Archive for March, 2008
March 31, 2008 at 10:03 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080331xa.html
GENEVA, Switzerland, March 31, 2008 – HP today announced two affordable, power-efficient HP ProLiant servers as well as the market’s first Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor-based x86 platforms.
In addition, the company is offering an expanded customer relationship management (CRM) portfolio, Linux-based management tools and remote access technology.
All of the products and solutions are designed to help small to midsize businesses reduce costs, improve security and better manage customer relationships.
According to an AMI-Partners report,(1) this year more than 60 percent of midmarket companies(2) surveyed plan to invest in technology specifically for customer relationship management and secure remote access.
“Through extensive research and customer interaction, HP has gained valuable insight into the needs of midsize business customers,” said Urs Renggli, director, worldwide small and midmarket business, Technology Solutions Group, HP. “As a result, we can deliver customized, affordable and effective technology designed specifically for them.”
Affordable, power-efficient HP ProLiant servers
The new HP ProLiant BL260c G5 offers customers the most power-efficient and affordable server blade in the industry. The BL260c costs 20 percent less(3) and is 64 percent more power-efficient(4) than any other blade on the market. The BL260c, for use with the award-winning HP BladeSystem c3000 and c7000 enclosures, is designed for branch offices and remote sites with small or virtualization-based environments. It supports CRM, enterprise resource planning, database applications, web applications, file/print services and high-performance computing.
HP also introduced the HP ProLiant DL120 G5, the most affordable rack-optimized HP ProLiant server available. The single-processor DL120 features the latest Intel® Xeon® technology and offers midsize businesses improved efficiency.
In addition, HP is first to market with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based x86 servers for customers of all sizes. The energy-efficient servers deliver improved processor performance as well as large memory footprints and storage capacities. They are ideal for demanding business and scale-out applications as well as virtualization deployments.
In all, these eight blade, rack and tower models can save customers money through server consolidation and lower energy costs.
Very cool, these new servers and the new blade sound very cool, I’ll need to read up more - offering an energy efficient blade helps highlight the possibilities of the platform and can also remind people that a blade solution can be an energy efficient one. The DL120 with the new Xeon sounds very cool, I wonder if it’s got lights out functions, and what kind of storage configuration it will have - I’ll need to read up about it, as well as the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor machines.
March 27, 2008 at 11:54 pm · Filed under Apple type things
http://patphelan.net/apple-attempts-blackmail-with-its-irish-staff/
I have just had three phone calls from Apple staff in Hollyhill today panicking about a note they received this morning the contents of which are below.
An interesting article about the terms and conditions that are reportedly attached to staff getting an iPhone, check it out.
March 27, 2008 at 11:46 pm · Filed under Consolidation
http://considerthesourceblog.typepad.com/consider_the_source/2008/03/server-consolid.html
Service providers are increasingly touting “server consolidation” as a sure way to cut costs in IT sourcing contracts. Providers typically offer guaranteed price decreases based on a commitment to reduce the total number of client servers. However, guaranteed decrease in price shouldn’t drive hasty contract signing.
The two primary alternatives include: consolidation guarantees within a sourcing contract via contractual price reductions, and project by project consolidation efforts.
Check out this post which is talking about things to consider in server consolidation, it raises some good points.
March 27, 2008 at 11:45 pm · Filed under vmware
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/24/AR2008032401119.html
VMware plans to improve virtual infrastructure through technologies such as high availability, automatic restart, better tolerance and masking of hardware failure, and site disaster recovery, the company’s chief scientist and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, told reporters in Bangalore on Monday.
A virtual machine would, for example, be able to record its execution on another virtual machine in a compact form, so that if one of them dies the other one takes over, Rosenblum said. He did not disclose the time frame when products based on these technologies will be available.
Virtualization will be more attractive if companies are pinched by a recession, said Diane Greene, VMware president and CEO. “People can do more with less, include perhaps postpone opening a new data center for three years, and do things more rapidly with fewer IT people,” she added.
Very cool, any innovations in the availability or fault tolerance areas has to be a good thing, particularly in terms of business continuity or service improvement. It will be interesting to see what new enhancements or products are released in the near future.
March 27, 2008 at 11:38 pm · Filed under Grid
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2232600.html
ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corp. (CTC) and GemStone Systems Inc., the leading provider of the Enterprise Data Fabric, announced a partnership to provide a data grid solution for financial computing systems. With this partnership, CTC will market GemStone’s GemFire Enterprise Data Fabric (GemFire EDF) and related software products on March 18.
Recently, financial institutions have seen an exponential increase of transaction volume in derivative risk calculations, various computational simulations and algorithmic trading for trade automation. High-performance computing systems built with grid computing technology are particularly gaining a lot of traction within the financial industry.
Users are not able to improve total performance by distributed computing. For high-volume transaction processing, the data infrastructure becomes the bottleneck (disk I/O and network I/O bottleneck).
