Bladewatch.com

MTB Mag

National Paints, the largest paint consortium in the Middle East, has selected NEC Computers’ Fault Tolerant Server NEC Express5800/320FT to enable its state-of-the-art computerised paint manufacturing machines to access its systems 24/7 while reducing TCO (total cost of ownership).

Since its establishment in Amman (Jordan) in 1969, National Paints is now the largest paint consortium in the Middle East with an annual production capacity of 200,000 tons with more than $200m in annual sales. It has around 54 distribution centres located worldwide to serve its customers with paint solutions to meet their needs.

National Paints offers a large variety of paint products from decorative paints to Industrial paints and marine paints. The company strives to make its presence deeper and stronger in the local and international markets. As one of the region’s market leaders, it leverages some of the best technologies available to produce one of the widest ranges of paint products in the Middle East.

An interesting article illustrating how this organization has made IT an enabler to it’s business, it’s always good to read what technologies are being used and how they are being deployed to add value.

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Business Week

Please tell me that “green” isn’t a fad.

I don’t know about you, but for the past two years I have been on green overload. Everywhere I turned, read, listened, and watched, the race to say “I am greener than you” has been on for individuals and businesses alike.

But that was then. With a struggling economy and oil prices falling fast, I think we will soon see just how real all those green aspirations are. And I for one sure hope the commitment to the environment and green technology is enduring. Unfortunately, I am not so sure that’s the case. I just read the results of a recent corporate responsibility survey conducted by Business for Social Responsibility and Cone LLC and found them troubling.

According to the survey, in the face of the current economic conditions, 31% of respondents see their corporate and social responsibility budgets decreasing; another 26% say it’s too early to determine the impact of the economic crisis on their corporate responsibility plans.

I think we’ll see more organizations focus on green in two main ways, how can Green IT be used to deliver an energy efficient/more cost effective solution, whilst working along side our requirements to reduce or environmental impact, consider the carbon footprint of the data center or the IT? Certainly I wonder if we might see the payback requirements get more short term (for the short term anyway), where I might want pay back in twelve months rather than 18, where I need to illustrate the business benefits financial, operational and environmental? As the IT becomes an ever more important part of the business, how it delivers, how it operates and reports its messages becomes ever more important – number of calls closed just isn’t enough…

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Wallstreet Journal

Hewlett-Packard seems to be taking a full-force swing at longtime ally Cisco Systems.

In a press conference Monday at its Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters, H-P introduced new switching devices for data centers and related software, broadening a push by the computer maker into the networking turf that Cisco has long dominated. To bolster its efforts, H-P said that a group of other companies that make networking products will bundle their products with H-P’s ProCurve networking hardware. Among the companies joining H-P are Microsoft, software-maker McAfee, and wireless security company AirTight Networks.

Marius Haas, the head of H-P’s ProCurve unit, didn’t single out Cisco by name in his presentation Tuesday. But in a subsequent interview, he made it clear that Cisco is a target. “Anytime you have a competitor in the market that has 60, 70, 80% market share, you’re going to run into them more times than not,” he says.

His company has had a networking business for about 25 years. But H-P is also a major reseller of Cisco hardware, too. The latest announcements come as the computer maker seems to be de-emphasizing that strategy–and not long after word leaked out that Cisco may be entering the computer business with a device known as a blade server ((http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/12/12/cisco-pushing-further-into-the-data-center/)), encroaching on turf occupied by companies that include H-P, IBM and Dell.

This is something I’ll need to read up on. Anything the vendors can do to continue the innovation, to further the opportunities and options for the end user community is good for the end user and the industry alike.

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TGDaily

Armonk (NY) – IBM is taking its version of cloud computing to universities around the world to solve what Big Blue says are “real world problems.” These include initiatives in Qatar, South Africa and Japan. By bring cloud computing to these remote places, IBM hopes to foster an air of cooperative advancement in machine utilization and software abilities.

IBM has teamed with three universities in Qatar – Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Qatar University, and Texas A&M University at Qatar – to open up its cloud infrastructure to local businesses and industries to test applications and complete various projects, including seismic modeling and the exploration for oil and gas. This is in addition to an Arabic language Web search engine and the testing and migration of various applications using Hadoop / MapReduce programming methods.

The South African effort, done in conjunction with the Computational Intelligence Research Group at the University of Pretoria, is using cloud computing for next-generation medical research. Students, said IBM, hope to find “ways to slow the progression of serious illnesses by studying drug absorption rates and protein structure folding of a person’s DNA once introduced to a certain type of medication.”

