Archive for February, 2008
February 25, 2008 at 11:55 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080219005117&newsLang=en
PISA, Italy–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Open Grid Forum (OGF) today announced the creation of OGF-Europe, funded by the European Commission for Mobilizing and Integrating Communities on Grid Standards & Best Practices Globally. OGF-Europe will capitalize on European Commission investments in Grid technologies by driving grid adoption and innovation across Europe in research, government, and industry.
The OGF-Europe project is aligned with OGF’s global mission of pervasive grid adoption through interoperable software standards. Key deliverables include outreach seminars and workshops, adoption challenges and recommendations reports; community surveys, best practice reports and tutorials. OGF-Europe will also coordinate an “Industry Experts” council to better understand how European enterprises are dealing with issues surrounding interoperations and standardisation and to engage them in the core work of OGF.
“We thank the EU commission for their strong show of support for OGF’s mission of accelerating Grid adoption through open standards and in recognizing the power of Grid in 21st century economies,” said Craig Lee, OGF President. “We are dedicated to meeting the needs of the European market and synchronizing with global priorities across all our key stakeholder communities.”
Great news, grid technologies can be a real enabler to your business/research organization, whether it’s in terms of compliance - taking the processing, the workload of the users trader pc, or more efficient use of the computing resources or faster performance for your overnight batch. Anything we can do to illustrate the technologies in use, the best practices, the ways in which the technology has been deployed, how it was managed and ’sold’ to the stakeholders, the more we can encourage adoption of the technology and it’s success to the end user.
February 25, 2008 at 11:48 pm · Filed under virtualization
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080219.1.xml
SANTA CLARA, CA February 19, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA), today announced general availability of Sun xVM Ops Center, an easy-to-use, highly scalable datacenter automation tool that enables customers to simplify the management of heterogeneous IT environments and reduce costs. Sun xVM Ops Center is a key component of Sun xVM software, the company’s open virtualization and management platform. To join the OpenxVM.org community, go to: http://openxvm.org/.
As companies move to virtualize their datacenters, the management of servers, network and storage is becoming increasingly complex. From a single console, Sun xVM Ops Center enables customers to simplify the management of all assets, regardless of the operating system or hardware platform on which they run. The management console automates time consuming, routine system administration tasks, such as: firmware updates, bare-metal operating-system provisioning, and patching and updating - making it easier for users to manage thousands of IT assets simultaneously. As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to the open source community, Sun has released updates to the source code used to build Sun xVM Ops Center to the OpenxVM.org community under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3).
Very cool, it will be interesting to see what benefits in terms of management and automation the new Sun virtualization tools bring. Anything Sun and the other vendors can do to aid in the automation and management of the virtual infrastructure has to be a good thing. I’ll need to take a look.
February 25, 2008 at 11:46 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/168675/data-centre-managers-are-like-4×4-drivers.html
Data centre managers are as environmentally friendly as motorists who drive gas guzzlers through inner cities, according to Fujitsu Siemens.
The company claims data centres account for 12% of power consumption in the UK, which is “roughly the equivalent of six nuclear power stations,” according to head of sales strategy, Dave Pritchard.
“Data centre managers are a bit like the person driving a 4×4 through town,” he says.
Pritchard claims the average data centre is running at only a fifth of its capacity, with the majority operating at only 10-15%. He claims huge amounts of power are being wasted.
An interesting article and a debate that’s set to continue. Could we be more efficient in the data center, in the way that we provide the IT? Certainly, but this requires cross business support and investment. It needs buy in from the end users, the investors and our customers. It might not mean we need to change our business, but could mean changes in the way we deploy, manage and provide the IT service, simple things like does the end user really need a desktop or just a set of applications on a thin client. To grander projects like virtualization and consolidation of the servers, the network and storage systems, whether it’s Windows, Unix or Linux. Ultimately though, looking at the data center to which many business will find underpins their business will become increasingly important - the ability to deploy that new trading system which could generate significant revenue to your business is dependent on the space, power and cooling being available. What is doing what for whom and in which location becomes key - who’s got the most servers, uses the most power/space and how does that aid my business, if it doesn’t let’s consolidate/virtualize it.
