Bladewatch.com

HP Technology@work

HP Technology@Work is our premier enterprise-wide conference in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region for technology leaders and strategists. Designed to provide insights into the latest technologies and trends, it’s a great opportunity to meet with top technologists from HP and our partners, who specialise in servers, storage, software, services and solutions.

I went to last years event, it was a great experience and I remember walking around the blade and server displays having a good look. I wonder what announcements will be made, what new porducts and services they will be showing as well as the presentation. Last years was very interesting, talking about the concept of Green IT, as this becomes more mainstream (as people consider their carbon footprint or their electricity costs), what’s the next big thing? Virtualization? Data Center efficiency or hardware refreshes?

Finextra

Technology spending by US financial services firms is declining for the first time in history, as projects are scrapped and delayed during the economic downturn, according to research from TowerGroup.

The research firm says overall technology spending by US financial services institutions will decline 3.7% between 2008 and 2009 as banks tighten their belts during the crisis.

“In 2009, IT strategies will be challenged by industry volatility, forcing financial services institutions to retract or postpone previously planned IT projects,” says Virginia Garcia, senior research director, cross-industry practice, TowerGroup.

But TowerGroup insists strategic technology investment remains imperative for institutions’ survival and growth after a watershed year for the industry that has seen mandates for improved risk management and compliance, relentless globalisation, and shifts in customer demographics.

The next few quarters for the banking sector anyway are going to be challenging and interesting. There remains some interesting issues, we need to reduce our operational costs, do more with less, to align the IT and it’s ability to deliver with the business need. To do this we need investment, we need a dynamic infrastructure which allows us to scale to the business need, that we can respond to market conditions, we can reduce our operating costs, our ‘cost of doing business’, the cost per trade even? We need in essence the next generation infrastructure which allows us to be data center independent, to have the ‘tin’ running in the location wherever is cheapest to operate at that point. Will spending in IT fall, it depends on your operating curve, by that I mean if you’ve just bought another competitior, you’ll have to invest some money on the integration, if you’ve got a legacy infrastructure, the operating costs long term are going to make it uneconomical not to upgrade your servers, to look at VMware or grid, Citrix or more systems going online. It’s challenging times ahead, but at the same time, there are a range of new operating systems, new products coming on stream, now and in the near future, as we seek to realize the benefits of this we’ll see the next big investment projects return.

Sun

Sun Microsystems Extends Virtualization Leadership with New Open Source xVM VirtualBox

Sun xVM VirtualBox Reaches New Milestone — 8 Million Downloads Worldwide, 2.5 Million Registrations and 25,000 Downloads a Day

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. December 17, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced a new version of Sun xVM VirtualBox, its high performance, free and open source desktop virtualization software, that offers the latest must-have features for developers and enterprise users. To download the freely distributed xVM VirtualBox software, visit: http://www.sun.com/software/products/virtualbox/get.jsp

Users of xVM VirtualBox 2.1 software will benefit from significant improvements in graphics and network performance, easier configuration, hardware platform support for the latest processors and additional interoperability. xVM VirtualBox software lets users create “virtual machines” into which they can install their operating system (OS) of choice. As a result, users can access their favorite software using any OS and developers can easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer. xVM VirtualBox software is the first major open source hypervisor to support the most popular host OSes, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

“With each new update, xVM VirtualBox software is evolving into a must-have tool for developers looking for new ways to develop software,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of marketing, Datacenter Software, Sun Microsystems. “With xVM VirtualBox software, developers all around the globe are turning their desktops and laptop computers into testing labs, creating multiple virtual machines, networking them together and deploying them using any OS. The excitement in the developer community has also taken xVM VirtualBox software into IT departments, where we’ve seen desktop virtualization software being used to solve issues of PC management, software distribution and desktop security.”

I remain a fan of xVM, that we as end users can choose the right virtualization platform for our business has to be a good thing, anything the vendors can do to aid the virtualization movement, to bring more tools to aid in management, reporting and functionality would be welcome. Virtualization of the desktop is the next big thing, it will be interesting to see what innovations and developments are announced this year.

