Bladewatch.com

HP.com

HP today introduced a program that offers consumers in the United States a simple way to receive cash for their unwanted technology equipment or, if there is no value, to recycle it.

The HP Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program aims to reduce the amount of electronics in landfills by refurbishing technology for further use or safely recycling it.

Through the program, consumers can receive cash back for their unwanted PCs, monitors, printers, digital cameras, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and smartphones of any brand. If there is no value, consumers can responsibly recycle their HP and Compaq-branded products for free.

The HP Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program is a service provided to HP customers through Market Velocity Inc. More information on how to receive a quote for, or recycle, unwanted technology equipment is available at www.hp.com/go/ConsumerBuyback.

Recycling is the way forward, the more the vendors can do to aid the process the better, that HP are offering to do this has to be a good thing for the consumer and the industry.  Well done to HP.

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VMware Europe

VMworld Europe 2009 Agenda at a Glance

VMworld Europe 2009 offers three full days of conference activities. Please note that this agenda is preliminary
and will be updated in the coming weeks.

So I’m thinking of attending the VMworld Europe event, it does look good, I’ve got a few friends that attended last year and loved it. They said it was a great chance to network, get some experience in the sessions and see what’s new. I’m particularly interested to see what developments and improvements they announce, but also just to hear what other people are doing with the technology, what issues they’re having. I’ve been excited by VMware’s recent announcements, the more we can do to aid functionality to the end user, and to make management and delivery easier, the more we can evolve IT as a platform and a service.

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Youtube

I was looking around on line and wondered what videos were on youtube on blades, in the process I found this one from Blade Network Technologies. It’s talking about the benefits of blade technologies, an interesting topic, do check it out.

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Computer Weekly

As further redundancies are inflicted on the financial sector, computer forensics firm Kroll Ontrack is warning companies of the risks of not backing up data on redundant computers and other hardware.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research has predicted 62,000 job losses in the UK’s financial sector alone by the end of 2009, and computer forensics specialists are warning that companies may not have the necessary resources to adequately back up data from computers.

With each device requiring anywhere between two and six hours of work to image contents, the financial sector alone could collectively require a quarter of a million human hours to complete the task, said Kroll.

Though redundancies have been most rife in the financial sector, the issue of preserving data is one that could affect companies in other sectors that are highly regulated.

Data integrity is a topic that is going to be an ongoing issue and debate regardless of the sector, establishing which systems need to be backed up and to what level is the ‘cost of doing business’ in terms of liability and delivery. Refreshing these requirements, testing the availability and quality of the restores is just as important, I can back data to tape, to disk or DVD, but can I restore it? At the same time we need to understand the different regulations regarding personal and private or sensitive data, how do we manage the need to deliver that urgent restore whilst manage our exposure in terms of following process, obtaining the correct sign off etc.

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MSNBC

SAN JOSE, CA – Xsigo Systems, Inc., a technology leader in data center I/O virtualization, today announced that Baker Business Systems has deployed Xsigo’s I/O virtualization technology to support its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings for automotive repair shops throughout the midwestern United States. Headquartered in Medina, Ohio, Baker Business Systems is a leading hosting provider of outsourced IT solutions for the automotive repair industry. Xsigo was selected to provide a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure for the company’s SaaS offering that allows automotive repair businesses to access up-to-the-minute repair cost estimate information without the burden of continuous software updates.

An interesting article talking about how this company has used I/O virtualization to enable its business and in doing so realized performance gains and reduced operating costs. I wonder if this kind of thing is going to be deployed in the enterprise in partnership or after a major drive to virtualization? That now I have the server virtualized, I need to be able to move it around my infrastructure, for that I need to eliminate the constraints relating to network and san patching – avoid the sorry you can’t have that network on that ESX server.

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Finextra

Barclays cuts 400 UK IT roles

Barclays is axing 158 UK-based inhouse technology staff and 250 contractors from its global infrastructure and service delivery (GISD) unit.

Most of the affected staff are in Cheshire, where around 3000 technology staff are employed, and London and Northampton. None of the jobs are being offshored.

In a statement, Barclays says it has “identified some aspects of our technology operations where the organisational structure impedes performance, and roles and responsibilities for colleagues are unclear”.

Some of the roles being axed are “obsolete or being duplicated elsewhere within the bank”.

The bank says it is working with union Unite and will look to mitigate compulsory redundancies by releasing contractors, closing vacancies and opening voluntary redundancy registers.

Many organizations are looking to be more efficient, whether this means aligning and consolidating systems, or consolidating roles and responsibilities. It is set to be a challenging few months ahead, but I wonder if we wont see some opportunities growing out from this? Those integration and consolidation projects? We’ll have to see…

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On-Demand Enterprise

LONDON, Dec. 11 — DataSynapse, a world leader in dynamic application service management (DASM) software for the next generation datacenter, today announced that NET2S, a leading UK capital markets IT consultancy, has received Training and Certification to meet the growing demand for DataSynapse administration roles within the UK investment banking market.

NET2S consultants have completed DataSynapse training and certification to achieve the level of “Certified Engineer GridServer Administration and Operations.” NET2S is the first consultancy in the UK to have engineers with this qualification.

“Net2S personnel have already supported our mutual clients and we are delighted to formalise our relationship and add Net2S to our partner ecosystem,” commented Stephen Leel, vice president of Global Services at DataSynapse. “The DataSynapse Certification Training received by Net2S consultants will provide a vital source of high quality support for our UK clients.”

