Bladewatch.com

HP.com

I was doing some research on blades and blade deployment times in response to a conversation with Chris about the whole build process – that from an end user standpoint it always takes ‘too long’ to deploy a server, (which is why he’s a fan of pre-provisioning). Anyway I found this HP video talking about HP’s blades including the new management features of the enclosure.

The video is about the systems management features of the new HP BladeSystem.

The reason for highlighting this is that the more we are able to automate features of the infrastructure, and integrate various technologies as part of a solution, the more we can enhance functionality and elements of control to the end user.

Adding features for system management for the end user not only empowers the end users – they can see what’s going on – ‘red is bad’, but it can also improve your chances of resolving issues remotely – over the phone with your internal IT, or with your service provider/vendor. Let us not under estimate the call out cost of an engineer, just to see that all that had to be done was known fix7. This becomes ever more so if you think of deploying servers to a remote office location an estate agent, small branch office, where an engineer isn’t necessarily available instantly.

As we evolve the infrastructure, we can move to that idea of bliss, where an application team opens a browser to http://mycorp.intranet/it/serverbuild, choose from a drop down, the operating system, even the blade name and say rebuild and have that hooked into your build mechanism. An email goes to the users’ line manager and submits a change form for validation, when the line manager clicks accept the build job begins.

Integrate this functionality with a monitoring system, the IBM Director/Insight Manager/Dell equivalent, and you can suddenly give the end user an application view of their infrastructure:

Have a Unicenter or HP OpenView of the Risk application:

• Server1 (Windows) – ok, no HP alerts, no application alerts, disk space ok
• Server7 (UNIX) – ok, no HP alerts, no application alerts, disk space ok

All through an online or Citrix type portal? Giving the support teams an instant application and infrastructure view.

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