Rackable

Today’s data center deployments should no longer be limited to the physical confines of fixed, “brick and mortar” facilities. Examples of such modern, fleet-of-foot data center deployments include emergency response situations in disaster areas, office deployments, scientific and engineering exploration projects, research and development endeavors, mobility for major events and trade shows and a wide range of military applications. Common across these diverse use models is the need for all-in-one solutions that offer customers extreme mobility, configuration flexibility, modularity, ruggedness and the ability to deploy quickly.

MobiRack™ enclosures are available in compact (5U and 11U) and midrange (14U and 16U) mobile data center configurations. MobiRack’s mobility and robust features strengthen Rackable’s broad portfolio of deployed data center products.

I was looking up the specifications of some Rackable servers to compare them with Dell and HP when I saw this on their site, it does look interesting. It would be a great way of deploying servers to those remote satellite offices, where you might need a few application servers, a domain controller and file server? I’ll need to read up more.

CBR Online

IT managers at financial institutions will look to virtualisation and high performance computing (HPC) to drive their business in 2009, according to a survey by Platform Computing.

Over half (54%) of those quizzed felt that virtualisation will be the ‘watch-word’ for banks in 2009 as it is considered the infrastructure priority by the majority of banks. HPC was second on the list with (17%) followed closely by cloud computing (14%) and SOA (12%).

It is interesting to note that over half of respondents (51%) did not think that 2009 would be the year in which cloud computing took off in the financial industry. A further 31% did not know what impact cloud computing would have in 2009.

A number of reasons were given for this lack of adoption in cloud computing, including those who believed it to be an early stage adoption (29%), with the same number believing it to be an ill-defined term. Security was mentioned by 17% of respondents and lack of management buy-in was cited by 9%.

The survey quizzed 35 IT managers at Tier 1 banks and found that the driving force behind the adoption of HPC was cost reduction (54%) and meeting the increased risk management need (23%).

We’re increasingly seeing more organizations needing to streamline their business, to be more efficient in the way they provision and supply the IT, we need to not only reduce the operating costs, the power, the cooling even the hardware support costs; we need to deliver the applications more effectively, reduce downtime and avoid those delays to excellence we can so easily see. Sorry the new site’s not going live, there was a problem with one of the web servers, the new application was deployed but it runs very slowly. With a virtual infrastructure, we’re not going to solve process or procedural issues, if the billing doesn’t work now, it’s not necessarily going to be fixed by moving to a virtua infrastructure. However, the grid and virtualized server infrastructure, we can be more adaptive with our resources, we can allocate more cpu/memory or resource to those systems that need it. We can move to a more on-demand way of doing business, of doing IT, at the same time, we can reduce server count, condensing more virtual servers to less physical hardware.

Eweek

I expect that the current devastating economic downturn will last through all of 2009 and will accelerate the adoption of virtualization technology.

Up until now, virtualization–especially x86 server virtualization–has been pushed forward by the huge hardware and operational savings accrued from app server consolidation. Sadly, the consolidation of whole businesses will likely become one of the main drivers of virtualization in the year ahead.

For IT managers at acquiring companies, virtualization will become a tool for onboarding IT assets without bringing along old servers, murky networks and a hodge-podge of management tools.

Virtualization isn’t the only technology that will get pushed ahead by the current economic crisis. Cloud computing–of which virtualization is a building block–will also get a push. For virtualization and cloud computing, bad economic times will be the push that kicks these tools out of “test and dev” environments and into production on a scale that hasn’t previously been seen. (Companies that survive this downturn are the “killer app” for virtualization.) This may also be true of cloud computing, but for slightly different reasons.

What kind of virtualization am I talking about? It’s clear that the biggest proven productivity gains can be found in server, followed by application virtualization. My initial work with desktop virtualization indicates it’s too soon to say that this type of virtualization technology will yield the operational or infrastructure savings on a scale that equals that found for servers.