It will be interesting to see what solutions/development arise from this announcements, indeed if we will see any innovations in the way the infrastructure is used, how cloud can be used as a business empowerment tool. Do check it out.

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Cisco blog

Lately, there has been a lot of speculation by the technorati that “something is going on over at Cisco!”  I am sure you have all read the blogs and reports in traditional media asserting that Cisco is going to enter new markets, compete for new business, and build new products.  The answer? Yes, Yes and Yes, of course!

Yes, Cisco is entering new markets.  We view periods of economic uncertainty as the perfect time to challenge the status quo and evolve our business to deliver customer and shareholder value.  Cisco’s success has always been driven by investments in market adjacencies during times that may cause other companies to blink.

Yes, Cisco is innovating around an architectural approach we call “Unified Computing”.  Unified Computing is the advancement toward the next generation data center that links all resources together in a common architecture to reduce the barrier to entry for data center virtualization. In other words, the compute and storage platform is architecturally “unified” with the network and the virtualization platform.  What are the benefits in doing this? Virtualization architectures today are very much “assembly required” islands where the burden of systems integration is on the customer. This increases costs and deployment times while decreasing efficiency. Unified Computing eliminates this manual integration in favor of an integrated architecture and breaks down the silos between compute, virtualization, and connect.

IT architectures are changing – becoming increasingly distributed, utilizing more open standards and striving for automation.  IT has traditionally been very good at automating everything but IT!  Unified Computing and automation at an architectural level can lower operating costs while extending capital assets.

I was reading the Cisco blog the other day, it’s always good to read what the vendors are talking about, and I was interesting to read about ‘Unified Computing’. In future will we see more deployment of clouds, more application centric infrastructures? Could we see the move to virtualization, where it’s the data center that’s virtualized allowing me to failover workloads between geographical locations, where London runs from New York in a BCP scenario/test? Exciting times are ahead, how the vendors can further innovate and empower the end users will depend on their sector, but the more we innovate, the more empowerment we can bring to the end users, the better for the industry and the end user community alike.

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Cnet

More than half of the security vulnerabilities disclosed during 2008 had no patches available from the vendor by the end of the year, according to a report released on Monday by IBM’s X-Force research group.

Meanwhile, 46 percent of vulnerabilities from 2006 and 44 percent from 2007 still had no patch by the end of 2008, the 2008 X-Force Trend and Risk report said. X-Force documented a record number of 7,406 new vulnerabilities last year.

While Microsoft is the vendor that tops the list in percentage of vulnerabilities disclosed, the Macintosh and base Linux kernel operating systems have dominated the top spots for vulnerabilities by operating system over the past three years, the report said.

Securing the infrastructure both in terms of security patches, access and permissions remains an important part of limiting your liability, of preventing unexpected system behaviour. With that in mind applying the security patches/hot fixes as appropriate, ensuring that anti virus/firewall software is working and configured is the cost of managing risk and maintaining system availability. At the same time securing the systems, locking them down where appropriate should also be undertaken, how much access do users actually need, would normal user access work ok? Managing user access to give them the tools, the access they need to fulfill their role to work in effect, protecting user and shared/private data as appropriate.

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HP.com

• Addressed a possible iLO Fatal exception after attempting a FW upgrade
• Improved presentation of multiple properties in the iLO 2 SMASH CLP
• Improved the gathering of historical power consumption data
• Improved several communication paths that cause blades to lose communication with the Onboard Administrator, resulting in a “red X” presented in the OA
• Fixed iLO SSH interface defect that could reset iLO and lose any active connections
• Improved the robustness of firmware update to prevent potential corruption if iLO 2 is reset during a flash or the firmware update fails to complete
• Improved IRC by allowing multiple users so simultaneously access .iso image files

Updating the Lights Out Firmware can provide enhancements and firmware is one of the first thing your vendor/service provider will ask when logging a call. Upgrading the ILO firmware can typically be done online and involves loading the firmware and restarting the ILO card (this does not reboot the server).

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Eweek

Despite the recession, global revenue from the sector will surpass $2.7 billion by the end of the year. The biggest market driver? Enterprises’ need to reduce the total cost of ownership of its IT systems; green IT is a welcome byproduct.

Chalk up the data center virtualization industry as another IT sector that is not expected to be seriously damaged by the current recession.

The data storage industry has already claimed a seat on that bus—for now, anyway.

IT researcher Gartner predicted Feb. 11 that worldwide virtualization software revenue will increase a healthy 43 percent from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009.

Global virtualization software sales and services, and the implementation of them, is on pace to reach 20 percent in 2009—up from 12 percent in 2008, the researcher said.