February 25, 2008 at 11:39 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=15165 and http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080220.1.xml
Industry’s Most Comprehensive Blade Portfolio Spans AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon and SPARC;
Sun Adds First Four-Socket Intel Xeon Blade to the Sun Blade 8000 System, Bringing Power of Solaris to Quad-Core Intel Xeon Computing: Sun Microsystems today announced dramatic customer and revenue growth for its entire line of Sun Blade systems, distinguishing Sun as the worldwide leader in year over year blade server growth in unit shipments and factory revenue (Q3CY07), according to IDC. Since re-entering the blades market in mid-2006, Sun tied for #4 in blade server market share for factory revenue (Q3CY07), released 29 new blade and supporting products, and gained more than 300 new Sun Blade customers. Sun also announced today it is introducing the Sun Blade X8450 server module, bringing the energy-efficient performance of Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors to the Sun Blade 8000 system family.
Very cool, the more scalable we can make the blade, the more potential markets and opportunities there might be for the blade platform. That Sun announces its Four-Socket Intel Blade has to be a good thing for customer choice and innovation of the blade platform. These Four-Socket blades might be great for virtualization or a grid application if the applications can utilize all four sockets or all the cores.
February 25, 2008 at 11:37 pm · Filed under Other things, datacenter, environment
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc1/021808-ndc-power-metrics.html?ts0hb=&story=ac1_ndc1
Two metrics are emerging as industry standards for measuring data center power consumption: Power Usage Effectiveness and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency.
Both metrics are backed by The Green Grid, an industry consortium formed last year to develop standards for measuring data center efficiency and productivity (see “Where to turn for advice about power”). These metrics are used to compare the amount of electricity the data center consumes for power and cooling with the amount of power used by the data center’s IT equipment.
“Site infrastructure overhead is a simple concept,” says Ken Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, which provides consulting services to more than 100 data center operators. “It’s easy to measure and captures everything.”
Here’s how The Green Grid defines these two metrics for measuring data center infrastructure overhead:
1. PUE = Total facility power IT equipment power PUE is a ratio. Should be less than 2; the closer to 1, the better.
2. DCiE = IT equipment power x 100 Total facility power DCiE is a percentage. The bigger the number, the better.
“The word about these metrics is really getting out into the community,” says John Pflueger, technology strategist at Dell and a member of The Green Grid’s Technical Committee. “These metrics have been discussed in some of our meetings in Europe. Policymakers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are very aware of these metrics.”
A lot of work remains, however, to document ways to collect power-consumption data and to apply these metrics so they can be used to compare the efficiency of data centers in different organizations, Pflueger says.
Do check out this great article about energy efficiency in the data center, it’s a topic of discussion that is set to continue. I was talking to a colleague in data center planning at one of the banks in Canary Wharf the other day. I was asking him about the concept of rating the data center, if we could have some time the kind of rating you get when you buy a washing machine. I was also interest to see how involved he was in the energy aspects of the data center. I’ve got an interview which is being posted tomorrow, interestingly to him the energy argument was one more of capacity of how many DL380’s you can get in the data centers with that number of Sun V490s and IBM blades you can have in the room at one time. Efficiency is part of it but not as much as delivering space and power to the business.
February 25, 2008 at 11:25 pm · Filed under environment
http://m-net.net.nz/2208/latest-news/latest-news/green-it-not-just-penny-pinching-it-managers-want-to-save-the-planet.php
While spiralling global energy prices will continue to drive many ‘green IT’ initiatives and policies, a genuine desire to tackle global warming among businesses of all sizes is proving just as important, says Symantec vice president of Global Solutions Jose Iglesias.
Speaking from Brisbane today, Iglesias told m-net there are three key reasons businesses around the world are eager to adopt green IT initiatives: “In no particular order of priority those drivers are cost, legislation and social consciousness,” he says.
Cost is obviously important with energy prices in some parts of the world rising dramatically over the past year or two and likely to continue rising in the foreseeable future,” he says.
This alone makes green IT initiatives as compelling for small businesses as enterprises, he says. “The cost to implement green initiatives is less, but the relative savings are the same. The return on investment is still there, the numbers are proportional.”