For server and application virtualization, the key next step is to ensure IT control over the VM lifecycle to prevent so-called “VM sprawl.” IT managers who are used to being praised for the huge equipment and operational savings accrued from implementing server virtualization solutions from VMware, Citrix XenServer and now Microsoft Hyper-V are facing the task of preserving these savings with effective and efficient virtual machine management. This will be become virtualization Job #1 in 2009.

An interesting article. It raises some interesting points, the use of virtualization within your project or your organization is going to be more dependent on risk and attitudes to change as much as cost or the business case. Say I’m bank7 and I’ve bought bank9. Technically I could get the VMware cd out and virtualize bank9′s systems, take all the x86 systems that are suited too and could easily be virtualized and then move them to my data centers, my virtual host servers. However that might need more sign-off, more buy-in and debate than doing one of two things:

1. Physically move the relevant application servers on to our network or our data center
2. Build replacement servers using my bank7 Windows/Linux build and port over the applications

Often in these projects the immediate goal is cost reduction, is consolidation of applications or even just reduce the number of data centers, with this in mind, what might be the first approach is to move everything and then sort it out. I can get sign off for that, it’s a physical move, there’s limited testing and debate needed, if it doesn’t work we call a man with a van and move it back.

What we need to see to further the virtualization movement, to realize the benefits and opportunities it can present is move to the three stream approach. I need to virtualize the network and storage, I need to virtualize the server instance and move towards application virtualization, abstracting the application from the server, moving towards a Citrix, web or grid scenario. As an end user (barring any legal/organizational issues), I shouldn’t care how the IT is provisioned, who owns the service or the infrastructure, that it works is key, everything else is noise. But where does this leave IT? IT teams that don’t deliver will increasingly be seen as an operating cost, an overhead which needs resolved with, ultimately though what we need is a change of perception, from one of these IT boys never deliver, to a business intelligence one. I want to be the best at (shoe polishing equipment sales), what tools do I need to achieve this, what do my sales and accounts team need to achieve this, what technical solutions do we need – crucially what are my barriers to delivery, technical and non-technical. That the sales guys don’t have a stock inventory means they can’t quote delivery times, that the delivery guys can’t see the sales figures means the delivery guys can’t make the quick win decisions, Mike sold 900 to store7, Bill sold 73 to store8, we’ve got 84 in stock, let’s fulfill Bill’s order. Your success in business is determined by two key things:

• Your delivery
• Your perception to deliver

That I think you’re delivering personally to me, that I am the center of your universe, it doesn’t take much to achieve this, to align yourself to your customer can be the differentiator to your competition. With that in mind within the way you do business, how do you use the technology, how could it be working for you and what is it process, information or delivery based that’s stopping you deliver.

VMware

Growing Business Sees VMware Platform as Scalable, Reliable Infrastructure Foundation, VMware also Facilitates Innovation by Helping to Accelerate Test and Development

PALO ALTO, Calif. – January 6, 2009 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that TradeBeam, Inc., a leading provider of global on-demand supply-chain management solutions, has selected the VMware platform, including VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Lab Manager, as the foundation for its development and production IT environments.

TradeBeam’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) model provides over 6,000 organizations with import and export compliance, inventory management, shipment tracking, supply-chain event management, and global trade finance solutions.  TradeBeam’s four international datacenters house more than 1,000 physical servers.  With the number of servers continuing to rise along with power consumption, space requirements, infrastructure complexity and IT costs, TradeBeam recognized that a new approach was needed to sustain the company over the long term.  This realization was the impetus behind TradeBeam’s decision to virtualize its application environment, including test and development, on the VMware platform.

