for the virtual machines is important. Check out the article, it covers some interesting information about the virtualization market, you never know when they might be needed for your next presentation.