Archive for March, 2008
Fujitsu improves ICT services for public body
http://www.pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88259&Itemid=9
Cafcass (The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service), a non-departmental public body which looks after the interests of children involved in family legal proceedings, joins public sector Flex. Flex is the framework which allows Fujitsu Services in conjunction with the Cabinet Office to provide information and communication technology (ICT) as a shared service across the public sector. The contract, valued at ?25 million, is for a seven year term with a refresh of both hardware and software after four years.
The Flex service will deliver cost savings and reduce the total cost of ownership for Cafcass. It will significantly improve the end user experience for office based workers as well as improving the effectiveness and security of employees working remotely from family courts, home or from other Government offices. The framework will also help Cafcass to achieve its carbon emission targets.
An interesting article talking about how this public body is outsourcing aspects of the IT function, including a hardware and software refresh. I wonder if this includes anything like desktop virtualization or thin client?
Mac Mini update on the way?
http://mac.blorge.com/2008/03/22/apples-mac-mini-to-get-new-processors-and-graphics-chip/
Mediocre and overpriced hardware; that’s the apt description of the Mac Mini. It may be a “low cost” Mac but it has stagnated while it’s more capable bigger brothers like the MacBook and MacBook Pro have received better and more regular update cycles. Now, finally, the Mac Mini is getting an incremental boost in processing and graphics power.
Apple has decided not to pull the plug on the Mac Mini as it was previously thought it might do. I don’t know which is better or worse, perpetuating the below average nature of the Mac Mini or canceling it all together.
On one hand, no more underpowered insignificant horsepower; on the other hand, no more “entry level” Mac. You decide which alternative is the least objectionable.
I wouldn’t exactly call the update to a starting point of 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo processors, Intel GMA X3100 graphics (the same used in MacBooks) and a bump from 667MHz front side bus to 800MHz, extraordinary. But, it is a slight improvement. Here’s hoping the memory gets bumped from 1GB to 2GB as well, a boost in standard hard drive capacity would be welcome too.
The Mac Mini seems to kind of split the viewpoint amongst colleagues and friends. Some go on about the notebook hard drive (I have too), others highlight that it’s just what they’re after a small pc for typing, for their front room or as a media center. Regardless, if we could think more in terms of price/bundles and price as well as functionality, it would be appreciated. We’ll have to see if the Mac Mini is updated and what specifications/enhancements it will have.
Degree Controls to make the data center cooler
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=835669
MILFORD, NH–(Marketwire - March 25, 2008) - Degree Controls, Inc. (DegreeC), the global leader of thermal and airflow technologies for the data center, today unveiled AdaptivCool™ Room Scale Intelligent Cooling (RSIC), a full-service thermal management solution that reduces data center energy consumption and cooling costs.
AdaptivCool™ Room Scale Intelligent Cooling (RSIC) is the next-generation version of AdaptivCool, which entered the market in 2006. The enhancements in AdaptivCool RSIC — the result of two years of intense research and development — help customers reduce data center energy consumption and increase computing load without deploying additional cooling capacity.
Very cool, being able to control or be more efficient with the air flow/cooling in the data center has to be a good thing. Let’s not forget that the more cooling we need, typically the more power consumed to achieve this, being more efficient with the cooling, ensuring that we aren’t wasting power on keeping an area of the data center too cool through inefficient technologies, or even data center layout has to be the way forward.
Grid computing continues to be an enabler
Some serious illnesses such as HIV tend to change, or mutate, rapidly within the body of a person suffering from the disease. Any number of factors can impact the ways the viruses mutate. For example, such factors may have to do with the properties of the patient’s genome, the treatments that were chosen earlier, and other biological factors. This leads doctors treating patients with these diseases to resort to a process that involves much guesswork, since it is not always apparent which treatment will work the best.
Recent research preformed at the University College London [1, 2] promises to change this way of working and to provide more robust solutions for professionals in the medical field. By using the techniques of grid computing, Prof. Peter Coveney and his team were able to generate results that test the medications on the Virtual Physiological Human.