“VMware is having a profound effect on our organization,” said Nasser Mirzai, IT director at TradeBeam.  “It’s helping accelerate our time to market with new applications by making our test and dev process much more nimble and efficient.  It would be very difficult to get as much done as quickly with a hardware-based approach.  And in our production environment, we’re much more scalable and responsive to changing business needs.  New virtual machines can be set up in minutes when additional capacity is needed.  From a cost perspective, we estimate that virtualization is at least 40-percent more cost-effective than a traditional approach to IT. ”

I was checking out the VMware site and found this article talking about this organization and how it’s benefiting from virtualization in particular using VMware. It’s always good to see not only how people are using the technology, but what process or organizational changes, what empowerment to the user community can be realized through a more flexible and adaptive infrastructure. Now that I can allocate more resources on demand, how does that change the way we develop our applications, how it can enable code to be rapidly validated on different platforms and allocate the resources where they are needed most.

I was talking with a friend the other day on the way home, he was telling me of the issues he’s been having between switching server vendors. By this I mean he’s been deploying Dell for a few years servers but the organization has started buying another vendors servers and he’s been trying to get used to using them, understanding how they work, what the process for driver packs etc is, how they do business (when logging calls etc).

Related to this (and not picking on anyone in particular) could the vendors create a how to guide/translation when coming from another vendor?

So that if overnight I switched from Dell or HP to IBM servers, what is it I need to know? What’s the IBM equivalent of SmartStart? I know there’s IBM Director for hardware monitoring, but what about network card teaming, and when I do a firmware upgrade on an IBM server do I need to do the driver pack as well? On the Dell what’s the lights out card called and can I mount virtual media (the answer is yes you can and it’s called a DRAC – Dell Remote Access Controller). When I replace a hard drive in an IBM do I need to match the hard drive firmware?

It’s these intangibles, these little things that make the difference.

In essence how can we make the information more accessible, how can we simplify core elements of the provisioning and ownership easier, on board more users, and then have the advanced/more technical or lower level documentation still available?

I got an email from Charlie:

“Hi Martin,

I’ve got a question. How do I tell the ip address that is assigned to my ILO card on our DL380 G3, without rebooting it?  I couldn’t find it…”

Great question, there are a few ways on the HP servers, the first is:

1. HPONCFG – one of my favorite HP utilities, download it from the HP site, and basically run the HPONCFG with the right switch to write a text file with the complete ILO configuration.
2. Use the web interface – if you’ve installed the HP driver pack, in windows, click start, run http://servername:2301, at this point you will need to log in, dependent on the version of agents it’s either a specific username and password or an account that is an administrator on the server itself. From the web interface you can see the server health and browse the configuration/status of the individual components.
3. Reboot the server and press the F8 key when the server is booting and displays the HP integrated Lights Out text.

Hope that helps, if you have any problems, do email me.

Public Technology.net

A strategic overview and briefing paper presents the findings of JISC’s Green Technology report, and outlines ways in which the intelligent use of technology can create savings of cost, energy or carbon output, and shows how Liverpool University’s self-developed ‘PC PowerDown’ software is already saving the institution £64,000 a year and over 500 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The paper also offers guidance for ICT staff and senior managers within FE and HE to make informed decisions concerning the sustainability of their current and projected technology provision.

Commenting on the report Peter James, Professor of Environmental Management at the University of Bradford, and head of the JISC-funded SusteIT project, said,

“The sector must do more to make its ICT use more sustainable, and this report raises awareness of the issues facing ICT planners and senior institutional management. It also highlights a range of cost-effective measures that are already being taken in some institutions that could easily be introduced in others.

“These include switching off PCs, better management of cooling in data centres and the increased use of video-conferencing via the JANET network. The SusteIT project also provides a tool to prepare a footprint of ICT-related energy and carbon consumption – the first step to improvement – and inspiration in the form of over 20 case studies.”

An interesting article highlighting how technology use can contribute to your carbon costs, even small steps like switching off the pcs, being more efficient with your air flow/cooling can reduce the carbon footprint (and thereby) the costs of your IT and your carbon footprint. I wonder if we wont see more of this going forward, if we’re going to see organizations declare their business and IT carbon footprint?