Bladewatch.com

Earth Times

SAN JOSE, Calif. – (Business Wire) The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today the availability for public review and comment its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification.

The initial Green Storage Power Measurement Specification includes a “Green Storage Taxonomy” for classifying storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments, as well as a baseline standard for idle power metrics which can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements.

“This initial release of the Green Storage Power Measurement Specification will play an important role moving forward in helping the storage industry, standards-setting organizations, and global governmental agencies measure and shape the energy and power efficiency of storage systems,” said Leah Schoeb, Chairperson of the SNIA Green Storage Initiative. “The Green Storage Initiative is dedicated to applying the technical and educational expertise of our members to help develop more energy efficient solutions for the IT industry.”

This is great news, the more we can talk about base lines, of power metrics, the more we can illustrate the benefit of Green IT, of showing how it might meet your business needs and reduce your operating costs, it will be interesting to see what developments result from this announcement.

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PC Pro

Seagate has revealed a firmware error on certain models of its hard disks is barring users from their data. Reports of high failure rates on Seagate drives have been circulating for days online. Now the company admits that faulty firmware is to blame for the reports.

The fault is occurring on the company’s Barracuda 7200.11 and “related drive families” manufactured in December 2008.

Check out this article about Seagate reporting an issue with specific drives which might need a firmware update. Upgrading the firmware is always best practice and something you should ideally be doing anyway, check out the article for more information.

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CNN

LOTUSPHERE — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced LotusLive (www.LotusLive.com), a cloud-based portfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business. LotusLive will extend customers’ current investments and link to everyday business services. LotusLive.com is now the place to find all of Lotus’ cloud solutions including email, collaboration and Web conferencing services.

“With LotusLive, we are brining 20 years of experience in collaboration to the cloud,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus software. “We believe our open, integrated platform will dramatically simplify and improve the way businesses interact with their partners and customers. With this offering we’re taking Lotus to more people, in more places, than ever before.”

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together — with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive’s online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus’ rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

It’s great to see what platforms and solutions are being created from the use of cloud computing, it will be interesting to see what new solutions can benefit from a cloud computing solution, what new markets can be opened and revenue raised.

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Sun

SANTA CLARA, CA January 7, 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.

I wonder what future products and services, what innovations might arise from this news, exciting times are ahead, anything Sun can do to innovate cloud computing, to make cloud computer more accessible to the end user community has to be a good thing.

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Network World

In the spring of 2007, UPS’s Ben Swanson and Joe Parrino attended a conference on the growing problem of data center power consumption. One suggested remedy was to benchmark and analyze the power flowing through the data center. So after the conference, Swanson, the facilities department manager, and Parrino, a data center facilities manager, profiled their two main data centers to learn what they could do to increase their energy efficiency and, ultimately, save money. More on CIO.com Five Ways to Find Data Center Energy Savings Good Incentives Boost Data-Center Energy Efficiency Signposts on the Road to Data Center Energy Savings

Check out this article about energy efficiency and the data center, it’s an interesting read and had some great suggestions about the concept.

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I lack a Blackberry (or blueberry as my wife called it).

At some point I had one, but then I got a laptop, found it was easier to log into my gmail account and check my email that way, the Blackberry became redundant in some respects. I’m wondering if I should get one again though, I’m feeling lost without my email during the day, and my ThinkPad is getting a bit slow.

More and more as I recognize I’m an end user of my mac, my pc, is it a mac I need? Or is it an online virtual mac I need? Would it make any difference if the xeon processors are in my study or virtual?

I need the following. The iTunes service, the facility to type a document, send an email, burn the odd cd, sync my iPod and blog.

How many of these services though, actually need to run on my trusted MacPro?

I used to use Entourage (and I still do in some respects), but with gmail or hotmail (to mention a few), what I’m wondering is if I don’t actually need more a Blackberry, a Windows mobile device, a tablet or an iPhone and a virtual mac, a virtual pc which is stored online somewhere and the applications/functionality streamed to me, to my Apple display and this keyboard and mouse I’m using?

As we evolve this and take it to the next level from a carbon footprint standpoint, a cost per user and business opportunity – how many home users need a home pc? How do we provide what the end user needs more efficiently, effectively, at a lower cost and more securely? The old statement, I’m not putting my email online, how do we manage what users need, and what they perceive to need?

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CNN

NEW YORK (Fortune) — VMware hopes virtualization becomes a reality for corporate America in 2009.