Grid computing is the technique that allows researchers to separate their simulations over a large number of CPUs that need not be centrally located [3]. The Virtual Physiological Human is a project that aims to map the human body in a way that “will enable collaborative investigation of the human body as a single complex system” [4]. The application of the distributed computers allowed the time needed to conduct the simulation to be reduced dramatically, despite the huge amounts of data that need to be processed (on the order of 15 GB per simulations). For each patient, two simulations need to be run, one which considers the history of this patient and the other which attempts to predict the mutations of the virus. Currently, it is possible to complete this process in under two weeks.
Check out this interesting article highlighting how Grid/HPC technologies can be used not only in the commerical world, but for research, whether we’re talking about the SETI type solutions or in academic/medical research such as HIV or cancer. I wonder if we will see this kind of technology rolled out more in medical testing?
Aperture’s acquisition by Emerson complete
http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=37727&hilite
London, UK – March 25, 2008 - Aperture, the leading global provider of software for managing the physical infrastructure of data centres, has announced the completion of its acquisition by Emerson (NYSE:EMR), effective today, March 25, 2008. This follows shareholder approval of the acquisition proposal first announced on February 25, 2008.
Emerson has now completed its acquisition of 100% of Aperture’s share capital. Detailed financial terms of the agreement will not be disclosed.
Aperture will now operate as an autonomous business division of Emerson Network Power, which has annual revenues of approximately $5.2 billion. Its Liebert-branded power, cooling and monitoring products and services are trusted by companies across the globe to manage critical data centre applications. Emerson Network Power is a division of Emerson, (NYSE:EMR), which reported 2007 revenues of $22.6 billion.
Very cool, I wonder if this might mean a new series of products and services through this acquisition?
Mac Mini to continue - grid engine anyone?
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/21/eating_our_words_apples_mac_mini_to_rock_on.html
Last Memorial Day, AppleInsider cited sources in reporting that it appeared to be the end of the line for the itsy-bitsy Mac, which had seen limited adoption and an uncertain role during the first 24 months on the market.
Since then, the product line has remained in a state of limbo, with subsequent updates consisting of minor component swaps that required little if any engineering effort.
For the first time in nearly a year, however, people familiar with the matter tell AppleInsider there’s new life in the Mac mini department, where a small team of engineers have recently been tasked with gutting the diminutive desktop and applying fresh internals.
I remain a big fan of the Mac Mini, and it’s good to see its production to continue according to the article. I wonder if the unit is updated if it would have a different onboard video card?
I still feel they’d make great grid engines, it’s not that I’ve got anything against blade servers for grid - in many respects blade servers are much more redundant, scalable and re-useable. But there’s just something about buying a bunch of low energy pc’s, putting them into a DataSynapse or Platform type grid, and using it for development/testing/uat? When or if the unit fails, we deploy another one like sweeties, - oh people will say cabling, storage, security, etc. But there is something about the ready availability aspect, that requesting more grid capacity for the developer community might not constitute significant investment, a cabinet full of Mac Mini’s running XP/Win2k3 with whatever layered components/grid tool we need.
NEC does well in performance benchmarks
http://computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=7771&pubid=3&tab=Home&issueid=125
TOKYO, 25 MARCH 2008 - NEC’s new Express 5800 server has broken the TPC-E benchmark performance record with a score about 70 percent higher than the current leading machine, the Tokyo company said Tuesday.
But there’s another record the company isn’t as keen to promote: the server has set a new low in cost performance, significantly below the previous bottom-ranked machine.
TPC-E is a new benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) that simulates online transactions at a brokerage. Customers generate transactions, account inquiries and market research and the firm interacts with the customers in the simulation. Like other benchmarks, it is intended to provide a meaningful and comparable measurement of how a server responds under load. To date benchmarks on eight machines are available.
Very cool, this article highlights NEC’s success in the Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark, in this case using Intel’s Itanium processor, it’s great to see what configurations and technologies people are using to achieve their business/performance needs. As with anything, the results you get from your server in terms of performance are going to depend on its environment, by this I mean, the network/storage, system configuration, the operating system as well as the applications/database being optimized for the platform; ensuring that you’ve got the relevant driver pack, fixes and patches could affect your system performance. Do check it out, it’s an interesting read.