Very cool, I’ll need to read up more about this new solution for financial computing solutions. There have been some very positive results in the risk calculations/equities derivatives fields with grid/hpc technologies, particularly if you are able to know your position in the market place, your risk, or be able to price more quickly or efficiently than your competitor.
March 27, 2008 at 11:35 pm · Filed under Grid, Other things
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2243313.html
March 19 — The UK’s national computing grid, along with their counterparts in the US (TeraGrid) and Europe have helped UCL (University College London) scientists shed light on how life on earth may have originated.
Deep ocean hydrothermal vents have long been suggested as possible sources of biological molecules such as RNA and DNA but it was unclear how they could survive the high temperatures and pressures that occur round these vents.
In a study published today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Peter Coveney and colleagues at the UCL Centre for Computational Science have used computer simulation to provide insight into the structure and stability of DNA while inserted into layered minerals. Computer simulation techniques have rarely been used to understand the possible chemical pathways to the formation of early biomolecules until now.
Professor Coveney explains, “Computational grids are only now being made easy to use for scientists, enabling simulations of sufficient size to model these large biomolecule and mineral systems.”
Very cool, check out this article showing how TeraGrid have helped UCL with their research on the origins of life through grid technologies - it’s always cool to see how the technology is used as an enabler, check it out.
March 27, 2008 at 11:33 pm · Filed under How IT works, Other things
http://weblog.infoworld.com/real-time-enterprise/archives/2008/03/datacenter_in_a.html
One of the biggest barriers to innovation today, is dealing with current datacenter complexity. This forces the largest IT investment dollars to be focused on keeping the lights on and containing infrastructure sprawl. The inability to focus a majority of time and investments on innovating and differentiating the business thru IT causes continued missed expectations and disappointment within the business user community.
It is essential to understand that past design choices resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers and cost models that don’t work for the customer or best in class distinction. The lack of transparency of what has been done in the past and how datacenter build-out continues to be a “don’t change” mindset – results in continued misalignment with business needs. This prevents business agility and reduces shareholder value.
Check out this great article from infoworld talking about the data center. It’s interesting topic of discussion for a mixture of reasons. I’ve often thought about this, but like to turn it around a bit, mix it up with the business viewpoint and suggest another way. Could we not have business transformation through data center transformation?
Could I not have the ability to fail over the data center, the IT infrastructure wherever the power is cheapest, which allows me to do data center wide updates in terms of security patching, systems upgrades, application releases? Think about it, I could deploy the application code to Sinagpore (when it’s offline), have my developers test it, and have it signed off ready for the Singapore users to come in, switch on and find their now on version 6.81 of the organization trading portal. Where we can fail over applications between sites for functionality, for performance or availability; “New York grid is bigger than Hong Kong’s, so Hong Kong use New York when they close for the day”.
If we want to truly take the data center to the next level we need to align the IT to the business and the business to the IT. Our architecture (usually application architecture and infrastructure architecture), our strategy needs to be done at the high level, at the business level with (and this will sound binary, harsh/lacking in due thought - please stay with me), rules applied from the top down, we need to fix the cost of IT by moving to a service provisioning model. Granted we can’t do this overnight but we can move towards the concept, gaining savings in energy efficiency, hardware support cost and evolution of the platform. What I mean in essence firstly is to do the adhoc rule number 9 type thing:
- All Windows 2000 servers need decommissioned by September 27th 2008.
- All x86 server which is older than 3 years needs to be decommissioned by August 4th.
- Any x86 server with storage array shelves needs converted to SAN or large physical drive by July 23rd - I’ll have an end to those 14×9.1GB drives and have a few 300GB ones please
Right why these rules.
A server older than three years is typically performance per watt wise giving you a poor return on investment, it’s contributing heavily to your hardware support contract, and giving you pound for pound less value than a newer server in terms of cpu,ram and storage. The 6 year old DL380 might be perfectly adequate for your application needs, but then does this application need that u space, that power? Could we not have a new box hosting three of these applications in a virtual machine?
Let’s abstract the user, the application from these issues.
Additionally, I don’t want people tied to the server, I don’t want application code that might be sticky, or dependent on build version 7.1.3, I want the server to be seen as a means to an end, a processing device, in essence a glorified desktop that we swap regularly to give you the enhanced functionality and performance you need. To keep evolving the operating system in line with support and allow me to be more efficient in the data center and reduce the hardware costs. In doing so we move to a model of abstraction from the tin, granted we still need server78 for equities, but if I deploy server 439, they should be able to port their code to the new server. With the ability to port the applications, porting them to grid, to Citrix or web should be the next step.
With these rules in place, I can then implement the smart technologies, the smart processes such as consolidation, virtualization or even grid, or the shared infrastructure. With directive, with buy in from the CEO level, I can approach that application team and say, “Hi, you’re running a DL380 Pentium 733 with 256mb ram, running your web site on Windows 2000. You can either request a new virtual machine, a new physical server, or switch to our shared web farm.”