Check out this interesting article which is talking about the green issue in IT. Switching off the pc’s at work doesn’t just save power directly, it’s the indirect or hidden costs that can be just as significant. That the pcs are ‘rebooted’ every night should reduce the number of issues in terms of desktops freezing or security patch installation failing, fewer pcs running means I can turn down the air conditioning, which can be significant amounts of money to your business.
February 22, 2008 at 8:37 am · Filed under virtualization, vmware
http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1301358,00.html?track=sy840&asrc=RSS_RSS-83_840
The recent release of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware Infrastructure 2.5 application updates invokes an urge to try those new features as soon as possible. But as with any major software upgrade, rushing into migration can lead to some major problems, including unplanned downtime. In this tip, I’ll address VMware ESX Server 3.5 upgrade considerations.
Check out this great post talking about upgrading the virtual infrastructure. It raises some great points. I’ve been speaking with colleagues about this, it’s not so much the technical thing, it’s the process, how do we do it? The big bang approach? Do we need to validate the ESX version against our hardware configuration?
February 22, 2008 at 8:33 am · Filed under Grid
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080214.1.xml
SANTA CLARA, CA February 14, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced the addition of 14 new applications in the Network.com Application Catalog, a collection of online grid-enabled applications that are available from Network.com’s Sun Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis with “Click and Run” ease. Sun also announced a new partner program, “Sun Network.com Connection,” for independent software vendors (ISVs) to create and expand lucrative on-demand service offerings to end-users at a lower risk and cost with access to new channels. Additionally, Sun has expanded Network.com’s international availability with the Netherlands being the latest of the 25 countries worldwide from where its services can be utilized.
“An expanded catalog of over 40 applications from ISVs and open source communities covering a wide range of industry segments is not only increasing the diversity of the Network.com’s portfolio of pay-per-use services but also attracting more developers and end-users to use, build and share new services,” said Mark Herring, Senior Director of Software Marketing. “Network.com is providing developers and ISVs with both flexible IT infrastructure resources and a robust portal for creating, publishing and accessing open source-based as well as ISV applications. With a growing collection of applications, a host of new developer tools and worldwide availability, Network.com is evolving into a virtual on-demand data center that allows businesses of any size to leverage compute infrastructure without the cost of ownership and with the flexibility of scaling up or down compute resources in real time as business demands change.”
Very cool, bringing more solutions to Network.com should bring more opportunities in the grid on demand space which has to be a good thing for the grid movement, and for Sun. It will be interesting to see what new applications and solutions can be ported to this grid technology, being able to buy in capacity on demand can be a real enabler to your business, particularly if it’s for a set project or time period - I need 400 hours processing time for the next 3 weeks etc.
February 22, 2008 at 8:26 am · Filed under Societe General
http://www.socgen.com/sg/socgen/pid/174/context/SC/lang/en/object/rubriqueSC/id/164/rubid/164/nodoctype/0.htm or the report:
http://www.sp.socgen.com/sdp/sdp.nsf/V3ID/A3246AB84993471DC12573F5006C82F4/$file/comiteSpecialFevrier08gbbis.pdf
Progress report of the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Société Générale
An interesting read, do check it out, it mentions strengthening IT Security as well as re-inforcing controls and alerts procedures. I suspect that this will be something that affects all the banks, and might cause projects/work to ensure that the different business lines and systems are secured and auditable for compliance and liability.
February 20, 2008 at 8:33 pm · Filed under Grid, environment
http://www.thecro.com/node/615
This list—CRO’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2008—matters.
If you think for a minute that it doesn’t, then get on the phone or sit upright at your computer to listen to or read some of the phone calls and e-mails CRO magazine received from irate companies that found themselves MIA from the list or lower in the rankings than they would have liked.
Somewhere in a corporate boardroom or in the compliance officer’s suite, rest assured that an Excel wizard is analyzing the category ranks and studying the algorithm, trying to figure out what Intel (No. 1) did right in Environment or Climate Change, or why a competitor ascended or nosedived this year in the ordering.
Check out this interesting article about corporate social responsibility, I wonder if we might start reporting on the IT within the realms of corporate social responsibility. Will we turn things around where it’s not who’s got the most blades, the most data centers, it’s about who can do the most with the least IT infrastructure whilst still delivering service.
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