Archive for February, 2008
February 29, 2008 at 3:49 pm · Filed under vmware
http://www.virtualization.info/2008/02/live-from-vmworld-europe-2008-day-1.html
As announced, virtualization.info is here at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to live blog during the opening keynotes for the first two days.
Diane Greene, VMware Founder and CEO, is on stage.
She starts introducing the virtualization phenomenon, the VMware historm, results and technology evolution, along with some major customers case studies (today the company has more than 100,000 customers worldwide).
To further validate the customers portfolio, Greene calls on stage one of the biggest case study: British Telecom.
BT deployed VMware technology over 11 datacenters (+900 platforms) worldwide and it’s using it to re-provision workloads across the globe, to delivery virtual desktops to travelling users, to achieve automated disaster recovery.
The approach taken so far seems to assume that the European audience is pretty new to virtualization and still needs basic evangelization.
Chekc out this post which is covering the VMWorld Event, very cool, it’s set to be an interesting event, it will be interesting to see what announcements are made and what new products come along - we’ll have to see.
February 29, 2008 at 3:27 pm · Filed under virtualization
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/renown-glasshouse-virtualization-expert-addresses-virtualization-implementation-at-vmworld-europe,289674.shtml
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. - (Business Wire) GlassHouse Technologies, the leading independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm, today announced that Ron Oglesby, director of virtualization and architecture services, will present at the VMworld Europe Conference on Wednesday, February 27 at 4:30 p.m. in Redaction room 2.
With so many companies focusing on disaster preparedness, a proper strategy for implementing a virtualization solution is often overlooked. Oglesby’s presentation - “Great Expectations: Are You Seeing the Real Benefits of Virtualization?” - will discuss implementation strategies, including why some virtualization customers are not meeting their ROI expectations after implementing a virtualization solution and the methods for remedying those issues. Oglesby will also highlight customers’ virtualization preparedness prior to implementation.
Very cool, the VMWorld Europe conference looked great and hopefully will attend next year. It would have been great to participate. It’s interesting to hear what people see as the benefits of virtualization as well as what benefits people are actually experiencing once the technology is deployed. One of my colleagues had been mentioning that they’d managed to virtualize about 300 development DL380’s over a few months, as part of a project to virtualize the infrastructure, the challenge they’re having is decommissioning this volume of servers, it’s easy to decommission 1 even 10 servers, scale that up and managing the logistics, the change process and everything else can get a bit more difficult, particularly if theire are specific time scales involved.
February 29, 2008 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=15187
You might soon be selling your spare computer power over the internet, or perhaps buying in extra resources to solve a tricky problem. In either case, network administration used to be a stumbling block – until European researchers developed a successful free-market approach to grid computing. As you read this, millions of computers all over the world are sleeping peacefully after a busy day at work. Computing power is going to waste simply because these machines do not have enough work to occupy them round the clock. The idea of using the internet to help make better use of computing resources is not new, but according to Professor Torsten Eymann of the University of Bayreuth, Germany, we need a better way to match resources with the people who want to use them.
Current approaches to “grid computing” tend to be organised like an online auction, Eymann says, with everything routed through a central server. This works well for small or slow-moving markets, but soon bogs down when many thousands of traders need to negotiate deals on a timescale of minutes or seconds.
Eymann says that a free-market approach, without central oversight, may be the best way to trade computing resources on a large scale. He is the coordinator of the EU-funded CATNETS project, which has developed a promising technical foundation for a free market in grid computing.
Check out this great article about the possibilities of grid technologies for the home user - the concept of selling your cpu cycles could be something we see one day. Interestingly with free broadband, I wonder if it would not be worth the broadbrand providers offering a free media center to home users and selling the cpu processing? A DL360 or a mac mini type pc in your living room, controlled by your broadband provider but giving you photos/movies etc? What customers would buy this cpu time? That small business needing some temporary capacity? Or a research organization - we’ve seen it with the cure cancer screensaver, the issue is one of profitability, I’ll sell my CPU time no problems, but not if it interferes or is perceived to disrupt my activities, and as the cost of power goes up, I need to think - how much is my CPU time worth? 8p per cpu per hour?
February 29, 2008 at 2:49 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/correcting-and-replacing-verari-systems-redefines-data-center-consolidation-with,284935.shtml
Energy and Cost-Efficient BladeRack 2 XL is the Second Platform in New X-Series and Delivers Remarkable Performance with Highest Storage and Compute Density Available
Verari Systems®, a premier developer of energy efficient data center consolidation platforms and independent blade-based computing and storage solutions, today announced the introduction of the BladeRack® 2 XL computing platform. The newest addition increases the company’s lead in high density blade-based storage, compute and workstation solutions with one of the most power efficient platforms available in one cost-effective product.
The landmark unveiling of the BladeRack 2 XL platform marks a strategic milestone in the company’s innovative market approach and promises to redefine the enterprise computing blade market. Ideal for demanding applications such as Web 2.0, data warehousing, high-capacity storage clusters, rendering and media streaming, the BladeRack 2 XL delivers the most computing and storage capacity in the smallest footprint possible.
Very cool, the more choices we have on the market, the more we can show the benefits of the blade platform and it’s possiblities in deployment, whether it’s telecoms, hpc or virtualization.
February 27, 2008 at 3:59 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com.au/topics/article.asp?DocID=1301076
While most of the buzz around server virtualisation in general, and VMware Infrastructure in particular, have been about server consolidation and greening the data centre, disaster recovery may be the IT area where server virtualisation technology has the biggest impact.
Disaster recovery (DR) planning for mission-critical applications historically called for replicating the data for these applications and having servers standing by at the DR site ready to take over at a moment’s notice.