It has good reason to be hopeful: As businesses look to cut costs (and maybe do something nice for the planet in the process), virtualization – the idea of using a single server to run many operating systems and applications – would seem like a no-brainer to implement. And as the leading purveyor of virtualization software and systems, Palo Alto-based VMware certainly would be poised to profit.

But the same economic conditions that are buffeting potential customers also affect VMware: It can’t be certain that clients will have the cash to spend on virtualization, no matter how good it might be for their balance sheets in the long run. The company also faces fresh competition from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, and an increasingly skeptical analyst community. And employees are recovering from the ouster last year of VMware’s founding CEO.

Check out this article talking about the economic conditions and VMware, we’ll have to see how the economy (local and global), develops.  Virtualization can be an ideal way of reducing your hardware support and operating costs when deployed in the right way, understanding the end user community needs and challenges, coupled with price competition and innovation seem the way forward.

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Eweek

Sun’s xVM VirtualBox 2.1 desktop virtualization software offers a variety of new features, from full support of VMware VMDK and Microsoft VHD hard drive image files to support for hardware virtualization from Intel and AMD. Sun is making the open-source, no-cost software more powerful, thus creating a good alternative to VMware Workstation and Parallels Desktop products. The virtualization software is also backed by Sun, giving enterprise IT managers the viable support options needed to bring it into their environments.

Sun Microsystems’ xVM VirtualBox desktop virtualization software is an increasingly powerful, no-cost alternative to VMware Workstation and Parallels Desktop products and should be added to the consideration shortlist of software developers and IT managers.

Any IT professional who wants to get more familiar with virtualization technology that goes beyond a 30-day trial version provided by competitors should get a hold of Virtual Box.

An article about Sun’s virtualization solution, anything the vendors can do to make the technology more accessible, to continue the innovation in the platform and in terms of system inventory or management has to be a good thing. I’m off to read up more.

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Realwire

Interxion, a leading European operator of carrier-neutral data centres, today announced that digital entertainment services company RealNetworks, Inc. has significantly increased its presence in the company’s Frankfurt data centres. RealNetworks is experiencing higher demand for its digital media and entertainment services and plans to expand its Interxion-based infrastructure by approximately 75 per cent.

Since 2007, RealNetworks – famous for pioneering the Internet media industry with the RealPlayer and RealAudio applications – has hosted a variety of its online services from Interxion data centres. These include the company’s Music-On-Demand (MOD) services operated for European mobile carriers, as well as Video-On-Demand (VOD) services for web-based entertainment platforms.

I wonder if we wont see the growth of media’s usage of the data center more than we already have, as we take more games, more movies and content online, we need more data centers, more network and infrastructure to facility the move to an on-demand digital lifestyle, be it Second Life, Youtube or Flickr.

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For me the three big things your CIO, CFO and CEO should be thinking about are:

1. Data center consolidation – I want fewer more efficient data centers doing more for my business – does my BCP/disaster recovery site need to be so large – could I rent a VMware virtual disaster recovery facility?
2. Virtualization including the application and the infrastructure (coupled with consolidation) – I want IT on demand, to spec when I need it. A VMware farm please which IT manage and scale – you just give the requirements.
3. Rightsizing / organizational or departmental transformation – by this I mean a mixture of things, technical, non-technical and process based

• Understand what processes/procedures ways of doing things work and which ones don’t
• Where our delivery, or end user perception fails – what do I as an IT person need to do to illustrate my delivery, to improve service and meet your business requirements
• What technologies are impacting not just our ability to meet your business goals, but our operating costs, our efficiency with your budgets? How many ‘ghost’ servers do you have (the ones that are labelled as IT and left which no one knows about)
• What teams/business units, charging, methodology or even work flows need improved, ownership issues resolved or evolved to aid in delivery? Is the business unit owning their servers beneficial to operations? “It’s my server, my 7u Pentium2 server and it works fine for me, I’m not upgrading it”, fine but that means equities can’t bring online their new services, what’s the opportunity cost?
• What strategies do you have in terms of data center strategy, lifecycle and inventory?  Are you able to move towards the ‘virtual machine cost’, a per cpu billing model where I provide the service, you pay for the level of service needed and it’s availbility requirements.
• Is it more people I need, or an array of technical solutions which could be deployed to make my data center lights out, my team more able to remote work, to ‘own’ their infrastructure.

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