Dell and Egenera announce OEM agreement
http://ideasint.blogs.com/ideasinsights/2008/03/dell-embraces-e.html
On Tuesday, Dell and Egenera will be announcing a strategic OEM agreement where Egenera’s PAN Manager will be available on Dell PowerEdge servers. PAN Manager is a unique management tool that is at the heart of Egenera’s enterprise BladeFrame servers, providing the ability to virtualize and manage not only virtual server environments, but also storage and I/O. Essentially, PAN Manager allows IT managers to create an entire virtual datacenter where nothing is tied to physical hardware. Compute, storage, and network resources can be dynamically allocated when needed and where needed. PAN Manager includes application clustering that allows virtual servers to failover automatically, and also full server failover to remote locations for disaster tolerance. All of these capabilities are tied together with a strong Egenera management framework that implements the high level of security demanded by many of Egenera’s financial services and government customers.
Very cool news, bringing more choice to the end user is always a good thing. Bringing Pan Manager to the Dell platform brings new opportunities and exposure to Egenera, as well as choice and functionality features for Dell customers - very cool. I’ll need to check this out.
Intel continues to improve the Xeon processor
SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 25, 2008 – Intel Corporation has further increased its energy-efficient performance lead today with the introduction of two low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) processors for servers and workstations that run at 50 watts, or just 12.5 watts per core and frequencies as high as 2.50 GigaHertz (GHz). The Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor L5400 Series takes advantage of Intel’s unique 45nm manufacturing capabilities and reinvented transistor formula that combine to boost performance and reduce power consumption in data centers.
Benefiting companies with power-constrained, high-compute density environments, the Quad-Core Intel Xeon L5400 processors are as much as 25 percent faster1 and have a 50 percent larger cache size than Intel’s previous-generation, low-voltage Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, while at the same time maintaining the low 50-watt thermal envelope. The quad-core L5420 and L5410 processors run at 2.50 GHz and 2.33 GHz, respectively, and feature a unique 12 megabytes (MB) of on-die cache and dedicated 1333 MHz front side buses (FSB).
“Using Intel’s hafnium-infused high-k metal gate transistors has allowed our quad-core 45nm low-voltage server chips to attain new heights in power-efficient performance,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. “These chips deliver the speed needed while using meager amounts of energy.”A number of systems vendors are supporting the L5400 series and L5210, including Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gigabyte, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Microstar, NEC, Quanta, Rackable, Supermicro, Tyan and Verari. Next quarter, Intel will also begin shipping a new dual-core low-voltage processor that will boast a 40-watt rating and clock speed of 3 GHz, with a 6 MB cache size and a 1333 MHz FSB. Intel is also extending the existing Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series for embedded market segments by offering the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5410 with support for a 7-year life cycle.
Very cool, these new low voltage processors do sound exciting, I wonder what the performance per watt ratio is like; regardless more choice has to be a good thing for the consumer and the industry. The ability to select a processor/server configuration around the business need is very cool, being able in effect to have the low voltage option for my satellite sites (those remote offices with 5 or 10 people), and have those more powerful systems for those slightly larger sites, is very cool, reducing the energy requirements and the cooling brings more possibilities to the platform.
Data center hosting - is Iceland the next place?
A 35-minute drive south of Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik lies the tiny fishing village of Grindavik. One January day, Kristinn Haflioason steers his car a few minutes out of town to a vast, snow-swept expanse of volcanic rock that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. He climbs out and launches into an unlikely sales pitch that he hopes will persuade corporations from the U.S. and Europe to locate operations there. “Dozens of companies have expressed interest,” he says.
It will be interesting to see if the conversations about data center hosting in Iceland lead to more companies investing in facilities there. I’ve certainly spoke with people and looked into the data center hosting possibilities there, sounds like an exciting concept, do check out the article, it’s an interesting read.
Yes, outsourcing can bring challenges to us, especially for the owners. Even before there are lots of challenges in outsourcing. 
Internet protection is a must for business security and data integrity. Electronic Banking 
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I always use `hponcfg -g` from the commandline of the Linux server. 
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If you have problems, email me and I'll send you a few config scripts. 
To answer your question:
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Given the depth of some of the Piles Driven into the ground for such buildings or companies with large car ...