I wonder if we wont see more small/medium businesses explore virtualization as a concept? As the technologies, the benefits become more well known, as costs and competitiveness become ever more important, could we extend the life of our server by installing VMware or Xen? Could we host our email, intranet and files on one physical asset? Could desktop virtualization be the next step?

What can the vendors do to empower end users through the technology?

What relevance does cost come into play and how does this affect adoption

What best practices as an industry, a vendor or service provider can we announce/work through to encourage more effective use and adoption of the platform?

Do we include the green message in terms of virtualization – is it Green IT people want or reduced cost? Is green a ‘bonus’ or a driver for business innovation through IT?

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Decipherinfosys

A lot has been said and written about virtualization and a lot of companies are finding benefits adopting it in their IT infrastructure or the data centers that they might be hosting their applications with.  At Decipher, we have been supporting our clients with their virtualization needs specifically with the VMWare and Hyper-V solutions and have also blogged about it before.  Recently, while making a presentation to a potential client, one of the questions that was asked by the Operations Manager was to give a brief overview of virtualization and the different types of virtualization.  We are sharing that with our readers as well here.

Basically, virtualization is dis-associating the tight bond between software and hardware.  In a traditional world, one would use one server for their Oracle instance, one for a Microsoft instance, yet another one to host their Exchange Server and so on for the other applications that they have to support.  At times, you would be able to consolidate them assuming that the OS, providers and the different vendor requirements are common.  What this ends up doing is give you a tons of servers to manage, which consume more power, waste the resources on these boxes because some of these servers would be under-utilized (CPU, Memory wise).  Not only that, if you need to add more capacity you would either try to scale up (more memory or additional processors if possible) or scale out (more servers).  By being able to dis-associate the bond between the software and the hardware one can then use the same hardware to serve up the needs of the different software servers.  So, you could be running Oracle, MS SQL Server, Exchange, Great Plans, Dynamics CRM, etc. all on the same hardware.  By doing this, it is also possible to run different operating systems so I could run MS SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 Server and at the same time run, Oracle on Linux all running on the same hardware.  By doing this, the resources will be better utilized and also allow us to easy add another VM on the same hardware assuming that we have the capacity.  There are additional benefits as well like making use of the vmotion capabilities of VMWare etc..

So, that was a 50,000 ft. overview of virtualization.  So, how does it really work?  What breaks the bond between the software and the hardware?  We are going to talk only about VMWare’s ESX Server 3.5 and MSFT’s Hyper-V since the older offerings from both these vendors had a different architecture.  Both of these are based off hypervisor based architecture.   A hypervisor which is also sometimes called a VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) is essentially a hardware platform virtualization software using which one can run different OS on the same hardware at the same time.  Hypervisor has access to the physical host hardware.  Even though both Microsoft’s solution as well as the VMWare solution are based on the same hypervisor based technology, there are differences in how the implementation is done.  We won’t cover all those differences here but will provide some links.

Check out this post about the different types of virtualization a topic of conversation that I was having with colleagues the other day, it’s an interesting read. There have been many articles about virtualization of the application, the desktop, the server, the network or storage.

The first steps should be regarding understanding your environment, what your core skills are, what the key drivers for a virtualization project would be in terms of cost or delivery.  With this in mind understanding what aspects we can virtualize, what we can consolidate or centralize. One thing to consider is whether you need virtualization, or consolidation, whether it might be that what we need in the small business is to buy in specific services rather than have our own managed ones (email rather than Exchange for example).

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Virtualization.sys-con.com

To understand where the High Performance Computing (HPC) paradigm is headed, it is useful to understand its history. High performance in computing comes from parallelism and faster and denser circuitry. Seymour Cray was a pioneer in this field and introduced the first production supercomputers in the 1960s (CDC 6600) and 1970s (Cray 1). Cray Research established the modern-day supercomputer architecture through multiprocessor (XMP) architecture and the vector processor. Other computer manufacturers adopted this architecture in the early 1980s.

It became evident with the advent of the modern microprocessor that clusters of microprocessors would challenge the dominance of vector supercomputers. In the second half of the 1980s, Encore and Sequent were building shared-memory systems that created a shared bus so that any of the microprocessors could access all of the memory in the system. By 2001, clusters and shared-memory systems based on microprocessors constituted 90% of the Top 500 machines, compared to 10% for vector-based machines.

An interesting article talking about HPC/Grid computing and the way forward. Certainly virtualization of the server hardware is the first step, we need to be moving on to virtualization of the application, the storage and the network. Recognizing which applications can be easily adapted or ported

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