Let me explain the buy in thing. If the CIO mandates all servers over 3 years old must be decommissioned, and is then indirectly or directly over-ruled by business line A, application team B, you undermine the CIO’s ability to drive through change. Now obviously change needs to be actioned in line with business need, in line with the constraints organizationally and from the application. But with CEO/board level buy in, we can be infrastructure led, we can be dynamic, focused on deliver, looking at the big picture, not in the situation where application A haven’t got budget to buy a new server, so we’re rebuilding a server which is relatively energy inefficient (performance per watt), which lacks lights out administration, the ability to host the newer operating systems and support the memory configuration that might be needed in the near future. At the same time, it’s using your organization wide data center space, Application C which uses the latest and greatest is in effect you could argue subsidizing application A. Fine, there are situations where this is the cost of doing business, where upgrading the application code would cost more than the ‘fixed support cost’, but can we not limit our exposure, in doing so limit our operational costs? Focus on revenue generation?
March 27, 2008 at 10:47 pm · Filed under How IT works, virtualization, vmware
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/top/?p=299
Tall fences make good neighbors. That goes for life in suburbia and, apparently, on the inside of computers.
The profile of virtualization is growing and, with it, the importance of virtualized security. It makes sense that this would be a big issue. It is impossible to get something for nothing: Virtualization squeezes multiple operating systems onto a single physical machine. That saves space and overhead — good things, certainly — but also creates the possibility of a problem impacting a greater proportion of what the company is doing.
This week, VMware patched a critical vulnerability found by Core Security. The problem, according to this SC Security report, appears to be a big one: In a properly working machine, resident virtualized systems (guests) can transfer data to non-virtualized host systems. In scenarios using shared folders, the vulnerability enables hackers to move from being a guest to taking full control of the host machine. The versions of VMware impacted are Workstation 6.0.2 and earlier; VMware Workstation 5.5.4 and earlier; VMware Player 2.0.2 and earlier; VMware Player 1.0.4 and earlier; VMware ACE 2.0.2 and earlier and VMware ACE 1.0.2 and earlier.
An interesting article about virtualization security, an issue that continues to be a topic of focus for many. Think about the big picture, just because you’ve taken that DL360 and made it a virtual machine, doesn’t mean you don’t need to apply the same level of auditing, access control and security/software patching that you would in the physical world. At the same time, defining ownership, establishing that the various components of the virtual environment comply to base lines (excluding those specific exceptions on an application basis), that the ESX server is secured, the Windows/Linux boxes are locked down to the right level with the right security patches is the ‘cost of doing business’. Do check out the article.
March 27, 2008 at 10:44 pm · Filed under datacenter, environment
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2243595.html
According to a recent report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), datacenters across the country consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006 at a cost of $4.5 billion — twice as much as in 2000. That’s more power than is required to operate the nation’s 250 million television sets. The EPA predicts that by 2012, U.S. datacenters will consume 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity at a cost of $7.4 billion.
IT managers have long known they pay “twice” for electricity in a datacenter: first to power up the many racks crammed full of IT equipment, and then to cool off all those power-hungry, heat-generating systems. Power is getting expensive, too — up to half the cost of ongoing operations, according to some reports. And being wasteful is no longer politically correct given the tons of carbon dioxide being dumped into a warming atmosphere.
Some organizations face an even more pressing problem: they simply do not have the power or cooling capacity to grow. Gartner estimates that up to half of all datacenters will encounter this problem in this year. And datacenters are scaling ever larger to meet the growing demand for new services and to satisfy the need for more online storage, particularly given the increasing use of video content. Consolidation to fewer and larger datacenters is also driving growth as operators seek greater economies of scale. Many of these new “mega” datacenters are being located, quite consciously and prudently, near sources of readily-available and low-cost power.
A very cool article. I wonder if we’re going to find more organizations get involved more in the data center space. Not only just in terms of how much space we have, how much power or cooling we have left. But to have the data center management taken to the next level; how efficient is our power and cooling - are we efficiently cooling the data center, are their hot and cold spots? How we use the power in the data center on a per application/revenue basis, I’m happy to use the necessary power and cooling, but do I not want to divert those resources to the systems that generate me or my client with the most benefit, the most revenue generation? As costs rise in terms of hosting and in buying or leasing data center space rise wherever you are, how you manage and account for your data center usage will depend on your business, but by acting now, thinking medium to long term you can not only save money but get benefits direct and indirect by thinking about how you provision the IT service; virtualization, application/server consolidation, lower voltage servers - even something as simple as upgrading the servers to newer more efficient models, reducing those disk shelves to SAN or bigger drives could bring savings with little real disruption or significant investment.
March 27, 2008 at 10:34 pm · Filed under Grid
http://freemangoestech.blogspot.com/2008/03/world-community-grid-join-in-and-help.html
World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
Our work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid’s foundation for scientific research. Our success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better.
A very cool article talking about the World Community Grid which runs a number of projects which you can donate your computer time to, it’s always good to see the technology being used to solve a challenge, to add value. In this case you can donate some of your computer time to a project that interests you.
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