“Our partnership reflects our recognition of the widespread use of DataSynapse in the leading Investment Banking establishments in the UK,” said Frederic Ponzo, managing director of Net2S. “Our investment in certification will provide us with a unique value proposition for our joint clients and give them the peace of mind that any resource provided by Net2S will be highly capable of maintaining the high levels of service demanded by the Trading community.”

This is great news for NET2S and DataSynapse, it should bring more exposure for the range of solutions from DataSynapse and bring further opportunities for NET2S.

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Chris from a rather cold Canary Wharf called me today. He was rather emotional. He’s been trying to resolve an ongoing problem with one of their production servers, which currently involves the server vendor and the operating system vendor.  His problem is as follows, he’s stuck at the first line step, he’s logged a call, provided the following as requested by both support teams:

• System model and serial number
• Operating system version and patches installed
• Driver pack and firmware versions
• System diagnostic reports and the hardware logs

The hardware vendor has called him back and said “You’re firmware is out of date, it needs to be upgraded. Can you do this and call us back. We need this done to progress your call?”

At this point let me explain why Chris could possibly be less than pleased with this response, maybe a bit emotional

To upgrade the system firmware/drivers he needs to ‘test them’. He has to find  the equivalent development/non customer facing server, arrange downtime, test the changes do not break anything. Once this is done he then has to request the work be carried out on the server that he currently has an issue with. This can all take weeks to achieve, and is an administrative overhead that he would seek to avoid if this is not going to fix the issue

I will at this point put my vendor hat on and say you should be following best practice, you should be running the latest firmware and driver packs, that your operating system should have all the latest patches installed as per the vendor recommendations.

On the basis though that it’s 2009 (Happy New Year to my readers), can we make an agreement? The end user community needs to keep their systems in support, but can the vendors recognize the way ‘we do business’, and consider the parallel run? That we need the firmware/drivers upgraded, but continue progressing the call seeing what we can do to improve/resolve the issue without making ‘changes’ where possible?

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PC Pro

Verdict: A low-cost, general-purpose rack server with a good spec and a support package that will appeal to smaller businesses.

Since buying IBM’s PC business, Lenovo has grown to become one of the top manufacturers, regularly trading places with Acer in the worldwide shipment rankings. However, this world isn’t enough, and last year Lenovo moved into the SMB server realm with a modest range of pedestal and rack-mount systems.

Last month, we brought you the very first look at its entry-level ThinkServer TS100 pedestal server, and now we deliver yet another exclusive – its RS110 low-profile rack system. Server spotters will immediately see a resemblance to IBM’s servers, since Lenovo has an agreement where it will produce single- and dual-socket servers based on IBM’s xSeries technology.

Check out this review of Lenovo’s RS110 server, it’s an interesting read and it’s always great to read about new products and what people think about them.

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IBM

IBM BladeCenter H requires nearly 10% less power than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem c7000. You really can go green and save with IBM BladeCenter® systems.

Designed from the ground up to help dramatically improve power utilization and reduce energy costs without sacrificing performance, IBM BladeCenter systems are the RIGHT choice for energy efficiency.

Edison Group, an independent technology analysis and consulting firm, compared the power consumption of IBM BladeCenter with a comparable BladeSystem blade server configuration from HP. Edison Group found that IBM BladeCenter H requires nearly 10% less power than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem c7000. Extrapolated over 224 servers and with an energy cost of 9.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, this can save you up to $12,000 per year.

I was doing some reading up on IBM blades this evening and saw this on the IBM web site.

Check out this report, it’s talking about an independent report illustrating that the IBM BladeCenter H requires 10% less power than the HP BladeSystem c7000 equivalent. This is a topic that is regularly discussed and a topic of debate in terms of the configuration and the environmental/operating conditions.

If we stay away from the comparison aspect and focus on the topic of energy efficiency. It’s an interesting read, the report illustrates the benefits of blade servers as a platform, discusses the benefits of IBM blade servers, and shows as well as the operating costs in terms of power and cooling.

What I think we should be discussing as end users/evangelists or even vendors is the following:

• The empowerment from the blade platform – commonality of the hardware, interchangeable infrastructure through the enclosure – easier management and rapid deployment.
• The energy efficiency of the blade platform – from the blades themselves (energy efficient power supplies), using integrated network switches and SAN boot for example can deploy a scalable energy efficient platform for business.
• Illustrating examples where blades might be ideal – virtualization/grid solutions as well as those remote small offices where I need a domain controller, print server and file server, where a blade enclosure might be more secure and easy to manage.
• Illustrate how consolidating from a range of rack servers to blade servers might reduce your support costs, fewer operating system builds, driver packs and firmware to manage, fewer components to be kept on site (reducing your hardware support cost). Fewer types of hardware, means less on site components needed.
• Working towards improving communication and best practices – this is how we did it, these are the things you need to think about. This is what you can get away with, these are the key issues and how we fixed them. To make the deployment process easier and more scripted? Could I not have a packaged version/auto scripted version of the driver pack for me to inject into my Windows image? Those little things that make all the difference – the enterprise customer might not be that interested but as we try to bring online the small/medium market – isn’t the value added, the ‘free stuff’ the difference between success and failure of your product to their business? Could we not have vendor neutral meet ups?
• Improving documentation and information about the products with a focus not so much in terms of the technical, (though this is important), to the business process/business empowerment – you want a blade solution because….. this is how you sell it…. this is what you need to think in terms of the change process, the build process….

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