Most organisations can save money by virtualising these standby servers. A single offsite server can act as the standby domain controller, SQL server, Exchange server and several more. Not only can you save the cost of all those physical servers, but also the rack space and power charges from your DR site.
Very cool, it will be interesting to see what innovations, what best practices come out of the need to be more energy efficient with the data center, in terms of our ‘live’ and business continuity/disaster recovery sites. Being able to virtualize the disaster recovery sites could bring real savings in terms of hardware and hosting costs, the ability to take that disaster recovery site of 500 DL380’s/580’s and replace with a batch of blade servers or DL585’s could mean changing your requirements from 60 racks to 20, a significant space saving in valuable data center real estate.
A good read, do check it out.
February 27, 2008 at 3:49 pm · Filed under blades, virtualization
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0365095.htm
Blade.org, the industry consortium driving innovation in blade-based solutions, announced that NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) has been named a governing member and that NetApp’s Adam Mendoza will join the organization’s board of directors.
Mendoza is NetApp’s senior manager for the Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures business unit. One of his principal responsibilities is the development of a virtualization solution strategy and portfolio that utilize blade server architectures and provide reference architectures that customers can leverage and adopt. He is also responsible for the development of strategic alliances with leading technology companies that jointly focus on the business, technology, and operational considerations for next-generation data center environments.
Very cool news for NetApp and Blade.org. The more vendors we bring online, the more we can show that blade technology can be a real enabler to your business with the right sort of related components, solutions and software; for example deploying blade servers using NetApp storage could be an ideal virtualization solution.
February 27, 2008 at 3:46 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2046889.html
Not only did last Monday mark the release of DataSynapse’s FabricServer 2.5, but it also marked something much bigger for the infrastructure software vendor, and possibly for the distributed infrastructure software market as a whole. DataSynapse, the grid-computing-turned-application-virtualization vendor, has changed its tune again, this time burying both technologies and marketing itself as a provider of real-time infrastructure (RTI).
The reason for the change, according to company virtualization evangelist Gordon Jackson, is that DataSynapse was focusing too heavily on the technology and not putting enough emphasis on the resulting business benefits. “The problem that we were having around the marketing that we’ve been doing up until this point was … we were telling people what we do,” he explained. ” ‘We do application virtualization, we do grid infrastructure. We do all these cool things.’ It was geek speak.” Essentially, while technologists got what DataSynapse was talking about, IT decision-makers were having a difficult time correlating the underlying technologies with results and business objectives.
By playing up the RTI angle, the company hopes to lure in organizations seeking lower costs, increased utilization, less complexity and, ultimately, increased customer satisfaction as a result of improved service levels. In what I believe is a smart move, the discussion of the enabling technologies will just be moved a level lower, reserved for later on, after the discussion about what business objectives FabricServer will help them meet has gotten customers in the door. Jackson noted that “grid” and “virtualization” are not terms that will be going away any time soon — in fact, he believes “grid” experienced a resurgence this year in relation to how it facilitates SOA — but they are not what DataSynapse provides. Rather, they are how it provides.
This article was highlighted for a number of reasons. It’s talking about DataSynapse FabricServer, which looks great. Interestingly though it’s taling about how DataSynapse are highlighting the ’Real-Time Infrastructure’. A message of importance, the need to provision the IT infrastructure on demand for the end user, whether we’re talking about allocating more ‘cpu’s to that application, or talking about application resilience, off abstracting the end user, the application experience, the transaction from the IT infrastructure. An interesting read.
February 27, 2008 at 3:00 pm · Filed under virtualization
http://www.platespin.com/Products/powerrecon/calculator.aspx
With rising energy prices and growing concerns about global warming, power consumption is becoming a critical factor for data center budgets. The issue is compounded by high-density equipment such as blade servers, which need a lot of power to run, as well as significant HVAC resources. Properly planned and executed server consolidation and optimization initiatives can help organizations achieve hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in power and cooling costs – especially when servers typically run at only 5 to 10% resource utilization.
One of my colleagues higlighted this online calculator on the platespin site, it’s always interesting to see how people are calculating or showing the benefits of virtualization. It’s important to understand your server estate, to understand what it is you seek to achieve through virtualization, whether it’s abstracting the business units from the ‘tin’ the server, or being more efficient, fitting more on to fewer servers.
February 26, 2008 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Apple type things
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
The latest Intel processor, a bigger hard drive, plenty of memory, and even more new features all fit inside just one liberating inch. The new MacBook Pro has the performance, power, and connectivity of a desktop computer. Without the desk part.
http://www.apple.com/macbook/
Faster is just the beginning. The new MacBook features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, larger hard drives, and up to 2GB of memory standard. Best of all, MacBook still starts at $1099. It’s the same does-everything-you-want notebook but better.
Very cool, the newer processors with more cache and the extra storage should improve the performance and functionality of these notebooks. I’m off to read up more about them, a Macbook Pro looks very tempting.
February 26, 2008 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Abn Amro merger
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2008/02/25/afx4690215.html
BRUSSELS (Thomson Financial) - Richard Wohanka, chief executive of Fortis Investments says the merger with ABN Amro asset management as part of Fortis NV’s wider acquisition of parts of Dutch peer ABN Amro NV is a ‘remarkably civilised, friendly, constructive process’.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Wohanka said client reaction has been surprisingly good.
‘We haven’t lost any assets due to the merger — for the life of me I don’t know why, because with this type of transaction, you would expect attrition,’ he said.
Very cool, integrating business lines, the IT and at the same time managing people can be a complicated process, the news that ABN Amro and Fortis are managing this is good news for the business as a whole, and it’s investors, we’ll need to see what the next quarter brings for the group.
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